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
A bill, which passed with bipartisan support in the Iowa Legislature last week, would make it a criminal offence for people to get a job at a factory farm and then start taking undercover video of what goes on there. It’s now up to the governor sign it or veto it.
Afra Sultan al Dahiri says she almost gave up setting up her dream of opening a hotel for pets in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. At first, her application for a license was turned down on the grounds that a pet hotel is not listed as an economic or commercial activity there.
Tiger the pit bull likes food. Any food. Especially if it’s on his head. His person, Andrew Small of Crystal River, Florida, regularly uploads photos of Tiger with some new food item balanced on his head.
Natural Gas Our New Savior? Not So Fast . . . You’d think we’d have learned something from the cautionary tale that is ethanol. Evidently not, though: we have a new savior called natural gas.
Renowned California chef Wolfgang Puck has written a letter urging fellow restaurateurs to embrace the state’s upcoming ban on foie gras. The bill, which was signed in 2004, gave restaurants eight years to come up with a humane alternative to the way the “delicacy” is produced.
Five months ago, in Zaragoza, Spain, the notorious bullfighter Juan Jose Padilla got bested by the bull. It was a grisly scene: the bull, known as Marques, plunged his horn into Padilla’s throat and it emerged out of the man’s eye.
In the world of dinosaurs, almost everything was bigger. Even the fleas. Back in the Jurassic Era, some of them were almost one inch long. New flea fossils, up to 165 million years old, have been found in China.
New research from a team at the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit suggests that when pods of bottlenose dolphins meet in the ocean, they exchange whistles in what is, even by human standards, a very complex and sophisticated communication system.
With public opinion solidly behind no longer having wild animals in circuses, Britain’s Conservative government has caved to the pressure and agreed to a complete ban.
Teddy Bear is so focused on his leaves he is oblivious of other dogs, people, garbage or cars. Often, he chases the leaves to the point of exhaustion or until I pick him up and carry him off. He is The Leaf Chaser.
Amy Jung went to bed at around 9.30. At about 11 p.m., Pudding woke her up by jumping on her chest, pawing her face and biting her nose. Amy was having a diabetic seizure.
Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, got a big vote of praise from the International Fur Trade Federation (IFTF) for wearing a fur-lined jacket. The only problem: It wasn’t real fur.
The investigation will focus on the health problems suffered by popular breeds, like spaniels, bulldogs and pugs, who are deliberately bred for distorted physical features that cause lifelong sickness, discomfort and pain.
A typical dolphin pod, or family, consists of about 12 individuals. So this video is beyond astonishing: roughly 2,000 dolphins all together as they race a whale-watching boat.
Expectations can be a bear. Just think about it. Whether you’re an actor, a politician or an athlete, expectations frame the conversation and carry a heavy load.
When the Earth warms up, animals get smaller. That’s what happened 56 million years ago during another time of global warming. Temperatures rose roughly 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and scientists examining the fossils of horses from that time are seeing that to cope with the heat, they began to shrink in size.
It’s well known by now that sharks have a lot more to fear from humans than the other way round. We’re killing them by the hundreds of millions every year to the point where they’re now close to extinction.
There’s more and more evidence that chimps have what scientists call a “theory of mind” – the ability to understand the minds of others. (It was once thought that only humans had this ability.)
Ayumu, who lives at Kyoto University in Japan, is back in the news for his ability to remember the location and order of a set of numbers in less time than it take you to blink – 30 milliseconds, to be precise.
But human children — and most higher animals — are “moral” in a scientific sense, because they need to cooperate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, he said.