Deep Roots: Animal Rights Blog

The floods in southern Indiana have been devastating. Our field was under six feet of water. All of us at Deep Roots were well above the flood waters, but not all others were as lucky. Animals throughout the region are in need of your help. In some cases, companion animals were stranded. In others, emergency shelters set up for humans refused access to families who refused to leave their non-human companions. One shelter in Morgan County was completely engulfed with water and over 200 animals had to be evacuated by boat. Things are getting back to normal, but many still need your help.

Here is a message from the Monroe County Humane Association:

The MCHA has received many phone calls and e-mails regarding what is being done and can be done to help our neighboring communities, their shelters and animals that may be stranded by flood waters.

For years, animal rights activists have argued that testing on animals provides skewed data at the cost of millions of lives. Well it seems that the National Institute of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency have finally came to the same conclusion.

“There are differences between species. We are not rats and we are not even other primates, and so that [the] desire here is to see if we could do better,” said Francis Collins, director of the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute. “Ultimately what you are looking for is [whether] this compound does damage to cells.”

Federal scientists have decided to collaborate on a new toxicology testing program that uses stem cell research and computer modeling rather than animal testing. The collaboration is the result of an agreement among the National Toxicology Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Chemical Genomics Center under the National Human Genome Research Institute, and EPA National Center for Computational Toxicology.

I never got a chance to mention that we were interviewed on WFHB a couple weeks ago. I’ve included our interview below. For the full show, visit the WFHB News site. Its always weird to hear yourself speak, especially when your words have been cut down from an hour to 17 minutes, but its a decent interview. Gets to the basics of what we are about and where we are coming from.

After several hours of writing, editing, layout and coding, our newsletter is now officially launched. Our print version is only available at our tabling events (and to prisoners), but you can easily subscribe for free and receive our newsletter directly in your email each month! You can subscribe by visiting our newsletter page. There you will also find the full web version of the March 2008 newsletter.

Yay! If you are interested in writing an article for the newsletter (or a letter to the editor), go ahead and send it to me at chris(at)deeprootssanctuary.org.

In other news, I apologize for the lack of posting here on the blog. There was a lot going on (within the sanctuary and personally), but things are getting back to a nice equilibrium so I should be back to regular posting.

Its not often that I am compelled to write about celebrities speaking out against certain atrocities, but Hayden Panettiere, star of the NBC series Heroes, has proven that she is willing to do more than just speak out.

Along with five friends, the 18-year-old actress from Australia paddled out on a surfboard to stop a pod of dolphins from being trapped and killed in a cull in Japan. Panettiere and friends were confronted by anglers who used their boat’s propeller and a boathook to force the surfers back to the shore.

From Sky News:

Panettiere, who is a keen surfer and a committed marine conservationist and supporter of the campaign to save the Japan dolphins, said: “It was really frightening.

“Some of us were hit by the boathook. But in the end all we really worried about was the dolphins.