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
When eight capuchin monkeys decided to make a break for it at the zoo in Parana, Brazil, they used the tools they had at hand to open the door of the cage. (Another example of how the old conventional wisdom that “using tools is a uniquely human ability” is completely wrong.)
Last week, the British Daily Mail reported that people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of taking a family expedition to Africa to kill giraffes.
Shaba was 2 years old when she was placed with Connie. Elephants have very close family bonds, and, far from their original families and homes, the two have basically known only each other.
Snowy owls (like Hedwig in the Harry Potter stories) are having a busy winter all across the country. Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Montana, tells the New York Times their numbers are unusually high this year.
Time lapse photography onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011.
Three hundred dolphins in Wellfleet harbor on Cape Cod were successfully guided out to safety in the ocean by volunteers with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
A few days before police raided the Butterball turkey factory farm in North Carolina, an official at the N.C. Department of Agriculture called the factory farm to give them advance warning that trouble was on the way.
The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007.
At the age of 87, Doris Day has just released a new album. Proceeds from the record will go to her nonprofit organization, the Doris Day Animal Foundation (DDAF), which supports animal welfare programs across the country.
It’s five years since white-nose fungus, the disease afflicting little brown bats, was first identified. Last May, reacting to the fact that these bats are a critical link in the ecosystem, pollinating crops and controlling insect populations, especially those that threaten to wipe out entire forests, a national rescue plan was launched.
Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer weighs in on the question of whether the U.S. military has any right to use dolphins as minesweepers in the Persian Gulf.
Military commanders in Afghanistan are now condemning the beating of a sheep to death by a U.S. Army soldier in front of a group of other laughing soldiers and children.
While many people greet Dragon years with a certain ambivalence, serious Chinese astrologers are rolling out the welcome mat for this particular Dragon year. That’s because this is the year of the Water Dragon.
The National Institutes of Health is recommending (just recommending, mind you, not insisting) that the size of their cages be increased a little. The average rat family, for example, would get 210 square inches of floor space rather than the current 140. Mice would get a little more space, too.
Should wolves, once hunted almost to extinction, be taken off the endangered species list? Arguing that he and his kind should be allowed to kill them once again, John Gaither, the president of the Idaho County Sportsmen Club writes in the Idaho Mountain Express that 4,925 people have been reported killed by wolves since the year 1580.
Expect the unexpected. That’s the message from Chinese astrologers. This weekend launches the Year of the Dragon, one of 12 years in the Chinese zodiac calendar (we’re just ending a rabbit year).
During yesterday’s South Carolina Republican debate, Mitt Romney added “hunting skills” to his list of presidential credentials, but got confused over which animals he’d actually hunted.
Discovery News explains that just two weeks of low-dose antibiotics boosted the number of E. coli in the guts of pigs and the bacteria had more drug-resistant genes.
New research from Sweden points to the fact that people who eat processed meats have a considerably higher risk of pancreatic cancer.
Can anyone doubt that this crow is simply having a great time in the snow with his/her “snowboard”? This amateur video, shot from a high-rise window in Russia, speaks volumes about a crow’s inner life. That it is play is undeniable. And there’s much more: tool use, planning, the emotion of fun.