Ga-ga-ga’s In-fes-ted Ga-ga’s In-fes-ted

Flash *Veg* News

FAIL

Creative Genius or Vapid Whore?

Lady Slab’a (Meat) was busted on Ellen the other day after wearing a dress made of the innards of abused animals and presented with a veg bikini. “Just my luck,” she said after finding out that Ellen was vegan. But the next statement reveals more about Lady Slaba’s limited mind than ever before. When asked what the purpose was of her fleshy fashion, she gave this weak, not quite proper English statement trying to link her dress to homosexuality:

“If we don’t stand up for what we believe in we’ll have as much rights as the meat on our bones.”

Girl…

Methinks she said the meat on “our” bones instead of animals’ bones because she realized last minute that being treated like a piece of meat is actually not an edgy comparison, but just sad to many people as it evokes the very real images of factory farming.

PETA issued a statement supposing that Gaga’s meat ensemble—dress, boots, purse, hat—was likely hopping with little worms: “Meat is the decomposing flesh of a tormented animal who didn’t want to die, and after a few hours under the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be crawling in maggots—not too attractive, really.”

And PETA could be right. According to the laws of Sweet Lady Science, once a fly lays an egg—say, on a rotting carcass, or a promising piece of flap meat—if the weather is warm, the eggs hatch in the next eight to 20 hours. Given that most gowns, particularly custom ones, take at least that long to design and execute, Team Fernandez would need to either keep the meat in a totally fly-free fridge, or hire an anti-insect squad armed with couture swatters to guard the dress around the clock until Gaga could don it.

“Maggot infestation can happen quickly on raw meat at room temperature and will develop faster with heat, accelerated by being close to skin and under hot lights,” says Dr. Shawki Ibrahim, chief scientific advisor for Grow Green Industries. Plus, “the dress is definitely puts her at an E.coli risk if she had a cut on her skin, but otherwise it’s just the stink factor.”

In an interview with Ryan Seacrest today, Ellen explained how inappropriate it was for daytime television, how uncomfortable it made her feel, and how clueless Slaba was to not consider the cruelty that went into such an outfit.

You can’t stop cruelty with cruelty. Duh.

WIN

Animal Rights Activists Stage Protest at Alumni Event

Article by Fabrizio Stendaro

On Tuesday, STOP UBC Animal Research, an animal rights group, held a protest at the Ce­cil Greene Park House during an alumni event to protest ani­mal experimentation at the uni­versity. Brian Vincent, a spokes­person for the group, said he was happy with how the event turned out.

“I’m very proud of how the volunteers represented the or­ganization,” he said. “They ad­hered to the mission statement of being very peaceful.”

He also said that UBC officials were respectful of their right to free speech.

This protest was the latest ac­tion in a media campaign the group has been undertaking over the past month.

STOP, which is an offshoot of the Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society of BC, ad­vocates for the abolition of all testing and research conduct­ed on animals at UBC. They were inspired by an 2008 ar­ticle published in The Ubys­sey entitled “Cruel Intentions.”

In the article, Dr. Chris Har­vey-Clark, director of UBC’s An­imal Care Centre, claimed the university might be “the sec­ond largest biomedical cam­pus in Canada.” According to Vincent, STOP has upwards of 200 members, including a pri­vate Facebook page.

The group claims that one of their primary objectives is to have greater transparency when it comes to animal research.

“We think that the public has a right to know how their money is being spent,” said Vincent. He said that STOP’s ultimate goal is to hold a debate between scien­tists on both sides of this issue.

However, UBC VP Research John Hepburn said that informa­tion regarding research on an­imals is “the intellectual prop­erty of individual researchers.”

Moreover, Hepburn worried that some of the information that STOP was asking for could be misinterpreted.

Hepburn said that STOP’s objective is unrealistic, which is why the university will not engage in a dialogue with the group.

“It’s important that UBC, as a major research institution, tries to find cures to major dis­eases,” he said.

Hepburn went on to say that testing on animals is a regula­tory requirement for agencies such as the Food and Drug Ad­ministration and Health Cana­da before anything can be test­ed on humans.

“You don’t want to stop re­search on animals because there is no substitute,” said Hepburn.

Recently, Hepburn sent an email to faculty and staff warning them to “remain vigilant…to help mitigate potentially unpleasant and violent situations” due to the increased activity by animal rights groups around UBC’s Van­couver campus.

In response, Anne Birthis­tle, another STOP spokesperson, said that the group’s presence at UBC had been threatened. Hep­burn maintained the email was a response to a YouTube video in which an unidentified person tried to gain access to research facilities on campus, which he said was not to his knowledge associated with STOP.

“[I believe that] STOP is a le­gitimate group that is repre­senting the rights of animals,” said Hepburn. “I am not wor­ried about their campaign. I am concerned with the [groups that] follow.”

FAIL

Aritzia is Carrying Fur Again. Fuckingest biatches

If you don't stand up for me, you'll have as many rights as... me : (

Just when Aritizia was proud to have gone fur free, the formerly awesome clothing store has started selling a coat with a racoon-dog fur trim! I approached the manager of the Pacific Centre location today who stated that they have no choice to buy it because they need to kiss ass with their designers and have no mind of their own, and/or aspirations to be cruelty-free. Such a shame when their carry awesome labels like Community which makes clothing out of organic materials. Le Grr (copyright to my homegirl, Lana, on that term ; )

Update: click here to find out Aritzia’s response!!!

WIN

Dairy Farmers go D-List

When I went to order a vegan pizza online from Domino’s last week, a message came up when I said no cheese that went something like: “Sorry, your pizza will have no cheese, but we still have to make it look that way to keep the dairy farmers of Canada happy.” I was like who the what now? I sent a quick, polite message to customer support and within days had 3 employees reply to apologize and tell me they were removing the comment from the site. Go Domino’s! Will we see more vegan options from you in the future?

The Animal “Care” Centre at UBC

Since When Does “Care” Include Poking Out Eyes?

Last week, some activists paid a preliminary visit to UBC to check in with students to see if they are aware of the mass amounts of animal tests occurring on UBC soil, more than any other Canadian university. We also took a look at UBC’s Animal “Care” Centre, a set of isolated buildings filled with cages surrounded by overgrown grass and piles of garbage, marked private though UBC is a public instituion.

In case you want to read that again, here is the plaque displayed outside UBC’s Animal “Care” Centre.

Just keep telling yourself that, UBC

If our care centres for the elderly were anything like the “care” centre at UBC, our grandparents would be artificially induced with Parkinson’s and glaucoma and have missing eyeballs. Just saying.

The Secret of NIMH

Vivisection is a Trick

They Make Money – We Get Sick

The Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society of BC is launching a series of campaigns against UBC’s animal testing programs:

“Tucked away somewhere on UBC’s south campus is the euphemistically called “Animal Care Center” (ACC), the current locus of animal experimentation at the university. Unbeknownst to most students and Vancouver residents, UBC is one of the largest bio-medical campuses in the country. The ACC annually distributes some 100,000 animals, both large and small, to dozens of UBC affiliated-research projects. UBC
researchers in Vancouver and in other UBC-affiliated facilities around Canada have been routinely experimenting on animals, including pigs, rats, cats, and non-human primates. For example, UBC researchers have been involved in: cutting lesions into cats’ brains to determine the effects on the cats’ ability to step over objects; exposing guinea pigs to smoking to assess damage to lung tissue; and using pigs in a host of research programs.”

Please join the AD-AV in helping liberate these unwilling subjects. All types of people are needed in this quest.

Over 100 million animals are killed in labs a year.

This is not an either/or issue. We can all be happy, healthy, and live in harmony. Learn more about it through the AD-AV.

Meeting: Thursday, February 11, 6:30-8:30 PM @ Society for Promoting Environmental Conservation 2150 Maple Street (at corner of 6th & Maple. 2 blocks west of Burrard St.), Vancouver

Here are some of the AD-AV’s ideas:

• Initiating whistler-blower campaigns to encourage those working within UBC research facilities to come forward with information
• Gathering more information about UBC’s research on animals programs
• Hosting a debate on the UBC campus between leading animal right advocates and UBC researchers
• Developing a state-of-the-art website to help educate the public about UBC’s research programs, highlight the grim realities or experimentation on animals, and empowering others to take action
• Coordinating media events to put the spotlight on UBC

******

The Secret of NIMH is a forgotten childhood fave of many 80s kids, but others may not be familiar with it because it was released at the same time as ET. Watching it again, I’d forgotten that the “Secret” of NIMH was the animal cruelty. The movie was produced at a time when these practices were a secret to most people; they are no longer a secret but still taking place – why?

There is powerful segment about animal testing at around the 5:50 mark:

*NIMH stands for the National Institute of Mental Health

Consider the irony – attempting to discover the secrets of well being by performing violent, heartless experiments on sentient beings. Could anything be further from mental wellness?

Animals In the Basement

Candlelight Vigil for Lab Animals

In the basement of St.Paul’s Hospital on busy Burrard, at UBC, SFU, BC Children’s Hospital, VGH, and the ICORD Centre, animals are being tested on right beneath our eyes, Canada silently advocating the death of 250 000 000 animals per year. Why is no one questioning these methods?

Because of the underlying belief that our pain is different from an animal’s – that our lives are worth more. Because some sad0-masichistic part of the collective unconscious believes that we must cause pain in order to heal ourselves. Le’ts take a closer look at Jessie’s sign.

Is this the way to healing?

Stepping over the discarded needles in the mossy grass outside St.Paul’s, we looked into the hospital’s basement windows in the labratories where the animals are being killed. “When one animal is experimented on – it’s sick, when many animals are experimented on it’s science.” (One of Jessie’s pins)

No animals in view, only torture equipment, most likely because they don't want broken windows.

The AD-AV (Animal Defense & Anti-Vivisection Society of BC) has posted an article by surgeon, Werner Hartinger on their website, entitled:

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION: ITS RELATIONSHIP TO
THE LAW, SCIENCE, INDUSTRY AND POLITICAL REALITY

Werner Hartinger, MD, Surgeon

“The problem of animal experimentation is complex, many-sided and hard to fathom. The cruel and deadly use of animals has been legalized by politicians, justified by church institutions, described as unavoidable by science and industry, accepted without criticism by too many people not interested in the sufferings of others, and defended in every way by all those who gain profit from it…”

Dove's next campaign? Yes, Dove tests on animals.

We must become label readers.

We must become internet sleuths and share with each other the information we learn.

We must look for The Leaping Bunny, an international symbol that represents the most rigorous standards in the humane treatment of animals.