vegansaurus!

It’s Paul Shapiro’s Animal News You Can Use!  »

Big news in Tennessee: The state attorney general ruled yesterday the ag-gag bill is “constitutionally suspect.” The bill is still awaiting the governor’s signature or veto.

Other big news: The Pennsylvania state senator who announced he was going to introduce an ag-gag bill decided yesterday that he in fact won’t introduce it at all.

Here’s a short new Food Day blog of mine on ag-gag, and a new interview of mine on the Tampa NPR affiliate about a variety of farm animal-related matters.

Politico had a big story on the beef and pork industries’ aggressive campaign to kill federal legislation to ban barren battery cages for egg-laying hens. One agribusiness spokesperson quoted in the piece says they oppose the bill so strongly that they’d fight to kill the entire farm bill (which gives them massive subsidies) if the legislation to improve laying hen welfare were included in the bill.

On a more optimistic note, meat giant Tyson Foods reported a 42 percent drop in net income this quarter…

Video of the week: Ever seen a pig and cat play cat and mouse?

Can’t see the video? Watch it on Vegansaurus.com!

Bonus article: If you’re as psyched about the cicadas as I am, enjoy!

Paul Shapiro’s Animal News You Can Use  »

It’s Paul Shapiro’s Animal News You Can Use! Yay, Paul! Yay, Animals!

Big week, so buckle up!

First, the Sunday New York Times had a cover feature about the meat industry’s efforts to ban investigations by HSUS and fellow animal protection groups. It even included a full-color HSUS photo of a crated pig on A1 of the paper. As well, the NYT editorial board condemned the industry’s effort, noting “the ag-gag laws guarantee one thing for certain: increased distrust of American farmers.”

(Another interesting NYT story)

Speaking of pigs, remember last year’s major HSUS investigation into a then-Tyson supplier gestation crate confinement facility? Well, we announced this week that several of the people caught on the video were convicted of criminal animal cruelty.

Finally, I did a half-hour segment on Miami’s NPR affiliate this week about the need to reduce per capita rates of meat consumption.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. Video of the week

P.P.S. Live in Mass? Hope to see you Sunday!

Why are tens of thousands of pigs dying in China?  »

NPR investigates, but fails to find out why 18,000 pigs died during January and February in the Zhejiang village of Zhulin, or why nearly 3,000 dead pigs were found in the Huangpu River last week. The Huangpu supplies Shanghai with drinking water.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted Zhejiang villagers saying farmers dumped pigs in the river because there were too many for government disposal areas. In addition, villagers said some farmers may have dumped pigs because of a crackdown on selling diseased pigs for human consumption.

Pork is the most popular meat in China. Half the world’s pigs live there, as The Salt has previously reported. China’s state media reported this week that 46 people have been jailed in Zhejiang for selling diseased pigs. Last year, police in the province confiscated about 11 tons of meat from sick pigs, according to the state-run China Daily.

The only things we know for sure is that those pigs lived terrible lives, and that they didn’t deserve whatever awful death came to them. Better check the sources of all your pork products, omnivores.

[Photo by Wolfgang Staudt via Flickr]

Science says you will die if you eat processed meat!  »

Delicious “meats” from Gutenfleischers vegan deli

Remember that palindrome you learned in fifth grade, “Go hang a salami. I’m a lasagna hog”? Besides being fucked up and unethical, this sentence is also hiding a not-so-secret truth about salami: it’s a major people killer. According to a new international study of 500,000 Europeans, you can pretty much consider yourself dead if you eat processed meat.

“Go hang yourself if you ate a salami because you helped kill a hog,” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I believe kids should know the truth! Gosh. Per NPR, this study says eating processed meat ups your chances for cancer and heart disease by, like, a bijillion. Apparently the toxic combo of salt, smoke, and nitrate used to preserve these processed dead animal carcasses masquerading as food is the WORST. Need another reason not to eat salami? I conducted an independent study by myself and found that 100 percent of the time it contributes to non-human animal deaths.

[Photo by Jon via Flickr]

What, we’ve wrecked wild bees now, too?  »

Two fun studies show that bees are having more troubles thriving in the age of modern agriculture than we thought.

First, honeybees aren’t the best crop pollinators; per a study published in Science, they get a lot of help from bumblebees and carpenter bees.

Second, wild bees hate monocultures, and don’t like to pollinate in single-crop areas.

Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s a co-author of the first study in Science, says one of the biggest problems for wild bees is the agricultural specialization that has produced huge fields of just one crop.

The almond groves of California, for example, are a sea of blossoms in February. It’s a feast, as far as the eye can see, for honeybees that come here from all over the country.

“But for the rest of the year, there’s nothing blooming,” she says.

That means there are no bees. “In fact, in places where we have very large monocultures of almond, we don’t find any native bees anymore,” Kremen says.

 So what does that mean for us? Will the fact that large-scale monoculture is bad for bees force us to change the way we farm? Is smaller-scale, more diverse farming financially feasible for modern farmers?

Home gardeners, at least, could learn to plant a variety of flowers and food plants together. As for commercial agriculture, we’ll see.

[Photo by Jimmy Smith via Flickr]

Marketplace loves the Veggie Grill!  »

thelastgreatpoolparty:

The Veggie Grill on NPR’s Marketplace

My dad was on NPR yesterday, selling Kai Ryssdal on plant-based fast casual food. Woo, go dad!

Vegansaurus pal and all-around wonderful human being Kate Dollarhyde brought to our attention to this interview with her dad, Greg Dollarhyde,* who is CEO of the Veggie Grill! Which everyone should love, as it is terrific. Look at that salad!

Click through to find out what cities can look forward to their own Veggie Grills in the near future (hint: outside of California!).

[Photo by Michael Liu via Flickr]

*[The original post misidentified the first name of Kate’s dad. His name is Greg Dollarhyde, not Steve. Vegansaurus regrets the error]

NPR considers the lobster  »

An animal behavior professor, reports NPR, has concluded that crustaceans do, in fact, feel pain.

As for what this might mean for those of us who occasionally dispatch a crustacean or two, the best way to minimize potential pain is likely electrocution or driving a knife through the creature’s brain, Elwood says. But as most of us lack specialized machinery and knowledge of crustacean anatomy, the easiest way is still dropping the crab in a pot of boiling water.

If you’re determined to eat animals, I guess how much they suffer before becoming their dinner doesn’t matter at all.

[Photo by Andrea Westmoreland via Flickr]

What happens to “retired” research chimps?  »

NPR had a nice report on Friday about the lives of chimps after they have been “retired” from scientific study, specifically those at the National Institutes of Health. Yes, “retired” is a bullshit term and life for lab animals is horrific, but obfuscatory vocabulary shouldn’t detract from the actual greatness of taking chimpanzees out of those labs; we made their lives hell, but now we are taking them out of that hell.

NPR focuses on two facilities that take in research chimps, Save the Chimps in Florida, and Chimp Haven in Louisiana. Both sanctuaries tell science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce that they are willing and able to take in more of the NIH’s retired chimps (which number in the hundreds), but because “Congress put a [$30 million] cap on how much the agency can spend on chimp sanctuaries when it passed the CHIMP Act in 2000,” and the NIH has already spent almost $29 million so far. Save the Chimps and Chimp Haven are raising more money to meet demand, but for 100 recently retired chimps, the NIH instead chose to make them “ineligible for experiments,” and “moved [them] to a different lab that had space to house them” instead of sending them to sanctuaries.

The cost of keeping a chimp in a lab for a year, $15,000, is close to the annual cost of housing a chimp in a sanctuary. As Greenfieldboyce reports, the sanctuaries are working on raising $5 million right now to take on the retired chimps, as well as make room for chimps expected to be retired by the NIH soon. The story is an interesting read (and better listen), if you can get past the “retired” euphemism. Because come on, NIH, none of these chimpanzees ever applied for the “jobs” you gave them.

[Photo of Chimp Haven resident by Steve Snodgrass via Flickr]