People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals

On a warm, sunny day at high noon, 17-year-old Ira Belobragina launched her career as a political activist. Proudly bearing a platter piled high with foil-wrapped vegetable burgers, Belobragina stepped onto grassy Pushkin Square on Friday and led a parade of a dozen animal-rights enthusiasts through clusters of bewildered picnickers.

The Nordstrom shoe salesman approaches. "May I help you?" he asks. "You really don't want to," Sabri na LeBeauf assures him. The actress, best known for her work on "The Cosby Show," is a vegan (VEE-gan) who wants nothing to do with animal products. She believes in "compassionate shopping," a practice that applies to clothing, cosmetics, accessories--even sporting goods and automobile interiors. Although many of the nation's 12.

An animal rights group wants the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach to gut its cafeteria menu of fish and seafood, arguing that "serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show." Like Lilo in the animated "Lilo and Stitch," who refused to make a tuna sandwich for her friend, Pudge, a fish, because it would be "an abomination," the head of the Fish Empathy Project for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said serving fish at an aquarium just isn't right.

About 50 animal rights supporters--including one dressed in a rabbit costume--demonstrated Saturday outside Cybill Shepherd's home in Sherman Oaks, charging that the actress profits from a cosmetics company that tortures mice when testing products. The protest, sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, targeted Shepherd for her work promoting L'Oreal cosmetics.

Alicia Silverstone unveiled her latest video Wednesday afternoon at Beverly Hills High, but instead of donning stretch suede for the rock band Aerosmith, she was shunning scalpels--as part of an effort to persuade high school students and their biology teachers to give up dissecting frogs. And cats and pigs. And even worms. But especially frogs. The 30-second video is dominated by close-ups of Silverstone caressing and even licking a frog.

In the eyes of animal rights activists, Carme was a model company. After all, Carme had never conducted product safety tests on animals and had sponsored advertising campaigns publicly opposing the practice. Carme even made donations to animal rights groups, organizations that promote boycotts against firms that conduct tests on animals.

It stinks, say animal activists. Non-scents, say animal keepers. Those are reactions to a crackdown on skunks swarming at the Los Angeles Zoo that led to 118 of them being killed during a four-week period this summer. Zoo operators say the white-striped creatures were trapped and shot to stop the spread of disease to zoo animals--not to mention discomfort to zoo visitors.

An animal-rights group has turned to a well-known figure to promote vegetarianism: Jesus Christ. About three dozen demonstrators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried to deliver that message to Christians on Sunday outside the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They carried signs proclaiming "Jesus was a Vegetarian" while a man dressed and groomed like popular depictions of Jesus waved at churchgoers stuck in traffic.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contend the biomedical community has hit below the belt in a recent article in Washingtonian magazine about PETA founder Alex Pacheco, whose 1981 expose of conditions at a Silver Spring, Md., research lab led to the facility's losing its federal funding.

On the Web site devoted to his animal insurance business and a nonprofit foundation he created to celebrate the healing power of pets, prominent Orange County veterinarian Jack L. Stephens proclaims his love for nonhumankind. "Very simply," the owner of nine dogs and two cats writes in an online resume, "I founded a pet insurance company to see that pets get the best of care and not have to be put to sleep."