Humans have an enormous impact on planet Earth, but from both an animal welfare and an environmental perspective, perhaps nothing is more important than our diets. In 2022, more than 82 billion livestock animals were slaughtered for meat, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, with the majority of those animals […]
Faced with a wall of egg cartons at the grocery store, all plastered with different labels and phrases, it’s hard to know what to choose. Which is better: cage-free, free range or pasture-raised? What does “farm-fresh” mean? What lies behind the USDA Organic label? Are vegetarian-fed hens healthier and happier? Without uniform regulation of these […]
Factory farming is on the ballot in Switzerland, which could become the first country in the world to ban the agricultural practice linked to a host of environmental harms from animal cruelty to the climate crisis.
Millions of day-old male chicks are killed around the world each year because they can’t lay eggs or be fattened fast enough to be sold for their meat. According to Eurogroup for Animals, in Europe this industrial-scale culling results in the gassing or crushing of 330 million male chicks every year. Only a few hours […]
Midsummer is the time for forecasts of the size of this year’s “dead zones” and algal blooms in major lakes and bays. Will the Gulf of Mexico dead zone be the size of New Jersey, or only as big as Connecticut? Will Lake Erie’s bloom blossom to a human health crisis, or just devastate the coastal economy?
How should the global agricultural system change in order to prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis? A group of young activists believe the answer is a global shift towards plant-based diets, and they are not afraid to make their voices heard. The campaigners disrupted a meeting at the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, on Friday to call for a Plant Based Treaty.
A highly infectious bird flu that has led to the deaths of millions of birds has been found in a U.S. human for the first time. A Colorado man who worked at a farm where poultry had been infected tested positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or the H5N1 flu, the Colorado Department of Public […]
In December of last year, YouTuber Niko Omilana shot a video called Behind the Bucket, appearing to show happy birds at a farm that sells chickens to KFC. The video, shared on Twitter by media site Joe, shows the chickens wandering freely in a well-heated shed filled with straw and enrichment activities including a swing.
According to a new study, children believe humans and farm animals should be treated in the same ways, but they start to lose these beliefs as they become teenagers. The study notes that speciesism is learned in adolescence. The study, done by researches at Exeter University and Oxford University, asked people of different age groups: […]