Leaked documents reveal SeaWorld is drugging its orcas

Shocking, but also not AT ALL shocking . . .

Leaked documents reveal SeaWorld is drugging its orcas.

My First Ever Glossy Publication AND Cover Story!!

The new issue of The Animals’ Voice magazine is out, and my narrative nonfiction piece about doing undercover stockyard investigations is the COVER STORY!! This is the biggest thing ever for my writing resume =)

My First Ever Glossy Publication AND Cover Story!!.

Travel Theme: CONNECTION

Bighorn sheep butting heads in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Roosevelt elk butting heads in Praire Creek Redwoods State Park.

Redwood buddies in Humboldt Co.

California newts mating in Sonoma Co., CA. This photo by Rebecca Stanger.

Rooseveldt elk baby nursing in Humboldt Co.

Thanks Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack? for the theme!

Travel Theme: DELICATE

I love the delicate little feet of the American avocet.

Can’t for the life of me recall this flower’s name, but their fine little petals so much remind me of parchment paper!

The fine, wispy feathers of the snow egret epitomize avian delicacy to me.

Thanks Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack? for another great Theme!

Local Activists Protest Chicken Sacrifice in Orthodox Jewish Ritual — Doug Kolk Reports

Travel Theme: HIDDEN

You never know what you’ll find hidden just on the other side of that branch over there…

I didn’t even know there was a spider on these flowers until later when I got home and looked at them. If I HAD seen the spider, this picture wouldn’t
exist because I’d’ve run away screaming!!

Weird…growths (?) of some sort on the underside of a wooden walkway over a wetlands preserve.

Look carefully, you can see a several-foot-long shark hidden underwater!

One of my new favorite places in Southern California, a gem of a place hidden somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains where you can jump from the cliffs into the deep water; there are jumps from as low as 15 feet all the way up to 45 and beyond!!

Thanks as always to Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack for another great theme!

Travel Theme: TILTED

Amazing tilted and stratified geology at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley.

More Death Valley beauty; Aguereberry Point, and its famous tilted layers of stratified sediments.

Me staring up at a strangely tilted Sitka spruce in Praire Creek Redwoods State Park, Humboldt Co., CA

Windblown Torrey pine at the top of a bluff, San Diego

A beautiful white pelican, doing that weird neck-stretching thing they do.

Thanks to Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack? for another great theme!

Travel Theme: MOTION

Rikki, my old dog, rocketing for a tennis ball at San Quentin beach, with a bulldog-friend in the back.

Tern in flight.

Avocet searching through the mud for crustacean-food, and right behind her a four-foot shark (!) gliding through the water.

SPLASH!

The exquisitely graceful snowy egret taking flight beneath wind-rippled bay water.

Thanks Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack? for another terrific theme!

Happy Birthday Rod Coronado!

Happy birthday to one of the most amazing Earth/animal liberation activists EVER! If you consider yourself an environmentalist or believe in animal rights you NEED to know all about Rod.

Check out this great article from the Earth First! Newswire.

And listen to this incredibly touching and beautiful song by Dana Lyons, a personal friend of Rod’s. It’s called “Song for Rod Coronado.” I had to upload it myself because it wasn’t yet on YouTube =)

You can buy this incredible collection of Rod’s writings called Flaming Arrows from former animal liberator Peter Young’s Animal Liberation Frontline.

Song for the Liberators

This is from the 1,600 page handwritten novel I wrote in prison, called The Liberators. It is an epic political thriller about a group of underground animal liberationists. Context: CJ Barry, the president of a University animal rights group, has been subpoenaed to appear before a Grand Jury, in Los Angeles, that is investigating an arson committed at his school. There is a massive protest outside the Federal Building, and a famous vegan mega-pop-star (kind of like a Chrissie Hynde-type, but even bigger) named Zander Huxley has written a song about animal liberation, called Song for the Liberators, which she sings at the protest (this is all fictional). Here is what she sings….

The animals trapped miserable in their cages
And everyone just sits around and waits.
Except for those brave, masked sages
Who break in and liberate.

“Carpe noctem,” they say, “seize the night.
We’ll don our black clothes and masks
And for the oppressed we will fight—
As we set about our righteous freedom tasks.”

“Our soaring hearts will not be tamed,”
Their primal warrior cry;
“We’ll watch their buildings go up in flames
Until the very day we die.”

So free the animals
Or support the ones who do.
Free the animals
It’s up to me and you.

Yeah free the animals.
Let ‘em say what they might.
Free the animals—
Search your heart, you’ll know it’s right.

“Liberate! Until the day we die!
Liberate!” Their ceaseless freedom cry.

Me (in white) reading the song/poem to a group of fellow activists recently during an event where we buried the ashes of the ~30 animals we used in a ceremony for National Animal Rights Day III.

For more information on National Animal Rights Day III and our incredibly powerful and touching public ceremony, during which several dozen compassionate southern Californians stood in formation and held the dead bodies of animals who died in slaughterhouses because of sickness, overcrowding, heat exhaustion, et. al. and were therefore “unfit to eat”, please see my dear friend Kara’s wonderful vegan feminist blog post on her Vegan Rabbit WP site, National Animal Rights Day 2013 Activists Share Their Stories.