My trusty calendar of worldly goings-on tells me that it’s National Fishing Week. Which means seven days of celebrating abuse to fish and anglers coming out in their droves to pose in ridiculous photos to try and prove their manliness. Forgive my scepticism, but what a load of tosh. Real men (and women!) don’t go anywhere near a fishing line and need to kill living, breathing creatures to prove anything. Compassion? Phwoar, now that’s what I go for!

Here’s a quick run-down of why we should not be celebrating National Fishing Week:

1. Fish aren’t swimming vegetables any more than dogs are. They have nervous systems, feel and respond to pain, and even throwing them back into the water after having a hook shoved through their mouths is cruel.

2. Ninety percent of large fish populations have been exterminated in the past 50 years and one report estimates that by 2048 our oceans will have been completely over-fished.

3. When dragged from the murky depths, fish undergo excruciating decompression - the internal pressure ruptures their swimbladders, pops out their eyes and pushes their stomachs through their mouths. When they’re tossed onboard, many slowly suffocate or are crushed to death.

4. Fish’s bodies absorb toxic chemicals from the water around them, and the chemicals become more concentrated as they move their way up the food chain. Big fish eat little fish, who eat littler fish, so you end up with a whole cocktail of nasties on your dinnerplate.

5. Vegan ‘fish-fingers’, ‘fishess steaks’ and vegan ‘scampi’ taste so good, so you don’t need to compromise on compassion to get a similar taste.

Everyone loves The Goonies. If you don’t (firstly, why not?), then you’ll still know Corey Feldman from childhood classics including The Goonies (duh), The Lost Boys, Stand By Me and The Burbs. This amazing actor and his gorgeous Playboy model wife, Susie, have just starred in a new ad for PETA US, proving his heart is as big as his talent! In homage to the iconic “Give Peace a Chance” John Lennon and Yoko Ono image, the sexy vegetarians put a new slant on it – “Give Peas a Chance”. Quite clever that, eh?

Corey says:

“Susie and I choose the vegetarian way of life because for us, there really is no other choice. We must evolve as a race and as a planet, and evolution includes learning and changing from our mistakes. We will never truly grow until we as a whole come to the realization that all beings on this Earth should be treated with love and respect.”

Rock on! I love this ad. What do you think?

Actress Elizabeth Hurley might be bringing out a ‘healthy’ and ‘low fat’ organic range of pre-packaged meals, but we’re not convinced they’re up to scratch. This is because the meals contain meat – not our idea of healthy and I’m pretty sure the 15 calves, 34 piglets and 50 lambs she’s got in her back-garden would like to avoid the slaughterhouse too.

In an interview with Red magazine, she talks about hand-raising one of the piglets destined for the dinner-plate: “I have to swaddle it, like a baby, lie it backwards and feed it with a bottle. It’s absolutely divine.” That whole scene I’m reading kinda freaks me out a bit. She wouldn’t kill a baby, I’m sure, so why another being that she treats like a baby?

Our Special Projects Manager, Yvonne, has just sent her a letter. Here’s what she wrote:

“Here at PETA we were excited to hear about your plans to launch a new line of organic products and meals that are billed as “healthy” and “low-fat” – that is, until we learned that these meals will contain meat. Animal products, which are typically loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol, are far from being healthy. Won’t you please consider promoting a truly healthy, low-fat vegetarian diet?

A vegetarian diet not only reduces the risk of cancer, heart disease and numerous other life-threatening illnesses but is also a far kinder diet for animals who need not have their lives cut short to please our palates. Given the chance, the piglet you have affectionately described hand-rearing would grow into a curious and intelligent adult who is as smart, loyal and affectionate as your dog, Emily. Just as you would cringe at shipping Emily off to slaughter, you should also be reluctant to betray a pig whom you have cared for and befriended.

Please know that no matter however “lovely” his or her life might have been, no farmed animal – intensively reared or organic – goes willingly or fearlessly to slaughter. In the UK, animal slaughter is poorly regulated and plagued by abuse. Pigs are often insufficiently stunned, and many remain conscious throughout the entire slaughter process. They often wake up while they are “bleeding out” and are still conscious when they are plunged into boiling-hot water.

We urge you to allow the piglets, calves and lambs on your land to live out their natural lives in comfort and safety and join PETA in promoting a healthy vegetarian diet.”

Image: The Sun / CC

You may be surprised to know that the news that former shadow home secretary, David Davis, resigned over the extension of detaining terror suspects without charge to 42 days interests us here at PETA. Why? While the decision by Gordon Brown has been described by MPs as an ‘infringement on civil liberties’, what struck us as most interesting is the comparison we couldn’t help but make between these detainees and chickens. Yep, chickens.

Broiler chickens to be exact. These chickens that are raised for food, either in dingy, smelly and cramped factory farms, or ‘free range’, are generally slaughtered after just 42 days of life. Sure it must be horrible to be locked up in a cell for 42 days, but think about our billions of feathered friends who are bred to die after just, yep you got it, 42 days. Their life sucks from day one and there’s no fair trial at the end of the line for them. Just a death sentence. Now THAT sucks.

Is this cow preparing for a trip into space? Is it a fancy-dress costume? Or could this the newest way to travel? No, this cow is having her burps and farts collected.

Researchers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are conducting a study to see just how much methane a cow produces – methane, of course, having a devastating impact on global warming. So these Argentine bods have strapped plastic tanks onto cows’ backs and stuck a tube down their throats, straight into their stomachs. According to The Telegraph, Argentina has 55 million grazing cows, and the country is one of the world’s biggest exporters of beef. So that’s a lot of methane.

Apparently, the answer to all of our concerns is to put cows on a better diet to stop them from parping and belching so much. Give me a break. When the world’s geniuses start to realise that the best thing to do in a situation (note BEST, not just ‘better’) is of much higher value than simply ‘making the best of a bad situation’, we might actually start making some progress.

Giving them clover and alfalfa will reduce their methane emissions by 25 percent. The equation needed to reach a much, much higher percentage than that piddly amount is staring everyone in the face – stop breeding tens of millions of cows and eating their flesh and milk. You could kick yourselves, right?

Thankfully the Japanese are on the right track, reporting yesterday that producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours. I wonder if Mr Blair is taking note?

Image author: Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

Seems to me political figures these days just don’t know what’s best for the environment (or themselves and their public image for that matter). First Gordon Brown, and now another figure who’s popped up in the media for his ‘championing’ of environment issues, is ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair. Yes, he’s still around, but there’s a slight problem with what he’s garbling on about. In a Q&A session with The Independent readers, he admits that eating meat produces four times as many greenhouse gas emissions as the airline industry (and about forty percent more than all cars, lorries, and other forms of transport combined), but seems too addicted to his chicken dinners to be able to see reality.

Anyway, it went a little something like this:

Blair: “This is why I have called for G8 leaders to support efforts to reduce forest destruction and degradation … Minimising emissions from agricultural sources will be an important part of efforts to limit climate change.

Reader: “Will you (therefore) go vegetarian and lead by example?”

Blair replied: “This does not mean the world has to give up meat.”

Oh. Come. On! Tony, we know you can do better than that, all you need is a bit of guidance.

So we sent him a letter today asking him to go vegetarian. Among other things, it said:

“Combating deforestation is a fine goal, but unless we tackle the root of the problem – which isn’t razing trees but raising billions of animals for food – we won’t make a dent in this serious and deadly problem. Won’t you please consider adopting a vegetarian diet and promoting it as the most effective thing anyone can do to fight against global warming?”

Image: Guardian / CC

Eating meat and other animal products can lead to a droop in the trousers department. Sorry lads, it’s true. So, you could go and pop a Viagra in the hope of raising the standards. But then it all gets a bit embarrassing, unnatural and doesn’t address the underlying problem - high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes and prostate cancer much of the time, which of course can be avoided with a low-fat vegan diet. Plus Viagra’s tested on animals – not cool.

Then along comes a little nugget of information like this that throws it all into a whole new light – watermelon is a natural Viagra. A researcher in Texas has discovered that the fleshy fruit contains an amino acid called citrulline, which works much like the chemical alternatives on the market, relaxing and expanding blood vessels in the nether regions. Oo-er missus!

So (my mind begins to wander), what happens if you’re a veggie or vegan – and already avoiding the impotence factor by not eating meat – and then you eat a load of watermelon each day? The mind boggles …

Image: CBSNews / CC

We <3 Hilary Benn. And so will England’s badgers when they find out that their lives have been spared by the Environment Secretary. It’s a victory for the badgers as the government announced yesterday, they will not be issuing licences to cull badgers in England, and will instead focus on the more effective strategy of preventing bovine TB in cattle, by introducing a vaccination scheme.

Everyone at PETA wants to say a big thank you to Mr Benn, for recognising (and making public) that a ruthless cull of badgers could end up making the problem of TB worse. Not to mention the fact that it’s cruel and inefficient. As we said back in April in a letter to Welsh Rural Affairs Minster Elin Jones, going vegetarian and removing the hideous conditions that factory farmed cows live in is the way forward. However the plan in the West seems to still be going ahead. The Welsh Assembly needs to follow Mr Benn’s compassionate and more effective lead on this one.

Image: Daily Mail / CC

Yesterday, as G8 members reached across the table to grab a helping of kelp-flavoured cold Kyoto beef shabu-shabu, an African child scraped around in the dirt for anything he could come across. As Gordon Brown tucked into an 18 dish meal (over eight courses, not including a five-course working lunch), the people of Britain baulked at the headlines that called for us to stop wasting food to avert a global food crisis. Forgive me if I sound blunt, but what a load of hypocrisy.

The world’s G8 leaders met in sunny Hokkaido, Japan, for a £285 million summit to discuss the global poverty problem. They dined on just about every animal under the sun, including kegani crab, smoked salmon and sea urchin pain-surprise-style, Kyoto beef and ‘milk-fed lamb’ (full menu at Times Online, it’s a real treat). Our letter to Brown not that long ago calling for him to adopt a vegetarian diet if he really cares about the food crisis had obviously slipped his mind.

A leaked World Bank report has concluded that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 percent, which in turn has pushed 100 million people across the world below the poverty line. So let me just remind you of a rather startling figure we gave our dear Prime Minister in April:

100 million tonnes of grain will be used to produce biofuel worldwide this year, 760 million tonnes will be used to feed chickens, pigs and other farmed animals.

Yet just a few hours before sinking his teeth (and the other G8 leaders’ of course, let’s not forget them) into dish after dish of extravagant – and most definitely not vegetarian – fayre, the government released this little gem:

“The rise of popular interest in food policy issues, and growing public awareness of the impact of what we choose to eat on everything from animal welfare, to our health and the protection of the environment has seen a massive transformation in Britain’s food culture over the past ten years.”

Elsewhere he also said:

“We need a global plan to deal with rising food prices that are affecting millions of families in Britain. That’s why I am proposing that we take action to both increase the global supply of food and reduce unnecessary demand.”

So, an 18 dish dinner is necessary, hmm?

Why did the bull cross the road? To escape the slaughterhouse! But sadly for Charlie, the 14-month-old bullock who was rescued from a Cornish cliff yesterday by the Ministry of Defence, it might have all been in vain.

For three days, Charlie was trapped down the bottom of a cliff after escaping from his herd of “beef cattle” in St. Levan, West Cornwall. The brave bull headed for the sun, sand and sea but sadly didn’t reach his holiday destination, as he lost his footing and plunged over the edge of a cliff.

Three days, 27 coast guards, the Royal Navy Air Service, the RSPCA and a team of supportive onlookers later, Charlie was flown to safety and all lived happily ever after. Or that’s how you’d think this story ends, but actually it does not.

Media reports suggest that the bull, who cost the emergency services thousands of pounds and a tremendous amount of effort to save his life, was returned to the herd and back in line for slaughter once again. You can see what he has to look forward to here.

So PETA sent the farmer a letter asking for him to consider retiring the bull to a sanctuary so he could live the rest of his life in peace. Here are the juicy bits:

We’ll let you know how it pans out.