Written by Jeff Mackey
Got your dancing shoes on? Several of PETA's celebrity supporters do, and they've been showing off their best moves on ABC's Dancing With the Stars (DWTS). The animal-friendly folks tripping the light fantastic this season include the following:
Andy Dick
Before he began cutting a rug on DWTS, this compassionate comic took on the cutting-up of animals for dissection and (with a valuable assist from Martin Short) hilariously showed the unfunny side of a certain fast-food clown in his memorable spots for PETA.
Karina Smirnoff
The lovely professional dancer dazzled us in her PETA ad declaring that she'd rather dance naked than wear fur!
© StarMaxInc.com
Kellie Pickler
The country chanteuse (who's also fur-free) has been wowing the judges with her moves and winning over viewers with her sweet smile—not to mention the fit physique that earned her PETA's Sexiest Vegetarian Alive title. Being good to animals is good for your body, too!
Zendaya Coleman
Zendaya has already shown that she has all the right moves on Disney's Shake It Up—and by helping PETA help animals with a fundraiser at the vegan-friendly Millions of Milkshakes.
Carrie Ann Inaba
This PETA pal, who is seated at the DWTS judges' table, partnered with her beloved late cat, Shadow, in a stunning ad promoting spaying and neutering to end the animal-overpopulation crisis.
Keep on dancing, y'all—we'll be cheering you on every week. To us, though, everyone who steps up for animals is a Mirror Ball winner!
Following troubling incidents in which students desecrated the bodies of dead cats in a school classroom, California's Newport-Mesa Unified School District has confirmed to PETA that it's replacing cruel and crude cat dissections in district schools with modern virtual-dissection software. This progressive change follows a PETA plea and offer to provide the district with non-animal teaching methods. Now, kids in the district will learn about life sciences more effectively and humanely—and without being taught the dangerous lesson that animals are nothing more than tools to be used and abused.
Cruelty in the Curriculum
The district's decision to eliminate cat dissection came after an outcry erupted over Facebook photos showing Newport Harbor High School students who played, posed, and smiled with the mutilated bodies of cats used in a biology class. The photos were brought to the attention of PETA and the faculty by brave students in the school's Compassion in Action club. PETA immediately contacted the school district with information about better, kinder methods of teaching anatomy and offered to provide the district with the software.
Cats who are cut apart in school dissections come from biological supply houses, which obtain the bodies of lost, stray, and abandoned animals from animal shelters—meaning that some cats used in biology classes may be the lost animal companions of families.
It's no surprise that trying to teach kids science with mutilated animals can foster callousness toward animals and breed this kind of inexcusable behavior.
Make the Switch
Is your school system still stuck in the Dark Ages, with animals paying the price? Learn more about how you can cut out dissection.
Written by Michelle Kretzer
Students attending District of Columbia Public Schools no longer have to choose between their grades and their morals. On PETA's recommendation, the school district has adopted a dissection-choice policy, giving students the option to use advanced software and other humane methods of studying anatomy.
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To help district teachers implement the new policy, PETA is offering to donate computers and software through our national educational grants program so that D.C. students have access to state-of-the-art virtual-dissection equipment. Teachers are already taking us up on the offer! Advanced computer models have proved to be more effective teaching tools than cutting up animals, and they allow students to learn compassion while learning about anatomy.
Animals used in dissection could be lost or abandoned companion animals or could be bred in squalid mass-breeding facilities and then killed. Frogs, the most commonly dissected animal, are often ripped out of their natural environments, stuffed into bags without food or water, and shipped across long distances, and many of them sustain injuries or die during transport. But states and school districts across the country are honoring students' right not to contribute to this cruelty by implementing dissection-choice policies.
To learn how to cut out dissection at a school near you, contact us to request a free "Cut Out Dissection" pack.
Pop the corks on those champagne bottles test tubes! After more than five years of discussions among PETA, the Intel Corporation, and the Society for Science & the Public (SSP) concerning cruel and deadly experiments on animals conducted by high school students participating in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair [http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/] (ISEF), the world's largest pre-collegiate science competition, the event has implemented a new policy banning experiments in which any animals die or are intentionally killed.
This is great news since it's estimated that in 2011 alone, thousands of vertebrate animals likely died in experiments conducted by students who were competing in regional science fairs around the world in the hope of making it to the ISEF finals. Seven million high school students participate in these fairs each year.
Groundwork Leads to Groundbreaking Victory
For years, high school students competing in ISEF-affiliated science fairs around the world have conducted and participated in invasive and deadly experiments on animals, such as addicting animals to cocaine, inflicting brain injuries on them, injecting them with toxic chemicals, and inducing strokes in animals and then cutting them open. To stop these cruel experiments, PETA has been working with Intel and SSP since 2007 with considerable success. Prior to the new ban on deadly experiments, SSP (which organizes ISEF)—after discussions with PETA and Intel (which sponsors ISEF)—adopted a formal statement in 2010 in favor of modern alternatives to animal experiments.
How to Help Animals in School Laboratories
Psyched about this victory? Use the buttons below to "like" it, tweet about it, and otherwise spread the word. And if you want to cut dissection and other lab-based cruelty out of your school's curriculum, get all the details at peta2.com.
Exciting news from our pals at PETA India! Following that group's extensive campaign, the Indian government has issued guidelines to the Medical Council of India, the Pharmacy Council of India, and the University Grants Commission instructing them to completely stop dissection and experimentation on animals to train both undergraduate and postgraduate students and use non-animal methods of teaching instead.
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This campaign was hard-fought. In addition to writing letters to the Ministry of Environment and Forests (which issued the guidelines) and the entities mentioned above, efforts included gathering petition signatures from university students, letters from and meetings held by progressive scientists, and work by other caring individuals as well as online outreach, celebrity involvement, media pressure, and demonstrations. And of course, the PETA Foundation's administrative, fundraising, and finance departments helped keep the campaign afloat.
Another key to this victory was a recent brainstorming session among government scientists and other researchers in which PETA India participated, making the point that animals are not required in order to train students. Indeed, as the ministry said in issuing the guidelines, "Nowadays effective alternatives in the form of CDs, computer simulations, manikin/models, in vitro methods, etc are available and they are not only effective and absolute replacements to the use of animals in teaching anatomy/physiology but they are also superior pedagogic tools in the teaching of pharmacy/life sciences."
Countless animals continue to suffer and die in laboratories at U.S. colleges and universities—please take action to persuade the U.S. to follow India's compassionate and forward-thinking example.
Written by PETA
Bubbles, one of the resident cats at PETA's Norfolk, Virginia, headquarters, has written a letter to Santa (with a little help from the author of 250 Things You Can Do to Make Your Cat Adore You):
'Tis the season of peace and goodwill, and students and teachers across the country are extending both to animals who would have been killed and dissected for crude biology lessons.
All too often, PETA receives complaints from compassionate middle school, high school, and college students who are faced with the daunting dilemma of whether to mutilate a dead frog, rat, or cat or receive a failing grade for standing up for animals. When we hear from these students, we quickly spring into action and contact faculty and administrators to urge them to respect the students' wishes by providing them with modern non-animal learning methods and asking them to cut out dissection altogether.
Photo: Robert Sebree; Makeup: Chantal Moore for The Cloutier Agency
One of the ways in which PETA facilitates schools' transition to humane science teaching tools is through our TeachKind educational grant program. Teachers can apply to receive free computers, software, and models to replace animal dissection in their classrooms. Not only do these modern and effective teaching tools save animals' lives, they also help create a positive learning environment that does not exclude students because of their moral beliefs.
The following are just a few of PETA's recent successes for students and animals:
To learn how to get modern non-animal science teaching tools for your school or to help fund these lifesaving donations, visit TeachKind.org.
Call it life imitating art. Fans who caught the latest episode of HBO's Enlightened on Monday got a little more enlightened when PETA's message popped up on the show. Executive producer, star, and PETA friend Mike White stuck it to cruelty when he stuck PETA stickers on the desk of character Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern). Here's what the stickers, which were clearly visible throughout the scene, read:
In need of some illumination of your own? Read more about the leather industry and dissection on PETA's website, and see the stickers' appearance in the new episode of Enlightened on HBO Go.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
It's that time of year when all you want to do is find the perfect comfy chair (or vegetable aisle) to hibernate in, but why not curl up with some steamy Internet Soup instead?
Following an extensive campaign by PETA India, Indian universities' top governing body, the University Grants Commission (UGC), is officially recommending that all colleges and universities replace animal dissection and animal experimentation in zoology and life sciences courses with modern non-animal methods. According to Dr BK Sharma, associate professor and head of the Department of Zoology at the RL Saharia Government PG College in Jaipur, by using computer simulations, interactive CD-ROMs, films, charts, and lifelike models, it is estimated that Indian universities will save 19 million animals every year.
Animals used for dissection may be captured from their natural habitats or may come from "biological supply" companies, which not only breed animals but also purchase them from slaughterhouses, pet stores, animal shelters, and dealers who sell lost or stolen companion animals. Animals are killed by gassing or drowning and are then injected with formaldehyde, sometimes without first being checked to make sure that they are dead.
The UGC's recommendations will not only spare millions of animals' lives but also ensure that students don't have to choose between their education and their morals.
Visit CutOutDissection.com to learn how PETA can help you get dissection alternatives implemented in schools near you.
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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