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The hip swimwear and clothing company Bonobos has shown that it's a champion for chimpanzees by pulling from its Web site a video that featured a chimpanzee cavorting in swim trunks.

Once Bonobos gave it some thought (maybe after its staff filled up on what must be their favorite brain food), it didn't seem like such a great (ape) idea to support an industry that captures baby apes and keeps them isolated in cages. The company realized that ads making apes look cute and clownish misrepresent these wild animals, who often end up dumped in roadside zoos when they get too large and strong to manage.

Here's what the company had to say:

"At the end of the day, we made Big Chimpin' with the best intentions—but we were also a little naive, and we're not afraid to say so. One of our missions as a company is to help out our friends in the Congo who are working so hard to improve the situation there, so in using a real chimp in our video, we were actually doing ourselves a disservice as well."

And what brought about the company's change of conscience? People like you!

"We thank everyone who wrote to us out of concern for Suzy's safety and dignity. In the end, it's because of your thoughtfulness and willingness to speak up that we learned so much!"

Three cheers to Bonobos! It's one more company—like Sprint Nextel, Gap, and SEGA—that has realized that apes do not aspire to be models or actors (even if they do seem cuter and more intelligent than some former child stars).

Posted by Heather Drennan

Ladies and gentlemen, it's show time. We have a new video to add to our list of hard hitters—our "To Animals, It's Not Entertainment" video, which takes you behind the razzle-dazzle of the entertainment industry to let you witness the routine abuses that animals suffer in circuses and on film sets—abuses such as frequent beatings and solitary confinement in cages that are too small to allow the prisoners to turn around or take a single step in any direction.

After you've checked that out, take a minute to tune in to "Meet Your Meat" and learn about the mechanized madness that animals endure before they are killed and ground up for hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets; "Testing … One, Two, Three," which shows the ways that cruel and dangerous animal experiments hurt animals and people; and "Whose Skin Are You In?" which exposes the cruelty involved in the leather, wool, fur, and exotic-skins industries.

These videos pack punches. After you've watched them all, leave a comment letting us know which one inspired you to take action.

Posted by Karin Bennett

Alicia Silverstone’s wonderful ad is in some very impressive company in TV Guide’s “Best of 2007” viral video list, including two of the very greatest videos of all time (IMHO): Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord,” and Justin Timberlake’s utterly glorious “Dick in a Box.” For anyone who works in marketing, you’ll know that companies tend to use the term “viral video” for pretty much any visual media they can come up with (it tends to be more of a wistful hope than an actual description of the video in question), but some videos really are “viral”—i.e., millions of people watch them, post them on their blogs, and pass them onto their friends—and it’s a truly incredible experience to be involved with one.

You can see TV Guide’s full list here, and here’s a reprise of the stunning pro-vegetarianism PSA that took 2007 by storm.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it is imperative that you watch this new video for our ABC Campaign, which is both an initiative to educate people about the importance of spaying and neutering their animals, and stop breeders from pumping out thousands of pups every year who take homes from those destined to die in shelters. What I like about Sex Talk, and the other spot we’ve put together for this campaign, is that it’s a lot more than just a funny ad. There’s something about it that makes you really uncomfortable—which, I guess, is exactly what a proper chat about the birds and the bees is supposed to. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet, and you can watch the other video (Buy One, Get One Free) here.

For anyone who still has doubts about the power of the internet, check out this AP story about 14-year-old Amy Bareijan. Amy wanted to go vegetarian after watching Meet Your Meat on YouTube, so she posted her own video asking for people’s advice and personal experiences that may help her. The response was overwhelming, to say the least. Check out the story here.

The video that started it all:

If J. Lo really has no current plans to give up her weird addiction to promoting the fur industry, she may want to seriously consider giving up promoting anything at all in public. Because this is just getting too easy. In the past year, PETA has protested the opening of her Pasadena restaurant, shouted her down at movie premieres, and showed up while she was giving a radio interview to get her reaction to some fur-farm footage we happened to have handy. And just this weekend, some PETA members posing as "glow girls" had some more input for her during the auditions for her new Glow After Dark reality show. Our friends at TMZ.com have the exclusive video:

Pretty much anyone with an ounce of compassion knows that wearing fur is somewhere between contemptible and downright wicked on a scale of 1 to evil—and most people have an inkling that the process of making leather isn't exactly a walk in the park for the cows involved (the live dismembering part in particular can be unpleasant). But until now, the wool industry has done a bang-up job of keeping its gruesome practices from the public eye. Which is why we're incredibly grateful to Pink for coming out and letting her millions of fans know what's really going on.

Today, Pink launched her video exposé of the Australian wool industry before her concert in Paris and called for an international boycott of Australian wool until the shocking abuses documented in the video are ended. You can click here for ways to help sheep, and watch Pink's disturbing but important video below.

This video is pretty cute. It's an award-winning PSA that a PETA member gave us to help encourage people to get their pets spayed or neutered. I'm not entirely sure where the narrator's odd accent is from, but I feel like it adds to the overall effect.

On a vaguely related note, when I first got Princess Cuteyface (she just came in through my window one day), the vet told me that she was at least a few months pregnant. This freaked me out because it was already kind of a big step for me to be committing in the first place, and, I don't know, everything was just happening so fast. Fortunately for both of us, it was a false alarm—turns out she's just a very big girl. Plenty of Princess C to go round. Anyway, I have a new vet now.