With the recent passage of its felony animal cruelty law, Arkansas has shed its dubious distinction as one of only five states - including Idaho, Mississippi, and the Dakotas - still treating heinous acts of animal abuse as mere misdemeanors.
Around the Ocean in 80 Fish & Other Sea Life is a beautifully illustrated journey that introduces readers to various inhabitants of the five oceans. Each turn of the page reveals a new animal—with short, informative text on each species framed by original, visually stunning watercolors by contemporary artist Marcel George. Creatures featured in the book range from small cone snails and money cowries to large sperm whales and tiger sharks; from well-known sponges and Atlantic bluefin tuna to lesser-known noble pen shells, ninja lanternsharks, and eyelash harptail blennies.
Evidence indicates that allowing beef calves to stay in the maternal herd beyond the age of natural weaning promotes animal welfare and may enhance the cows' natural reproductive potential.
Permanent mother-infant separation prior to natural weaning is a common husbandry practice in monkey breeding colonies. In the United States, such colonies have been established in all eight Regional Primate Research Centers.
Today, the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) petitioned the US Department of Agriculture to change its animal disease regulations to require that producers have in place audited emergency response plans, including strategies to humanely “depopulate” animals, before they can receive taxpayer-backed compensation for animals killed during a disease outbreak.
Japan and Norway resumed slaughtering whales this month, while Iceland’s only fin whaling company has decided that it will not hunt this summer, citing a declining demand for whale meat products in Japan. Japan killed the first fin whale of the 2025 season today, after launching its whaling season on April 1. Kyodo Senpaku, Japan’s only factory ship whaling company, is expected to kill up to 56 sei whales, 153 Bryde’s whales and 60 fin whales (a threatened species that is the second largest animal on the planet). In addition, five small coastal whaling boats will kill up to 144 minke whales.
In September, the NIH announced its plan to move 110 chimpanzees from the New Iberia Research Center—10 to Chimp Haven, a lush 200-acre sanctuary, and 100 to Texas Biomedical Research Institute (TBRI), which experiments on thousands of nonhuman primates annually and uses NIH-funds for “educating the public” on the “importance of chimpanzees in biomedical research.”
The primary supplier of chinchillas for research, listed in the online AALAS Laboratory Animal Science Buyers Guide, is Moulton Chinchilla Ranch (MCR) in Minnesota. MCR is a USDA-licensed dealer that has been breeding and selling chinchillas since 1966; the company states that its inventory is 500 to 900 animals.
Anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) are rodent poisons that have been widely used globally for decades for the control of commensal rodents (those who live off what they obtain from human communities). Deaths due to exposure to these rodenticides have been documented in several bird of prey species, and an increasing number of studies from countries around the world have found residues of ARs in predatory wildlife. Due to the persistence of ARs in the tissues of animals who ingest them, ARs bioaccumulate, and their detection in numerous wildlife species indicates that they are likely pervasive in the food chain.
In November 2017, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced it was reversing a 2014 Obama administration ban on the importation of sport-hunted elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Kathryn Spann and Dave Krabbe are the owners of 97-acre Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) Prodigal farm in Rougemont, North Carolina, where they raise goats for meat and cheese. Like Dan and Susan Gibson of Grazin’ Diner and Grazin’ Angus Acres (profiled on page 5), Kathryn and Dave traded fast-track lives centered around New York City for life and labor on the farm.
Every hour, some 1,000,000 chickens, 14,000 pigs, and 4,000 cows are slaughtered for human consumption in the United States. It is a process that takes place far from public view, and one that few know very much about. In the past, revelations about cruelty to animals during the slaughtering process resulted in actions by Congress to improve enforcement of the federal law created to protect animals at slaughter—primarily the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA). Despite congressional action, however, enforcement of the HMSA by the US Department of Agriculture remains lacking.
On February 20, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced its decision to list the highly imperiled Atlantic humpback dolphin as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced a proposed rule today to list the Atlantic humpback dolphin under the Endangered Species Act, in response to a 2021 petition filed by the Animal Welfare Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and VIVA Vaquita.
The National Marine Fisheries Service announced today that it would begin a status review to determine whether the highly imperiled Atlantic humpback dolphin should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The owner of an Atlanta piano import/export company was sentenced in March for illegally smuggling internationally protected elephant ivory into the U.S. Pascal Vieillard and his company, A-440 Pianos, were each ordered to pay $17,500 and given three years probation, with the condition that all imports by the company will be monitored for the duration of the sentence.
The Animal Welfare Institute commends the Illinois General Assembly's House of Representatives for reaffirming their commitment to equine welfare by opposing an attempt to overturn the state's 2007 ban on horse slaughter on the House floor today.
Near the end of 2016, the USDA Office of Inspector General released an audit intended “to evaluate the research practices and operations of MARC” (the USDA’s Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, Nebraska). It was conducted in response to myriad allegations published in a New York Times exposé of appalling animal welfare conditions at the facility.
Time and time again, we learn that individuals who have committed violent acts against others—whether it be a spouse, a parent, or the 21 schoolchildren and teachers gunned down this year in Uvalde, Texas—also have a history of abusing animals.
