Terrassa is home to more than 9,800 cats, according to municipal data — a population that lives quietly among its 220,000 residents. The temporary ban forces the town, and perhaps the rest of us, to confront a deeper contradiction. How can a culture that loves animals and fills social media with cat memes still tolerate cruelty in the name of tradition or aesthetics?
Read more
Turkey has started culling 4 million stray dogs, throwing them out in plastic bags.
Read more
Turkey has approved a law to cull its estimated 4 million stray dogs.
Read more
KFC, Nando’s, Greggs, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose are among the 250+ companies in the UK and EU to have committed against Frankenchickens, but supermarkets including Morrisons, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Lidl are refusing.
Read more
If you’ve traveled to India, Mexico, Amman, Jordan –– you see that dogs don’t have it so good. They are kicked, wounded, abused, and in some places poisoned or shot on sight, nursling puppies killed in front of their mothers and then left to rot in a garbage dumpster. Or litters of puppies and kittens tossed out of the windows of speeding cars. Or puppies kicked around like soccer balls. This is what happens in holy cities like Bethlehem, says Diana George Babish, who cries about the state of animal rights in her home city, run by the Palestinian Authority.
Read more
A California woman riffed off that old saw of “turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse” when she chose to rebound from a difficult divorce by uprooting to a quiet new home near a tranquil river. She settled on a 6 acre parcel in 1983, where she often mused, “What am I thinking, single woman […]
Read more
Things have gone terribly wrong in an Egyptian zoo where a group of baboons turned on one of their cage-mates, tearing at its legs and biting off its feet, according to eye-witness reports. Images of the African baboon, whose feet were cannibalized by his cage mates, have gone viral on Egyptian social media. “Due to extreme hunger, […]
Read more
Israeli non-profit Modern Agriculture Foundation (MAF) is developing lab-grown chicken meat that doesn’t require the rearing and slaughtering of birds. Since 2014, they’ve been researching mass production of cultured chicken meat from a single bird cell. If they succeed, we could soon be asking, Which came first, the chicken…or the chicken? Chicken is the world’s second favorite meat […]
Read more
It’s raining cats and dogs in Amman, Jordan now, closing roads (flooded underpasses), some schools, and many offices. It’s the usual drill for a city ill-equipped for atypical weather. Now online transportation giant Uber is helping to “rain down more dogs” for a limited time today in what could be the world’s most adorable fundraiser.
Read more
There’s a huge new movement in Israel. Not politics. Food. Specifically, veganism. Of a country totalling eight million people, an estimated 200,000 are now declared vegans (see Karin’s post about the growing movement here). That’s roughly 2.5 percent of the population. Influential American animal-rights activist Gary Yourofsky’s recent visits to Israel, and his videos, tipped […]
Read more
Last week, the Gaza Strip and its zoo witnessed the unprecedented birth of two African lion cubs at the Beesan Zoo, a facility in the northern part of the densely populated Strip that was built and opened by the Islamist Hamas movement. But just three days later, the cubs died, from unknown causes.
Read more
Life on the streets has never been easy for stray animals, especially in the Middle East where animals are often targets. There are stray dogs that get shot dead in Lebanon and stray dogs that kicked around in Jordan.
Read more
An “actress” performing at the Arab Cultural Center in Brussels ran up against the law for her odd public antics between shows. Belgian police demanded she be forcibly removed from the theater’s street-facing balcony where she’d been unwinding with a bucket of water and stack of fresh hay.
Read more
A new online petition has been created to curtail animal cruelty in Saudi Arabia. It calls for ending the use of violence against animals for human pleasure and currently needs around 1200 signatures in order for the petition and letter to be sent to the Saudi Ministry of Agriculture.
Read more
Religious organisations are working with conservation groups to help end the consumer demand for products supplied by the illegal wildlife trade A major initiative linking religions and conservation groups in opposing the illegal wildlife trade, which is annihilating the world’s rare and endangered species, has been launched. Leaders of 34 religious traditions presented the Alliance […]
Read more