Adopting Plant-Based Meals Several Times Per Week Can Improve Food Security, Lower Food Costs
Researchers from The Miriam Hospital and the Rhode Island Community Food Bank report individuals who participated in a six-week cooking program and followed simple, plant-based recipes decreased their total food spending, purchased healthier food items and improved their food security.

Despite herpes concerns, St. Louis Zoo continues elephant breeding
The St. Louis Zoo is hoping for a healthy Asian elephant calf amid concerns that the animal could be born with a deadly herpes virus that already infected one of the herd…The virus has killed about 25 percent of Asian elephants born in North American zoos in the past three decades. An animal rights activist told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that it is irresponsible to breed elephants knowing the presence of the virus in the herd.

Oklahoma lawmakers pass horse slaughter bill
Oklahoma lawmakers approved a bill on Tuesday that will allow horses to be slaughtered in the state for human consumption in other countries.  The state Senate passed the measure in a 32-14 vote, sending it to Republican Governor Mary Fallin who is expected to sign it into law. Fallin’s office did not return requests for comment.  The bill became an emotional issue, pitting the United States Humane Society and animal rights activists against livestock interests led by the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization.

Livestock abuse: The peril of ‘ag-gag’ bills
A California Assembly bill that would require anyone who videotapes, photographs or records incidents of animal cruelty to turn over the evidence to authorities within 48 hours — or be charged with an infraction of the law — sounds like a tough new measure to crack down on abuse. It’s not.

A Tiger, a Truck Stop and a Pitched Legal Battle
Tony is only the latest in a line of tigers to live here. Thirteen cubs were born at the truck stop, and several adult tigers brought in, including a white tiger named Salena who died of pancreatic cancer in the early 2000s and is now stuffed and sitting in the Tiger Cafe atop the salad bar.

 
A Conversation with Karol Orzechowski the Director of the film Maximum Tolerated Dose
Maximum Tolerated Dose is a feature-length documentary described as, “a look inside modern animal experimentation with the animals who lived through it and the people who walked away.” This award-winning creation is equal parts beautiful, haunting, and novel in its approach to the topic. HRC is pleased to present an insightful conversation with the film’s director Karol Orzechowski on the role the film plays in our social movement, the importance of profiling individual stories, and lessons learned for advocates.

Hey Vegans! There May Be Fish Bladder in Your Guinness
Isinglass, a gelatine-like substance made from the air-bladders or sounds of fish like the sturgeon is added to cask beers like Guinness to help any remaining yeast and solid particles settle out of the final product. As the finings pass through the beer, they attract themselves to particles in the fermented beer that create an unwanted “haziness” in the final product and form into a jelly-like mass that settles to the bottom of the cask. While beer left untouched will clear on its own, isinglass speeds up the process and doesn’t affect the final flavor of the beer once removed.

Diary of a one-month vegan
The month-long vegan experiment — wherein I, my fiancé, and two friends try to strip all animal products from our diets (for several reasons, primary among them “just to see what it’s like”)

The US first used dogs in war in the early 1800s. (Pit bulls were used as protection and couriers during the Civil War!) Approximately 5,000 dogs were used by American forces during the Vietnam War, and were credited with saving over 10,000 lives. In spite of this, around 3,000 of them were abandoned to terrible fates when the US pulled out. In 2000, President Clinton signed a law that allowed military dogs to be adopted after their service instead of euthanized. Now…finally… thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama has signed, military dogs are henceforth no longer “military equipment”, to be left behind in foreign lands, but military veterans.  Regardless where you stand on the use of dogs (who are not volunteers) in wars (that they didn’t start), this is surely the very least we owe them.

The coalition group Keep Michigan Wolves Protected managed to mobilize more than two thousand volunteers to gather enough signatures to put the issue of a wolf hunting season on the ballot in November.  Required were 161,305 signatures, and they only had 67 days instead of the usual 90, but they gathered 253,705.  The most common response was “THANK YOU for what you are doing.”

This shows the state’s legislators that they were wrong to approve a wolf-hunting bill last year, and it means all plans for a wolf-hunting season are on hold until Michigan voters — not politicians — make a decision at the ballot box in November of next year.

Collecting signatures is no one’s idea of a good time. But those volunteers knew they were all that stood between Michigan’s wolves and the bloody images we all carry in our minds.  And signature by signature, they got over a quarter of a million in two months, and they did it in the subfreezing dead of a Michigan winter.

Where you just point blank refuse to countenance injustice and cruelty, there IS a way.

About 9 months ago, Bobby Joe McConnell, 47, of South Carolina duct-taped the legs and muzzles of three dogs belonging to his daughter and mother-in-law and threw them into a canal.  Only one, a lab named Dara, was rescued in time; the two others drowned.  McConnell has just been sentenced to TEN YEARS in jail for this — a far cry from the nothing-to-a-few-months sentences animal abusers have often received.  His attorney said he was a good guy who was just high on alcohol and drugs that day.  (Wow — maybe alcohol/drugs would be more tightly regulated if people knew they turned users into serial killers.)  Judge Hyman, however, said McConnell’s actions were “the product of an evil heart” and he handed down the MAXIMUM sentence for the two dogs, which is 5 years each, consecutively, and a $10,000 fine, half of which is to go to the organization caring for the lone survivor, Dara. His sentence is reflective of tightening animal abuse laws nationwide. The Animal Legal Defense Fund’s annual report on animal protection laws shows that 75% of all states have improved their laws over the past year — some, like Mississippi, significantly. (At present, the state with the toughest animal abuse laws and penalties is Illinois, and the state with the weakest is Kentucky. Washington comes in 6th-best.)

Personally I think regression to an-eye-for-an-eye justice in the case of animal abuse would deal with the problem a lot more equitably and quickly, but I cannot always have my own way.

E.U. Bans Cosmetics With Animal-Tested Ingredients
European Union regulators announced a ban Monday on the import and sale of cosmetics containing ingredients tested on animals and to pledge more efforts to push other parts of the world, like China, to accept alternatives. The ban, which will take effect immediately, “gives an important signal on the value that Europe attaches to animal welfare,” Tonio Borg, the E.U. commissioner for health and consumer policy, said in a statement.

Five shark species win protection against finning trade
The millions of sharks killed every year to feed the vast appetite for shark-fin soup in Asia now have greater protection, after the 178 nations at the world’s biggest wildlife summit voted to crack down on the trade.  Those fishing for oceanic whitetip, porbeagle and three species of hammerhead shark will now require strictly controlled permits to export the fins. The move is a landmark moment for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) because many previous attempts to protect marine species – including these sharks – have failed.

Colo. House committee delays vote on cow tail bill
The backside of Colorado’s dairy cows was the focus of a contentious debate Thursday in a state House committee, which ultimately postponed a vote on a bill that would prevent farmers from cutting cattle tails for sanitary reasons…The milk producers federation, the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and others have come out against tail docking because research has found it doesn’t make milk or workers safer. The groups also argue tail docking robs cows of their built-in fly swatters and causes pain.  California, Rhode Island and New Jersey have banned tail docking. Ohio will stop the practice in 2018.

If it’s Monday, the L.A. Unified school cafeteria is meatless
Los Angeles public schools have just gone meatless on Mondays. But unlike the Los Angeles City Council’s resolution in November that simply urges people to observe a Monday without meat, the school system really has issued an edict. It stopped serving meat on Mondays last month. Of course, students could pack turkey sandwiches from home. But the school cafeterias won’t be selling them, and that’s a good thing.

States Consider So-Called ‘Ag-Gag’ Bills
Since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle over a century ago, going undercover has been one of the only ways to expose malpractice in agricultural and meat processing facilities. But legislation, so-called ‘ag-gag’ bills, has either passed or is being considered in about a dozen states and would explicitly outlaw undercover reporting as well as the publication of material gathered by undercover reporting.

Animal-rights advocates speak out against horse slaughterhouses in Oklahoma
About 100 animal-rights advocates spent Thursday at the state Capitol trying to persuade legislators that authorizing horse slaughterhouses would be a bad deal for Oklahoma.

Amid Suffering, Animal Welfare Legislation Still Far Off in China
About animals, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’” So wrote Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, more than 200 years ago.  It seems anomalous that China, the world’s second-biggest economy, lacks animal welfare legislation (other places do too, though in Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines have been praised for their protection laws.)