Los Angeles has been on a roll lately (ever since PETA's new Bob Barker Building opened there—coincidence?). First, the city banned pet stores from selling puppies, kittens, and rabbits from breeders, and then it became the first major city to embrace and endorse Meatless Monday. Now, the City of Angels is considering a ban on cruel elephant acts.

Here's what's going on: The City Council's Personnel and Animal Welfare Committee proposed a measure that would ban circuses and other traveling exhibits in L.A. from forcing elephants to perform. 

If the council passes the measure, Ringling Bros. and other circuses that abuse elephants will no longer be allowed to haul them to Los Angeles in cramped, stifling boxcars or trucks in which they're kept chained for up to 100 hours at a time. These circuses will no longer be allowed to drag elephants into an L.A. arena and force them to stand on their heads or balance on balls, with the ever-present bullhook looming threateningly nearby. In L.A., they would no longer be able to deprive elephants of the right to be elephants.

Ringling Bros. is already blasting the measure with both barrels, so the L.A. City Council needs to hear from every single person who has elephants' welfare at heart. Please write—even one line—to the council and encourage it to support the ban on cruel elephant acts. Get everyone you know to do the same so that L.A. can continue to serve as a role model for cities across the country.

peta2 turned Los Angeles' 101 highway into the freeway of love for turkeys. A group of precocious pilgrims and one tenacious turkey asked rush-hour drivers to bury the hatchet: 

Show turkeys some love this Thanksgiving. Drop the pedal and go, go, go get yourself a delicious Tofurky roast.

ci.arcadia.ca / CC

Oil's not the only thing they're changing at L.A. Jiffy Lubes. After learning that Ringling beats and whips animals behind the scenes (among other things), the prez of the chain's SoCal operations has promised us that the Jiffy Lubes in the greater Los Angeles area will no longer give away free Ringling tickets with the purchase of an oil change.

That's one way to stick it to those dip sticks at Ringling!

Written by Amy Elizabeth

While Jack is away in Cali, I pledged that I wouldn't make The PETA Files too girly. Not that I'm really known to be the type of girl who focuses on clothes or make-up more than, say, how the Saints are a better football team than the Redskins. But in the absence of the second-best PETA blogger, I vowed to keep girl talk to a bare minimum—that is, until I found a reason to write about H&M.

In addition to turning out trendy clothing that is both affordable and stylish enough for all of us hipster wannabes (Jack included), H&M is now on my list of top places to shop for an even better reason. The international retail giant has pledged to stop buying cruelly produced Australian wool!

That's right! In addition to already carrying a wide variety of synthetic leather purses and an abundance of cruelty-free clothing, H&M is going a step further by pledging to buy more wool from countries that don't use mulesing—the crudest, cruelest, and cheapest method used for flystrike "prevention." H&M also vows to ensure that the Australian merino wool used in its designs comes only from farmers that don't practice mulesing.

To learn more about mulesing—in which Australian farmers use shears to cut chunks of skin and flesh from lambs' backsides, without any painkillers—please visit SaveTheSheep.com.

- Amy

The Trollsen Twins Campaign I was talking about earlier today was debuted in LA this afternoon with a demonstration unveiling peta2's "Fur Is for Beautiful Animals and Ugly People" ad, starring none other than the Olsens themselves. Here are some pics: