John Robbins led through writing, speaking & personal example Vegan health and fitness advocate John Robbins, 77, died on June 11, 2025 in Soquel, California from complications of post-polio syndrome. Medically described as “a neurological condition that affects some individuals years after recovering from poliomyelitis (polio),” post-polio syndrome is characterized by the onset of new […]
No miracles for pigs in genetically modified kidney & heart transplants
More than 2,000 years of ethically questionable results continue BOSTON, Massachusetts––Possibly not since Jesus allegedly cured two demon-possessed men by casting a legion of demons into a herd of pigs have more people been excited by the prospect of pigs becoming human saviors than in the wake of the March 16, 2024 first-ever transplant of […]
More Than a Meal: Thanksgiving, turkeys, tradition & Karen Davis
First condemned, then pardoned, without a statement of rights WASHINGTON D.C.––Perhaps nothing could underscore the role of turkeys as Thanksgiving sacrificial victims than the annual ritual at which U.S. President Joe Biden on November 21, 2022 “pardoned” the 46-pound and 47-pound turkeys Chocolate and Chip on the South Lawn of the White House. For what […]
Karen Davis, Ph.D., United Poultry Concerns founder, dead at 79
Karen Davis was a frequent ANIMALS 24-7 guest columnist & commentator MACHIPONGO, Virginia––United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis, or Karen Davis, PhD., as she always signed her writings, “passed away peacefully on the morning of November 4, 2023 at the United Poultry Concerns sanctuary, surrounded by her beloved birds,” the organization announced, pledging to “continue […]
Blurring the boundary between humans and other animals
by Karen Davis, Ph.D. Founder & president, United Poultry Concerns Heinrich Himmler, who founded the quasi-military police unit known as the SS [Schutzstaffel]and administered the Nazi death camps, was initially a chicken farmer. According to Charles Patterson in his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Himmler’s “agricultural studies and experience breeding […]
The Origins & Spread of Domestic Animals in Southwest Asia & Europe
Reviewed by Jim Mason Edited by Sue Colledge, James Conolly, Keith Dobney, Katie Manning, and Stephen Shennan Routledge, 2013, https://www.routledge.com/. 354 pages hardcover, also available in paperback and Kindle formats. This book is an academic work, a collection of recent writings by zooarchologists (or archeozoologists) on the origins of animal domestication in the prehistoric Middle […]
An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature by Jim Mason
Reviewed by Merritt Clifton 193 pages, paperback. $20.00. Lantern Publishing & Media, www.lanternpm.org The slimmed-and-trimmed 2021 edition of An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature, published 28 years after the first edition, is dated only by author Jim Mason’s new introduction, in which he acknowledges the many changes in the world occurring […]
Making a Thanksgiving place for Tofurky
Eventually live turkeys joined the feast. But not at first. Chloe Sorvino, food and drink editor for the business magazine Forbes, marked Thanksgiving 2020 by looking back 40 years to the invention of Tofurky in 1980, by then-nature educator Seth Tibbott. Described as a “turkey alternative,” blending tofu and wheat with a wild rice and […]
The Thanksgiving Turkey as Ritual Scapegoat
in the Carnivalesque Tradition by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns Human radical abuse of “food” animals cannot be explained by economic efficiency alone. It is also an outgrowth of attitudes humans have had toward nonhuman animals through the ages, rooted in our resentment at being animals, which we project onto them. In his […]
Are feminists right to resist comparison with the females of other species?
by Karen Davis, PhD., president of United Poultry Concerns A woman employed on a chicken “breeder” farm in Maryland wrote a letter once to the local newspaper berating the defenders of chickens for trying to make her lose her job, threatening her ability to support herself and her daughter. For her, “breeder” hens were “mean” birds who […]