Culprits not easily identified (See also How plastic reindeer can feed the world.) ALBERTON, South Africa; KOCHI, India––Animal charities in the developing world often have first-hand experience with the failures of livestock gift schemes meant by well-meaning western donors to relieve hunger and poverty. But developing world animal charities tend to […]
How plastic reindeer can feed the world
(at least as well as livestock gift charities) The 2015 holiday giving season is here. Predictably as plastic replicas of Santa Claus’ reindeer appearing on Sunbelt rooftops where no snow ever falls, livestock gift charities including World Vision, Oxfam, and the original, Heifer International, are saturating mass media with appeals to donors to subsidize distributing […]
Super floods in Pakistan: question mark on animal agriculture
Ill-considered food policies aggravate effects of global warming The super floods in Pakistan may be the result of a global ecological shift, but the country is also suffering from misguided domestic food production policies, possibly based on bad advice from donor nations and international charities. Has the world reached its limits on the production capacity […]
Will animal industries throw rotten eggs next?
Hampton Creek & Chipotle scare agribiz Not all that long ago bigtime animal agribusiness and the fast food meat industry clamored for laws against so-called “food disparagement,” to try to silence influential critics. Now bigtime agribusiness and allies of the fast food meat industry are doing the disparaging, using the “check-off” funds created by Congress […]
Pigs investigated as possible Ebola vectors
Pigs can get Ebola, but do they spread it? KAMPALA, Uganda; NAIROBI, Kenya––Domestic pigs may already be among the vectors transmitting deadly Ebola viruses to humans, though no one knows for sure yet, warns a five-member International Livestock Research Institute team in a soon-to-be-published edition of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Transboundary and Emerging Diseases. The […]
Smart money bets on bio-cultured meat
Facebook & Google financiers say animals are not the future of agribusiness BROOKLYN, SAN FRANCISCO, HONG KONG––Some leading edge investors in agribusiness with long successful histories are betting big-time that the future of animal agriculture will no longer involve raising animals. Li Ka-Shing, for example, the richest man in Asia, with net worth of […]
The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals
by James McWilliams St. Martin’s Press (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2015. 278 pages, hardcover, paperback, or Kindle. Reviewed by Merritt Clifton In The Modern Savage, Texas State University history professor James McWilliams’ sixth successful book since 2005, McWilliams returns to some of the themes he explored in his first book, A Revolution […]
Factory farmer Austin “Jack” DeCoster sentenced to prison––but will he really do time?
Three months & fines SIOUX CITY, Iowa––U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett on April 13, 2015 sentenced egg and pork barons Austin “Jack” DeCoster, 81, of Turner, Maine, and his son Peter DeCoster, 51, of Clarion, Iowa, to serve three months each in prison and pay fines of $100,000 each for selling salmonella-contaminated eggs from their […]
Pain in my heart: Why the lack of attention to animal welfare in international development?
by Janice Cox The many ways in which the development of industrial animal agriculture harms humans, animals and the environment in developing nations have been subjects of concern to far-sighted thinkers for more than a century. The lineage of intellectual concern about such issues includes Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977), Barbara Ward (1914-1981), Lester Brown (1934-), Frances Moore Lappe […]
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Produced by Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn A.U.M. Films & First Spark Media documentary Animals United Movement A.U.M., 2014 85 minutes running time. $9.95 as download; $19.95 DVD; discounts available for orders of five, 10, and 25 copies at a time. Screening licenses available for $108 up. “Organizers in the US can also host a screening […]