Feature Archives

Andronico's Market claims it is "committed to the highest standards of animal husbandry." Yet the Bay Area grocery chain still sells eggs from chickens confined to battery cages. East Bay Animal Advocates has called for a week of action at Andronico's locations in Palo Alto and Berkeley, Sunday, July 16 through Thursday, July 20. The campaign will encourage Andronico's to adopt an exclusively cage-free egg policy as other socially responsible grocery chains already have.

On Friday, April 21st, President Bush was in San Jose. A protest was held at 1:00pm outside of Cisco Systems ( Audio | Photos: 1 | 2 ). Bush was then scheduled to meet with fellows at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, but thousands of protestors blocked the main entrance forcing him to change his plans. ( Photos | Video ) He spent Friday night in the Napa County town of St. Helena, where Friday evening's protest were renewed on Saturday 4/22. Later on Saturday, Bush made a stop in West Sacramento for Earth Day, and was met with hundreds of protesters. ( Photos )

Read More On Indybay's Government and California Pages

On Sunday, May 14th, activists gathered at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant in Palo Alto to protest the cruel treatment of veal calves, whose flesh Puck serves. The protest coincided with Mother’s Day to highlight the plight of calves, who are separated from their mothers at very young ages to be turned into veal. The protestors distributed leaflets about veal production and held signs urging customers to say no to veal.

Wolfgang Puck has refused to stop serving this inhumane and decadent item, and also serves foie gras, the artificially fattened livers of force-fed ducks. When representatives from Farm Sanctuary worked to educate Mr. Puck and his affiliates about the plight of veal calves, they responded with misinformation, excuses, and ultimately, silence. Read more

To mark the 19th annual World Week for Animals in Laboratories (WWAIL), activists in San Francisco and at Stanford University held a variety of events to bring light to the thousands of animals utilized in research facilities in the Bay Area every year.

Stanford: Animal Rights on the Farm, and the law school group, Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, held a series of events and protests, an annual event to highlight the suffering of animals used in research and testing. The students demands were modest: accountability for animal welfare violations, transparency of the procedures and animals used, shifting funds toward alternative models of research, and stopping some of the most gruesome experiments, such as the cocaine addiction studies on juvenile monkeys. ARF and SALDF have a new petition, urging the administration to implement some of these reforms. There were three protests, a talk on "Why Progressives should care about animal rights," and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had an animal liberation exhibit on campus.

UCSF: In Defense of Animals (IDA) joined with Vigil For Animals to protest the University of California, San Francisco's (UCSF's) use of dogs and other animals in controversial, taxpayer-funded medical experiments. These experiments include pumping hundreds of dogs' hearts to high speeds to cause heart attacks, puppies injected with drugs to cause their nerves to malfunction, monkeys having metal plates bolted onto their skulls and their eyes cut open with scalpels, monkeys restrained by the neck and waist to prevent their hands from reaching their heads for five hours a day five days a week, paralyzing infant monkeys and cats, and on and on. This past October UCSF paid one of the largest fines ever for Animal Welfare Act violations after the U.S. Department of Agriculture charged the lab with 75 counts of animal welfare violations. By educating the public and keeping pressure on the university to operate with greater transparency, the groups hope to help end what they call the pointless suffering of these exploited animals.

Stanford Events Report and Photos

UCSF Demo Report and Photos | More on UCSF's Lab

World Week for Animals in Laboratories

Past Indybay Coverage of Stanford's Animal Labs: 1 | 2
Past Indybay Coverage of UCSF's Animal Labs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

SERV, or Students Ending Rights Violations, will host an evening of food, music, and discussion to draw attention to the plight of political prisoners in the US empire. The event will take place on February 28th, at 6:00pm in the Library Quad Tent, at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. The event will celebrate the release of Father Gerard Jean Juste from illegal incarceration in Haiti, and is a fundraiser for the legal defense of political prisoners in Haiti through the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

A celebration with food and music will be followed by a panel discussion with former political prisoners about: their experiences, current political prisoners, why they are there, and what can be done. Speakers will include former political prisoners from Chile, the American Indian Movement, and the Black Panther Party, as well as an exiled pro-democracy activist from Haiti. Read more about the event

4/10/2006: Students organized a rally at Stanford in conjunction with the National Day of Action for Immigrant Rights. They blocked off two traffic arteries off White Plaza to draw attention to the problems of "borders." At the conclusion of the rally, borders were tossed down and the students jumped upon them in celebration before gathering on the lawn. They planned carpools to join other Immigrants Rights' rallies in San Jose and San Francisco later that day, but were also admonished to "Hurry, Don't cut class!"
Read More | Reports From More April 10th Protests | Indybay's Immigrant Rights Page

Animal Rights on the Farm (ARF) continued its campaign against Stanford University's animal experiments with a demonstration on Friday, February 10 at the University’s Research Animal Facility (RAF). Stanford undergraduates, law students, and graduate students converged on the RAF to voice their opposition to Stanford’s experiments involving up to 109,000 primates, dogs, mice, and numerous other types of animals. ARF seeks increased transparency and accountability for experiments at Stanford, since the private university is not subject to the California Public Records Act or the Freedom of Information Act. ARF also calls on the University to begin its shift to more humane alternatives by eliminating what it considers the worst experiments, such as cocaine research on adolescent squirrel monkeys, maternal deprivation research on infant squirrel monkeys, and sleep deprivation research on monkeys, rats, and mice.

Full Report and Photos · More Info