PETA US conducted an 11-month undercover investigation inside a laboratory owned by the international drug-testing company Covance. Covance subsequently went to court in an effort to prevent millions from seeing video footage showing the company’s appalling physical and psychological abuse of monkeys.

PETA Europe (PETA) presented the judge with the video, which prompted him to state that the “rough manner in which the animals [were] handled and the bleakness of the surroundings in which they are kept … cry out for explanation”. Final outcome: The judge dismissed the case and ordered Covance to pay PETA’s legal costs.

PETA made great progress for sheep in Australia, where ranchers use shears to cut chunks of skin and flesh from lambs’ backsides without using any painkillers. This mutilation, called “mulesing”, is the crudest, cheapest and cruellest way to try to reduce maggot infestation. Older sheep are packed onto open-decked ships and sent to slaughter in the Middle East. Forced to stand in their own waste for weeks, sick sheep are crushed to death, or they are tossed into a macerator or thrown overboard to the sharks while they are still alive. Survivors have their throats slit without being stunned. PETA and PETA US succeeded in persuading Benetton to join the movement to reform Australian wool after holding dozens of colourful demonstrations worldwide and convinced retail powerhouses Nordstrom, Limited Brands, Ann Taylor and Timberland to agree to avoid cruelly produced wool. As a result, many wool producers in Australia have stopped mulesing and live exports, saving thousands of gentle lambs and sheep from immense suffering.

A wave of panic swept through the fur industry when the BBC showed PETA Germany’s undercover video footage of the Chinese trade in dog and cat fur. In an interview watched by millions, Sir Paul McCartney and Lady Heather Mills McCartney screened the footage, which shows cats and dogs packed together in tiny cages, about to be skinned. Every year, millions of cats and dogs in China are bludgeoned, hanged, bled to death and strangled with wire nooses for their fur. This fur is often deliberately mislabelled as fur from other species and is exported to destinations around the world, including the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. Sir Paul vowed never to perform in China as long as this dreadful trade continues.

PETA believes that the most effective way to eliminate animal abuse is to teach compassion to successive generations. PETA reaches the largest possible audience of young people by using the medium that they prefer most: the Internet. Our youth outreach Web site peta2.co.uk receives thousands of visits per month.

The peta2 Street Team is made up of young activists who spread the animal rights message in their communities. We e-mail them weekly activist “missions”, such as showing undercover video footage on their personal Web pages, leafleting outside their local KFCs and other projects. With each mission completed, the Street Teamers earn points that can be “spent” on items such as concert tickets, PETA T-shirts and other gear, celebrity-autographed items and other prizes.

PETA also reached tens of thousands of young people by setting up information stalls at music concerts and festivals.

PETA has won acclaim for our work to raise awareness of animal rights, and celebrity involvement has been the surest way to bring media attention to the issue of animal exploitation.

The past year has been enormously successful in focusing public attention on cruelty issues with the help of some of the top celebrities in the United Kingdom, including television personality Jodie Marsh, Miss United Kingdom Universe Brooke Johnston, Coronation Street’s Kate Ford, comic actor Martin Freeman, supermodel Imogen Bailey, film star Sir Roger Moore and beauty icon Pamela Anderson.

Our campaigns gained much momentum in 2005 with hundreds of creative actions, including demonstrations at KFC restaurants to protest the chain’s suppliers’ cruel treatment of chickens, sending a person in a bear costume to the Queen’s public appearances to protest the use of bear skins to make the palace guards’ hats (at least one bear dies for each hat) and “snarl-in” demonstrations by activists and their dogs to urge consumers to boycott Iams until it stops torturing animals in laboratories.

We also launched our largest marketing initiative in the United Kingdom, with our new pro-vegetarian ads which appeared throughout the London Underground.

“I Am Not a Nugget”, announces a defiant yet irresistibly cute chicken in the colourful ad, which also encourages people to visit PETA.org.uk for more information.

PETA also organised the “Running of the Nudes” in Pamplona, Spain – one of 2005’s largest animal rights events anywhere in the world. More than 600 international activists wore plastic bull horns and little else, gaining global media coverage of the cruelty in the annual “Running of the Bulls” and the vicious bullfights that follow.