ANOTHER HORSE "CHAMPION" DIES TO SERVE GAMBLERS

Ed Berliner, a pretty well known sports journalist who has covered horse racing on many occasions, issues a scathing condemnation of the entire institution and all but calls for its elimination after Eight Belles follows in Barbaro's footsteps as a high-profile 'winner' of a horse that trips and must be killed.

UPDATE 5/4: Berliner's not alone... Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? is asked in the New York Times.

EXPERTS: FACTORY FARMING MUST GO

This is almost as big a bombshell as the Humane Society video, though it won't hit with the same force, because, why? No pictures. But it's still big.

Factory farming takes a big toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America's economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock, concludes an independent, 2 1/2-year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

The report, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and released Tuesday, finds that the "economies of scale" long used to justify factory-farming practices are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for associated costs.

Among those costs are human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots and the degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.

Read the whole story - while the 10-year "phaseout" is predictably wussy, there are still some pretty breathtaking recommendations, considering the (very staid, mainstream) source. They even call for an end to forced feeding of poultry to produce foie gras, which should have repercussions in cities across North America where activists are pressing that fight.

ADVANTAGE: EDDIE LAMA

If you've seen The Witness, you know what this is about. You also know that it's just one method, as part of an ongoing barbaric industry, that's being eliminated. But it is an important step. "New York has become the first state in the nation to ban the electrocution of animals in a particularly gruesome way to harvest their fur. The law bans the practice of anal and genital electrocution of fur-bearing animals, including mink, foxes, chinchillas and rabbits."

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

It's many months now since one has been named, but the name remains the same. Just worth citing for those who persist in believing a vegan diet renders the human body weak or unfit: "Tim VanOrden will do whatever it takes today to get his body to the top of a 62-story skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles before hundreds of others.
But unlike his competitors, he is only fueled by fruits and vegetables, some nuts and some seeds, and he eats them only in their natural state: uncooked, unprocessed and unrefined. He is a raw vegan athlete and has been for the past three years."