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…
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…
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…
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,…
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
Poldi the cat went for a walk from his family home in 1996. He reappeared … this week. For months after he disappeared, Poldi’s family searched their Munich, Germany, neighborhood for him. They finally gave up, thinking they would never see him again.
They found that the pitch of the male white-crowned sparrow song has risen over the years – they’re singing at a higher frequency now in order to be heard better over the lower-frequency growl of passing cars, lawn mowers, etc. Their song overall has changed, too. The two researchers call it “the San Francisco dialect.”
There’s outrage in the U.K. over the number of military working dogs who are routinely destroyed, rather than retired, when they return from active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, yet another food revelation: Chickens on factory farms are routinely fed acetaminophen (as in Tylenol), along with the same antihistamine you find in Benadryl, the antidepressant that’s featured in Prozac, plus various antimicrobials, and, yes, arsenic.
She weighed a ton and a half, was at least 30 feet long, lived about 125 million years ago, and was an early cousin of the Tyrannosaurus family. But the really big thing about her is that she had soft, fuzzy feathers.
The high plains of southern Peru are famous for the Nazca Lines – animal shapes about an eighth of a mile long that were carved into the high plateau land around 400 C.E. and were once thought by some, like the controversial author Erik von Daniken, to have been landing strips for extraterrestrials.
What pink slime represents is an open admission by the food industry that it is hard-pressed to produce meat that won’t make you sick. Because, I hate to break it to you folks, but ammonium hydroxide is just one in a long list of unlabeled chemical treatments used on almost all industrial meat and poultry.
Israel’s attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, has told the nation’s High Court of Justice that it is illegal for a vivisection breeding farm to export their macaque monkeys to laboratories in the United States.
So far this year, according to the newspaper Peru21, more than 3,000 dolphins have washed up on the beaches of the northern Peruvian region of Lambayaque. Scientists are generally agreed that the cause of death is sonar from companies probing for oil.
For years, animal protection volunteers have faced off with people clubbing baby harp seals to death on the ice floes of Newfoundland. It looks like the baby seals may be winning.
Two years ago, the new president of the Maldives held a cabinet meeting in the ocean as he tried to draw attention to the fact that his island nation is being submerged by the rising sea.
Good news for wildlife in Africa. Five countries have come together to create a conservation area that they hope will protect the animals from poaching and other threats.
Researchers at the Bonobo Hope Great Ape Trust Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa, have developed a tablet app that allows humans to communicate with the great apes who are living at their sanctuary.
Police were called to the offices of the Iowa Farm Bureau to investigate the case of an employee who had been caught urinating on the office chairs of four female co-workers.
More and more supermarkets and burger sellers are joining the list of people who say they will no longer sell beef that includes the so-called “pink slime” – a ground up mixture of fatty bits from other cuts of meat and treated with ammonia to enable it to meet food safety standards.
If you want to understand human nature, learn from other animals – especially chimpanzees. That’s the word from one of the world’s experts on chimpanzee behavior, Frans de Waal. He’s been studying chimpanzees for nearly 40 years, mostly at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center …
A new series of studies is demonstrating what most experts have assumed for some time: that at least one of the causes of the devastating collapse of bee colonies is being caused by pesticides and other chemicals.
This is Panchita, a Galapagos sea lion, relaxing next to Eric Nies, an American human (and former star of Real World New York), at a hotel in the Galapagos.
In the Palestinian territory of Gaza, a new relationship is blooming between humans and felines. Seven years ago, as Israeli settlers were preparing for the evacuation of Gaza that had been ordered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, cat lovers were panicking.
Our planet is on the edge of a series of tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, according to scientists from around the world who have been meeting in London this week.