Animal rights and animal welfare.
Last month, Chipotle shared an ad that gained some media attention. Most notably, there were some tear-jerker moments that included the saddened face of a cow and a chicken being injected with hormones to “beef it up” behind closed doors. I admit that even I was emotional during this video. It’s really powerful and even though I don’t think anyone will become vegan or vegetarian after viewing it, there’s certainly…
Imagination is bringing science into new realms which may soon put an end to animal suffering. It’s already possible and is being done through bio-fabrication which is environmentally responsible, efficient, and humane. This is a great first-step in introducing lab-grown products like Lab-Grown Burgers, and the leather can even be grown to exact shapes, thickness, color, and texture. Watch this (short) excellent talk by Andras Forgacs which argues that biofabricating…
This is one of the earliest vegetarian children’s stories in English that we have discovered. George Bedborough’s thinking is delightful. I particularly love his reflections on militancy. ! Please remember that this story was written more than 100 years ago – just pre-WWI – it is ‘pre-factory farming’ & does not go ‘all the way to vegan’. The ‘non-vegan’ section is highlighted in purple. Mrs Duck and Mrs Cow are pragmatists –…
October is not just for haunted hayrides, jack-o’-lanterns, and all-night horror movie marathons. It’s also the month set aside to highlight an issue even more gruesome and frightening than a Friday the 13th film fest—the murder of millions of cats, pigs, frogs, and other animals every year for classroom dissection. October is “Cut Out Dissection” Month, and PETA‘s youth division, peta2, is asking students to observe a day of silence…
Updated – Mon Oct 13, 2014 The Humanitarian League’s team has had a busy year – promoting veganism, opposing vivisection & planting many trees. During the past 12 months The Ernest Bell Library has been given / has purchased more that 200 of the items on our main ‘Search List’ & has ‘found’ another 300+ items previously ‘unknown to us’. We now have more than 300 pieces of Ernest Bell’s own writings.…
All year long, our moms are there for us, offering sage advice, rejoicing in our successes, and encouraging us when we’re down. We’d be lost without them, so for Mother’s Day, PETA and HappyCow are celebrating some of the coolest moms around. We love: Sweet moms, who are so compassionate that they wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or a cow, or a chicken, or a pig. Fun moms, who would much…
In the April issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine, Martha talks about the flock of chickens at her farm in Bedford, New York. She started raising her own hens, she says, after personally visiting a factory egg farm. “I was so disturbed by what I saw—the cruel, inhumane conditions—that I vowed to always have my own coop,” she writes. The “cruel, inhumane conditions” Martha speaks of are the battery cages…
Article by Heidi Stephenson It’s all too easy to gloss over that abstract figure of 60 billion+ animal victims (excluding fish), who die each year because of human meat-addiction, unfortunately. Very few people go on to make that empathic link with the suffering sentient individual inside our hellish, anonymous system. But as we HappyCow-ers know, every life matters – and every death is an extinction. Back in March and on…
It is enormously tragic, that the defenseless, the harmless and the gentle sentient beings from whom we might have learned so much, who would have trusted us, and by whose acquaintance our lives could be so much enriched, are rewarded with imprisonment, torture and slaughter. I am often reminded of, and haunted by, a post to the HappyCow blog on July 30, 2011 from Alisa Rutherford-Fortunati. The piece, entitled “Bruno: A New…
I was in the waiting room at the local massage school here in Santa Fe about to have a bodywork session with one of the students. A woman in the seat next to me started talking to me about her work. She and her husband raise beef cattle. She was very proud of what she was doing and excitedly went into it without knowing who she was talking to, “We…
The local food movement folks often think they have a very different philosophy from the compassionate vegan folks. The reality is that our intentions are very much the same. We want to do the right thing. The problem is that everyone I know who claims to just eat locally, doesn’t. They often buy non-local products and eat out at restaurants that use non-local ingredients. I have also found that most…
While backpacking along the Appalachian Trail this past spring, I made a brief stop to replenish my dwindling stock of vegan food in the sleepy town of Erwin, Tennessee. While there, I had a conversation with one of the locals who relished in recounting a bit of Erwin’s notorious history for me. Yet much to my dismay, the most poignant story was one involving the tragic end of a traveling…
This is my story about growing up with animals as a young girl. I grew up in a little suburb in Hunter, Utah. At the time, it was all part of Salt Lake City, Utah. I have two little stories that involve my parents, so I will first introduce them a bit. My mom grew up on a big farm in Idaho. She was one of ten siblings. My dad…