From IDA:

“Please join In Defense of Animals to educate circus-goers at the upcoming Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Portland, Oregon about the cruelty of forcing wild animals to perform and the reality of the animal’s miserable life on the road.

Recent Ringling Bros. Circus protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco have brought out hundreds of activists. We need you to keep this momentum going.

We will meet on the south side of the Rose Garden Arena, near NE Multnomah St. Street. If taking TriMet, your destination will be the Rose Quarter Transit Center. Meeting times are as follows:

Thursday, Sept. 2, 6:30 p.m.
Friday, Sept. 3, 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 4, 1 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 4, 5 p.m.
Sunday, Sept. 5, 12 p.m.

Signs and literature will be provided – we just need you to be there!

Contact Eric eric[at]idausa[dot]org or Matt matt[at]idusa[dot]org or call 503-249-9996 for more details. Also check out our Facebook page for this event.“

Well, not that you should eat a ton of these, but we’re pretty sure that you will. Got 5 cases, but we’re pretty sure they’ll be gone pretty fast. Not gluten free. Not organic. Overly processed. The complete opposite of a “living food offering.” Kinda great.

Want to stock up on some Daiya cheese? Today only. 8/31/2010. Buy 2, get 1 free. Kinda like BOGO, but different. Come wipe us out!

” The shelter land is more valuable now, and the city wants the dogs out – and they have told Mr. Cenac he must leave as well. On top of this, a woman whom the city had hired to work at the shelter was subsequently fired, and took revenge by breaking into the shelter and killing a handicapped dog, and stealing many things. Whether due to this tragedy or fate, Mr. Cenac ended up in the hospital with his heart condition. His wife looked after the shelter as best she could. Thanks to Romania Animal Rescue donations, we have been able to hire a worker for the shelter.There is no place for the dogs to go, except to be killed by the city. Romania Animal Rescue and Stichting Wereld Asielen have decided to work together to purchase land and build a shelter for the 250 dogs of Mr. Cenac’s.”

Hey! Yo! DC Vegetarian just dropped off a small batch of their new seitan for us to sell you. Try it and tell us what you think. 5 bucks for a twelve ounce package. Be one of the lucky first to try it.

Damn it. Read the full thing HERE. Gawd bless ‘merica.

“Ummm, yeah. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t watching. We knew it would happen sooner or later. The surveillance state is not only watching social media sites, the social media sites are the surveillance state.

Long time environmental and animal rights activist Rod Coronado is being sent back to prison for four months for “friending” Earth First!, RAN and Ruckus Society co-founder and anti-mountaintop removal organizer Mike Roselle on Facebook and for accessing an unauthorized compter. See Coronado’s lawyer’s statement here.”

Good work from Food Empowerment Project!

Check out all the details HERE.

“The Vegan Revolution Adopt – a- Zombie and casting Call

Aug. 29th 4 PM at the vegan mini-mall SE 12th and Stark! Filming starts at 5 PM! You don’t have to be a vegan to be zombie! all are welcome. Dress like a total zombie hipster and you will get lots of love from the camera. read all the details below about casting!”

Well, kinda free. If you come in by the end of day Sunday, and drop $50+ cash money on food and other junk, we’ll give you one of our new fancy bags, a whopping $10 value!!! We’ve gone crazy!

Check out what some good folks are doing! Pitch in!

“We had such a great time last year that we’re doing it again and we need your help to make it bigger and better in 2010!

The Ride to the Light is a bike ride to benefit Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary, Out To Pasture Sanctuary and IDA’s own Project Hope Sanctuary.

This one hundred mile (century) bike ride is Saturday, September 25, 2010. We’ll be leaving from the IDA office in Portland and riding to Out To Pasture in Estacada, then on to Lighthouse in Scio. Project Hope is in Mississippi, so we won’t be making a stop there, but they’ll be with us in spirit.

Come along for the ride or make a donation and help us reach (or even better, exceed) our goal of $15,000 for these three very worthy causes.

Please contact Eric or Matt or call 503-249-9996 for more information.

Please also check out our Facebook fan page to find out more about the ride.”

Hey readers. If you’re in Portland and have a pile of paper grocery bags cluttering up your space, we’d love to take them off your hands. This is always the case, but especially right now. We just ran out and try to buy new bags as little as possible.

xoxo

FFG

So… yeah, whatever. Got 3 new kinds of frozen Gardein products. Chipotle/Lime fingers, BBQ wings, Mandarin Orange crispy chick’n… no big deal. Come inhale them, or don’t. Pfffft.

We just got a bunch of new stuff made by Wildnerness Poets. On the healthy tip, Wild Mixes with cacao, goji berries, pumpkin seeds and what not. Then a bunch of nut butters, pistachio, madacamia, pecan, almond. Don’t say we never cared about your health.

So, you may have seen these folks around at your local farmer’s market. We just started carrying their delicious fresh beans (all sourced from farms in the NW), some refried style, some not, from The Better Bean Company. First batch on sale for $2.85. Really really good. Come give ‘em a try.

Hey folks. No matter if you’re planning on coming out to the Ringling Bro’s protest(s) or not, would you do the animals a solid and maybe print up a couple of these flyers? And then put them a few places in your neighborhood? C’mon, it won’t be hard. Pretty please?

Great news from Portland IndyMedia, congrats to Justin and Jeff:

“Two animal activists were acquitted of “violation of a restraining order” charges associated with the Nicholas Ungar Furs Campaign.

At approximately 4:45 PM today, Multnomah County Judge, Maureen McKnight acquitted Justin Kay and Jeffery Wirth of “violation of a restraining order” charges associated with the long running Nicholas Ungar Furs campaign.

In her explanation of the decision, Judge McKnight described the poor case the state District Attorney made in showing that the defendants willfully violated their restraining orders, which restricted the protestors from being within 50ft of store owner, Horst Grimm. Instead, she stated, the opposite was true. The defendants did everything within their power to obey the directives of their restraining order while still asserting their first amendment rights. They never willfully disobeyed any court ordered restrictions.

It was a win for activists and a win for the animals on factory fur farms. “

Hey, if you’re at all interested in buying our new shirts or totes online, as well as a couple other new items. We just added them. So now you know. Thanks.

“The Unified Police Department has agreed to pay more than $15,000 to settle a federal lawsuit by animal-rights advocates who said their constitutional rights were violated when they were forced to end a demonstration in May.

Fourteen members of Salt Lake Animal Advocacy Movement (SLAAM) decided on May 8 to hold a spontaneous demonstration that day near 700 West and 8600 South, adjacent to a facility operated by the Fur Breeders Agricultural Cooperative, according to the suit. It says the protesters wanted to inform the public about their opposition to fur farming.

The suit alleges that two Unified Police Department officers broke up the protest – which was held in unincorporated Salt Lake County – by threatening to arrest or cite the protesters because they did not have a permit to hold a demonstration. The SLAAM members say the law does not require gatherings of fewer than 50 people to get a permit but they left because of the threat.”

More HERE.

A guest post by our pal Darius:

+++++++++++

After many years of fighting for animal liberation, I have never felt more optimistic than I do right now. Why? I recently started using Take5Save5.com – the most efficient outreach tool in our arsenal.

Now every time I open up my email, my inbox is filled with requests from people all over the country who are interested in vegetarian diets. I can provide them with the information they need to move towards a more compassionate diet. Not only can I change the world from the comfort of home, it doesn’t cost me a cent to do it.

The premise is simple: post ads to the “Free Stuff” section of Craigslist classifieds offering free Vegetarian Starter Pack booklets. Take5Save5.com provides a semi-automated way to do this.

The entire process of posting an offer takes just a couple minutes. First hit the “Pick Me A Craigslist” button and you will be directed to a listing from somewhere in the country. You will need a Craigslist account to post. If you don’t aleady have one, don’t worry. It’s free and takes only minutes to set up. You’ll be glad you did.

There is sample text for the subject line and body of the ad on the Take5Save5.com page. You can cut and copy from there if you want. Or, just make up slightly different variations. For the subject, you could use…

Vegetarian Starter Kit booklet
Free Vegetarian Starter Kit Booklets!
Vegetarian Info & Recipe Booklets

…or a million other variations. Changing it up a little is important because if you try to post multiple listings, Craigslist will block the repeat post. But minor changes will allow you to post as many listings as you want. The same goes for the body.

As a bonus, I like to include a picture, as it draws more attention to the posting. For ideas, just put “vegetarian” into Google Images. Try a few different ones and see what gets the best response.

Once you have posted your add the fun begins. Requests for booklets will start popping up in your inbox. After years of trying to give out information on veganism to people, what an awesome feeling to have them coming to you!

You don’t need to send them anything yourself. Remember, I promised it wouldn’t cost you a cent. Just got back to the Take5Save5.com website and hit the “Click Here to Enter Past Orders” button. Then simply cut and paste their name and address into the fields provided, and magical vegan elves in the North Pole will mail them one. (I’m not sure where they actually come from, but I like to think that it’s elves)

So you put up and add and it got flagged and removed? Don’t worry. About half of the ads that go up get flagged. Just keep plugging away. It only takes a couple minutes to put another one up. Those that stay up get an average of 4 to 6 responses each.

To remind myself to put up an ad  (or more) every day, I set Take5Save5.com as the homepage on my browser. So every time I start up my computer I am at the page and reminded to put a posting up—it only takes a couple minutes.

Sometimes it gets even easier. Go into your Craigslist account page from time to time and look for postings that have been colored purple. These have expired, which means with just a couple clicks of the button you can repost them!

Here is what makes Take5Save5.com such a powerful tool: unlike the random person on the street, these people are actually requesting our materials, so they have a very high likelihood of changing their diets as a result. How high? Follow up studies have shown that around 60% of them will subsequently reduce or eliminate their meat consumption.

Do a little math and you’ll see how efficient this is. That means you can realistically cause one person to reduce their meat consumption for every one to two minutes of effort. A truly amazing opportunity for you to change the world. So get to it!

-Darius Fullmer