Animal welfare groups find sows in Europe forced to spend weeks in cages so small they can only stand and lie down
Animal welfare campaigners are calling on UK supermarkets to stop selling premium ham, including Parma, produced in “sow stalls” on EU farms.
An undercover investigation conducted by Compassion in World Farming (CWF), an animal welfare campaign group, found that sows are forced to spend many weeks in cages so small they can only stand up and lie down.
Continue reading...Chaos overtakes city of Espinal after wood and bamboo stands collapse during cultural festival
At least four people were killed and hundreds injured in Colombia on Sunday after spectator stands at a bullfight collapsed, authorities said.
The bull reportedly escaped from the plaza hosting the spectacle and was causing panic in the streets of Espinal, Tolima, a city of nearly 60,000 people about 145km (90 miles) south-west of Bogotá, the capital.
Continue reading...Controversial asphyxiation method used in 73% of culls this year despite vets urging its use to be limited
The US poultry industry has increasingly switched to “the most inhumane method available” to cull tens of millions of birds during the latest outbreak of avian influenza, according to government data.
Outbreaks of the disease, also known as bird flu, have wreaked havoc across Europe and the US this year, with 38 million birds killed in the US so far.
But how these birds are killed has generated controversy, with veterinarians and animal welfare campaigners urging an end to the use of the ventilation shutdown method, which kills animals by sealing off the airflow to the poultry sheds and increasing temperatures to lethal levels.
Workers have described the method as like “roasting animals alive”. European officials have said it should not be used in the European Union.
Sellers could pass off elephant products as derivatives from unprotected mammals, Born Free Foundation says
Ivory peddlers may continue to sell elephant tusks after a new ban by disguising their products as walrus or narwhal derivatives, campaigners have warned.
From Monday, trade in elephant teeth and tusks is illegal in the UK, punishable by fines of up to £250,000 or up to five years in prison under the Ivory Act. Pre-1975 musical instruments and antique items of “outstanding importance” are exempted from the act, as well as ivory from non-elephant species.
Continue reading...Opposition says it will recommit to phasing out live sheep exports from Western Australia but has not indicated when it will do so
The Greens and animal welfare groups have called on Labor to commit to a timeline for phasing out live sheep exports, after the opposition said it still intended to ban the trade.
Labor told the Alliance for Animals that it will recommit to its policy of phasing out the live sheep export trade, which it announced in 2018 in response to whistleblower videos of a deadly voyage in which 2,400 sheep died.
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
Continue reading...Experts launch Australian Alliance for Animals to push for independent national animal welfare commission
Two RSPCA animal welfare experts have left the organisation to campaign for a national independent animal welfare commission, saying the current regulatory structure is “broken”.
Dr Bidda Jones stepped down as chief scientific officer at RSPCA Australia in late 2021, after 25 years. Dr Jed Goodfellow stepped down as a senior policy officer in October.
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
Continue reading...Woman hit by stray bullet during wild boar hunt sparks row over stricter regulations before presidential election
The accidental killing of a hiker by a teenager who was hunting wild boar has rekindled a bitter debate over stricter regulations of France’s hunting tradition before the presidential election in April.
The 25-year-old woman was walking with a friend along a marked trail near Aurillac in the heavily forested Cantal region when she was hit by a stray bullet on Saturday. She died instantly.
Continue reading...Delayed legislation includes ban on trophy hunting imports and stricter sentences for puppy thieves
Some of the government’s most prized new animal welfare policies are being put on pause in what supporters see as a sneaky attempt to ditch the “woke” measures altogether.
Senior sources in the Conservative party have confirmed to the Guardian that a series of policies including a ban on trophy hunting imports, stricter sentences for puppy thieves and a ban on live exports of livestock have been put on pause after a campaign led by Mark Spencer, the chief whip.
Continue reading...Analysis: As doctors monitor world’s first human recipient of pig heart, safety and ethical concerns remain
The world’s first transplant of a genetically altered pig heart into an ailing human is a landmark for medical science, but the operation, and the approach more broadly, raise substantial safety and ethical concerns.
Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center spent eight hours on Friday evening transplanting the heart from the pig into 57-year-old David Bennett, who had been in hospital for more than a month with terminal heart failure.
Continue reading...The Oscar-winning director’s new documentary explores warmth, joy and anger through the eyes of a farmyard animal. She reveals what it taught her about life
Andrea Arnold’s films are known for their spare dialogue, and in her first documentary it is more pared-backed than ever: Cow consists of 94 minutes of moos, with the odd off-camera interjection from farmhands. It is hardly a thriller (though the ending is pure Tarantino). But it is one of the most beautifully crafted and tender portraits of a life you are likely to see.
Arnold, who started her professional life as a rollerskating TV presenter on the children’s Saturday show No 73, began thinking about documenting an animal’s life nine years ago. Eventually she settled on a cow. “I thought a cow would be interesting because they work so hard, getting pregnant and giving milk their entire lives. It’s a huge job they do.” She chose Luma because she was told she had a big personality and was feisty. Arnold and her team spent four years, on and off, filming her. Why did she make Cow? “I wanted to show a non-human consciousness. I was intrigued as to whether we would be able to see her consciousness if we followed her long enough.”
Continue reading...Method used to control dogs while making arrests illegal under new animal rights law
Berlin police dogs trained to attack perpetrators have been put on an enforced break, along with their handlers, over contradictions between the methods used to control them and a new law to prevent cruelty to dogs.
The use of pulling collars to channel a police dog’s aggression towards an agitator or potential criminal contravenes the law, introduced by the former agriculture minister, which came into force on 1 January.
Continue reading...Four wolves were shot dead by park workers and five anaesthetised by officials at scene
Authorities in the south of France have temporarily shut down a zoo after a pack of nine wolves escaped from an enclosure during visiting hours, officials have said.
No humans were injured in the incident last weekend at the Trois Vallées zoo in Montredon-Labessonnié in the south-west Tarn region but four of the wolves were shot dead by park workers and five were anaesthetised by local officials on the scene, Fabien Chollet, a local official, told AFP on Friday.
Continue reading...Aerial shot shows devastating effect of drought that has left people and animals without water
Six dead giraffes lie in a spiral on the dry earth, their bodies emaciated and interwoven. The aerial shot, taken by the photojournalist Ed Ram, shows the devastation of Kenya’s drought, which has left people and animals struggling for food and water.
Already weak, the animals had died after they got stuck in the mud, according to Getty Images. They were trying to reach a nearby reservoir, although it had almost dried up, the agency reported.
Continue reading...Vicki Holland, from Newport, south Wales, pleads guilty to animal cruelty charges after videos found on phone
A woman has pleaded guilty to abusing her pet marmoset, including offering cocaine to the primate and attempting to flush it down the toilet.
A court heard how Vicki Holland was aggressive towards the primate, which is native to tropical forests in Central and South America. The monkey’s treatment was shown to the RSPCA after videos were discovered on Holland’s phone by Gwent police after a drug raid at her home.
Continue reading...Dozens of animals disqualified after owners manipulate their looks with hormones, fillers and facelifts
Saudi authorities have carried out their biggest crackdown on camel beauty contestants, disqualifying more than 40 “enhanced” camels from the annual pageant, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.
The camels disqualified in the competition, at the King Abdulaziz camel festival, were judged to have received Botox injections and other artificial touch-ups.
Continue reading...Continuing our series looking behind the headlines of 2021, the former Royal Marine on his perilous evacuation of hundreds of dogs and cats during the fall of Kabul – and how he answers the sceptics
From his home in Exeter, Paul “Pen” Farthing reruns the events of late summer through his mind. The former Royal Marine, who 15 years ago established the Nowzad charity in Kabul to care for animals suffering the fallout of war, still cannot believe that America “would just throw Afghanistan to the wolves”. When the retreat began in August, he realised “things were going south very, very quickly. We’d got young female staff who had trained as vets, who feared they would be married off to Taliban fighters. Their faces were just horrible to see…”
At the time, the Nowzad animal refuge employed 24 Afghan staff. Since Farthing first adopted his own street dog in 2006 while stationed in Helmand, Nowzad had reunited 1,600 soldiers back home with animals they cared for on active service, while establishing a pioneering veterinarian practice and neutering programme. Farthing had been living at the compound since the beginning of the pandemic. Given the charity’s symbolic and practical mission, with Kabul about to fall, it was clear that he had to get both his team and the animals out of harm’s way.
Continue reading...Animals brought illegally to Colombia by the drug kingpin have been allowed to roam free and are now disrupting the fragile ecosystem
Myths and legends continue to surround Colombia’s most notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar 26 years after his death. But his legacy has had an unexpectedly disastrous impact on some of the country’s fragile ecosystems. A herd of more than 80 hippos roam free, the descendants of animals smuggled to Colombia from Africa in the 1980s and now flourishing in the wild.
Reporter Joe Parkin Daniels tells Michael Safi that when Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in his hometown of Medellín, the authorities seized his estate and the animals on it. While most were shipped to zoos, the logistics of moving his four hippos proved insurmountable and they were left to wander the Andes.
Continue reading...Going vegan has never been more popular – but some people who try it and then decide to reintroduce animal products face shocking treatment
In 2015, Freya Robinson decided to go vegan. For more than a year, the 28-year-old from East Sussex did not consume a single animal product. Then, in 2016, on a family holiday in Bulgaria, she passed a steak restaurant and something inside her switched. “I walked in and ordered the biggest steak I could have and completely inhaled it,” she says. After finishing it, she ordered another.
For the previous year, Robinson had been suffering from various health problems – low energy levels, brain fog, painful periods and dull skin – which she now believes were the result of her diet. She says her decline was gradual and almost went unnoticed. “Because it’s not an instant depletion, you don’t suddenly feel bad the next day, it’s months down the line. It’s very, very slow.” In just over a year, the balanced plant-based food she cooked daily from scratch, using organic vegetables from the farm she works on, and legumes and nuts vital for protein, had, she felt, taken a toll on her body.
Continue reading...Activists threaten legal action over mouflon hunting on Tuscan island as part of EU-funded biodiversity project
Animal rights activists have threatened legal action against the national park that runs a group of islands off Italy’s Tuscan coast as controversy intensifies over the culling of rare mouflon sheep on the tiny island of Giglio.
Hunters arrived on Giglio this week and have so far killed four mouflons, a wild sheep native to the Caspian region that is thought to be an ancestor of domestic breeds.
Continue reading...Welcome to our monthly roundup of the biggest issues in farming and food production, with must-read reports from around the web
As UN climate talks take place in Glasgow, the role of cows and other farm animals in human-induced climate emissions – and what can be done about it – has been in the spotlight.
The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are being “given a free pass by governments” over the lack of clear targets to reduce climate emissions, say campaigners, who have published a new ranking of the worst offenders.
Cutting methane is the biggest opportunity to slow global heating between now and 2040, say experts, who lament that “no country has a real target to reduce its livestock-related emissions or meat consumption”.
Brazil and Argentina, two of the biggest producers of beef products and animal feed crops in the world, are reported to have argued strongly against UN recommendations that reducing meat consumption is necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The net zero climate pledges made this year by the world’s largest meat company, JBS, have been critiqued as an attempt to “avoid scrutiny from shareholders and investors” in a new report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.