Ben the bear, who lived for six years in a 12 x 22-foot cage near Fayetteville before becoming the subject of a lawsuit garnering national publicity, is featured in tomorrow night's episode of "Animal Intervention" on the Nat Geo Wild channel.

In the episode, which airs at 9 p.m., the show's star Alison Eastwood and actor-activist Billy McNamara visit the Jambbas Ranch in Cedar Creek and meet with Ben's owner James Bass, who at the time of filming had been under fire over Ben's living conditions.

In the episode, McNamara explains to Bass that in the wild, bears walk approximately 20 miles each day. Ben, a grizzly-black bear mix who never left his cage, slept on a concrete floor and was fed dog food, bread and hot dogs once per day. In the wild, bears forage and eat constantly. Eastwood and McNamara both put pressure on Bass to either hand over Ben or improve his living quarters.

PETA will unveil its controversial anti-McDonald's chicken statue in Raleigh tomorrow, and the group is hoping it will have residents declaring, "I'm hatin' it."

Smithfield Foods defeated two shareholder resolutions aimed at making the company "greener" and more humane, according to a report this morning in the Virginian-Pilot.

At the company's annual meeting Wednesday, 96 percent of the voters opposed a shareholder resolution requesting specific goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions at Smithfield's operations, the paper reported.

Slightly more — 97 percent — voted down efforts by the Humane Society of the United States to get the company to switch to "controlled-atmosphere killing," using inert gases, of turkeys at Butterball.

Before the meeting, Smithfield executives hard argued that the company was only a minority owner of Butterball and didn't control operations at Butterball facilities.

Butterball is based in Garner and employs about 2,500 people at a facility in Mount Olive. The majority owner is privately owned Maxwell Farms of Goldsboro.

In June, Smithfield offered $200 million to buy out Maxwell Farms. According to the Virginian-Pilot report, Pope told shareholders that Maxwell Farms had still not responded to its offer. Maxwell Farms' deadline is Sept. 11. If it rejects the offer or does not respond, Pope has said that Smithfield will pull out of Butterball.

The newspaper also reported that after two years of deep losses, the company was again profitable.

Pope's only concern, according to the paper,  were overseas grain shortages, which could drive up feed costs. He was less worried about the possibility of a double-dip recession.

"Recessions are usually good for the company," Pope said, according to the paper's report. "We're in the protein sector, where people have to eat, and we're in the moderately priced protein sector."

When you're a celebrity who has messed up or is in need of a career boost, the antidote is the reality show.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that Michael Vick is partnering with BET for an eight-part docu-series scheduled to air early next year, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tentatively titled "The Michael Vick Project" the show willl spotlight his comeback with the Philadelphia Eagles and deal with his past, including his childhood and his 2007 arrest for funding a dogfighting ring.

PETA dislikes duck hunters