animal welfare

Jonathan Safran Foer on his book ‘Eating Animals’

If you’re a meat eater, don’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. Unless, that is, you are a meat eater curious about the health of your body, the planet, or the animals you consume. The acclaimed author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer, has been an on-again, off-again […]

Ask Umbra on sex … chicken sex, that is

Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, Vegans don’t eat eggs because it’s an animal product like honey and milk and also because of how animals are treated. However, does eating an egg kill a baby chick that could have had a life? I am a vegetarian and people often argue that the eggs […]

Terrorism laws are wrongly being used to round up eco-activists, says author Dean Kuipers

Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, during Rodney Coronado’s radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to […]

Ashley Judd and Defenders of Wildlife want you to know that Sarah Palin still hates wolves

Ashley Judd (yes, that Ashley Judd) and Defenders of Wildlife would like you to know that even though Sarah Palin is no longer running for vice president, she still hates critters. They’ve launched a new campaign and website, Eye On Palin, that decries her “anti-wolf, anti-wildlife” agenda. Here’s their new YouTube video:

Report shows that feds have failed to protect marine mammals, even though it's required by law

Pity the poor false killer whale.

Fishermen in Hawaii who set longlines studded with thousands of hooks over dozens of miles often snag the whales -- actually large dolphins -- instead of their desired tuna or swordfish. Even the federal government, in the form of the National Marine Fisheries Service, acknowledges that the false killer whale is seriously threatened by longline fishing. NMFS has named the whale a top priority for protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

In 2004, NMFS determined the fishery was killing false killer whales at a level that mandated action under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, yet the agency has yet to attempt to solve the problem. The Hawaiian longline fishery continues killing false killer whales, unabatedly.

And this isn't an isolated scenario. In a scathing new report [PDF], the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that NMFS has failed to follow through on the directives of the Marine Mammal Protection Act on numerous levels, primarily thanks to a lack of funding and inadequate data.

Animal rights v. climate mitigation

Ezra Klein: The carbon implication is that vegetarianism is best, but if people insist on eating meat, chicken is far better than beef. This puts the carbon argument at odd with the animal rights movement. For them, chicken is far worse than beef. It takes a human being years to eat a cow but only […]

Berlin Zoo might have to send their once-famed polar bear packing

No longer the adorable baby polar bear who once graced the pages of Vanity Fair, apparently Knut is now under the threat of eviction from the Berlin Zoo. He’s almost 500 pounds, in need of a bigger home, and even, ahem, a mate. The zoo says rising costs and falling revenues mean they might have […]

New research demonstrates that higher infant mortality rates surround CAFOs

Thanks to Proposition 2, Californians will soon phase out some of the most egregious confining animal conditions. However the rest of the country continues to utilize concentrated animal feeding operations for the production of meat, poultry and dairy products. CAFOs are industrial facilities that are designed to produce the most amount of meat in the […]

Don Tyson details plans to export the U.S. meat model to global south

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —– A handful of large companies [PDF] dominate the U.S. meat industry. The biggest of all (besides Cargill whose interests extend well beyond meat) is Tyson Foods, one of the two largest beef packers, the second-largest pork packer, and the […]