Kim Bartlett is a veteran of 40+ years in animal rights advocacy. She earned humanitarian service awards from various animal welfare organizations in Texas for volunteer efforts in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1986, Kim left Texas to become editor of The Animals’ Agenda magazine, a position she held until 1992, when she co-founded Animal People. Her interest in international animal affairs brought Animal People into the forefront of humane outreach to the developing world. While anthropologist Margaret Mead was known for teaching that "a small group of committed people can change the world," Kim believes that runaway human population growth has rendered one-person-at-a-time activism futile. Says Kim, "The growth of the human population in the developing world has outstripped our efforts at awareness building, ever since the rise of the modern animal rights movement in the 1970s. Only in countries with relatively stable populations has the animal rights movement sustained a lasting effect. Mass media, now including online social media, is essential for educating people and effecting change on a global scale." Recent paradigm shifts in human attitudes toward animals - startling and unpredicted shifts - including the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which leading neuroscientists joined to declare the consciousness of animals, and Pope Francis’ encyclical, "Care for Our Common Home," which calls for kindness toward animals and an entirely different understanding of “dominion,” give Kim hope that a completely new human relationship with animals lies somewhere ahead of us. Click to see author's profile.
Someday in the future, a population of rabbits on a distant archipelago might be something people would marvel at. The focus of conservation should be on promoting environmental stability rather than attempting to reintroduce or eliminate particular species.
Pit bull bans are cruel to both the dogs and the people who have taken them into their homes and love them. A humane alternative to banning any breed of dog (for whatever purpose) is a breed-ING ban, whereby the worst thing dogs and their families would face would be spaying or neutering.
The whole meat issue is trivialized when it becomes about which animals are appropriate for eating and which are taboo. The legitimate way to focus campaigns against the dog and cat meat trades in Asia and elsewhere is to point out the additional cruelty involved in handling and killing those species.
Reptiles are not commonly thought of as being responsive, or particularly intelligent. But in October 2001, we met a caiman (a type of small alligator) named Josefina, living in a lagoon in the rainforest of Costa Rica. Josefina displayed amazing intelligence, as well as sensitivity to human behavior and the effect her presence had on us.
A Lebanese ship carrying 5,000 cows capsized and sunk pier side at Vila do Conde…
A common objection posed by meat-eaters to considering a vegetarian diet is that “plants have feelings” which may be comparable to the feelings of animals, or that the result of a vegetarian diet is for more plants to die than animals and thus the net amount of killing is somehow equal.
The biomedical research community has already agreed in principle that scientific use of animals should be subject to rigorous scientific review… If the practices and regulations… were changed or amended so that scientific use of animals were to be conducted in an improved and strict manner regarding the welfare of animals, we believe that animal advocates would agree not to interfere with such research or specifically object to it through targeted campaigns.
What does it take to implement a successful TNR program, and when if ever is it more humane to euthanize animals than return them to their habitats?