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.
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 […]
Farm reform matters for people too
The United States is having a big discussion about farm reform right now in spite of the ag-gag laws that are working double time to silence exposés of the reality of conditions on farms and the resistance to conversations about factory farming and animal abuse. Animal welfare has become a concern for a growing percentage […]
As on land, so at sea: the extinction of marine life
We’re having a big conversation about species loss in the face of growing environmental problems. And a lot of numbers are being thrown around — 40% of birds, hundreds of mammals, at times it seems like no one even knows what we’re losing and things feel almost unimaginable. To some extent, that’s true. We didn’t know […]