Happy Year of the Sheep! (Domestic or wild, it’s no party)

Animals Australia Unleashed-click image

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

The Chinese lunar new year arrived recently, and regardless of whether you’re in the sheep or the goat camp, for the purpose of this post I wish you a Happy Year of the Sheep! Of course, there’s nothing happy about live export, perhaps only the worst fate to befall any given sheep on Planet Earth. Shame on Australia!

But wait a minute, Yanks–let’s don’t get too smug. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Farm Animals are regulated under the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) only when used in biomedical research, testing, teaching and exhibition. Farm animals used for food and fiber or for food and fiber research are not regulated under the AWA” (source). This puts a sheep between a rock and a hard place–protected by welfare standards in biomedical research labs, but not in factory farms. Hmmm. Which hell would you choose?!?  

Eating Earth: an ethics-based guide for enviros & animal activists

Kathleen Stachowski     Other Nations

They’re eating me out of house and home! Idioms, as you know, are shorthand codes for more complex ideas. As I read Lisa Kemmerer’s latest offering, “Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics & Dietary Choice,” I kept returning to that idiomatic gluttonous guest or the self-centered roommate who mindlessly consumes such a vast quantity of our household resources that we’re headed for ruin.

Now consider what happens when that gluttonous dweller is Homo sapiens and the “house and home” is our planet. That’s the premise in “Eating Earth,” a readable, thoroughly-referenced book “written both for environmentalists and animal activists, explor(ing) vital common ground between these two social justice movements–dietary choice” (from the book’s jacket).  

Los Angeles Animal Law Symposium

Jennifer Molidor

Much has been made recently about the shocking results of an investigation into taxpayer-funded experiments on farmed animals. Most people don’t know the degree to which the law fails to protect farmed animals, or the catastrophic impact of “factory farms” on our planet. That’s why this topic is so important to animal law, and why factory farms are the focus of  the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s very first symposium for its Los Angeles regional attorney network, on Saturday, March 28, 2015.

This cutting-edge event features top speakers in animal law, including ALDF’s director Stephen Wells, Ethan Brown, CEO and co-founder of “Beyond Meat,” Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red, David Simon, attorney and author of Meatonomics, Leslie Brueckner, senior attorney at Public Justice, Paige Tomaselli, senior staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety, Robert K. Rasmussen, Dean and Professor of Law and Political Science at USC Gould School of Law, and T.J. Tumasse, ALDF Manager of Investigations. These speakers, and many others, will discuss the legal challenges and strategies for taking on factory farms.

Factory farms confine and slaughter 10 billion farmed animals every year. Chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys,