PERDUE DEAD

No foolin' - Frank Perdue, who built an international corporation from the killing of chickens, and one of whose signature quotes was "the prime ingredient of success is fear," died today "following a brief illness." Well, maybe a little bit of foolin' - what was that unstated "brief illness," anyway?

1000 WORDS

"It's just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see."
- Rebecca Aldworth, HSUS.

Yep.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SAWDUST

Along with the demise of foie gras, the elimination of elephants (and next, tigers) from circus entertainment continues its inexorable march, as the public slowly becomes more and more awake to what an idiotically cruel institution it is. I don't track every single piece expressing this in every paper, but when it's in the New York Times people tend to pay attention. So in this otherwise straightforward account of a circus show, we get a digression:

Everyone gasped when six women lay down like human markers on a ruler and let an elephant named Asia navigate the small paces between them. Asia did this with great care. Elephants never lose their air of remote dignity even when they must sit on stools and raise their front legs like small dogs. I couldn't help wishing that the circus had used men in this human marker routine. What a novelty: men are rarely asked to expose themselves passively to danger. They are still the ones cracking whips as Bengal tigers (beautiful but a little fat) walk in circles, occasionally roar and run in and out of cages that look too small for them. Their trainer, Taba, did not seem worthy of them. But our consciousness has changed. We worry about how the animals are trained and treated.

Yes we do. Now it's time to go beyond worrying and do something about it.

UPDATE: Just ran across this related story: Elephants are the only land mammal other than primates that can undeniably copy sounds - an imitative skill based in their intensive social bonding.

SURPRISE: NO MILK = HEALTHY BONES!

Yeah, it's a big "surprise," all right. Some coverage of this study has focused only on the strict numbers on bone mass, missing the bigger picture, which the Globe, at least, gets: In a piece headlined "Strict vegetarians -- surprise -- have healthy bones," they report that "People who adhere strictly to raw food vegetarian diets are thin but have surprisingly robust bones, US researchers reported yesterday. Although nutritionists and the food industry have warned that a diet without dairy foods can lead to the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, the team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found the vegans they studied had many of the signs of strong bones." The study, appearing in this week's Archives of Internal medicine, compared "18 average Americans with 18 strict raw food vegans ages 33 to 85. All ate a diet that included unprepared foods such vegetables, fruits, nuts, and sprouted grains."

But wait, there's more: "Fontana expected the vegans to have low vitamin D levels because they avoid all animal products including dairy. But in fact their vitamin D levels were 'markedly higher' than average." Huh? Why would that be? "These people are clever enough to expose themselves to sunlight to increase their concentrations of vitamin D," Fontana said. Oh, so raw veganism doesn't just help your bones, it makes you smarter - to the point that you get enough sun not only to make up for all the Vitamin D you're missing from dairy, but enough to give you more than milk-drinkers! It's either that or dairy foods make you stupid, and we know that's not possible, right?

GIVING UP THE GOOSE

"Foie Gras" is still a mainstay of gourmet dining in the United States, but it's becoming clear that its days as such are numbered. Anti-foie gras legislation is being considered in Oregon, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Get this: "Some bills would make it a criminal act even to possess the delicacy." Uh, yeah, I'll hold my breath till that happens. The article also follows up with more detail on that Pittsburgh post from a few weeks back: "Activists recently persuaded about 10 restaurants to stop serving foie gras in Pittsburgh." Great job!

UPDATE 4/7: Chicago fight picks up steam: Alderman wants foie gras off menus. Stay tuned...

FAST FOOD: GIVING YOU THE FINGER

I will grant right away that this story is exceptional, wayyy out of the ordinary - at least I hope like hell it is! - but as with all "bad" meat stories it has a certain perverse relevance. A woman eating Wendy's chili, expecting only the "regular" form of meat, found herself biting into a severed human finger: "The woman scooped up a mouthful of the steamy stew and bit down on the digit before spitting it out." Think that's as gross as it can get? "Health officials said the fingertip is approximately an inch-and-a-half long. They believe it belongs to a woman because of the long, manicured nail." Ewwwwww. Who wants to eat a human finger with a nail still attached? Wouldn't you much rather be munching on the normal fast food meat components, like good ol' hog anus?

UPDATE 4/24: While the perverse relevance of the claim remains, law enforement officials are now saying the finger-in-chili story was a malicious hoax and have arrested the woman. So don't worry, folks, the chili's human finger-free - it's only grade-A hog anus in there!

WHAT IF IT LED TO A CURE FOR CANCER?

That's the question some people like to bring up about animal testing - after all, "a cure for cancer" is the holy grail of both science and rhetoric, used as a trump card in many hypothetical scenarios across many topic areas. But what if it's already here, it's just a cure people don't want to take? There is at the very least some interesting anecdotal evidence that might make the more serious-minded among us take a closer look at that question.

In the story "Heather: Vegetarian diet saved me from cancer" we hear that "Heather Mills McCartney claims a vegetarian diet may help cure cancer. The former model has joined husband Sir Paul in extolling the virtues of a meat-free lifestyle." She relates that after trying all sorts of drugs to treat her condition, "In desperation, I went to the States. The moment I arrived they took me off all my medication... Just 10 days of a strict vegetarian diet, wheatgrass juice and placing garlic poultices on my wound (Owwww!) and I was healed - as were scores of people around me, from addicts to cancer sufferers and non-insulin dependent diabetics." She added: "I managed to stay meat and fish-free for years. When I briefly went back to eating it, it coincided with my contracting cancer of the uterus. I vowed from then on that vegetarianism was the healthy lifestyle for me."

VEGAN - IT'S GOOD BUSINESS!

"San Diego State's Entrepreneurial Management Center hosted its 16th annual Venture Challenge last week at the Mission Valley Hilton. This competition offers graduate students the opportunity to present business ideas for cash prizes," notes the Daily Aztec. SDSU's team, Believables Corporation, walked away from the competition with the Showstopper Award. Believables intends to start its business in the near future: "Believables plans to build a chain of quick-serve restaurants offering a completely meat-free menu," Blake Travis, vice president of marketing for Believables Corporation, said. "We will be the first to successfully transition the meat-alternative food category from the retail food channel to the quick-serve industry through a chain of restaurants that appeal to nearly 100 million health-conscious Americans."

ATKINS RUNNING SCARED

Well, not Dr. Atkins himself, of course - he's no longer running anywhere after *cough* slipping on that ice. But the company that bears his name, knowing that the jig is up and that the recognizble name is all it has going for it, is holding onto that precious name while changing the basis of the diet itself. As this widely reproduced article puts it, Atkins Nutritionals, which championed a dieting craze that made millions of Americans shun bread and other carbohydrates, wants a do-over. Lots of good lay-it-on-the-table quotes in this latest saga: food analysts "say the bloom is off the rose for low-carb names like Atkins, as consumers have dismissed it as a fad that got rid of weight at first, but was unsustainable." And Bob Goldin of the food industry research firm Technomic notes that "What Atkins is saying is that this is the new way of doing things, which is the same as saying the old way wasn't that good." And in this piece on the company's embarrassing liquidation of its British subsidiary ("following poor sales"), Sian Harrington of the food trade magazine the Grocer sums up the elemental story: "Once they started trying to flog their own products, consumers asked whether it was a money-making machine rather than a proper diet." Gee, ya think?

UPDATE: I guess it's official now: "Ding dong, the craze is dead."

WORLD WATER DAY

I'd like to see this promotional video that Leo DiCaprio was introducing today as part of "an international campaign to draw attention to the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who don't have access to clean water." It boggles the mind how people can scratch their heads about what to do about this when there's one overwhelming source of not only needless freshwater consumption but staggering water pollution worldwide. Maybe, just maybe, the video spends more than 2% of its running time on this key enemy of clean water.

NOT ALL RECALLS MAKE HEADLINES

Remember, even when you don't see it on the front pages, contaminated meat is out there doing its day-to-day job of sickening people. Like this 12,090 pounds of Chicken Dumplings, the 1,120 pounds of Cooked pork products or the 5,760 pounds of Chicken Products, all recalled for Listeria - or, oddly, the 123,000 pounds of Ground Beef recalled for being contaminated with "hydraulic fluid." Of course there are plenty of smaller recalls, but it's worth noting that this alone is 71 tons of bad meat just over the past month and a half.

THE WIDE WORLD OF VEGAN BLOGS

So I was checking back through the Vegan Porn archives for something, and came upon a post that referenced this blog: www.vegblog.org Cool! And I'm reading along in that one and it leads me to another, veganfreaks.org! Which is also cool! And which links to other blogs and/or sites I haven't even gotten to yet! So that's what this Internet thing is all about, eh?

I've read enough of these ones to know I want them in my sidebar and have added them there. But the biggest surprise of the day is when I go back to read some more of Vegblog.org and - what's this? Neal Barnard is wailing away on electric guitar in a band? How did I miss this? Why didn't Neal ever mention this to me when I talked to him? I feel like I've just woken up from some kind of daze - I guess it's more accurately called "not paying enough attention." Anyway, check out all these other sites if you haven't already! (And if you have... why didn't you tell me??? )

ARE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE?

That seems to be the question that would face cowboy scientists who want to create a mouse with a human brain. Just go read Vegan Porn's take on the whole unbelievable concept. They've nailed it, and I have little than I can add other than my spiffy headline above.

IT'S OFFICIAL: MAD COW FEED BAN NOT BEING ENFORCED

"The Government Accountability Office, the investigative wing of Congress, said that while the FDA has made improvements in its management of the feed ban, 'various program weaknesses continue to undermine the nation's firewall against BSE,'" says this AP story. Well, that's one way to put it, GAO, "undermine the firewall." But see, a "firewall" is an all-or-nothing thing. If just a little teensy bit of fire can get past a firewall and start a fire on the other side, it ain't a firewall anymore, is it?

Other findings: The FDA has "no uniform approach to identify the feed manufacturers and shippers that are subject to the feed ban but have not been inspected;" 20 percent of the 14,800 firms inspected since 1997 have not been re-inspected in five years or more; the FDA's feed-ban inspection guidance "does not include instructions to routinely sample cattle feed to test for potentially banned material;" and the FDA has no "consistent standards for cleaning machinery and transport vehicles that handle both prohibited and allowed feed materials." But other than that, firewall all the way.

HUNTING GETTING MORE UNPOPULAR

Here's a story from last week that doesn't actually seem to have any news in it - if I'm reading right, the latest figures are from 2001, a decline that's already been covered - but this was all over the wires, and if it helps get the message across to people that bloodsport is not a legitimate use of 21st-century leisure time, then I'll happily point to it.

BIRD FLU PANDEMIC MARCHES CLOSER

OK, now is it time to start paying attention to this? "It's a scenario that the World Health Organization (WHO) and other health experts have been expecting and fearing, a mutated version of the bird flu virus that can spread from human to human. The WHO says clusters of H5N1 bird flu cases among people in Vietnam may be a signal that the virus has mutated into a version that can be spread by humans."

KILLER CATS

Sure, it was funny when Monty Python did it, but not in real life.

Well, OK, it's kind of funny in real life too. In this case, unlike with the puppies, the guy wasn't trying to shoot the animal, but it's all too apparent that the animals are now looking out for each other and fighting back on a worldwide level. Besides, the man was cooking at the time, and I'll lay you ten-to-one odds that it wasn't tofu he was fryin' up. Maybe that pushed the cat over the edge, and likewise the cat did to the gun?

MAD COW MAKES VEGANISM A PRIORITY

I recall explaining to someone back when the beef-in-McDonalds-fries thing broke in 2001 that Mad Cow was going to change the way people looked at product ingredients, and people were going to become more like vegans, checking for the absence of bad stuff. It's not only true for food but cosmetics and the like, and now one company is trumpeting its development of a meat-free drug base: "Oxoid has launched a new meat-free culture medium to serve what it says is a growing demand by pharmaceutical companies for non-animal-derived materials for use in pharmaceutical production. Companies making drugs have been trying to reduce the use of animal products in the production environment because of the risk that these materials may carry the agents that cause transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), such as mad cow disease and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases (vCJD) in humans."

MILK'S 'STRONG BONES' BROKEN

Check this out, man! The Washington Times says: "Milk and dairy products do not promote healthy bones in kids and young adults, a Washington-based research group found after analyzing 58 studies." It continues with an explanation of the "calcium paradox:" "Though Americans are some of the world's highest consumers of dairy products, U.S. rates of osteoporosis and bone fracture also are among the world's highest." This is noteworthy because the research was released by PCRM, and has made a nice-sized splash in the national media, with multiple write-ups occupying the "Health" box of Google News for over 24 hours. Plus, although many of the treatments "balanced" PCRM's peer-reviewed research (it appears in the reputable journal Pediatrics) with dissent from such unbiased parties as the National Dairy Councill and Rick Berman's Conspicuous Consumption Foundation, one that reported it straight up, no chaser was... yes, the Washington Times. What a world.

Also, thanks to a CCF-rebutting press release from PCRM I learned that the oft-cited "censure" of the group from the AMA is not only wrongly reported, but has been recanted by the AMA itself, essentially averring that new scientific evidence has proven its old position wrong and PCRM right. Read it.

CONNECTICUT CONSIDERS CIRCUS ELEPHANT BAN

Note that the main argument is human safety rather than the cruelty inherent in forcing elephants to travel town-to-town and do silly tricks. But whatever the motivation, a ban is a ban. "The legislation before lawmakers, proposed by state Reps. Steven Fontana, D-North Haven, and Diana Urban, R-North Stonington, would prohibit the use of elephants in traveling shows, theatrical exhibitions and circuses that come to the state. A similar bill has been proposed in Massachusetts."