As I may have mentioned before, POM Wonderful has apparently decided that the juice industry is just too damn wholesome. The images of healthy kids and smiling parents guzzling delicious, vitamin-filled beverages are fine and all, but there's just not enough blood for POM's tastes. The company's ingenious solution has been to start doing all sorts of animal tests. Not, like, taste tests, but proper suffocating-mice and slicing-up-live-rabbits kind of tests.

We have found this to be somewhat upsetting. Yesterday, we launched our campaign against POM's animal experiments outside their headquarters in Los Angeles. The pictures and video tell most of the story, but a lovely little side note was when POM's security tried to block the protesters from public view by parking a big truck in front of the demonstration. Except they parked in a red zone, the LAPD got involved, tickets were issued, and everybody except POM thought the whole thing was kind of wonderful. Anyway, moral of the story: Test juice on animals and face the combined wrath of PETA, the LAPD, and a giant rabbit on your doorstep. Nobody wants that.

Up until a couple of months ago, I had never heard of POM Wonderful, but apparently they're this big company that sells pomegranate juice for like three times what any sane person should pay for a beverage that has no known alcoholic effects. If I'm going to pay five bucks for a drink, I want some kind of assurance that I'll be blathering incoherently or trying to breakdance by the time I'm finished with it, but all POM does is turn your mouth red.

Anyway, the reason POM is on my radar all of a sudden (despite the fact that I'm clearly not part of its target market) is that—in a twisted attempt to hide the fact that their juice is just some kind of glorified Grape Drink in a fancy bottle, the fine folks at POM have been asphyxiating mice and torturing rabbits so they can make claims about the juice's health properties.

Pam vs. Pom

Cue Pamela Anderson, who is really pissed off about the whole thing: Pam just put up a statement on her website, encouraging people to boycott POM until the company "enters the 21st century and stops killing animals in these cruel experiments." If you agree with Pam that the world can probably do without giving rabbits erectile dysfunction and then feeding them pomegranate juice to see what happens, click here to let the company know how you feel. Then, next time you feel the urge to blow a paycheck on a bottle of juice, spring for something like Naked Juice, so you can know that your money will simply be used to make more expensive juice, not to kill rabbits.