In Switzerland, animal welfare issues are mainly discussed with regard to wildlife, companion animals and so-called “farmed animals”. In doing so, we forget about the individual whose interests we neglect the most and who are hardly – if at all – protected by the law. We are talking about the “invisible” animals – pigeons, rats, bees and fish.
These animals are subjected to immense daily suffering. Pesticides strip bees of their navigational abilities; rats face an agonising death from rodenticides; sick pigeons lie lifeless on the streets of our cities; and fish are confined in aquaculture basins under conditions that would be deemed unacceptable even in factory farming.
Considering the capacity for suffering as a crucial moral criterion is the core concern of Sentience. Therefore, we believe that all these animals deserve more attention, consideration, and protection. To eradicate today’s injustices, we must, together with you, sharpen public awareness and advocate for animals’ interests in politics.
Even small changes – such as banning certain rodenticides or pesticides, maintaining pigeon lofts, and improving water quality in aquaculture – can improve the well-being of billions of animals. By signing our petitions today, you help bring political attention to the “invisible” animals.
The Royal Horticultural Society, arguably the UK’s foremost gardening charity, has had a change of heart when it comes to our garden gastropods and whether we should be poisoning them. But what about other animals deemed pests, or those who simply don’t have a convenient role or value in our human lives? Claire Hamlett discusses.
Whenever it rains and snails dot the wet pavements, I watch my step, often pausing on walks to move snails to a place of greater safety. But not everyone takes such care over the slow-moving molluscs. Indeed, snails and their bare-backed cousins, slugs, have long been considered the bain of a gardener’s life. If you search for them on the internet, many of the results are about how to kill them or get rid of them. Garden centres are full of poison with which to dispatch them (and any other creature that mistakenly ingests it). But the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is now trying to redeem its image by no longer classing them as pests.
The RHS wants gardeners to see the ecological role that slugs and snails play, including eating decomposing matter and being a source of food for animals including birds and hedgehogs. This change of heart is part of the RHS’s broader campaign for ‘Planet-Friendly Gardening’, which it launched last year. While it’s good that an influential organisation like RHS is moving towards a more compassionate outlook, it also feels rather like it is having to do damage control for the prejudice that it has helped to create against these creatures. The current RHS page on snails, which will hopefully get an update soon, leads with an accusation that they “can cause a lot of damage in the garden” and has a whole section on controlling their numbers, including with pesticides.
I do wonder why it took the RHS so long to start thinking about how it demonises species given that the serious trouble the UK’s wildlife is in has been known for many years. Now it has seen the light on slugs and snails, hopefully, it will soon also update its thinking or many other species it currently classes as pests, and work instead to educate people about their role in the ecosystem and how to keep a balance of species in gardens without resorting to chemicals.
Unfortunately, the murderous mindset that categorises some species as ‘pests’ does not end in people’s back gardens or with molluscs.
Foxes are not only hunted illegally across the countryside but are persecuted for living their lives in and around the grounds of schools and businesses, as well as in the parks and on the streets of our cities. Fox cubs orphaned after their mother was killed were also shot at a school in North London last year for pooping in the playground and supposedly posing a risk to pupils’ health. There have been fox culls in London, where urban foxes are a common sight, especially after the Christmas period when there is more rubbish left out on the streets for longer. One ‘pest-controller’ interviewed by the Evening Standard said he had shot and killed thousands of foxes over his 30-year career.
But with public pushback, sometimes foxes’ lives are spared. A cull of foxes on a London golf course was halted in 2020 after campaigners including Animal Aid urged the golf club to choose an alternative humane solution. In 2021, hunt saboteurs raised the alarm about a planned fox cull on the grounds of Coca-Cola’s factory in Sidcup. The soft drink giant apologised for the upset and promised to use a humane alternative.
Rats and mice are among the prime ‘villains’ of the animal world in the minds of many people. While it’s understandable to not want rodents living in your house (though I did cohabit with a mouse for many months without any problems), these creatures are subjected to some particularly gruesome methods of ‘control’. Traps set with bait snap their spines. Poison can cause internal bleeding or death by dehydration. Some kill the animals slowly over days. There are humane, no-kill alternatives, but poison and traps sadly seem to be the most popular methods.
Sometimes an animal comes to be considered a pest simply because it disturbs the neat and tidy aesthetic that people prefer. One recent story I found particularly disturbing was a Guardian feature on a man called Jason Bullard in North Carolina, US, who kills armadillos for money. Driven north by climate change from their native habitat in South America, people in North Carolina were so “perturbed at their lawns being torn up by the newly arrived mammals” that they started paying Bullard to hunt and shoot them.
All too often animals are demonised for simply existing and trying to live their lives. Animal behaviour expert Marc Bekoff argues that calling these animals ‘pests’ “devalue[s] them as if they’re non-sentient objects.” Animals often find themselves in urban contexts because humans have taken over so much of what was once their habitat. Sometimes they benefit from living near us, such as by being more easily able to access food and shelter. As Bekoff writes, what we need is a “culture of coexistence”, in which killing is no longer the go-to option for resolving our conflicts with other species. With advocacy from organisations like the RHS, perhaps hearts and minds can finally start to change.
This January, a 57-year-old man in Baltimore received a heart transplant from a pig. Xenotransplantation involves using nonhuman animals as sources of organs for humans. While the idea of using nonhuman animals for this purpose might seem troubling, many humans think that the sacrifice is worth it, provided that we can improve the technology (the man died two months later). As the bioethicists Arthur Caplan and Brendan Parent put it last year: ‘Animal welfare certainly counts, but human lives carry more ethical weight.’
Of course, xenotransplantation is not the only practice through which humans impose burdens on other animals to derive benefits for ourselves. We kill more than 100 billion captive animals per year for food, clothing, research and other purposes, and we likely kill more than 1 trillion wild animals per year for similar purposes. We might not bother to defend these practices frequently. But when we do, we offer the same defence: Human lives carry more ethical weight.
But is this true?
Most humans take this idea of human exceptionalism for granted. …..
Shrinking tiger habitat has led to man-animal conflict in Assam state
A Royal Bengal tiger was killed and dismembered by a mob in India’s north eastern state of Assam, a forest official has said.
Angry residents from a village in the Golaghat district reportedly took the step because the tiger had killed livestock in the area and posed a threat to their lives.
The state’s forest department has registered a case.
Instances of man-animal conflict are not new to Assam. This is the third tiger killing that has been reported this year.
Top forest official Gunadeep Das told Times of India newspaper that the tiger had died from sharp wounds and not gunshots.
The carcass was later recovered in the presence of a magistrate, reports say.
Mr Das told a local newspaper that “around a thousand people had gathered to kill the tiger” and that some of them attacked the tiger with machetes. He added that the tiger’s carcass had been sent for an autopsy.
Mrinal Saikia, a lawmaker from Assam state condemned the killing on X. He shared a video that showed the purported dead body of the tiger with parts of its skin, face and legs missing.
The BBC has not independently verified the video.
“This is a very painful act. The Earth is not only for humans, it is for animals as well,” he said in the post, adding that strict action will be taken against those involved in the killing.
Another forest official, Sonali Ghosh told local media that the origins of the tiger were unclear. According to reports, the animal was killed about 20km (12 miles) away from the Kaziranga National Park.
Latest data by Assam’s forest department shows the population of tigers in the state has steadily increased from just 70 in 2006 to 190 in 2019 due to various conservation efforts.
However, instances of tigers being killed due to conflict with villagers have been often reported in the media, which could be because of shrinking habitat and lack of protection of tiger corridors between different national parks in the state.
Tigers are a protected species under India’s Wildlife Protection Act (1972), which prohibits poaching, hunting and trade of tiger parts.
Briana figures she’s probably killed more than 300,000 animals throughout her career. Most of them mice. The occasional rat. Sometimes a hamster. At the biomedical research facility where she used to work, at a university in the United Kingdom, the method of execution wasn’t always the same. Some test subjects were killed by an overdose of anaesthetics, others by a rising concentration of carbon dioxide that was slowly pumped into a sealed enclosure.
But the most common technique was something called cervical dislocation. Ten times a day, on average, for more than 10 years, Briana’s job involved taking a mouse by the tail in one hand, pinching its neck with the other, and yanking hard to dislocate its vertebrae.
“The last week before Christmas was always the worst; I’d spend an entire day just breaking necks,” she tells VICE World News over email. “Having to kill so many animals and be part of their suffering left me feeling like there wasn’t much point in my existence.”
“Artists have a powerful medium for reporting on the consciousness of our current civilization and can paint visual records of the unpalatable realities of our time. The aim is to move the viewer to feel those realities and engage them in a dialogue towards recovering our lost humanity.” ~ Mark Barone
Mark Barone has paved the way for compassion by creating a stirring collection of 5500 portraits of shelter dogs, (illustrating the approximate number destroyed every day), and with his wife, Marina Barone, they run their charity (An Act of Dog); using the power of art for social change. PBS created a 30-minute documentary about The 5500 shelter dog project.
An Act of Dog uses art to educate for change and donates to Semper Fi Service Dogs because they save shelter pets with 72 hours left to live and train them to be service dogs to zero out the 22 Veterans who commit suicide every day.
Mark has been an Artist for over 40 years, with his work featured in top art publications, awarded, and exhibited throughout America, with much of his work hanging in private and corporation collections around the world. https://artofsobriety.org
The wild is full of drama, but not every moment should be captured on your camera. Ethical photographers know when to put the camera down.
Especially if an animal is distressed; threatened or vulnerable. As an example; getting too close to nesting birds can cause the parents to abandon their chicks. Chasing or cornering animals for a shot could lead to injury or even death.
Sometimes the most corageous act is to leave no trace, thus allowing nature to unfold, undisturbed.
The respect for boundaries separates the true wildlife photographer from those getting a selfie snapshot.
Here is a link about wild animal photography and how it should be approached:
Today was a bad day for the wolf; as the European Parliament voted to back the European Commission’s proposal to weaken the protection of wolves; meaning that wolf hunting will now be possible again.
I can sense the German hunters having a celebratory beer tonight !
This vote is the last step in the legislative process to decrease the level of protection for the wolf in the EU from ‘Strictly Protected’ to just ‘Protected’.
In March, the European Commission proposed to amend wolf protection under the EU Habitats Directive; after the Bern Convention had accepted its request to downgrade the species’ protection in December. The EU Council had already approved the proposal a few weeks ago.
This decision marks a worrying precedent for European nature conservation. Under the EU Habitats Directive, decisions must be based on SCIENCE. Despite the proof that wolf populations are recovering due to strict protections; the species continues to be in an unfavourable conservation status in six out of seven ‘EU biographical regions’.
These decisions undermine the credibility of EU nature laws; as well as threatening the recovery of wolves across Europe.
‘Wolves are vital to healthy ecosystems; but todays vote treats them as a political problem, and not an ecological asset’ said Ilaria Di Silvestre, the Director obut thef Policy and Advocacy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
There is no data justifying a lower level of protection; but the EU institutions decided to ignore science. Decisions made on the basis of political interests rather than on facts. These now seem to be undoing decades of conservation progress.
The EU was once proud to lead on nature protection; but now we are witnessing vital species such as the wolf being sacrificed for short term political interests that will benefit nobody. Member States must now step up and do the correct thing. Wolves still need STRONG PROTECTION if we are at all serious about saving Europe’s nature.
Despite the Parliaments decision; EU member states can STILL CHOOSE to keep wolves strictly protected – a step nature conservationalists strongly recommend. They remain legally bound to ensure that their wolf populations achieve and stay at a favourable conservation status.
World Animals Voice 