Is LAPC Filtering PFW?

Content filtering is popular with the ruling powers in places like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other geographies where the current regime has a reason to fear and subdue its adult citizens. Content filtering in the workplace is popular with employers who have actual, economic concerns about their workers’ abilities to simultaneously idle on MySpace, bid on Ebay, chat on AIM, play Warcraft, and still work at a productive pace. Content filtering in K-12 schools is popular with parents and administrators because it protects minors from sexually explicit material of a pornographic or obscene nature.

Content filtering at public, CA community colleges ain’t so popular, much less defensible, when the filtered content turns out to be neither obscene, pornographic, inflammatory with an intent to incite unlawful action, or libelous, but merely critical of a filtering institution’s policies, programs, curriculum, and publicly-employed personnel.

If you are unable to reach any Pierce Farm Watch content (all over there in the sidebar) from computers located on the Los Angeles Pierce College campus, or your browser is redirected to a page you did not request, let us know. And we’ll let EFF know.

We’d like you to test from libraries, computer labs, Wi-Fi spots if they exist, and any other networked computer on the Los Angeles Pierce College campus from which you have access to the Internet. Other LACCD campus locations and CSUers can test, too, because the wider you cast the net and the narrower the set of results … well, that says a whole lot about a little.

What you are looking for:
Instances of domain/subdomain failure or redirection:
Examples: You get redirected from www.piercefarmwatch.org to a page you did not request.
You can read other Blogspot or WordPress blogs, but not ours.
You can reach Eurekster, but our swicki is not available.
You can reach Flickr, but our photo sets are unavailable.
You can watch YouTube videos, but our playlists are unavailable.
Social networking sites (del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and shadows) are available, but our bookmarks are not.

Search Engine cache filtering:
Example: You found us via a search engine, clicked on the Cached link for page results, but were redirected.

Legitimate URL redirection services fail:
Example: tinyurl

Mobile content translation fails:
Example: You are redirected to somewhere other than results you request through Google Mobile Search.

RSS-formatted requests fail:
Example: You can reach Feedburner, but clicking on our feed URL from Feedburner fails.

Language Translation fails:
Example: You know how to do the en-to-en thing to get Google Translate to serve as a proxy, but that fails.

That’s about it for the testbeds, other than the many mega-lists of anon proxies out there which you can find and play with for yourselves. Happy animal-safe-and-sane hunting!

Taking Action for Animals

Conference happening July 28–30 in DC. Want to go but short on funds? AVAR is offering two scholarships this year to cover your transport, conference reg fee, and a comfy stall so you can bed down at night. To apply, visit the scholarship application page of the conference site. Need more info? Drop abodai@humanesociety.org an email. This year’s hot topic area is farmed animals. So near, so dear.

We love us some animal conferencing, but they all seem to lack one thing that another esteemed con is notorious for, that being this. Let’s try to remedy the situation for AR2007. STF is more fun than a curbside seat for celebrity jailarity—trust us!—and quite apropos.

Weekend Film Festival

The Fourth Annual Pacific Palisades Film Festival starts Thursday, May 17th.

Beyond Closed Doors is screening at 2:00 PM, Saturday, May 19th, as part of the social justice film program. Location: Pacific Palisades Elementary School Auditorium, 800 Via de la Paz, Pacific Palisades. Writer/producer Hugh Dorigo, panelists Karen Dawn (moderator), Dr. Marc Bekoff, Gene Baur, and Dr. Armaiti May head up the post-screening Q&A session. Individual tickets are $5, $10 for a 2–or-more film pass.

Congratulations to Western University’s first graduating Class of 2007 DVMs. Somewhere among these faces is

• your new associate
• your practice owner
• your mentor
• your confidante
• your state’s delegate

One person, one practice, one state, one nation, one world, all in good time. In your lifetime.

All He Needs is Pickles

Relish, the little pig from Deer Hollow Farm in Los Altos Hills, has arrived at Healing Hearts Animal Sanctuary in Wilcox, Arizona.

Relish left Deer Hollow for Healing Hearts on Valentine’s Day and will live out his life in peace and comfort. His sister Pickles, pictured below on the left, remains at Deer Hollow where she awaits an uncertain future.

James Teixeira, recreation manager for the City of Mountain View which owns and operates Deer Hollow Farm, said giving up Pickles depends on being able to replace her and “this time of year, the breeder we’re working with has a couple of groups ahead of us.” Hmmm…

There are literally hundreds of pigs like Relish and Pickles, from infants to adults, in shelters and sanctuaries all over the country waiting for permanent, caring homes in those geographic areas where they are permitted and can be comfortably accommodated, provided with good food and clean water, appropriate housing, and quality veterinary care. Replacing Pickles for the “outdoor environmental education program” in which she participates shouldn’t require a breeder’s involvement at all, should it?

But reputable shelters and sanctuaries won’t place needy animals with facilities where they are in danger of being discarded, for profit or otherwise, once their “educational value” has decreased in proportion relative to their increase age and size.

Is it actually Pickles who faces becoming a loving mother only to experience her own babies taken away and sold at a livestock auction, like her brother would certainly have been?

Is it Pickles who will be used to perpetuate the cycle of teaching children that getting rid of healthy animals for a price, who never asked to be born in the first place, is the right thing to do? We don’t know. But somebody in the Mountain View Department of Recreation does.

Contact Deer Hollow Farm by placing a call to John Marchant at 650-903-6618. Ask them to reunite Pickles with her brother at Heavenly Hearts as soon as possible and not to contribute further to the fallacy of intentional animal breeding for intentional animal death as educational, environmentally responsible, sustainable, or justifiable.

Donate to Healing Hearts Animal Sanctuary for Relish’s future and his lifelong role as a teacher and ambassador of all things pig and wonderful.

Sunday Triple-Header

Folks in Michigan would like a state legislator brave enough to step forward in their state and make cruelty to animals a felony.

Apparently, leaving them to resort to cannibalizing their own offspring just to stay alive, die with their heads stuck in a fence trying to reach food on the other side, and rot beside the bodies of their starving herdmates is still a misdemeanor. If the pic-link to the Port Huron Times Herald video above is broken, you can download it from us.

The Nebraska Unicameral (it’s their one-of-a-kind Legislature) is considering a bill that would make animal cruelty a felony. If the bill isn’t maimed or killed in Committee by the usual suspects, LB 227 would protect animals other than companion dogs and cats, i.e., ones that have hooves, horns, beaks, and snouts.

We’re ending our Sunday with a story out of the Inland Empire which, if it didn’t get your attention the first time around, might make you look twice this time. In September, 2000, Godwin Collins Onunwah put a bunny in a plastic bag, tied the bag closed, and waited for the bunny to die in his special education classroom at LAUSD’s Gage Middle School.

Since the school district didn’t provide animals for dissection, perhaps because it isn’t permitted in middle schools and only permitted in high schools if the animals are sourced through biological supply houses, Onunwah asked his special education students to supply their own animals for the exercise. The suffocated bunny was purchased by a student from a pet store. When the bunny didn’t succumb before the end of the school day, Onunwah put the closed bag in a cabinet for the weekend.

His first trial on one misdemeanor count of animal cruelty ended in a hung jury voting 11–1 to convict. He was acquitted following a second trial.

This bunny’s exquisite face is courtesy of the House Rabbit Society, where you can discover just about everything you’d need for companion bunny care and habitat.

House Rabbit Society, like the educator resource TeachKind, is a child-and-bunny-safe site, free of plastic bags, suffocation experiments, administrative leave, multiple aliases on undisclosed public employee records, and predators who target developmentally disabled children and defenseless animals. We hope you’ll visit both. In at least one case, we’d like to make it a 2nd-strike felony not to.