A new relationship with animals, nature and each other.

Posts from the ‘Old News’ category

  • Ringling Caves!

    The elephants are packing their trunks. By any standard, today’s decision by the Ringling Circus to phase out its elephant acts represents a seismic shift in the use of…

  • Collapse of Antarctic Ice Sheet Irreversible

    One of the six major glaciers being eroded from below by warm water What does it mean when two major studies this week tell us that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is…

  • 2013 Game Changers

    Two events share top prize as game changers for the year just ending: The Nonhuman Rights Project's lawsuits have started a whole new conversation about how we relate to other…

  • Mother Carries Shot Pit Bull to Safety

    It started out as the same hike that Andi Davis does every day to the top of one of the mountains near where she lives in Phoenix, Arizona. But this time, close to the top,…

  • Liberators or Terrorists?

    When 100 people, mostly women from various rescue groups, rescued 178 beagles from a research lab in Brazil last week, nobody called them terrorists. The five security officers…

    The Right Music for Cats
    Greyhound Shock Angers Australians
    Holiday Gift for Elephant Music Lovers
    The Yeti Bear

    Seals on Trial

    Scientists plan to glue submersible cameras onto the seals’ backs, using the footage to prove to fishermen the animals are not harming their way of life.…

    Bonobo Genome Revelation

    Scientists have completed the mapping of the bonobo genome. This means that all five great ape species – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and humans – have now had their genomes mapped.

    When Turtles Divorce

    Bibi and Poldi in more romantic times It may have been one of the longest relationships on record. But two Giant Turtles at the Austrian Zoo…

    Do Plants Think?

    In his new book, What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University, says they can see, smell and feel – not in the same way as animals, obviously, but certainly their own way.

    The Dead Kitty Copter

    This takes Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch to a whole other level. And the responses are mixed: from “cute” to “hilarious” to “utterly tasteless” to “completely grotesque and definitely not funny.”

    Donkey Rescuer at Queen’s Garden Party

    Most days, she’s out looking after the donkeys at the sanctuary she founded in Israel. But last week Lucy Fensom was at Buckingham Palace for one of the pre-Jubilee garden parties hosted by Queen Elizabeth.

    Farewell to Oliver the ‘Humanzee’

    Oliver was captured in Africa as a two-year-old in the 1960s and sold to animal trainers in the U.S. For the next few years he was exploited for the fact that he had a flatter face than most chimpanzees and tended to walk upright like a human. Perhaps, his owners suggested, he was a hybrid or a “missing link.”