How to Live a Healthy and Happy Vegan Lifestyle

  The bills include a ban on live exports and keeping primates as pets. Better standards of animal welfare[not rights] will be highlighted in the Queen’s Speech this week, ahead of several landmark UKs bills. Among them, animal sentience and tougher penalties for animal cruelty are to be enshrined in law. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs UK Minister George Eustice detailed the plans in an interview with The Telegraph . The Queen’s Speech marks The State Opening of Parliament. The annual event is taking place on Tuesday, May 11, and sets out the government’s agenda for the coming political year. Continue...

  'So many bodies are squashed together in one space, with no crates, no boxes, no shelter, no chance of a momentary reprieve from the utter havoc'. Acclaimed actor and vegan advocate Evanna Lynch has gone undercover in a factory farm for chickens. The Harry Potter star visited a standard farm in the UK alongside Matthew Glover – Founder of Veganuary and VFC . Lynch penned a blog post about the experience, which she described as ‘overwhelming’ and ‘chaotic’. “We stop and pause once through the door to look out at 25,000 chickens crammed together under one roof,” she writes. Continue...

  Belgium’s animal rights group GAIA is lobbying the three ministers in charge of animal welfare to ask that no more authorizations be granted for experiments on healthy dogs and cats that are knowingly made ill, it said in a communication published on Friday. GAIA, which stands for Global Action in the Interest of Animals, describes itself as an organization that “unites defenders of animal welfare and advocates for animal rights in Belgium.” The association conducted a survey in 2019 on the use of laboratory animals in Belgium and estimates that 1,302 experiments were carried out on 542 dogs, all of the Beagle breed. The majority of these were in Flanders, with 1,286 experiments on 526 animals. Last week they launched a satirical campaign calling for beagle owners to bring their dogs to laboratory testing centers to combat an urgent need for test animals, and today they’ve launched a new website focused on raising awareness of (and eventually ending) the use of animals as test subj

  The dog has recovered and has been adopted. Carey Marie Wilson was initially charged May 27 with two counts of animal cruelty after a dog was found with an arrow shot through his skull 11 days earlier. A 38-year-old Hilliard woman has been sentenced to 15 days in jail for shooting a dog in the head with a crossbow , a punishment called "pitiful" by an animal-rights group. Carey Marie Wilson of Missouri Street was initially charged May 27 with two counts of animal cruelty after a dog was found with an arrow shot through his skull 11 days earlier, according to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office. She entered a no-contest plea Tuesday on one count of animal cruelty and was sentenced to jail, due to report on May 14, according to the Sheriff's Office. Continue...

  The Lone Star State has long muddled the line between hunting and farming.  Now cloning may help game ranches breed big buck$. A Republican legislator wants to legalize deer cloning, and is accusing Texas wildlife officials of using the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine a breeder’s attempts to spawn big buck$. In a state that often blurs the distinction between hunting and farming, many game ranches have looked to science ― from supplemental protein to artificial insemination ― to grow bigger game for the deep-pocketed customers willing to pay well over $10,000 to shoot them. The proposed law, from state Rep. Matt Krause of Fort Worth, would legalize cloning to help in that endeavor. But the prospect of commercial deer cloning has raised concern from wildlife officials, who say a rancher cloned and sold deer for years without the state’s knowledge or authorization. Krause filed the bill on behalf of Jason Abraham of Canadian, Texas, who told HuffPost he has cloned somewhere between 35 a

   An inspirational life-changing speech by Gary Yourofsky, an animal liberation activist, national lecturer on animal rights and veganism, and founder of ADAPTT , a non-profit organization based in the US.

Following an investigation by animal welfare organization Lady Freethinker, YouTube is implementing a ban on staged rescue videos that purposely place animals in jeopardy. Popular online video-sharing platform YouTube recently announced it is implementing a ban on staged animal rescue videos.  The platform has noticed a “disturbing trend” of people putting domesticated animals in dangerous situations—such as puppies and rabbits being suffocated by snakes and cats found buried alive—to film an apparent rescue.  According to YouTube ’s global head of trust and safety, Colin Goulding, the company will also focus on banning eating live animals in videos. The ban follows an extensive investigation by animal welfare organization Lady Freethinker that flagged more than 2,000 videos for animal abuse , garnering 1.2 billion total views.  The videos of staged animal rescues are often made so the filmmakers can gain views, subscribers, and revenue.  According to media outlet Business Insider , t

Harbin hotel keeping threatened species in pen overlooked  by bedrooms angers animal welfare groups A Chinese hotel built around a central polar bear enclosure for the non-stop viewing pleasure of its guests has opened to immediate condemnation from conservationists. At Harbin Polar Land in north-east China , the hotel bedrooms’ windows face onto the bears’ pen, with visitors told the animals are their “neighbours 24 hours a day”. A video shows the bears – a threatened species – being photographed by crowds of guests under harsh warm lights, in a space consisting of fake rocks and icicles and a white painted floor. Animal rights organisations reacted with outrage, urging customers to stay away from establishments profiting “from animals’ misery”. “Polar bears belong in the Arctic, not in zoos or glass boxes in aquariums - and certainly not in hotels,” said Peta Asia’s vice-president, Jason Baker. Continue...

  Philip Schofield was completely gobsmacked and went to pieces live on TV when a horse was milked live on his show, despite the fact that he's been drinking the breast secretions of very similar animals for years and years with zero hesitation...

  Institutional offenders remain untouched by felony cruelty penalties “More prosecution will never lead to greater animal rights. Longer sentences have not incrementally advanced the standing of animals in society,” argues Sturm College of Law professor Justin Marceau in the March 20, 2021 edition of the Harvard Law Review Forum. Marceau is also the Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy, and an affiliated faculty member with the Institute for Human Animal Connections at the Graduate School of Social Work. Continue

  'Everyone' wants to end “chick culling.” So what’s the holdup? Every year, up to 7 billion day-old male chicks are tossed into shredding machines, gassed, or suffocated in plastic bags—a process known as “chick culling.” This grim ritual is underpinned by both biology and economics: Male chicks don’t lay eggs, and they fatten up too slowly to be sold as meat. Across the globe, culling has become the default strategy for the egg industry to eliminate unwanted hatchlings. “It is horrible. You see these puffy, newly hatched chicks on a conveyor belt,” headed toward a large blade that slices them “into a gazillion pieces,” says Leah Garcés, president of Mercy for Animals, an animal-rights advocacy group in the United States. In recent years, local and international animal-rights groups, particularly in France, Germany, and the U.S., have been ramping up pressure on governments and the egg industry to commit to ending the practice—particularly given technological innovations that

This report examines the issue of “blue loss,” or how many aquatic animals are unaccounted for in the human food chain each year.  Aquaculture is often touted as the solution to overfishing, yet our study has found that up to half of all animals caught at sea are fed to fish on farms.  This poses serious questions about aquaculture’s animal welfare paradigm. Listed below are our main findings: ● Approximately 1.2 trillion aquatic animals are fed to other aquatic animals each year. This is approximately one-third to one-half of all animals fished. ● In order to produce the billions of fish that end up on the human plate, trillions of fish are processed, or fed live, as fish feed. ● Many of the fish we feed Salmon have similar welfare needs, thus creating a ‘welfare pyramid’ effect, as each farmed salmon must eat the biomass equivalent to 9 herring, or 120 anchovies, to be brought to harvest weight. ● In terms of welfare, this means that each farmed fish we produce under welfare scrutiny

While Seventh-day Adventists around the world have heeded their co-founder’s teachings on eating a plant-based diet, veganism has risen for some adherents to a place next to godliness. Denominational researchers found that many members in South Asia believe salvation is ensured two ways: through Jesus Christ (92%), and through giving up meat, animal products, alcohol, and tobacco (80%). Within the denomination’s East-Central Africa Division—which has the second-most vegan or vegetarian members (42%)—three-quarters of members (74%) maintain that dietary choices contribute to salvation. “The data suggest that Adventist Church leadership needs to engage in further member education to differentiate and avoid confusion between the benefits of adhering to the Adventist Health Message and the Church’s belief that the actual source of salvation is through Jesus Christ alone,” wrote Andrews University sociologist Duane McBride, lead author on a recent paper in the Review of Religious Research.

  A leaked 'member alert' by the largest fishing industry organization in the US shows that they are scared and have a top-down plan to respond to the upcoming Netflix documentary Seaspiracy .

Our use and abuse of animals has demanded change for a long time.  This pandemic has shown us the life or death consequences of failing to act. A new report from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a call to action for animals. It proposes nine policies aimed at reducing the risk of another pandemic arising from zoonotic (originating in animals) disease. The novel coronavirus, responsible for COVID-19, likely developed in bats and infected humans through an intermediate host, and it isn’t the first time this has happened. The pathogens responsible for Ebola, avian flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, and SARS all came from animals. An estimated 73% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. As for known infectious diseases, almost three in five (58%)—think rabies or salmonella– are transmitted by animals. Human activity, and the use and misuse of animals, are frequently behind the spillover of contagions from animals to humans. In response to this now glaring threat, the