Last year I worked as a copywriter for a shopping site and often described coats as having “chic faux fur accents” (I tend to over use the word chic when I copyright. It’s a go-to fancy word for me) I often wondered what this mysterious “faux fur” was made of, well it turns out that for many of the products the fur wasn’t faux at all, it was the manufacturers that were “faux”. The Humane Society filed a lawsuit against Andrew Marc, Dillard’s, Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for false advertising and mislabeling of fur garments.Apparently the ‘faux fur’ used in their products is actually raccoon dog fur from China. The Humane Society claims that 70 percent of the garments sold by the named compnaies actually contained fur from the raccoon dog. Yikes!

For more info on this story and ways to help The Humane Society protect animals takepart and visit http://www.hsus.org

As President-elect Obama said in his acceptance speech on Tuesday night, he and his family will be bringing a new member with them when they settle into the White House-a dog.  And, news stories report that the dog will be lovingly adopted from a shelter.  How great is it that the Obamas are already making an exemplary choice as the soon-to-be first family by adopting a dog?  Hopefully this will spurn national interest by  families across the country to skip breeders and puppy mills and instead choose a beautiful mutt or pure-bred from a local shelter or animal rescue group.  Coincidentally, this happens to be National Animal Shelter Week and the Obamas’ choice is probably the best PR ever for this movement. I don’t need to remind everyone of the millions of dogs and cats that are annually killed by shelters because of the unmanageable number of animals they receive. TakePart by visiting the Humane Society’s Animal Shelter site today to find your local shelter to adopt a pet or volunteer.

A few weeks ago, I posted the incredibly sad news that vegetarian and animal rights activist Berkeley Breathed was being forced to retire from writing and drawing his comic strip Opus (stripping, as Breathed calls his profession) due to spasmodic torticollis.  Breathed made a name for himself penning Bloom County back in the eighties, and is one of those we hoped would just never hang it up.  Well, the sad news is that the retirement day was yesterday.  Opus will probably never grace our comic pages again.  I’m including a small version of the strip here, but please go HERE to see the final in-print strip, and HERE to see the full-sized image of the final panel.

The silver lining of all this was that Breathed left Opus the Penguin’s fate up to readers.  He wanted you to decide what paradise Opus would find himself in.  The winner received a $10,000 donation to the animal shelter of his or her choice.

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by Jennifer Fearing

Americans could barely believe their eyes when they saw the sickening mistreatment of downer cows at a California slaughter plant earlier this year. An undercover investigator for The Humane Society of the United States documented downed cows being brutalized in order to get them into the kill box. Government inspectors and plant management either missed the abuse or allowed it to persist, sending meat from these animals into our National School Lunch program. After the broadcast of the graphic video, the federal government was finally pressed into stopping the sale of meat from sick and crippled animals to consumers.

This investigation shows us we cannot always wait for the government and the factory farming industry to protect animals from abuse or to guard us from food safety threats. That’s precisely why Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act - which phases out the cramming of veal calves, breeding pigs, and laying hens into small cages and crates - is so important and timely.

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The videos keep coming! Here is more from Slow Food Nation. You can watch other slow food leaders chatting with TakePart here and here.

Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center For Food Safety

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What possessed the Easter Bunny to go on a rampage and attack all these innocent people? Is he rabid? Or just really, really angry about the egg industry’s barbaric “battery-cage” practice of confining chickens to cages so small they can’t even flap their wings? 

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So we’re in the middle of a housing crisis - it isn’t good. But when you take away the newspaper headlines, the influence it has on the campaign and the people who are struggling to figure out what to do - what do you really have left?

The answer is more cute and cuddly than you might think. What you have left are cats and dogs - pets left behind by their owners:

Pets “are getting dumped all over,” said Traci Jennings, president of the Humane Society of Stanislaus County in northern California. “Farmers are finding dogs dumped on their grazing grounds, while house cats are showing up in wild cat colonies.”

In one such colony in Modesto, two obviously tame cats watched alone from a distance as a group of feral cats devoured a pile of dry food Jennings offered.

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