May 2010

  • What’s Your Poison?

    By sarajean on 5/31/10 5:49pm
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    “As Americans, we know you have a wide variety of poisons, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, toxic chemicals, and people who talk like Glen Beck to choose from when it comes to selecting your neighborhood, and we appreciate you choosing our noxious area to raise your young.”

    Wouldn’t that be a swell label to see on the disclosure forms for your new home before you buy it? Not only does it list that your basement is unfinished, with part of the floor made up of just dirt (yeah, we actually saw a house like that when we were looking)—you also live in an area full of arsenic and old lace!

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  • Put an End to Cruel Mulesing

    By sarajean on 5/30/10 8:30am
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    As an animal activist, I usually consider myself pretty hip to the jive when it comes to animal issues. I’ve educated friends and family members about the horrors of foie gras, what happens to chicks in factory farms, and why they shouldn’t shop at Petco. I’ve participated in dozens of campaigns, am trying to raise my child in a humane education setting, and generally try to be aware of the issues surrounding all sentient beings.

    It was astonishing to me, as you could guess, when I learned about the practice of mulesing. Why hadn’t I heard of this before? For one thing, it’s a weird word—if I’d skimmed it in my reading before, I likely would’ve chalked it up to cruelly making mules sing for their supper, as I knew a woman who once did with her several cats. (I think it was more creepy than cruel, myself; she reminded me of that old cat lady in Jeepers Creepers.)

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