The era of disregarding animal welfare laws cannot end soon enough Reports from China this week are delivering a dose of heartbreak and how-can-it-happen. Dog meat traders are butchering terrified and terrorized dogs at the infamous Yulin festival, selling their parts to buyers in defiance of a new Chinese regulation that reclassified dogs from “livestock” to … Read more
Sir Winston Churchill may have missed the mark by more than a few decades, but his vision for the future of food was characteristically bold and accurate. “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he … Read more
Nature — by that, I mean the Earth’s crust and atmosphere, its five kingdoms of living organisms, water and fire and rock, the effects of the sun and moon, and all other interrelated parts and processes — is more than a mere backdrop for the human experience. It is, and has always been, central to … Read more
Guest Tamara Drake of the Center for Responsible Science Unpacks the Problem The world is racing to formulate a vaccine for COVID-19, but what hurdles stand in the way? In the best of circumstances, vaccine development is not an easy process. The SARS coronavirus (SARS-COV-1), which originated in a live-wildlife market in China in 2002, … Read more
While cruelty is universal, so is the fight against it (This essay is the latest in our continuing series about the relationship between animal-use industries, pathogens and their effect on animal and human health.) Since early March, after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, there’s been alarm and uproar about the mistreatment of … Read more
Washington, D.C. — Nearly eighty Members of the U.S. House, led by Reps. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Vern Buchanan, R-Fla. sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. and Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, D-Calif., urging leadership to include $4 million funding in the next COVID-19 package to help domestic violence victims … Read more
Washington, D.C. — Animal Wellness Action today applauded U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, for introducing a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives calling on all nations to permanently close “live wildlife markets.” In addition, Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., Ted Yoho, R-Fla., Scott Perry, R-Pa., Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., Michael Guest, R-Miss., and Steve Watkins, R-Kans. Also joined … Read more
Impossible to Achieve ‘Social Distancing’ at Animal Factories and Slaughterhouses In its own dispassionate way, the Johns Hopkins’ coronavirus dashboard plots the global hopscotching of COVID-19. More than 550,000 afflicted and 23,000 dead in the United States, with global infections eclipsing 2 million. Politicians and epidemiologists direct our attention to graphs to remind us of … Read more
COVID-19 has infected 1.5 million people, with that number to swell before the virus’s person-to-person global hopscotching pauses. In response, scientists in laboratories are racing to develop a vaccine and therapies to arrest its progress and to palliate its worst effects. But the race between the scientists and the virus is rigged. The virus had … Read more
Washington, D.C. — The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Veterinary Services Laboratories has confirmed SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans) in a captive tiger at a zoo in New York. This is the first instance of a confirmed infection of COVID-19 in a tiger. Samples from this tiger were taken and … Read more