The carcass-cooking food trucks that signed up for the barbecue competition at D.C.'s Meat Week got thoroughly smoked—by a pig, a cow, and some meat-free meatballs. 

PETA members and their costumed counterparts set out to give Meat Week attendees some flesh-free options, but as it turned out, meat-free was the only way to be: The food truck chefs couldn't handle the cold temperatures and retreated inside. The iron-fueled vegans, however, stayed out to greet passersby and share the secret behind their resilience: 

The event's organizers might not have been outside handing out meat, but they did have to hand it to our dedicated demonstrators. And in return, the PETA members offered the organizers a taste of compassionate fare that hopefully left them feeling a little warmer toward animals. 

Rosa Parks is remembered as one of the most fearless civil rights activists in history. So it's fitting that her birthday, February 4, has been deemed the National Day of Courage, when we are all encouraged to raise our voices against injustice.

The Henry Ford Museum in the Detroit area, where Parks spent the latter half of her life, plans to pay tribute to her with a day of special events. But the museum overlooked an important detail: Parks didn't harm animals for food. She was a vegetarian. And a celebration of her life and her legacy should be, too. So PETA raised our voices and asked the museum to honor all of Parks' convictions by serving vegetarian food.

Parks is, of course, best known for her work to end segregation and racism. But like her friend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Parks soon broadened her base to advocate for all socially disadvantaged people. And she, like Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and his son, Dexter Scott King, went on to embrace other disadvantaged species. Believing that animals should also be free from being subjugated and abused, Parks became a vegetarian and King's widow and son both went vegan.

Not only did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat on the bus, she also refused to go along with the idea that it's OK to inflict suffering on others for her own ends. In honoring her legacy, we should do the same.  

 
Poisoning, shocking, burning, and killing animals is all in a day's work for vivisectors. If these atrocious acts were committed outside laboratories, they would be felonies. But animals suffer and die every day in laboratories with little or no protection from cruelty. Here are the top five reasons why it needs to stop:

1. It's unethical to sentence 100 million thinking, feeling animals to life in a laboratory cage and intentionally cause them pain, loneliness, and fear.
2. It's bad science. The Food and Drug Administration reports that 92 out of every 100 drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans.
3. It's wasteful. Animal experiments prolong the suffering of people waiting for effective cures by misleading experimenters and squandering precious money, time, and resources that could have been spent on human-relevant research. 
4. It's archaic. Forward-thinking scientists have developed humane, modern, and effective non-animal research methods, including human-based microdosing, in vitro technology, human-patient simulators, and sophisticated computer modeling, that are cheaper, faster, and more accurate than animal tests.
5. The world doesn't need another eyeliner, hand soap, food ingredient, drug for erectile dysfunction, or pesticide so badly that it should come at the expense of animals' lives.

For everyday ways to keep animals out of cruel experiments, see PETA's list of surprising ways to help animals in laboratories.

mastermaq/cc by 2.0

Every year, hundreds of discarded cows bound for slaughterhouses from dairy farms are caught under the influence of drugs—illegal levels of antibiotics, that is.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is concerned that those antibiotics are making their way into the cows' milk. The agency had planned to start expanding its testing of milk for unsafe levels of antibiotics and other drugs this month, but—wait for it—the dairy industry threw a fit. Shocker.

Throwing out every cockamamie reason that it could think of, the industry managed to stall the FDA—but hopefully not for long. "The agency remains committed to gathering the information necessary to address … this important potential public health issue," the FDA said in a statement. "F.D.A. is concerned that the same poor management practices which led to the meat residues may also result in drug residues in milk."

Of course, the best way to avoid drinking a drugshake is to avoid cow's milk altogether.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Photo by Sage Ross, CC by-sa 3.0

Citing research showing that feeding antibiotics to animals on factory farms in order to promote growth "is not in the interest of protecting or promoting public health," the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is recommending that farmers stop routinely mixing antibiotics into animal feed.

Unfortunately, just because the FDA—along with about a gazillion (give or take a zillion) other health experts who are alarmed by the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant "superbugs"—recommends this, it doesn't mean that factory farm operators are going to meekly flush their arsenal of magic bullets down the drain. After all, the reason why antibiotics are fed to animals on factory farms is to keep them from dying in the filthy, crowded conditions that farmers force these animals to call home. Factory farms are prime breeding grounds for potentially deadly bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter, and the conditions are so putrid that millions of animals die within a matter of weeks before they are even sent to slaughter, despite being shot up with drugs. Imagine how few would survive without them.

So expect factory farm operators to fight tooth and nail to avoid giving up their pharmaceutical cocktails—because the only alternative is to improve conditions on factory farms or … gasp … to stop raising animals altogether.

While Big Ag continues to play Russian roulette with public health, you can get started kicking the drug habit today by ordering a copy of our free vegetarian/vegan starter kit.

Written by Alisa Mullins

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9229859@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

Did you know that in a period of just 12 years, from 1996 to 2008, the market for soy milk grew more than eight times over? The folks in the dairy industry know—and it's got them scared. Never ones to play fair (subsidies, anyone?), the cow exploiters are now trying to get the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop companies that make soy milk and other nondairy beverages from using the word "milk" on their product labels.

Heaven forbid that the word "milk" should become associated with something that's actually humane and healthy, right? At any rate, it looks like the FDA is going to ignore this insulting and time-wasting request, and it's a good thing too—who knows what the dairy pushers would go after next? Would new mothers have to buy "mammary secretion pumps"? And who wants to treat digestive upset with nondairy fluid of magnesia?

Thanks to Laura Lewis for sending this story our way.

Written by Jeff Mackey