No Animals Were Harmed”® in the filming of HBO’s original and inspirational film Temple Grandin. Grandin, who has autism, is a renowned consultant in animal welfare and livestock care, and is a member of American Humane® Certified’s Scientific Advisory Committee.

I just found this on the Free Farmed website!  Was I ever glad to see it!  I shall definitely watch the movie as soon as it hits Netflix and I can fastforward through the gruesome bits . . .

Hi Emily,

Enjoying your blog!  Just reading an article you wrote on the leapingbunny.org.  It makes sense that the cosmetics companies can say they don’t do animal testing but their suppliers might.  Wondering if you know how I can find out for sure if a manufacturer is really cruelty free?  Is there a list that you know of for that?  The reason why I’m interested is because I want to buy some mineral make up ingredients to make some mineral eyeshadows for myself.  Are you familiar with companies like “PV soap”, “TKB Trading” or “Coastal Scents”?  They claim to be cruelty free, but how can I know for sure?

Thanks!
Mineral Makeup Entrepreneur

Hello!

I think it’s absolutely wonderful that you’re thinking of starting a cruelty-free mineral makeup — unfortunately I don’t know anything about finding out if any manufacturers are really 100% cruelty-free.  (If you find out, please email me about it and I’ll write a post about it!)  As far as I can tell, there’s no publicly available list that mentions what suppliers are cruelty-free.  I suspect the Leaping Bunny people have a list they keep out of the public eye.

I suggest just calling/emailing the companies you mentioned, asking them whether any of their ingredients are tested on animals, and whether their final products are ever tested on animals, and hoping they’ll tell you the truth.  (Again — if they send you an email swearing up and down that they 100% never test on animals and never let their ingredients be tested on animals, please forward me their email — I’d really like to know!)  I like to think the best about people — I suspect everyone at those companies will tell you the truth, the only difficult part is that the customer service representative you talk to may have absolutely no idea whether their company tests on animals or not, and may be unknowingly feeding you a line.  (Also I think a lot of businesses do not want to be caught lying about their animal testing policies — PETA might come after them if they did :).) If you can get an email from the president of the company or someone who really sounds like they are in a position to know what they are talking about and who says their ingredients and final products are never ever tested on animals — sometimes PR people are very knowledgeable! — so much the better.

Eventually, once you have your mineral makeup line going, and sign up with the leaping bunny people, they’ll have you send a form to your supplier that confirms that they do not test on animals.

Best of luck on starting your new mineral makeup line!  If you do eventually sign up with leapingbunny.org, please, please, please email me about it and I’ll add you to my list of cruelty-free companies!

Regards,
Emily

The Body Shop Tea Tree Oil Skin Clearing Facial Wash for Oily/Blemished Skin (1/5 stars)

I was at the Body Shop a few months ago, and a very persuasive salesperson persuaded me to buy the Body Shop oily skin sample set.  Unfortunately, the face wash that came with the kit really didn’t work for me.  I started developing these red dots on my face — sort of like almost-pimples.  I stopped using this face wash and they went away, and I’m back to good skin again. So overall, I’m ranking this facewash at 1/5 stars.  Would not recommend.  Did not make my skin clear, in fact, the reverse.

(Reiteration: the Body Shop is in fact 100%-animal-testing-free, despite being owned by evil L’Oreal, 100%-vegetarian, and its products that don’t contain honey, mel, cera alba, lanolin, shellac, or beeswax are vegan. Here’s is the Body Shop’s Policy on Animal Derived Ingredients.)

The Body Shop Tea Tree Oil Skin Clearing Facial Wash (8.4oz) is available for $11 at your local Body Shop or the online Body Shop store.

Ingredients: aqua, glycerin, sodium laureth sulfate, cocamidopropyl betaine, PEG-120 Methyl Glucose Dioleate, Polysorbate 20, Alcohol Denat, Melaleuca alternifolia, Phenoxyethanol, benzyl alcohol, allantoin, polyquaternium-10, sodium salicylate, limonene, citric acid, Cl 19140, Cl 42090

I caught part of the new made for TV movie on HBO about Temple Grandin a few nights ago.  Since I’m a huge fan of Temple Grandin, I’m really excited about this!  Temple Grandin has done so much to improve the horrible conditions cows face in slaughterhouses.  Thousands of cows are slaughtered in peaceful conditions every day because of her influence.  You know those horrible slaughterhouse videos PETA occasionally airs?  Grandin-designed slaughterhouses keep cows from being treated horribly like that.

Temple Grandin also revolutionized the way people think about animal behavior.  I highly recommend her book on animal behavior “Animals in Translation” — it has wonderful insights into how animals think.  Once you read it you’ll have a newfound understanding of how your dog sees the world — basically, Dr. Grandin suggests that animals, and autistic people, have trouble seeing overarching patterns.  As I understand it, this means that the reason your dog wraps his leash around a stake you tie him to and becomes all tangled up is because he can’t see the overarching pattern that walking in figure 8s and circles around a stake would cause the leash to tangle — he just can’t see that overarching pattern.  Similarly, (some) autistic people have trouble following the storyline of a movie — just like the dog wrapping the leash around the stake, they can’t see how the first scenes of a movie would lead to the last scenes.  They can’t see that overarching pattern.  Surprisingly enough, this is what makes autistic people smarter than nonautistic people in some situations.  For instance, some autistic people can see subliminal messages hidden in movies — they see the movie as a series of unrelated scenes, and when the subliminal message pops up for a hundredth of a second, it leaps out at the autistic people, and they notice and comment on it and wonder why there’s an advertisement for popcorn.  Whereas a nonautistic person is following the overarching theme of the movie, and their brain discards the subliminal message without even allowing their conscious mind to notice it because the subliminal message doesn’t fit in within the storyline of the movie.  Autism is a really fascinating condition!  Dr. Grandin actually relates normal peoples’ abilities to discard nonpattern related information as why airport concourses are so poorly designed — the nonautistic engineers are looking at the big picture and their minds are unable to see the tiny details that make the airport concourses hell on earth.  They see the overarching pattern of getting people from the parking lot to the planes, but they really just don’t see the bottlenecks their design creates by the ticket counters because they aren’t focused on details in that way.  Dr. Grandin would probably recommend that someone with autistic tendencies design airport concourses!

“Animals in Translation” is a really great book — I’m including a link at the bottom of this post because it is so awesome, and I think anyone with an interest in animal behavior would read it.  It provides a much more subtle and sophisticated analysis of how animals think like autistic people that my little explanation above.

I think it’s so great that Temple Grandin is getting so much recognition due to this movie, and I think it will be a huge boon to the humane-farming movement.  (Though I admit I find it really strange how Temple Grandin has this tremendous love of animals and hates animal suffering violently, yet designs systems that kill them, and actually writes about how she thinks killing animals is a ritual-like experience.  But she did grow up in a much less animal-friendly culture than today’s, I suppose. That’s my explanation for that, anyway).

However, the bad news is I only actually saw a few minutes of the Temple Grandin movie — it was a part in which they showed Dr. Grandin, as played by Claire Danes, thinking about how to improve slaughterhouse conditions, and it showed a cow struggling in a poorly designed slaughterhouse.  I turned the TV off pretty quickly — I just can’t watch that sort of thing.  I guess I should have expected it — a movie about someone who vastly improved slaughterhouse conditions would have to have some film footage devoted to “bad” slaughterhouse conditions, right?

Maybe I’ll give it another try when it’s available on Netflix?  At least then I can fastforward through any animal suffering parts.

Also I’m really hoping no animals were made to suffer during the filming of this movie.  That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?  A film promoting a humane-design specialist who has made the lives of millions of cows sent to slaughter a less horrific, suffering-filled existence leading to a film in which animals suffer?  Please no.

I was just remembering how after Katrina there were a lot of homeless and hurt animals.  I hadn’t even thought about how an earthquake would affect animals while I was watching the latest people-centric news on the Haiti earthquake, but apparently there are hundreds of homeless and injured animals who have lost their homes and owners due to the quake.  The animals are now wandering the streets, homeless, injured, and at risk for disease, dehydration, and starvation.  If you’d like to donate money to help the animals, there are a variety of wonderful organizations out there trying to round up, medically treat, hydrate, feed, and probably eventually find homes for numerous animals wandering the streets of Port-au-Prince.  Here are a few wonderful organizations.  Please donate!  (I’m sure someone else has a better list of this somewhere else, or there are organizations that should be listed — please put them in the comments, and I’ll add them to this list.)

The Humane Society International:

The Humane Society International Disaster Fund is working to help animals in Haiti — they have an international disaster fund you can donate to, and they also have a webpage with regular updates on what the situation is like in Haiti right now, as they rescue animals there. I’m really impressed with the Humane Society here — they seem to be the first veterinarian-led team to make it in to Port-au-Prince as of today.

From the Humane Society International Disaster Fund webpage:

January 22, 2010.  6:50pm EST

. . . as they drove into the country, they saw cattle grazing in fields, stray dogs and rubble everywhere. People are still fearful of getting too close to buildings in case of further collapse.

Today, the team traveled to a site where tent cities had been set up and found many more dogs wandering around the area. Aside from being hungry, the animals encountered there seemed to be in okay condition, but starvation, dehydration and disease remain threats, especially to the injured.

Our vet Rebecca, paramedic Lloyd and the rest of our group attempted to get to the U.S. Embassy, but the lines were so long they gave up temporarily. They did attend a meeting of Interaction, a coalition of non-governmental organizations of which HSI is a member, where security issues were discussed . . .

. . . tomorrow, they plan to visit the outskirts of the city to review the situation for farm animals and companion animals further removed from crowds of people and food.

The American Veterinary Medical Association:

The American Veterinary Medical Association currently has Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams standing ready in the Dominican Republic to tend to animals in Haiti as part of the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH).  If you’d like to donate money to support the teams, you can do so by donating to the AVMA’s general fund (unfortunately they don’t allow direct donations to the veterinary medical assistance teams in Haiti right now).  There has been no call for the teams to go into Haiti as of yet, according to Dr. Heather Case, the AVMA director for emergency preparedness and response, but you can follow the Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams on Twitter and see when they actually do go into Haiti — @AVMAVMAT.

The AVMA VMAT Twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/AVMAVMAT

Latest (1/22) ARCH situation report on #Haiti #animal relief now available on AVMA.org website: http://bit.ly/8bB7oI

The United Animal Nations:

Also the United Animal Nations Emergency Animal Rescue Services has a great blog about rescuing animals in Haiti — they seem to be doing what they can.

From the United Animal Nations Emergency Animal Rescue Services blog:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2010

http://unitedanimalnations.blogspot.com/search/label/Haiti Earthquake 2010

Help is on the way

Good news - the Haitian government has formally requested assistance from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH). The ARCH field team is expected to arrive in Port-au-Prince on Saturday to begin assessing the earthquake’s impact on animals.

. . . UAN has already contributed more than $30,000 to ARCH, thanks to the generosity of our donors. One hundred percent of all the donations we’ve received for Haiti to date are going directly to the ARCH relief effort . . .

The Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti (ARCH):

However, you can also donate money to the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti — the coalition the AVMA and UAN mentioned above are part of — and that money, as I understand it, goes indirectly to the Veterinary Medical Assistance Team and the United Animal Nations team mentioned above.  The Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti was cofounded by the World Society for the Protection of Animals and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).  I can’t find a way to donate to to the Animal Relief Coalition for Haiti directly, but you can donate to its member coalitions.  Its members include the American Humane Association, Best Friends, RSPCA (UK), United Animal Nations, American Veterinary Medical Association, and the Kinship Circle.

To donate to the World Society for the Protection of Animals Haiti Disaster Relief, click here.

To donate to the International Fund for Animal Welfare Haiti Emergency Relief Response, click here.

To donate to the American Humane Association Red Star Animal Emergency Services Haiti Earthquake response — click here.

To donate to Best Friends Haiti Animal Rescue, click here.

To donate to RSPCA International, click here.

To donate to United Animal Nations Emergency Animal Rescue Services, click here.  You can also read their blog about rescuing animals in Haiti.

To donate to the American Veterinary Medical Association general fund, click here.

To donate to Kinship Circle’s Haiti Earthquake Relief, click here.

PS: does anyone know if there are any organizations that rescue abandoned pets in Haiti and then adopt them out to other countries?  Something like Tigger House but for Haiti instead of Afghanistan?  I’m sure there must be — but I just can’t find any online.  I’m sure they need donations too to pay for airfare of those rescued dogs/cats!

These are really, really amazing organic vegan caramel-flavored chocolates!  (They don’t actually have caramel inside them, unfortunately, but they are still very, very good.)  You can find them at any Whole Foods.  There are two other flavors as well, I think — anyway, there’s three different colored boxes of truffles — the yellow one is the caramel flavored truffles, I think one of the flavors is just plain chocolate truffles, and I am not sure what the remaining flavor is.  Walnut maybe?  I should have looked more carefully.

Anyway, if you like truffles, these are excellent!  They’re very rich and very, very chocolatey.  I can’t remember exactly what they cost me, but I think something like $6 for 8.8oz of truffles.  A pretty good deal, really!  I recommend them highly.

Ingredients: Organic cocoa mass, organic expeller pressed coconut oil, organic cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, organic cocoa powder (processed with alkali), soy lecithin (emulsifier), natural caramel flavor.

Allergen information: Contains tree nut (coconut) and soy ingredients.  May contain milk, other tree nuts and peanuts.  Produced in a facility that also processes wheat.

I’ve had pretty good luck so far cooking vegan meals — my recipe for success is that first of all, I rarely cook!  Amy’s Kitchen frozen dinners, Trader Joe’s frozen products, soup tetrapacks, bags of prewashed salad greens, and fake ice cream are what I “cook” at home.  If any of these involve sauteeing/roasting/etc., I substitute olive oil where I might have once used butter, and sometimes it changes the flavor of the dish, but the dish still works.  (Have I mentioned how great Divina olive oil is?)

But recently I made a foray into vegan baking.  I made my favorite sugar cookie recipe, and I substituted Earth Balance for the butter, almond milk for the milk, and Ener-G egg replacer for the eggs.  The cookies were pretty good right out of the oven, though they lacked the richness of egg-based sugarcookies, but really terribly, an hour after they’d cooled they became very tough.  Rocklike.

So, I’m a little bummed.  Am I missing something about vegan baking?  Should I not try to veganize nonvegan cooking recipes?  Is there something else I should do when veganizing cookie recipes besides just making substitutions?  Because this is my alltime favorite sugar cookie recipe I’m talking about here . . .

Also, I’m really not wild about Earth Balance.  It seems to have a strange aftertaste.  Are there any other good-for-baking margarines out there that don’t have a weird aftertaste?  Should I just use oil instead?

My dog died a week ago today.  It’s so horrible to think she’ll never snuggle up to me again, she’ll never dance with joy when I walk in the door, never follow me from room to room because she hates it when I’m out of her sight.  I’m so lucky to have had her so long — five extra years really than the average lifespan for her breed, and these past 10 months after she nearly died last October were stolen months — I know that.  I know I was lucky to get those extra 10 months.

But it’s so hard to come home to an empty house that’s full of memories.  It’s so hard to do the right thing and have your baby euthanized before she dies trying to breathe through an airway she can’t keep clear on her own.  It’s so hard after you spend a month putting her on different strong antibiotics and her breathing just gets worse and worse.  It’s hard when your baby’s immune system stops fighting infections.  It’s hard when your veterinarian tells you the kindest thing you can do is euthanize your baby and that if you don’t, nature will not treat her kindly from here on out. It’s hard to watch the light go out so quickly in the eyes that are so cheerful and friendly even as she struggles for breath.

I had no idea euthanasias were so quick.  It took all of ten seconds.

It’s hard to let go when you’ve lived with a dog for more than half your life. She was such a tiny puppy whose head fit in the palm of my hand almost sixteen years ago when I wasn’t much more than a baby myself — I can’t believe she’s really dead.  Even worse — stored in a freezer, waiting to be cremated.

It was so hard to walk away after after she was euthanized.  I just couldn’t leave my baby there.  I just couldn’t walk away.  I felt like a bad pet owner.  I couldn’t stand the thought of the freezer they were going to put her in.  She who always hated the cold, and who was still so warm.  I couldn’t bear it.  And I had to walk away.  I felt terrible.

I feel bereft.  I have no responsibilities.  There’s no reason to go home — no friendly little face that needs a walk or dinner.  Instead there’s a little ghost that prances around the house — I keep expected to see her come running around a corner to find me.  I’ve lost my identity in a way — I always was a dog-owner, and it defined me.  I’ve been a teenager and an adult as a dog-owner.  As a little kid I had family dogs before, but they were never my dog.  My baby was my very own dog — not my mom’s, not my dad’s, not my brother’s.  She always loved me better than anyone else, and it hurts to think she’ll never look up at me again with her big eyes and a lolling tongue.  I just can’t bear it.

This isn’t a real “Dear Emily” question.  It’s a comment I received from a post I wrote a while ago on veterinary experimentation — Veterinary Students: Merchants of Death? I feel like it summarizes my thoughts on veterinary experimentation very well.

I should also state for the record — various people have accused me of bashing the veterinary profession.  I don’t think I am — I think I’m looking at it from a rational perspective, but if you think I’m bashing it, you’re quite welcome to feel that way. :)  My mom is a veterinarian (Hi Mom!), and I almost went to veterinary school, so I think I have more of a critical understanding of veterinary medicine than many people do, and I do tend to attack its weak spots more stridently than other people do (and I’m just argumentative by nature!).  I debate this sort of stuff with my mom at the dinner table all the time.  Also I’ve met a lot of very conservative veterinarians who really don’t care about animal rights (not that they’re not nice people who aren’t deeply devoted to the animals in their care — they just vigorously oppose animal activism of any kind and think animals are here to feed us and provide us with research subjects) — and they’ve made me really question the common belief that veterinarians have animal welfare at heart.  You know large animal veterinary medicine?  The job description of large animal medicine is literally fattening up animals for slaughter.  (I don’t think large animal veterinarians are bad people — I can’t tell you how many nice large animal veterinarians I’ve met who really enjoy visiting the sheep and cows in their care — they’ll tell me about their favorite cow, I kid you not.  They just don’t see the problem with slaughtering animals eventually.  It’s an interesting mindset full of contradictions.)

I also think that once more members of the veterinary community adopt a more animal welfare centric lifestyle, there will be a revolution in animal welfare in this country.  Who better to drive improvements in animal welfare, after all?  If you are a veterinarian, and you’re interested in animal welfare, there’s a conference in November on it– Swimming With the Tide—Animal Welfare in Veterinary Medical Education and Research.  You should also join the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association.

Anyway, here is the comment and my response:

I just wanted to comment on/clarify something about this issue. Although I am sure some individuals actually hurt the animals in order to do surgeries, this is not always the case. For example, after speaking to faculty and students at Iowa State Vet school, I learned that they only use animals that have been injured or are sick already. They absolutely do not injure the animals just for the sake of learning/research. In order to learn surgeries with bone issues, they use PVC pipes and things like that.
Also, Emily referred to torture situations and compared these surgeries with those and I think that that comparison is inaccurate. These animals (at least at Iowa State) are not tortured. They are taken in by the school and cared for when the humane society is going to euthanize them. Then, they are put under like they are going into real surgery (which means they can’t feel anything, since when I have been put under for surgery it is painless, and you wake up and just feel like you forgot the last couple of hours). The surgery is done exactly as it would be done in a real vet clinic as if they animal would be woken up again. Then the anesthetic is increased. So the animal feels no more pain then they would have if they would have just been put to sleep. And they have the chance of living a bit longer and being cared for and played with by the students. They also have the chance of being adopted by the students.

I agree with the fact that this is a very controversial subject. And my heart has some problems with it as well. But I think it is important to at least understand what is happening, and not try to make it sound like these vet schools are torturing these dogs. I am by no means saying these surgeries are “okay” but people should be properly informed before they decide on their own opinion.

My response:

I’m glad you agree that this is a controversial subject, and I’m so GLAD to hear your heart has some problems with it as well. I also agree with you that it is important to at least understand what is happening. However, I disagree with you that these vet schools aren’t torturing these dogs.

Um, interesting choice of examples — PCRM just declared a victory in forcing Iowa State to stop using healthy live animals to practice emergency procedures on. So, I don’t think they made that jump to using pipes willingly — we have PCRM to thank for stopping Iowa State from torturing live dogs.
Second point, so you’re okay with using healthy dogs as subjects for unnecessary surgeries, but you oppose my using the word “torture” for these since according to you, none of these dogs are ever allowed to wake up once they’ve started being attacked with a scalpel? I guess I can honor your opinion there — if that’s the way you feel, that’s the way you feel, and it is your right, and I don’t dispute that. Again though, I’m a little unsure of the whole they’re under anesthesia, therefore it’s painless, argument. I had a pet that died while I was on vacation, and the veterinarian told me they couldn’t keep her alive till I returned — there were no pain medications that would dull her state of pain, and that they could keep her under anesthesia at different levels of consciousness — just a little would basically keep her not moving for the MRI, a lot would almost kill her, etc.

So, I’m wondering — I always find it funny when people claim things aren’t torture or “bad” in any way if they’re done to animals — just substitute the word “human” there and suddenly they turn around. Do you feel the same way? If I took a human being, anesthetized them, performed all kinds of unnecessary procedures on them, and then killed them, would you NOT consider that torture? Or sick? Or do you think that would be good medicine? You wouldn’t worry about the anesthesia levels being high enough? (No jokes about human medicine here, please! I know there are lots of unnecessary procedures that occur there )

That is a really good point about the animals having a chance of being cared for and played with by the students — I really like to think that happens.

I think the current trend in veterinary medicine of moving away from taking unwanted dogs and performing unnecessary, though anesthetized, surgeries on them, and instead turning to shelter medicine, is the far more humane way to go. Long live shelter medicine! (I’ve been keeping up on the veterinary trends, as you can see . . .   )

Thanks for writing in,
Emily

(Do you have a cruelty-free question for me?  Email emilycrueltyfree@gmail.com)