Au Revoir, 2008

As we say goodbye to 2008, we have many things to be grateful for. Proposition 2 passing in California. Oprah Winfrey using her national platform to expose mainstream America to factory farming and puppy mills. Donna Karan finally agreeing to stopping using fur. Even small victories, like the pet shop going out of business at my local shopping mall. And yes, even the humble organic soy milk in my office refrigerator that has become so popular after I requested it.

With a new year ahead, the fight for animals must go on. Fur somehow seems to be socially acceptable again, with fur trimmed jackets all over. People are going to McDonald's and other fast food places as the economy dips...bad news for the animals, the environment, and our health care system. Many alternative energy plans are on hold, a victim of both the weak economy and dipping gas prices, worse yet for all the inhabitants of this Earth. I think Tori Amos had it right in her song "Father's Son" when she asked, "Can you blame nature if she's had enough of us?"

But it is we as individuals that decide the America and the larger world we want to live in, and not just on election day. Every day, with our dollars and our voice. Do we want a world filled with factory farms, or local, organic farms? Do we want chain restaurants with homogenized foods, or do we support the local restaurants? Do we value animal rights, workers rights and the environment when we fill our shopping cart?

And we must continue to spread the light of veganism in the most positive way. Judgement is not the answer. It was all a different journey for everyone of us to get to our current destination, and with habits so ingrained on our population, change can only happen step by step.

I love this passage from "This Low," by The Swell Season. While the song is about relationships, I always think of it in the context for continuing to learn and build our knowledge and wisdom as animal advocates, and then spreading the beauty, joy, compassion and peace that is veganism, and doing it in the most loving of ways.

"Shine the light,
Don't hide the light,
Live the light,
And give the light,
Seek the light,
And speak the light,
Crave the light, and brave the light,
Stare the light,
And share the light,
Show the light,
And know the light,
Raise the light,
And praise the light,
Thread the light,
And spread the light"

A happy and healthy new year to all. Let's make 2009 an even better year for the animals.

CNN to Showcase Animal Issues on January 1

Set your DVRs. PETA reported that Jane Velez-Mitchell will devote an entire show to animal issues, including puppy mills, shelter adoption, Prop 2 and more. It will air on Thursday, January 1 at 7 p.m. EST on CNN Headline News. It isn't even here yet, and 2009 is off to a good start.

Read the full story.

Year of the Dog...A Must-See for All Animal Advocates

Ingrid Newkirk said, "To rid ourselves of our biases takes effort, and sometimes it takes an experience." In Year of the Dog, a charming movie starring Molly Shannon as Peggy, it takes the experience of losing her beloved dog Pencil to open her eyes to the larger, unknown world of animal abuse. While we are nation who cherishes their companion animals, even fiercely debating where Barack Obama's puppy should come from, most give little thought to the animals they wear and eat.

When Peggy, a dog lover like so many, meets Newt, she becomes exposed to the horrors of animal testing, factory farming and the fur trade. Peggy even visits a farm sanctuary and treats her coworkers to vegan cupcakes (the latter with results many of us are accustomed to).

While Peggy eventually takes things to the extreme, her love for animals - and her mission to expose as many as she can to their widespread mistreatment - is something we can all relate to. Despite the many vegans and animal advocates I've met, we are still small in numbers, and often our passion for animals can seem so mysterious to others. That is why I found what Peggy said so poignant as she tried to demystify her passion to her friends and family.

"There are so many kinds of life in this life. So many things to love. The love for a husband or a wife, a boyfriend, a girlfriend. The love for children. The love for yourself. And even material things. This is my love. It is mine. And it fills me, and it defines me and it compels me on."

After the holiday madness, this is a DVD for all animal advocates to enjoy in the comfort of their home.

Eliminating Animal Products from Your Wardrobe

Hope everyone had a festive holiday. I feasted on a cashew nut roast, sweet potato mash and broccoli made by the best un-vegan mother ever. I also hit the stores for some great sales. If you're in the market for vegan clothes, now is the time to buy. I picked up a cute vegan coat for under $50, and even scored $5 ballet flats at Old Navy.

In my nearly 20 years as a vegetarian, I never gave much thought to leather or wool. I would justify my purchase of a pair of leather boots or shoes by saying, "I don't eat animal flesh, which saves a lot of suffering." Truthfully, like most people, I just didn't think that much about it.

When I started to research veganism, I was horrified to learn about the cruelties involved in leather production and that I had, even in a small way, contributed to it. Most leather comes from India and China, where animal welfare laws are either non-existent or not enforced, according to PETA's Cows are Cool web site. These suffering souls face extreme crowding, deprivation, castration, branding, tail-docking, and dehorning, all without any anesthetics.

Wool is no better. Australia is the leading producer, accounting for 30 percent of all wool used worldwide, according to PETA's Save the Sheep web site. Animal welfare standards are atrocious for the 100 million sheep there. Lambs' ears are hole-punched, their tails are cut off, and the males are castrated without painkillers.

With so many man-made alternatives, both stylish and inexpensive, now widely available, there is no need for the suffering to continue. For vegan shoes, I recommend Payless Shoes for price and availability. Just beware: many of their sneakers do have leather, but the majority of their shoes are manufactured from man-made materials. Target also has a large man-made shoe line. PETA's Dan Mathews recommended both of these stores when I heard him speak at his book signing. Most people don't have money for Natalie Portman's vegan shoes at Te Casan, typically $200 a pair, and in today's economic climate, that just seems frivolous anyway.

Finding a vegan coat may be a bit more of a challenge, but inexpensive options are available at H&M, Forever 21 and Old Navy. Besides, it's worth the little extra effort to purchase products without any animal by-products. While no one can un-do their past purchases of animal products, we can go forward by making more educated purchasing decisions, and showing, not only how much healthier and better for the animals and planet veganism is, but that you can look great doing so.

Resources:
Check out PETA Living's guide to vegan coats.
PETA's Cows are Cool
PETA's Save the Sheep
Payless Shoes
Vegan Chic

Season's Greetings to all My Fellow Animal Lovers

Wishing everyone a safe, happy, and cruelty-free holiday!

For those celebrating Christmas, don't forget to leave the cookies and soy milk out for Santa so he'll bring you cool vegan goodies!

Companion Animal Trust Fundraiser

Saturday, I dined on vegan chow with fellow animal lovers to raise funds for Companion Animal Trust, which rescues and places homeless cats and dogs in the northern New Jersey/New York City area into their forever homes. Run by a guardian angel named Carol, the group also feeds feral cat colonies, and is a strong advocate of a no-kill policy. The dinner was organized by Claudia, who runs my HEARTS for Animals meetup group and fights for various animal rights causes, including elephants abused by Ringling Bros. It never ceases to amaze me how many animal advocates there are. I also believe it is important to give my charitable dollars to local organizations such as this group, in addition to national organizations like Farm Sanctuary and the Humane Society.

Dinner was at Su Restaurant, a vegetarian restaurant in Edgewater, New Jersey. While I was disheartened by so much dairy on the menu, I'm still glad that another vegetarian restaurant is now open. I can still count on one hand the number of vegetarian restaurants in northern New Jersey, a stone's throw from New York City.

A sampling of some dishes. To start, yam and yucca fries. Delicious.

Baby spinach salad with battered onions, mangoes and tomatoes. The dressing needs work.

Pad Thai rice noodles. Hard to get this dish wrong, and Su didn't.

One of my dining companions let me sample his Malaysian coconut curry. It was divine.

Mango pudding with banana coconut tapioca pearls. There are only a few vegan options on the dessert menu. This one was very sweet.

A Plea to Give Up Fish

In his lively look back on his activist life, Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir, Dan Mathews, the senior vice president of PETA, describes a fishing trip he took in the ninth grade, just a few weeks after being bullied for being gay. He discovered, to his dismay, he had caught a flounder.

"'You've got a booby prize!' someone joked as he stomped the flailing fish to the deck and tore out the hook, causing blood to flow from the slimy creature's mouth to the beat of his racing heart. Everybody laughed, but I grew uneasy. I considered what the scene looked like from the flounder's point of view. Stunned, he looked up to see a collection of chuckling faces as he lay gasping for breath...I had become one of the terrorizing bullies I dreaded so much at school."

More than 17 billion fish are killed for food in the U.S. annually, and sport fishing and angling kills another 245 million animals per year, according to PETA's Fishing Hurts web site. Much like their farm animal counterparts, they have no legal protection from cruel treatment. They are impaled, crushed, suffocated, or sliced open and gutted...all while they're fully conscious.

For whatever reason, fish is the one flesh many vegetarians struggle to give up. Perhaps because there isn't as much graphic footage available of their horrible treatment. Or maybe because we've succumbed to the marketing of the industry touting it as a health food. But did you know seafood is the leading cause of food poisoning in the U.S.? So many of our waterways are polluted with human and animal feces, and this waste carries dangerous bacteria like E. coli, according to PETA.

Mercury is in the news as of late due to actor Jermey Pivens' bout with mercury poisoning due to a twice-a-day fish consumption lifestyle. PETA noted a study by the Environmental Protection Agency that revealed that women who ate fish just twice a week had blood mercury concentrations seven times higher than women who had not consumed fish in the prior month.

Meanwhile, commercial fishers have destroyed the ocean's ecosystem to the extent that large fish populations are just 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s.

Please consider shunning fish once and for all, for the health of your body and of our oceans, and for the long-suffering fish.

Learn more about the health, environmental, and moral impact of consuming fish by visiting PETA's Fishing Hurts web site.
Check out Dan's book, available at your local library, or through the PETA catalog.

Veganize and Green Your Laundry Routine

Living a vegan life extends way beyond the plate. Animal by-products are hidden everywhere. Scarier yet, animal testing is still a routine practice. Did you know that Procter & Gamble, maker of the popular Tide brand, still tests on animals?

Luckily, there are more cruelty-free, affordable options than ever before. Trader Joe's Liquid Laundry Detergent is my pick. Biodegradable, non-animal tested and containing no animal ingredients, it has a pleasant, but not over-powering, lavender scent, and is reasonably priced at $8.99 for a one gallon container. It also has a built-in fabric softener. Not lucky enough to have a Trader Joe's nearby? Check out Method and Seventh Generation brands at Whole Foods Market and increasingly available in mainstream supermarkets.

Did you know that most fabric softener sheets contain animal fats? Fortunately, our friends at Method offer a vegan alternative with their squeaky green dryer cloths. Personally, I hang-dry most of my clothes, so I only need these for my towels and sheets. Hang drying is kinder on the environment than being dependent on the dryer, and of course saves money, always a plus.

Don't forget to wash in the cold cycle. A startling 90 percent of the energy used by a washing machine goes to just heating the water, according to Carbon Conscious Consumer. They calculate that if you wash four out of every five loads in cold water, you could reduce your CO2 emissions by 72 pounds in just one month, and save $60 or more on your annual energy spending.

Learn more eco-friendly tips from Carbon Conscious Consumer, including how to reduce your junk mail and breaking the bottled water habit.
Want to know if the products you're buying are tested on animals? Check out PETA's Caring Consumer search engine.

"All Living Beings Wish to be Free"

I first heard of PETA in my teen years, when I made the life-changing decision to become a vegetarian. I've never eaten animal flesh since, save a few years in my late twenties when I confusingly decided to dabble in pescetarianism. Why I thought consuming any level of mercury in fish, whatever amount of omega 3 fatty acids it contained, was an acceptable notion I have no idea. Let alone neglecting their feelings as living, breathing creatures who have as much a desire to live as any cow, chicken, pig or human. But I am now fully committed down the path of veganism, with no desire to look back.

Ingrid Newkirk continues to be a source of inspiration, particularly in her arguments on the moral issues of how we treat animals. Our society is so dependent on animals, as a food source (often poor), for fashion (which we tire of so quickly), for entertainment (to amuse ourselves for a few fleeting hours) and more. Yet they are such an after-thought to many, and to most, their treatment is not thought of at all.

On this snowy weekend, I took the time to listen to Ingrid's moving speech, "Non-Violence Includes Animals," and encourage others to as well.

"How we treat animals goes to the very heart of who we are."


"failure to recognize the us in them."


"They are treated like things, like commodities, machines and objects. They are treated like everything but as animals."

"There is no human nature. It is shared nature, for all animals laugh, and lie and cheat and love and breathe and are lonely and feel pain and wish to be free."


"There will be a day...when we will stop saying, we are human beings, treat us like human beings and start saying, we are living beings, treat us, please like living beings."


Check out PETA's official page on Youtube.

Tom Vilsack To Be Ag Secretary: Animal Groups React

As you may have heard by now, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack is Barack Obama's choice to head the Department of Agriculture. Notably, two of the nation's leading animals rights crusaders offered a mixed reaction.

The Humane Society seemed pleased. Writing in his blog, Animals & Politics, Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said Vilsack was the top choice of head the USDA.

"As governor of Iowa, Vilsack advocated for bills to toughen the state's penalties for animal fighting. He stood up to the puppy mill industry and vetoed a bill in 2006 that would have weakened protections for pets by reclassifying dogs as "farm products." He also...vetoed legislation in 2001 that would have allowed the sport hunting of mourning doves for the first time in decades."

Farm Sanctuary, the nation's leading farm animal protection group, was more critical in its statement, given by Gene Baur, president and co-founder.

"Vilsack has an uneven track record when it comes to farm animals and fighting factory farming. He has supported some animal protection measures and has at times stood up to Big Ag, yet he has also taken actions that are not in the best interest of farm animals or rural communities. During his tenure as governor of Iowa, the state saw a proliferation of massive hog farms, and we saw these hog farms first-hand this summer when we rescued pigs from the flooding in southeastern Iowa."

While a historic shift has come to Washington on a campaign that had a central theme of "change," we humans are creatures of habit, and change in practice is harder to implement than change in theory. That is why it is more important than ever to be emblodended by victories such a Proposition 2 in California, and keep the fight going. The animals are depending on all of us.

Silk Soy Nog, A Festive Addition to Your Holiday Menu

Break out the nog. Silk soy nog is here again! Hooray! Traditional dairy eggnog has 6g of saturated fat and 75 mg of cholesterol per 1/2 cup serving, enough to drive Santa's cholesterol through the roof! Silk's version...zero grams of saturated fat and no cholesterol, and of course, no chickens or cows have to suffer.

Any gatherings you attend are a great opportunity to introduce co-workers or loved ones to new vegan products. I plan on bringing a carton to my office pot-luck party. Best yet, Silk nog is becoming widely available, and I found it in my local Stop & Shop and Shop-Rite supermarkets. I've even spotted soy pudding at Shop-Rite. Change is happening every day, and with our help, we can bring awareness to others how delicious and heart-healthy these products are.

Another Loss for Shelter Dogs

The first word (and second, and third) upon hearing that Vice President-elect Joseph Biden bought a 3-month-old male German shepherd from a Chester County, Pennsylvania breeder..."Why?!?" He had a nationwide platform to make a more compassionate, humane choice, yet he chose the vanity of his breed over common sense. I have just never understood people's obsession with having to buy a puppy. One more dog has to wait for his or her forever home, facing likely death, due to this reckless decision. Read PETA's take.

Shelter dogs lose out any time people patronize breeders or pet stores, typically supplied by grizzly puppy mills. Check out PETA's undercover puppy mill investigation, narrated by Charlize Theron.



PETA offers some ways to help.

"Shelter Dogs" is a soul-churning photography book featuring 50 beloved souls captured by Traer Scott. Some found their forever homes, and some went on, hopefully, to a better world than the one they knew here on earth. This book is available through the ASPCA website.

Pay a Bill, Spread a Message of Hope

Bill paying is never fun, but writing out a groovy check that support your animal rights message is. Message!Products offers personal checks, checkbook covers, and address labels from Farm Sanctuary, PETA, Best Friends Animal Society, and a host of other animal advocacy groups. While a small royalty of your purchase goes to your organization, the best motivation is advertising our cause each time we write a check. Learn more.

Blinders: The Truth Behind the Tradition

Don't miss this heart-breaking look at the plight of New York City carriage horses. Sadly romanticized by many and patronized by legions of tourists, the horse carriage trade has a very ugly side.

There are as many as 68 horses at a time on the crowded streets of New York City, who must evade cars, buses, and emergency vehicles, according New Yorkers Against Horse-Drawn Carriages. Last year, a mare, frightened by a street performer's drum, died after going into shock when she broke her leg after running into a tree. Meanwhile, a second horse bolted into a car. That incident came just as a NYC Comptroller audit concluded that horses work without sufficient access to water and shade or oversight from authorities.

The list of accidents and deaths goes on and on. Horses, who are extremely sensitive to loud noises and unexpected sounds, should not be subjected to lugging tourists around, just so they can get some delusional New York City experience.


Blinders the Movie site.

Fortunately, people are banding together to put this cruel practice to an end. Learn what you can do: Coalition to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages. Also visit PETA:'s The Cruelty of Horse-Drawn Carriages.