PETA Supporters’ Top 10 Victories of 2023: How Action Alerts Help Animals

Eager to help your fellow animals? Each PETA action alert is a great way to accomplish this goal. Below, we reveal how we get things done when people like you take action using our innovative systems. Then, to celebrate, we share our top 10 victories by PETA supporters in 2023.

How to Quickly Take Action Online for Animals

PETA achieves many victories via our action alerts—simple and effective ways for people to get active online for animals. Urging companies, universities, legislators, government agencies, and others to stop exploiting animals is a key part of PETA’s most pressing campaigns, and completing action alerts is the quickest and easiest way for our supporters to contribute to this work.

Each year, nearly 1 million people target abusers and help animals who are suffering when used for experiments, food, fashion, or entertainment. Many of our supporters who complete our action alerts go on to share them with their friends, family members, and social media followers.

Take Action via Text Message: PETA’s Cutting-Edge Mobile ‘Reply Y’ Feature

We send texts to approximately 50,000 supporters each week, asking them to take action by replying “Y.” After they do, an e-mail is sent from them to an animal abuser. This innovative tactic only requires participants’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and it’s easily one of the fastest ways to help animals.

Here are some other ways we advocate for animals:

• Sending out e-mails reaching an audience of over 1 million people
• Asking supporters to make phone calls
• Posting compelling viral content on popular social media sites to raise awareness of our campaigns
• Posting action alerts on our iPhone and iPad app

2023’s Top 10 PETA Action Alert Victories: Cheers to Our Supporters

1. Following a PETA campaign lasting over 17 months, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, which oversees the University of Tennessee College of Medicine (UTCOM), wrote to us announcing that UTCOM would stop using live animals in surgical and emergency medical residency training programs on its Chattanooga campus. Our supporters took more than 183,800 actions on our alert to help achieve this victory for pigs in April.

We’re thrilled that UTCOM is doing right by pigs, physicians, and patients by ending these deadly drills that mutilated animals.

2. In early February, documents obtained by PETA showed that gruesome decompression experiments on sheep funded by the U.S. Navy—which had been awarded nearly $390,000 in taxpayer money—at the University of Wisconsin–Madison had been abruptly stopped up to two years ahead of schedule. This achievement was due in part to PETA supporters taking over 178,500 actions to help spare these animals.

The sheep formerly slated for these tests were spared the agony of cardiovascular collapse, spinal cord injury, and paralysis. This victory prevented more sheep from being abused in painful experiments.

3. Pajar Canada—which manufactures and sells footwear and outerwear—confirmed to PETA in early November that it had banned fur. The exciting news came after pressure from us and over 177,400 e-mails to the company from our supporters.

As a result of this campaign, Pajar Canada is no longer funding the cruel fur trade, which forces animals to live in cramped cages where they frantically pace and often languish with sores, bleeding eyes, or broken legs before being electrocuted, gassed, or poisoned. It joins hundreds of top companies and brands—including Canada Goose, Hudson’s Bay Company, Moncler, Moose Knuckles, RUDSAK, and MACKAGE—in banning fur, and we’re rallying the public to demand that LVMH follow suit.

4. Following pressure from PETA, Lily Tomlin, and our supporters, Ford Motor Company issued a statement banning all animal testing in mid-July. PETA supporters sent 175,000 e-mails and took part in multiple call-ins before the automaker slammed the brakes on animal testing.

With this victory, Ford no longer funds useless crash testing that used animals as stand-ins for high-tech crash-test dummies.

5. Following over 134,500 actions by PETA supporters—plus thousands of phone calls, social media posts, and personalized e-mail messages—the Apache Rattlesnake Festival in Oklahoma dropped a photo booth exhibitor who sewed live snakes’ mouths shut. This victory prevented snakes from being painfully maimed for a mere snapshot.

6. After more than 128,000 actions from PETA and PETA Latino supporters, American Pistachio Growers stopped funding notorious Iditarod musher Dallas Seavey. As more and more companies cut ties with mushers and the race, the pressure is on the last remaining sponsors to follow suit.

We’re one step closer to ending the Iditarod. PETA’s list of companies that have severed ties with the cruel dog-sled race keeps growing.

7. In mid-September, following a relentless campaign and over 121,600 actions by PETA and PETA Latino supporters, Anheuser-Busch InBev agreed to stop amputating Budweiser Clydesdales’ tailbones.

With this kind decision for Clydesdales, the self-proclaimed “King of Beers” is back at the top of the heap. To those who took action for horses to help make this victory possible, we say, “Cheers!”

8. After a relentless PETA campaign, including more than 100,000 actions from our supporters, UniverSoul Circus finally dropped its cruel animal acts and no longer uses animals for entertainment.

PETA had long urged UniverSoul to stop exploiting elephants, tigers, zebras, camels, horses, and other animals in its cruel live-animal acts. Before our supporters’ actions, shocking whistleblower reports of animal abuse emerged. We carefully planned countless protests at UniverSoul shows across the country, and celebrities like TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas spoke out against the abuse.

9. Following over 99,600 actions by PETA supporters—and an assault on two nonviolent animal advocates—the Moolah Shrine, which had already ended the use of big cats and bears, announced that it was ending its use of elephants in its circus. The Moolah Shrine Circus in St. Louis was among the last remaining shows that still exploited wild animals who were confined to small crates or kept in shackles and deprived of any semblance of a natural life.

Tell other Shriners that their circus acts would be safer, more entertaining, and better off without forcing animals to perform confusing, painful tricks under the threat of violence.

10. In mid-February, after more than 94,600 PETA Latino and PETA supporters took action, Telefónica’s paid TV platform, Movistar Plus+, agreed to stop airing bullfights that showed the slaughter of nearly 600 bulls. Animal defenders sent thousands of e-mails to make this change possible, and more than 800 animal protection groups from around the world, including PETA, fired off a letter to Telefónica’s president urging him to reject any plans to air the ritualistic killing of bulls.

This move is in line with public sentiment around the world. Most people in Spain and Latin America are against bullfighting and don’t want the bloody events to be televised. By refusing to broadcast bullfights, Telefónica is showing respect for their opinion and promoting a message of compassion.

More Victories

We celebrated many other PETA victories in 2023 with the help of our supporters, including the following:

• The National Hockey League pulled the plug on working with Gatorland for its All-Star Weekend.
• After our supporters took over 71,000 actions, HelloFresh stopped supporting forced monkey labor, dropping coconut milk sourced from Thailand.
• In California, the Pasadena City Council voted unanimously to adopt a humane, nonlethal coyote-management plan—rejecting cruel, ineffective, and expensive lethal methods.
• The Galesburg City Council in Illinois agreed to forgo a proposed goose massacre in favor of a humane, multipronged approach and to use such measures in the future.
• After over 47,300 actions by PETA supporters, Cue Health made the compassionate decision to stop sponsoring the cruel Iditarod.

We hope you’ll read more about each of these victories and get even more engaged by taking action online, making phone calls, signing up for our texts, attending our demonstrations, and more.

Let’s help animals more in 2024 by working together to achieve more victories than ever before.

We encourage you to take action on our website and share action alert pages with everyone so we can continue growing our supporter base.

Check out our most urgent action alerts below—and here’s to a kinder new year filled with plenty of new animal defenders!