“Excerpts from a Dog’s Diary”
8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Milk bones! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing! Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: Thursday, 13 September, 2007

A heartwarming story from China: The abandoned monkey who has found love with a pigeon.

LOVE AND KINDNESS…TRANSCEND ALL

They’re an odd couple in every sense but a monkey and a pigeon have become inseparable at an animal sanctuary in China. The 12-week-old macaque - who was abandoned by his mother - was close to death when it was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Goangdong Province.

After being taken to an animal hospital his health began to improve but he seemed spiritless - until he developed a friendship with a white pigeon. The blossoming relationship helped to revive the macaque who has developed a new lease of life, say staff at the sanctuary.

[Item research by M. Cichy]

BY STEVEN BEST

A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”

Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. Read the rest of this entry »

Carl Sagan, the celebrated astronomist and distinguished humanist, who seriously objected to the notion that humans have an inherent “right” to do as they please with animals and nature.

BY KATHY FRESTON
Dateline June 29, 2007

There is a growing sense these days that the issues that plague our planet — war, injustice, and blatant abuse of nature — are intensifying and perhaps moving us toward the point of no return. And that if we don’t snap to attention and start doing things differently soon, we as a civilization, could be in real trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

BY KATHY FRESTON
Originally at ALTERNET.ORG Read the rest of this entry »

perspective \•/ BY ANDREW FEINSTEIN
Dateline: 07/27/2007 Denverpost.com

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) protesters carry signs and shout slogans calling for the suspension of Atlanta Falcons football player Michael Vick, outside the NFL’s headquarters in New York, Friday, July 20, 2007. Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury on Tuesday for his alleged involvement with dogfighting. (AP / Bebeto Matthews)

Like most of you, I was appalled when reading the ghastly details of the indictment against Michael Vick, which accused the Atlanta Falcons quarterback of violating federal laws against dogfighting, procuring and training pit bulls for combat and conducting this illegal enterprise across state lines. Read the rest of this entry »

BY AMANDA GRISCOM LITTLE
An interview with Dennis Kucinich about his presidential platform on energy and the environment

Dateline: 01 Aug 2007

This is part of a series of interviews with presidential candidates produced jointly by and Outside.

Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. The only one with a vision intelligent and bold enough to solve this nation’s central moral and economic problems. Of course, that in itself relegates him to the corporate media’s Siberia.
Editorial disclosure: Cyrano’s Journal supports Dennis Kucinich without reservations.
Photo: SEIU via flickr

He may be eating the front-runners’ dust in the polls, but among deep-green voters, Dennis Kucinich is considered a trailblazer. A Democratic U.S. rep from Cleveland, Ohio, Kucinich is calling for a radical overhaul of the U.S. government and economy — one that infuses every agency in the executive branch with a sustainability agenda, phases out coal and nuclear power entirely, and calls on every American to ratchet down their resource consumption and participate in a national conservation program. Read the rest of this entry »

What the use of Nuclear Weapons really means
BY FRANCESCA CAIGATTI
Picture taken of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

It is beyond my comprehension how our president or any world leader can loosely and irresponsibly talk about nuking ANYONE on this planet, as has become so popular these days. The first time I heard words to that effect out of our president’s mouth I thought that alone was grounds for removal from office because it indicated a serious lack of understanding about what he was talking about … or, even worse, that he did know and would do it anyhow. And here he is seven years later, still acting as if nuking somebody is actually a choice. Did/does he understand what nuclear bombs DO? He is certainly not speaking for the American people when he threatens half the world with the use of these weapons! Read the rest of this entry »

BY RALPH R. ACAMPORA
July 22, 2007

The story many Long Islanders have followed during the past few weeks of an escaped steer on the North Fork whose notoriety landed him a refuge away from the abattoir gets more perplexing the more you think about it. From a strictly agribusiness point of view, of course, the fugitive livestock presented only the problem of recapturing an ornery investment before its due harvest. Bad cow - get back into the pen. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MS. X

All the products we consume take a toll on nature—directly or indirectly.

Over the years I have become more and more discouraged and angry at this nation’s refusal to acknowledge, at a national level and in a consistent way, the harm we do our planet and its life forms. Our Environmental Protection Agency is so lame that I have to ask whose interests it serves. Profit, not health, is the prime motivator in all business. Industrial processes which poison the air, water, and soil have been developed and left in place for decades because to change them will reduce profits. Of course, NOT changing them continues to poison the planet and sicken its organic populations, but for so long now that consideration has been pushed aside. The “sickness industry,” interconnected through pharmaceuticals, insurance, and the grossly expensive medical establishment, then makes money “curing” the conditions that industry has caused. This whole cycle is so blatantly interwoven that I wonder why more people don’t perceive it. Read the rest of this entry »