Written by Michelle Kretzer
As a vegan, Jessica Chastain has famously said, "I don't want to torture anything in my life." And shooting disturbing torture scenes for the upcoming film Zero Dark Thirty, which details the hunt for and takedown of Osama bin Laden, was understandably rough on the actor. But Jessica revealed how she and director Kathryn Bigelow got through it: "During the week that we were filming the interrogations, we sent each other videos of animals being rescued. It was so emotional for me because I rescue dogs and so does she. That's the kind of stuff that was going on behind the scenes. Like, this is not our lives, we are not these characters, there's a place that is waiting for us."
Many of us have experienced how an animal's love can get us through tough times. Anjelica Huston believes it's high time for us to return the favor and help heal the wounds of chimpanzees who have been confined to laboratories and experimented on. She penned an impassioned article urging everyone to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would free all federally owned chimpanzees and retire them to peaceful, spacious sanctuaries.
Paul McCartney is advocating for turkeys to be freed from the fate of ending up as holiday centerpieces. The legendary musician and animal advocate posed for a new "Say No, Thanks to Turkey" Thanksgiving ad for PETA and reposted it on his Facebook page as a reminder before Christmas.
And scores of other celebrities shared animal-friendly reminders with their Twitter followers:
Congratulations are in order for one of our favorite compassionate couples: Jenna Dewan-Tatum and Channing Tatum are expecting their first bundle of joy. With parents like that, we know that their child will be beautiful inside and out.
To keep up with what all your favorite stars are doing for animals, follow @PETA on Twitter.
Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied wed last weekend, and to celebrate their nuptials, they feasted on vegan food at an all-vegan reception. PETA sent our friend Natalie the "Tea for Two" teapot from Daisy Dog Studio.
The U.S. has fallen for gold medal winner Gabby Douglas, but the gymnast hardly ever falls—except for animals. Answering Us Weekly's "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" quiz, Douglas' number one fact was "My favorite animals are dogs and cats." She went on to brag about having two dogs of her own.
Glee star Charlotte Ross hit it off with a chimpanzee named Burrito she met while visiting a Washington sanctuary. Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, which PETA works with, is a home for chimpanzees who were rescued from animal testing facilities. Charlotte said the trip made her even more determined to see the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act passed.
There was no love lost between Jane Lynch and the restaurant most notorious for bigotry and chicken abuse. Jane kicked off Comedy Central's roast of Roseanne Barr with a spirited, "F*** Chick-fil-A!" We're with you, Jane.
SMcGarnigle|cc by 2.0
So is Alicia Silverstone, who joined in the Twitter conversation this week with her pro-equality, pro-chickens message:
Written by Jeff Mackey
Update: We have an exciting development to report! Invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes are closer to being history in the United States now that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has voted to advance the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act to the full Senate.
We want to thank everyone who responded to PETA's call to urge senators on the committee to pass the bill. Now let's make sure that this lifesaving measure becomes law—please contact your U.S. legislators and encourage them to support the great-ape bill when it comes up for a vote!
Originally published April 23, 2012:
In advance of the April 24 U.S. Senate hearing on the historic Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (GAPCSA), PETA sent members of Congress a print of a painting along with a photo of and a letter about the artist—a chimpanzee named Jamie, who was rescued from a laboratory.
Photo: Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest
From Experiments to Expressionism
Jamie, now 34 years old, spent more than 20 years alone in a cage in the windowless basement of a Pennsylvania laboratory, where she was used in hepatitis experiments. In 2008, she—along with six other chimpanzees from the same laboratory—was rescued with PETA's help by Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. Jamie now spends her days relaxing, playing outdoors with her friends, and expressing herself through art, including pen drawings and finger paintings. You can watch her creativity in action here.
GAPCSA would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees, retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year. PETA hopes Jamie's artwork and photo will help legislators put a face to this lifesaving bill at a critical moment.
How You Can Help Great Apes Like Jamie
Please contact your U.S. representative and senators and urge them to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.
Where others see problems, PETA sees possibilities. Case in point: The Kennedy Space Center is looking for tenants for some of its facilities left vacant by the end of the shuttle program, so PETA has inquired about renting a vacant repair hangar or other building there—so that we can turn it into a memorial for the chimpanzees (in)famously abused for violent crash tests and experimental flights in the U.S. space program.
Courtesy of NASA
While NASA may have made the compassionate decision to stop experimenting on chimpanzees decades ago—more than a half-century after a chimpanzee named Ham was subjected to painful tests and then fired into space—nearly 1,000 of these highly intelligent and social animals continue to be tortured in laboratories across the country. PETA's proposed memorial would allow NASA to acknowledge its part in this shameful history—including the unfortunate role that the agency's breeding program had in creating a population of captive chimpanzees who subsequently spent decades being tormented in labs and whose offspring are still locked up—while helping to bring attention to the need for the United States to join every other industrialized nation on Earth in banning experiments on chimpanzees.
Toward that end, more than 160 senators and representatives have already signed on to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act. Passage of this important legislation would permanently end the use of chimpanzees and all other great apes in invasive experiments, retire federally owned apes to sanctuaries—where many chimpanzee refugees from the space program are already lucky enough to reside—and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
Please contact your U.S. senators and representative and urge them to cosponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 1513/S. 810) if they haven't already and to make sure that it becomes law.
As the U.S. Congress considers the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would permanently ban the use of chimpanzees in invasive experiments and retire all 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, Rampart star Woody Harrelson has written a letter to one of his California senators, Barbara Boxer, on behalf of PETA imploring her in her key role as the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to support the bill:
[N]early 1,000 of these complex beings are locked inside barren cells in U.S. laboratories—some for as long as 50 years—where they have been intentionally infected with diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis and forced to endure decades of invasive procedures, fear, loneliness, and pain. This hellish experience leaves lifelong emotional scars on chimpanzees, and many of them resort to self-mutilation or suffer from depression and other psychological disorders for years after experiencing the trauma of having their minds and bodies violated.
Beloved actor Michael Clarke Duncan from The Green Mile is keeping his mile-high frame in shape with a green vegetarian diet. The star of the new show The Finder is also a huge animal lover!
Our pal Russell Simmons tweeted about the letter that we sent to his pal Dr. Dre regarding his ear atrocities, while Ashley Judd was busy asking her Twitter followers not to patronize circuses:
The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act has a new ally—Harry's Law. A recent episode tackled the issue of whether apes could be defined as persons under the law, with Kathy Bates' character arguing, "Apes are a lot less inhuman than we would like to think....There's a qualitative shift happening in the way we view the animal world, especially when it comes to apes."
Carrie Underwood always views the animal world as deserving protection. When she spotted an injured dog on the highway, she pulled over, bundled up the dog, and gently loaded her into the car. After the animal received emergency veterinary care, Underwood took the dog to her house to recover and cried when she had to say goodbye after finding the pup an adoptive home.
Underwood was PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian of 2005, and plenty of other sexy stars have turned heads to change hearts. Check out the Mirror's ranking of PETA and our affiliates' top naked celebrity ads.
Written by PETA
In an essay posted today on The Huffington Post, PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk talks about the progress being made in behalf of chimpanzees in laboratories and posits that great apes appear to have at long last reached a turning point with the introduction of the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would phase out all invasive experiments on great apes and mandate the retirement to sanctuaries of all 500 chimpanzees currently held in federally funded laboratories.
"These chimpanzees, hundreds of them, have been alone all those decades: no mate, no child, no friend to comfort them, to help them get through the pain of whatever experiment they are being subjected to," writes Ingrid. "Being possessed of the ability to anticipate, they could only dread the next ordeal―a lung biopsy, perhaps, an injection, an infection―who knows? They don't."
Ingrid notes how far chimpanzees have come since she attended a symposium on alternatives to animal experiments 30 years ago at which a famous chimpanzee experimenter, Dr. Alfred Prince, was labeled a turncoat by many of his colleagues for proposing a "Chimpanzee Bill of Rights" that proposed the then-radical idea that chimpanzees should be treated as more than test tubes with opposable thumbs.
"After Dr. Prince spoke, there was much mumbling and foot-shuffling in the auditorium," writes Ingrid. "Then, a red-faced scientist stood up and screamed―not spoke but screamed―that any talk of affording chimpanzees rights was nonsense. He was beside himself with rage as he accused anyone who cared about animals as using 'solely emotional arguments.' I stood up to say that there's nothing wrong (in fact there's often everything right) with being moved by the plight of others―for those who can't empathize include sociopaths―but I really didn't need to open my mouth. The irony of his fiercely emotional outburst said it all. I drove home thinking, 'It's started.' But look how long the journey has taken!"
"Animal liberation was once a wonderful dream, but now, starting with the chimpanzees, it is beginning to happen. Let's wish the other animals the best in winning their future freedom, too, and celebrate the eventual end of our role as their masters."
To read Ingrid’s essay in its entirety, visit HuffingtonPost.com.
Written by Alisa Mullins
PETA Files readers, it's your call. Who's the cruelest monster of them all? The contenders for May's Vivisector of the Month are vying hard for the title, and animals are suffering for it.
John VandeBerg is the director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas—one of the last laboratories in the world that still torments chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, in cruel and invasive experiments. VandeBerg is even urging the federal government to rip hundreds more chimpanzees out of a peaceful retirement and send them to his laboratory, where these highly intelligent and social beings will spend the rest of their lives confined to what amounts to a prison cell for infectious-disease experiments. And his callousness doesn't stop with chimpanzees: VandeBerg also torments and kills baboons and opossums to show that a diet high in fat and cholesterol is bad for you. Your tax dollars at work!
Up against VandeBerg is Aleksey Sobakin, who definitely cannot count sheep to help him sleep at night. He and his cohorts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent decades placing hundreds of sheep in a decompression chamber that rapidly reduces air pressure, causing bubbles of nitrogen to form in the brain, the blood, and other organs. This extremely painful condition—commonly known as "the bends"—killed many of the sheep in clear violation of a Wisconsin cruelty-to-animals law. The sheep who didn't die during decompression were killed afterward. These hideous experiments were only stopped after PETA and Madison-based Alliance for Animals filed a formal complaint in court and a judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the apparent violations of state law.
Who should be "Vivisector of the Month"?customer surveys
After you make your decision, make your voice heard. Ask your congressperson to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would keep retired chimpanzees away from VandeBerg and other experimenters. And urge the special prosecutor investigating Sobakin to file charges against him and other culpable experimenters before the statute of limitations runs out.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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