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All tagged animalwelfare
French film legend Brigitte Bardot died this week at 91. The pouty “sex kitten” appeared in over 50 films in a 20-year career, which she abruptly abandonedin 1973. For the remaining decadesBardot devoted her life to animal welfare.
An African elephant named Kariba has bounced around since her family was wiped out by ivory hunters 40-plus years ago. The orphan has lived in various European zoos since then but soon – in early 2026 – she will be housed in a real sanctuary in Portugal. How well she fares there could help decide the fates of an estimated 625 elephants in captivity around Europe.
A marine park in Canada hoped to sell its last 30 beluga whales to an aquarium in China, but the deal was kiboshed by the fisheries minister. So Marineland, a near-bankrupt tourist attraction in Niagara Falls, is threatening to euthanize the whales if the government doesn’t cover some of the cost of their care.
In August a cow escaped from an Arizona meat processing plant and enjoyed a few brief hours of freedom before being tracked down and returned for execution.
New York lawyer James Sexton wants to protect the interests of the most vulnerable parties involved in divorce court: the pets. To that end he’s offering legally binding prenuptial agreements to safeguard the interests of furry and feathered household members on his platform TrustedPetnup.
The Trump Administration has been slashing federal funding for scientific research – in the National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and elsewhere. The slash-and-burn approach to policy making has a lot of downsides, but it might come with a silver lining: the end of animal experimentation.
Three baby pigs were stolen from an art exhibition in Copenhagen last week, and that’s the good news. The pigs would have been allowed to starve to death – just as the artist intended – in a misguided attempt to draw attention to animal welfare in Denmark.
A pet deer has been confiscated in Pennsylvania. Tammy Shiery of Fayette County says that she and several neighbors raised the 2-year-old deer from the time they found him as a fawn, but the Pennsylvania Game Commission says that’s illegal.
In April 2023, Elodie Cappé found an abandoned boar piglet near the rubbish bins on her horse farm in Chaource, France. She tried to release the piglet back into the wild, unsuccessfully, so she named it – Rillette, after the local dish of shredded pork – gave it a pen, and had the boar sterilised and vaccinated.
Your turkey did not die well, according to philosopher Peter Singer, and its life was no great shakes either. That’s the gist of Singer’s new book, Consider the Turkey, a short account of the bird’s miserable existence.
A 9-year-old girl who fell in love with the goat she raised for a California county fair was devastated when deputy sheriffs seized, and eventually had butchered, the floppy-eared pet named Cedar. Now the County Sheriff's office must pay $300,000 to settle this atrocity.
This week the Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of five elephants in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. The question at hand: Shall the pachyderms have the same rights as “persons” under the law?
Envigo, the company that had to put 4000 beagles up for adoption because its breeding facility was shown to be a squalid hellhole, has gotten its comeuppance in the form of a $35 million fine.
A group of animal cognition experts gathered by New York University are grappling with a profound question: Which animals are sentient, with at least the capacity for conscious experience?
Conditions at Central Park, a humble city-run zoo in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, were not ideal for at least one resident, a 4-year-giraffe named Benito. The young male had only about a half acre to wander within a small enclosure, very few trees to nibble on, and within a climate no giraffe is accustomed to – brutal heat in the summer and freezing cold in winter.
Animal welfare group PETA UK is asking Katie Price to cease and desist owning animals because the “media personality” has had a horrible track record with her pets. The org is offering Price £5,000 ($6,300) if she’ll sign a legally binding agreement promising never to acquire another animal.
“The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous.” That’s how Chicago lawyer Ioan-Radu Motoarcă opens his argument, published in the serious Oxford University Press journal Analysis.
The depth of human tragedy attendant to the Hamas-Israeli war leaves little emotional bandwidth for animal welfare, but animals – dogs, cats, and other pets – still need care. Animal rescue goes on, within and near Gaza, even under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.
Mundi is a 41-year-old African savannah elephant who spent 35 years alone in a small enclosure at Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez Zoo. The troubled zoo was closed for good this year, and Mundi was relocated to the comparatively luxurious Elephant Refuge North America in Georgia.
