Is feeding kids meat child abuse? The answer is yes, but to the people that complained to ASA about our campaign ad, it’s a very tetchy subject. The Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) has released their ‘top 10’ most offensive ads and PETA has cropped up as number 9 for the genius poster below.

The complaint was not upheld (duh) and we walked off scot-free, which is the only reasonable verdict really, due to the factual nature of the poster – as the ASA recognised that saying feeding kids meat is tantamount to child abuse is a reasonable view. The ASA quite rightly came to the conclusion that the ad did not trivialise child abuse, in the context of what we were saying it did not mislead consumers and that parents have enough intelligence to work out how to “replace the nutrients meat provides”. Meat is not nutritious good for you; in fact I think you’ll find it sucks on a whole load of levels (ten actually!). A vegetarian or vegan diet is the only one that should be fed to children if parents care about their offspring’s health.

You may remember me telling you that Morrissey was a bit miffed at Edinburgh Zoo over their upcoming chimp enclosure plans. Well, PETA are pretty peeved too. So once again we joined forces with other animal protection groups (12 of them to be precise) and let the zoo’s CEO know how we feel.

It certainly seems like animals are treated with a bit more respect in Switzerland than in its European counterparts (other than the, ahem, alleged cat fur problem – make up your mind people!). A new law, which will come into place in September, gives ‘rights’ to animals - or at least encourages people to treat them a whole lot better than in most parts of the world. Welcome to the world where prospective dog guardians will have to pay for and complete a two-part course on the needs and wishes of the animal and how to walk their dog and react to various situations. Farmers, anglers and goldfish guardians are also on the list affected by the new law, which will see an increased awareness of animals’ individual needs and preferences. Obviously this new world is not a complete Utopia for animals and there are still many, many problems that all countries need to deal with, i.e., animals will still be incarcerated and slaughtered for their flesh. But hey, what a great start! The Daily Mail has more on this story…

In some sad news, a female dolphin called Sharky (I kid you not) has died whilst performing a stunt at an aquatic theme park in Florida. The 30-year-old bottlenose collided with another dolphin as they both jumped through the air at the same time in a ‘trick’ for spectators. Unfortunately they hit each other and Sharky died of head injuries.

A spokesman at the park has said, “This is an unfortunate, random incident”, but animals in captivity, forced to perform tricks day-in, day-out do not die accidentally. These dolphins belong in the big, blue ocean where they know best how to play their own games, rather than having some demeaning routine etched into their memories by profit-seeking ‘conservationists’. The park in question is allegedly now reviewing their training techniques but is that really good enough? No, it’s not. Take the dolphins out of the park for good and then we’ll give you some credit.

What a legend. Our man Morrissey is unstoppable - he’s now taking on Edinburgh Zoo for their up-coming chimp enclosure, the Budongo Trail. He recommends instead that parents should take their children to the abattoir “for a lesson that no kid would ever forget”, stating in no uncertain terms, “If the Budongo Trail at Edinburgh Zoo is such a stimulating highlight, then why don’t the zoo staff live in it instead?” The full story is at The Times today, where you can read Morrissey’s damning view on keeping animals in captivity.

Image: TimeOut / CC

With just under a month to go until World Vegetarian Week (19-25 May), I thought I’d let you in on our Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Meat. It speaks for itself, so without further ado, here are PETA’s…

1. Helping animals also helps the global poor
While there is ample and justified moral indignation at the diversion of 100 million tons of grain diverted for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) are fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating meat supports cruelty to animals
The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests or do anything that is natural to them. They won’t even feel the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter. Dr. Jane Goodall says, “Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.”

3. Eating meat is bad for the environment
A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost forty percent more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”

4. Avoid the Flu
The World Health Organisation says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming, from foot-and-mouth to SARS, can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If you wouldn’t eat a dog, you shouldn’t eat a chicken
Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals, able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats or dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys”. Dr. John Webster of Bristol University found that chickens are capable of understanding cause and effect and that when chickens learn something new, they pass on that knowledge (i.e., they have what scientists call “culture”).

6. Heart Disease - the UK’s number one killer
Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the UK’s three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer and strokes. Doctors Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn, two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease, have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esslesytn’s Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success of unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer - the UK’s number two killer
Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarise it, Dr. Campbell states that “human studies also support this carcinogenic effect of animal protein, even at usual levels of consumption. … No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

8. Fitting into that itty-bitty bikini
Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. You can be an overweight vegan, of course, and you can be a skinny meat-eater. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters, without dieting. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer-review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global peace
Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than an acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Tolstoy to Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The joy of veggies
As the hot new vegan restaurant Saf has shown, veggies rock. Vegetarians report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a centre-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed. Alicia Silverstone says, “Since I’ve gone vegetarian, my body has never felt better and my taste buds have been opened up to a whole new world. It’s one of the most rewarding choices I’ve ever made and I invite you to join me in living a healthy, cruelty-free lifestyle.”

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

Ready to give it a try? Order a free Vegetarian Starter Kit for recipe suggestions, fun facts and more. We’ll be doing lots of exciting things during World Vegetarian Week, so keep checking back for more.

Fruit image: Pre School / CC
Chicken image: Netstate / CC

Yesterday’s Independent was all about the eggs. Should we eat them, shouldn’t we? No we shouldn’t. Should we care about battery farming? Yes we should.

On the same day in the same paper, another two articles appeared – Going to work on the egg and a comment piece by animal champion Joanna Lumley.

It’s great how factory farming has been getting such a decent amount of coverage over the past few months. Yeah free-range is better than battery, that’s a given, but what’s even better is avoiding them all together and going vegan. Why? Read on…

If there’s one new scheme that I seriously hope won’t become the next fad, that’s the irresponsible FlexPetz which forces dogs to move between families who fancy becoming a ‘pet owner’ for a weekend. There’s an interview and the full story on Five News but before you get any wild ideas about how cute it could be to ‘dogsit’, take a moment to think about the poor animals involved. Going back and forth between different homes and families will be stressful and create unstable personalities, it’s bad enough that they’ve already been thrown out of one home for being unwanted. ‘A dog is for life’ isn’t just a catchy phrase to be tossed around – be responsible and only take in a companion animal if you can care for him or her as a full-time guardian.

Boy, am I jealous of whoever wins the $1,000 voucher to spend in Stella McCartney’s new online US store. To celebrate the launch of the new store, PETA US got together with the compassionate fashion designer and one lucky winner will walk away with $1,000 worth of gorgeous items from the online collection. But never fear my British friends, we’re lucky enough to have the Stella McCartney shop in Mayfair, London, that we can pay a visit to when in need of some retail therapy. Now where did I put my purse…

When you picture a dog, is s/he bouncing along after a ball, greeting a guardian at the front door or some other picture of health and happiness? In 2006, about 5,000 dogs were used in laboratory experiments in the UK alone. These dogs are no different than the ones who live in our own homes, yet the vast majority of them will spend all of their short lives confined indoors and used in drug and pesticide tests, and heart research.

As you’ve seen throughout the week, we don’t need to use animals in testing at all. Alternative, humane techniques provide relevant data about what will happen in humans, and these techniques are far more accurate than animal tests. Examples of animal-free methods include computer models that assess how a drug might work by looking at its chemical structure, cultures of human cells and tissues, and sophisticated scanning techniques that show how organs like the brain actually work in living human beings. These animal-free methods provide accurate, relevant information that we couldn’t get from animal tests. Exciting new techniques like toxicogenomics can assess the effects of chemicals on human genes in a matter of hours. Animal experiments are a throwback to Victorian times, and we should be doing a much better job today. Don’t support charities that conduct or fund animal experiments. Put your money to better use and only donate to charities that have a heart for animals as well as humans.