The consolidation of veterinary clinics marks another important shift in the way Americans approach animal care, and it’s not a good one.
How animal medicine went corporate
Category: animals
Send nudes: PETA, misogyny, and animal welfare
The misogyny behind PETA’s publicity stunts is on painful display when you see who is allowed to wear clothes and who is not.
Dog people: Leashes exist for a reason
Your dog belongs on a leash, period, no excuses. Yes, that applies to every dog. Yes, even yours.
Stop overstating the effects of wind turbines on bird populations
Are wind turbines a horrific bird-endangering menace? Not so much, to be honest.
Barnum and Bailey got rid of elephants: What’s next?
The use of performing animals is on the wane in American circuses, but it hasn’t vanished from the landscape altogether. What’s it going to take to get animals out of the ring?
No, your dogs do not belong everywhere
A brouhaha over dogs in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area highlights the fact that some dog owners have an overblown sense of entitlement that ruins things for other dog guardians in addition to threatening the environment.
Animals aren’t toys to discard when they’re broken
One reason we have so many homeless animals is the belief that it’s acceptable to treat animals like garbage, paired with lack of information about options for treating sick animals and finding social supports. We can do better than this.
Tragic animal stories and individual responsibility
I am, as we know, a tremendous softie, and I always get very sad when I read tragic animal stories, which are the bread and butter of a huge number of websites, whether they’re highlighting the horrors of what we do to companion animals or telling success stories. I generally try to avoid these stories […]
Monetising your pets is weird, right?
In a piece for Racked late last year, Kyle Chayka wrote about the ‘fast, furry rise‘ of pets on Instagram (and other social media), discussing the growing number of celebrity pets who captivate the internet, but, more critically, the smaller numbers among those ranks who turn into money generating machines for their handlers, instead of […]
‘He’s just a cat’
I don’t really know what to say to people who, when confronted with the news that someone’s pet has died, dismissively say ‘well, it’s just a pet, they can always get another one,’ as though animals are some kind of renewable commodity that can be replaced like a broken lightbulb. Losing a pet is more […]