REGULATION

KAREN DAVIS: While Peter Singer's new book is said to include updates on the advancing technological assaults on farmed animals and recent cognitive science on certain animals hitherto deemed insentient, his current “recommendations” suggest that his own advocacy for animals has not advanced since 1975 and may even have regressed. Prime example: from The Guardian Q. Conscientious omnivores oppose factory farming but continue to eat animal products from farmers who treat their animals well and don’t subject them to suffering. Do they get a pass? A. Honestly, I can’t show that they are…

CIWF: A new report debunks the myths perpetuated to keep the global factory farming industry alive, and the few multi-national corporations making billions from the systems that are cruel to animals while damaging our health and killing our planet. Factory Farming: Who Benefits? How a ruinous system is kept afloat – produced by Compassion in World Farming – lays out the seven key input providing sectors benefiting from intensive agriculture and obstructing the reforms needed to switch to higher welfare, health- and climate-friendly farming. While the activities of the big meat-providing…

KAREN DAVIS: Ethical protest against the genetic engineering of birds and other animals has focused primarily on the violation of species integrity, although attention has also been paid to the suffering of individual animals, and a moral repugnance has been shown against defining animals as patentable "manufactures." This definition represents a further debasement of nonhuman animals from their traditional low status as property lacking value and claims in their own right. Animals used in genetic engineering are further degraded in not even being recognized as whole beings but only as…

JOHN ELY: A pro-vegan campaign group wants to compare the harms of red meat to cigarettes in pursuit of turning the NHS completely vegan. PETA, famed for provocative advertising campaigns, wants to erect giant billboards outside hospitals of a patient being served a plate of sausages and cigarettes with a slogan saying: 'Still serving meat? How about a cigarette too?' A caption at the bottom states that eating processed meat causes cancer and urges the NHS to go vegan... People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) thinks meat should be banned from hospital menus completely. PETA,…

KAREN DAVIS: It is my impression that mainstream media organizations may actively be sabotaging the effort to replace slaughter-based food products with plant-based, animal-free alternatives. But first: The good news is that, despite the gruesome display of animal carnage at every major food outlet, most now carry an impressive array of plant-based burgers, nuggets, cheeses, milks, and more, all free of animal ingredients. You would think that any civilized person with a choice between food from a slaughterhouse versus foods made from plants would choose the plant-based versions. You’d…

JUSTIN MARCEAU: The US Supreme Court rarely has occasion to hear an animal law case. Laws having to do with animal treatment are primarily matters of state law, and, historically speaking, precious few of them have threatened industrial animal exploitation to a degree that major federal lawsuits emerged. But California’s Proposition 12, a 2018 ballot measure that was approved by more than 62 percent of voters, sufficiently rankled the US pork industry that it filed a federal lawsuit and, after repeatedly losing, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Prop 12 bans the sale of pork in…

VICTORIA HAWEKOTTE: When it comes to the regulation of lab-grown meat, there may be too many cooks in the kitchen. A battle between two federal agencies that both claimed sole authority to regulate cell-cultured meat ended in 2018 as a plan for these agencies to regulate these products jointly. But is this plan the right path forward for the regulation of cultivated meat? In a recent article, Tammi S. Etheridge of Howard University School of Law argues that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is well equipped to regulate lab-grown or cell-cultured meat independently, and that the…

BRIAN KATEMAN: Big Dairy has been funding pro-milk public relations campaigns for decades: You’ve without a doubt seen a “Got Milk?” ad on a billboard or in a magazine at some point between the 1990s and now. One of dairy’s biggest rivals, oat milk brand Oatly, has just launched its own campaign in response to the many attack ads plant-based milks have been subject to. Oatly’s campaign takes dairy to task with a seemingly simple offer: free ad space in exchange for the dairy industry releasing information on the climate impact of its products... The campaign is brilliant in its simplicity:…

PETER SINGER: Fifty years ago, my first article arguing that it is wrong to treat animals as we do appeared in the New York Review of Books. Two years later my book “Animal Liberation” was published, subsequently to be credited with triggering the modern animal rights movement. Similar ethical perspectives are now supported by many philosophers. But the factual descriptions in that book of what we do to animals have long ceased to capture current conditions accurately. In updating the book, I could not avoid the question: Have we made progress in our attitudes toward animals and our…

ESSERI ANIMALI: Do you know how fish are farmed? While many of us can evoke pictures of chicken or dairy farms, fish farms have gone under the radar. Recent investigations by our member organisations Essere Animali and Animal Equality UK, as well as the Franz Weber Foundation, shine a spotlight on this overlooked industry: exposing high stocking densities, extortionate mortality rates and inhumane slaughter methods. This year, Compassion in World Farming exposed the scale of global fish farming in a new research paper. Their findings revealed that since 1990, farmed fish numbers killed…