Joaquin Phoenix Reveals Cold-Blooded Horrors

Millions of reptiles are slaughtered each year and turned into shoes, handbags, belts, and other accessories. These helpless animals are viewed as a commodity by those who poach and hunt them, and these creatures suffer as their skin is pulled off their bodies while they are still alive. Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe- and Grammy-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix refuses to support an industry based on such cruelty and takes a behind-the-scenes look at the exotic-skins trade in his exclusive video for PETA.

Joaquin is calling for major fashion houses, such as Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo, to choose compassion over cruelty by eliminating exotic-skins from their collections. Please join Joaquin and send Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo a polite message asking them to stop selling exotic-skins.

Compassionate companies, such as Nike, H&M, and Overstock.com, have agreed not to sell exotic-skins. With tons of fashionable and cruelty-free alternatives there is no reason for animals to suffer for a wardrobe.

Help Joaquin and PETA send a powerful message not only to the cruel exotic-skins industry but also to designers, retailers, and others who directly profit from the suffering caused by this barbaric business.

Take the pledge now to shed exotic-skins from your wardrobe!

Source: Peta.org

Tarantulas Shoot Silk from Their Feet

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2011) — Climbing is possibly one of the riskiest things an adult tarantula can do. Weighing in at anything up to 50g, the dry attachment systems that keep daintier spiders firmly anchored are on the verge of failure in these colossal arachnids.

"The animals are very delicate. They wouldn't survive a fall from any height," explains Claire Rind from the University of Newcastle, UK.

In 2006, Stanislav Gorb and his colleagues published a paper in Nature suggesting that tarantulas may save themselves from falling by releasing silk threads from their feet. However, this was quickly refuted by another group that could find no evidence of the silk. Fascinated by spiders and intrigued by the scientific controversy, Rind decided this was too good a challenge to pass up and discovered that tarantulas shoot silk from their feet when they lose their footing. She publishes her results in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Teaming up with undergraduate Luke Birkett, Rind tested how well three ground-dwelling Chilean rose tarantulas kept their footing on a vertical surface. Gently placing one of the animals in a very clean aquarium with microscope slides on the floor, the duo cautiously upended the aquarium to see if the tarantula could hang on. "Given that people said tarantulas couldn't stay on a vertical surface, we didn't want to find that they were right," remembers Rind. But the spider didn't fall, so the duo gave the aquarium a gentle shake. The tarantula slipped slightly, but soon regained its footing. So the spider had held on against the odds, but would Rind find silk on the microscope slides?

Looking at the glass by eye, Rind couldn't see anything, but when she and Birkett looked closely under a microscope, they found minute threads of silk attached to the microscope slide where the spider had stood before slipping.

Next, Rind had to prove that the silk had come from the spiders' feet and not their web-spinning spinnerets. Filming the Chilean rose tarantulas as they were rotated vertically, Rind, Benjamin-James Duncan and Alexander Ranken disregarded any tests where other parts of the spiders' bodies contacted the glass and confirmed that the feet were the source of the silk. Also, the arachnids only produced their safety threads when they slipped.

But where on the spiders' feet was the silk coming from? Having collected all of the moulted exoskeletons from her Mexican flame knee tarantula, Fluffy, when she was young, Rind looked at them with a microscope and could see minute threads of silk protruding from microscopic hairs on Fluffy's feet. Next, the team took a closer look at moults from Fluffy, the Chilean rose tarantulas and Indian ornamental tarantulas with scanning electron microscopy and saw minute reinforced silk-producing spigots, which extended beyond the microscopic attachment hairs on the spiders' feet, widely distributed across the foot's surface. Rind also looked at the tarantula family tree, and found that all three species were only distantly related, so probably all tarantula feet produce the life-saving silk threads.

Finally, having noticed the distribution of the spigots, Rind realised that tarantulas could be the missing link between the first silk-producing spiders and modern web spinners. She explains that the spread of spigots on the tarantula's foot resembled the distribution of the silk spigots on the abdomen of the first silk spinner, the extinct Attercopus spider from 386 million years ago. The modern tarantula's spigots also looked more similar to mechanosensory hairs that are distributed over the spider's entire body, possibly making them an evolutionary intermediate in the development of silk spinning. So, not only has Fluffy settled a heated scientific debate but she also may be a link to the silk spinners of the past.

Source: Sciencedaily.com

PETA's Gift to Will and Kate

In honor of William and Kate's wedding, PETA is sending the royal couple "something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue."  

We chose some favorite movies and a book that each have an important message about compassion for animals. For "something old," we've chosen three classics: Disney's family anti-fur film 101 Dalmatians; Bambi, with its anti-hunting message; and the classic about the suffering of horses, Black Beauty. For "something new," we're sending the dolphin-hunting industry exposé The Cove.  

We're letting the couple indefinitely "borrow" from PETA's library a signed first-edition copy of the seminal animal rights book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.

Finally, we included two films that may make William and Kate "blue," but that have touched the hearts of countless viewers and inspired them to make simple changes in their lives that have a big impact on animals. They are PETA's slaughterhouse exposé Glass Walls, narrated by Sir Paul McCartney, and the documentary I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA.

We hope the couple finds these gifts illuminating, inspiring, and even challenging—much as marriage can be.

Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post

Source: PETA

Russia bans polar bear hunt this year

MOSCOW — Russia has banned the hunting of polar bears this year, thanks to a group with close ties to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a longtime defender of large endangered animals.

A Russian-U.S. commission last year agreed to restrict polar bear hunting to 29 animals per year for each country. But The Polar Bear program, established under Putin's patronage, said this week that Russia had waived its quota for bear hunting.


Although the polar bear is an endangered animal, officials in Russia and the U.S. have said hunting is vital for the indigenous people in Alaska and in far-eastern Russia across the Bering Strait.

The Polar Bear program, which said U.S. officials had long been reluctant to introduce the cap on hunting, said around 100 polar bears a year have been killed in Alaska in recent years.

"Measures taken by Russia will ensure that the United States will be killing at least 70 polar bears fewer than before, which, according to Russian specialists, will help to sustain and boost the population of this beautiful Arctic animal," the group said in a statement posted on Putin's official website.

Putin last year helped scientists put a tracking collar on a sedated male polar bear. Before leaving the bear, he patted the animal affectionately, shook his paw and said "take care."

He also joined scientists last year in studying the gray whale off Russia's Pacific Coast, firing darts from a crossbow to collect skin samples from a whale swimming near their small boat.

Putin also has championed the cause of endangered big cats. In 2008, he was given a 2-month-old female Siberian tiger cub for his birthday, which he later gave to a zoo in southern Russia.

Source: msnbc.com