Vegetarian Star

Remember to spay and neuter your pets. And educate yourself on animal law.

Bob Barker has donated a million dollars to the University of Virginia Law school to help establish an animal law program, which includes a course on animal law and funding for guest speakers as well as a writing competition, according to nbc29.com.

Barker has long been both an animal rights activist and philanthropist, being an advocate for spaying and neutering cats and dogs and donating funds to other universities including Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford and UCLA.

“There is definitely interest in animal law at the law school,” said the School’s Law Dean Paul Mahoney. “I think whenever you have a high profile legal case, it influences student interests, and certainly the Michael Vick case has raised awareness of animal law issues.”

If you’re a law student at U of V, you can start taking the course in the 2009-2010 school year.

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Pamela Anderson is known to tell other countries what they should be doing with their sex lives, now she’s at it again, this time writing a letter to India’s financial capital, Mumbai, asking that stray dogs be sterilized rather than killed.

Mumbai’s high court has recommended the dogs be killed, saying they are a nuisance to the public.

Pammie says just put a doggie condom on it. A permanent one.

”Dogs cannot use condoms, but… they can be fixed painlessly, quickly and permanently,” she wrote in a letter to city authorities and cited studies conducted by the Animal Welfare Board of India and the World Health Organisation.

”It is well established that killing stray dogs is not a permanent solution to controlling their populations…mass sterilisation of stray animals is the most viable solution to nuisance and health concerns in addition to being more humane.”

The dogs are practically a city of their own-70,000 strays wandering the streets of Mumbai and some say they are attacking pedestrians and cyclists.

The solution to animal control is never easy and stories such as these are a constant reminder that Bob Barker couldn’t have said it enough when he advised people to spay and neuter their pets.

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Today is the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday, which is observed in all 50 states in the U.S.

The day is meant to honor and remember the civil rights activists who changed so many lives through his beliefs in every human having equal rights.

Some might not know that his late wife, Coretta Scott King, was a vegetarian and sometimes raw vegan and their son, Dexter King is a vegan as well. He was inspired to do so by comedian and activist Dick Gregory, who has recorded several PSAs for PETA and equated using animals in circuses as “modern day slavery.”

“If you’re violent to yourself by putting [harmful] things into your body that violate its spirit, it will be difficult not to perpetuate that [violence] onto someone else,” Dexter was once quoted as saying.

It’s fantastic to know a family known for advocating fairness and justice extended their beliefs to include rights for animals as well.

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The UK show Jamie Saves Our Bacon featuring celebrity chef Jamie Oliver may have a man behind the wheel, but there’s a female giving some directions as well.

Actress Joanna Lumley (The New Avengers, Sapphire and Steel), both vegetarian and animal lover, will be demonstrating what pigs who are crated endure by joining students who will live in the farrowing crates for 24 hours.

Farrowing crates are the narrow cages pigs are kept in while giving birth and feeding their litters.

“The conditions they face are both physically and psychologically harrowing,” the actress told the Times Online.

The program is meant to educate on how pigs are treated on farms and to let consumers know where their food is coming from. While some have argued that it doesn’t solve the problem of animal abuse because it’s not advocating vegetarianism, it’s at least trying to incite the creation of more humane standards for the animals, which is a step forward.

“Jamie Saves Our Bacon” will be showing on UK Channel 4.

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British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made waves in the UK recently for criticizing the quality of foods in his native land from school lunches to the dinner table. Now he wants everyone to understand the conditions pigs endure before they arrive on their plate.

Oliver and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) are calling upon the European Union to set minimum welfare standards for pig farmers and demand more honest labeling of foods that indicate how the pigs were reared. Unlike free-range chicken, there is currently no definition of free range pork.

Throughout the month of January, Oliver will be uncovering investigations revealing how pigs are treated on some farms in the UK, which includes undesirable practices such as castrating pigs without anaesthetic and preventing pregnant animals from moving.

The RSPCA hopes the program, titled “Jamie Saves Our Bacon,” will incite people to start buying pork reared in more ethical environments, such as a similar program by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did to increase the sales of chickens reared with higher welfare standards.

Hopefully, Oliver’s attention to the matter will produce a U.S. Prop 2-like overhaul in the UK.

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Jane Velez-Mitchell is a television news journalist who has who covered dozens of high profile cases on television networks such as CNN, MSNBC, Court TV, Fox News, and E!

When she’s doing work for CNN, she she’s sharing some of the veg anchor spotlight with vegan journalist Nicole Lapin. That’s right! Good ol’ Jane is a vegan as well as an animal rights activist and her report on animal cruelty on Celebrity Justice, earned the show two Genesis Awards from the Humane Society of the United States.

Tonight she’ll be on CNN Headline News at 7PM EST talking until her mouth’s dry on tons of animal rights issues, including puppy mills, adoption, spaying and neutering animals, and Prop 2 to name a few. Wow! This woman knows how to cover her beat.

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“I’m a great subscriber to Chrissie Hynde’s perspective that when you’re working for a social cause, the danger isn’t in going far enough or feeling embarrassed or that it’s in bad taste. You’ve got to really push the envelope. Animals are in desperate trouble in the fur farms, in the laboratories.”

—-Ingrid Newkirk, President of People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), when asked if there were any animal rights campaigns she regretted during an interview with Willamette Week.

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The Animal Planet television series, “Whale Wars,” premiered on November 7, 2008. If you’re looking to watch a vegan, eco-pirate show, this may for you.

The heavily Hayden Panettiere promoted show stars Captain Paul Watson, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He and his crew on the boat named “Steve Irwin” after the late crocodile hunter, attempt to non-violently stop Japanese ships from hunting whales that are to be later used in research purposes.

The crew is fed three vegan meals every day, as was revealed in the introductory episode. No word on if every one on board is completely vegan or if the Captain just has some strict rules about what happens on his boat.

Some of the tactics the crew uses to deter the whale hunters are throwing stink bombs filled with rancid butter on the ships.

And this is not your typical peaceful protest. In one episode, Watson was allegedly shot, but was protected by his bulletproof vest.

Is this Whale Wars or Cops?

It will be interesting to see if veganism comes up in future episodes between shoot ’em up moments with the hunters.

via Animal Person

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