Police have launched an inquiry after the public outcry sparked by a video posted on social media showing three dead jackals hanging in two different places in the region of Messinia in southern Greece.
According to a report on Skai TV, the jackals were shot and killed earlier in the week in the village of Xirochori in Mani by an unknown assailant or assailants.
One of the jackals was hung in the village square and two on signposts.
Another atrocity followed when a fox was also hanged in the area.
The incidents were the latest in a long string of reports of animal cruelty in different parts of the country.
In 2023 alone, there were more than 10,000 animal abuse complaints.
Authorities intensify hunt for suspect in Kypseli cat killings
08.10.2024 • 22:25
Authorities in the central Athens district of Kypseli are stepping up efforts to catch a suspect responsible for the gruesome decapitation of stray cats.
Reports suggest the perpetrator is targeting stray felines and leaving their bodies in various locations, sometimes accompanied by ominous notes.
Residents are growing increasingly alarmed, fearing more attacks. Despite reviewing surveillance footage from the crime scenes, police have yet to uncover any significant leads, but they continue to actively investigate the case.
Since December 14, 2023, five similar incidents have been reported, indicating a possible pattern that points to a single individual behind these heinous acts.
Police in Thessaloniki have arrested a 34-year-old man on suspicion of torturing and killing a kitten.
The incident came to light after a video surfaced online showing the man kicking a kitten – believed to have already been injured by traffic – onto the road before deliberately running it over with his car.
The Municipality of Kalamaria, where the alleged incident happened, issued a statement expressing its “anger and disgust,” saying the act “offends the culture of our city.”
Police in Thessaloniki are investigating the mass poisoning of 16 stray cats in the Agia Marina district.
A local woman had been taking care of the cats and had given them food, but an unknown individual then added poison to the food, Vasilis Diamantakis, deputy mayor for the environment, told AMNA news agency.
The remains of the poisoned cats have been sent for an autopsy while a sample of the poisoned food has also been kept for examination.
“The police are conducting the necessary checks to identify the perpetrator and are investigating the case through the cameras in the surrounding area. We want the person responsible to be identified and punished so that people understand that there are consequences for such heinous acts,” Diamantakis said.
AI may soon be able to decode whalespeak, among other forms of communication – but what nature has to say may not be a surprise
harles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors’ first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won’t be long before we join the conversation once again.
The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.
In April, Michoacán became the sixth Mexican state to ban bullfighting, while the previous month, legislators in Mexico City approved legislation to reform the sport. These reforms will ban ‘traditional’ bullfighting, limiting the length of contests and preventing matadors from killing their animal opponents – making the sport ‘bloodless’. Meanwhile in 2024, the Colombian President signed a bill that calls on the country’s government to completely ban bullfights by 2027.
These developments are part of a number of recent legislative and legal efforts around the world aimed at enhancing animal welfare. In New Zealand, the government plans to outlaw greyhound racing – a result, it says, of the significant number of injuries and deaths suffered by the dogs. It intends to introduce legislation later this year. Meanwhile, a growing number of non-profit organisations are seeking to protect animal rights through the courts.
‘It’s unmistakeable that there’s a growing trend in favour of protecting animals through the legal system,’ says Christopher Berry, Executive Director of US-based organisation the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP). His organisation is now 30 years old, but Berry believes the use of the law to enhance animal welfare has taken strides forward in recent years.
‘We’re currently in the midst of a global change in society’s relationship with animals,’ Berry says, highlighting how science is delving deeper into their intelligence, emotions and communication. There’s reportedly a boom in such research, with an ever-increasing range of species observed using tools or playing for fun.
Helen Mitcheson, a director at non-profit legal organisation Cet Law – which focuses on advocating for the protection of whales, porpoises and dolphins – agrees science has been one of the factors in the growing regulation of facilities that house captive cetaceans in recent years. However, ‘there’s not one driver or one-size-fits-all movement to stop captivity or change practices in captivity and in a lot of cases it’s not even a legal driver. It’s driven by legislative, political and social actions,’ Mitcheson says.
Looking back at the history of the anti-bullfighting movement in Mexico, Cecilia Stahlhut, Secretary of the IBA Healthcare and Life Sciences Committee, explains that the sport was suspended in Mexico City in 2022, but the ban was later overturned by the country’s Supreme Court in 2023. Since then, groups advocating both for and against bullfighting have been vocal on the subject.
The details of Mexico City’s reforms are still awaited. The city’s government has seven months to publish secondary regulations, detailing exactly how the changes will be brought about. ‘Most of the groups that support bullfights will wait until that moment to submit any claim against this amendment. That’s when the real legal fight will begin,’ says Stahlhut, who’s also a partner at Hogan Lovells in Mexico City.
While other states have already introduced regulations to prohibit bullfights – and also contests involving dogs – some are waiting to see how the situation in Mexico City develops, says Stahlhut. However, she adds that Mexico has strong regulations around animal protection. At the end of 2024, the Mexican Constitution was amended to explicitly protect animals from cruelty and to allow Congress to legislate in matters of their protection and welfare.
At a federal level, these amendments to the Constitution enhanced the protection of animals in the country, and Stahlhut says the Mexico City proposals on bullfighting would bring its state legislation in line with federal laws. ‘It’s just to be consistent with what the government at a state and federal level has been working on. You can’t criminalise certain acts against animals and not other ones,’ she says.
However, legislation protecting animals can lead to complex knock-on effects. In 2021, France banned whale and dolphin displays at aquariums – a move that has, according to park managers, directly led to the closure of facilities such as Marineland in Antibes, which shut its doors in January. Mitcheson says the park is still responsible for the care of the dolphins it had in captivity, and questions remain about where they should be sent.
Similar questions arise in the case of Happy the elephant, who has been in captivity in the Bronx Zoo since 1977. NhRP brought a case to the New York courts arguing that Happy was entitled to the right of habeas corpus – which would allow a challenge to the elephant’s detention. The New York Court of Appeals rejected the case in 2022, but two judges wrote dissenting opinions saying Happy did have a right to freedom – even if that involved merely moving to a more spacious sanctuary. Bronx Zoo operator the Wildlife Conservation Society maintains its elephants are well cared for.
Efforts to give animals legal rights are growing worldwide. In 2024, Polynesian Indigenous leaders signed the He Whakaputanga Moana – or Declaration for the Ocean – granting whales legal personhood. That move was followed by a pro bono initiative involving the UK’s Simmons & Simmons, marine law firm Ocean Vision Legal and the Pacific Whale Fund, to draft proposed legislation called ‘Te Mana o Te Tohorā’ (‘the enduring power of whales’), which would offer nations a pathway to adopt similar laws. ‘Legal personhood for environmental bodies is a real topic,’ says Mitcheson. ‘It’s very academic at the moment because the difficulty of it is implementation.’
Cultural barriers will probably also remain a challenge when it comes to implementing legislation protecting animals, and there are significant differences in the ways jurisdictions look at these issues – what may be permitted in one country could be banned in another.
But recent trends certainly show a move towards enhanced animal welfare protection through legislation, regulation and the courts. ‘There’s a lot of energy and there is a lot of progress being made,’ says Berry. ‘It’s incremental and it’s frustrating and there’s a lot of obstacles in our way, but I’m very positive about the way this is headed in the long term. How fast it spreads and how quickly remains to be seen, but the trend line is for more protection and higher legal status for animals.’
Living with animals is thought to have profound effects on our immunity – potentially reducing the risk of allergies, eczema and even autoimmune conditions.
Since they first emigrated from Central Europe to North America in the 18th Century, the Amish have become known for their unique lifestyle. Today they are reliant on the same practices of dairy cattle farming and horse-borne transportation that were followed by their ancestors for centuries.
The Amish have gripped the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters, documentary makers and sociologists for decades. But in the past 10 years, their way of life has become of increasing interest to the medical world too, as they seem to defy one particularly concerning modern trend. While rates of immune-related conditions which begin in childhood, such as asthma, eczema and allergies, have soared since the 1960s, this has not been the case for the Amish.
The reason for this is revealing insights into how our immune systems operate – and the profound ways that the animals in our lives are affecting them.
A diverse community
To try and understand why the Amish have lower rates of certain immune conditions, a group of scientists spent time back in 2012 with an Amish community in the state of Indiana, and with another farming community known as the Hutterites, in South Dakota. In both cases, they took blood samples from 30 children and studied their immune systems in detail.
One difference between the two communities is that while the Hutterites have fully embraced industrialised farming technologies, the Amish have not, meaning that from a young age, they live in close contact with animals and the plethora of microbes that they carry.
“If you look at an aerial drone photographs of Amish settlements, and compare them with Hutterite communities, the Amish are living on the farm with the animals, whereas the Hutterites live in little hamlets, and the farm could be a few miles away,” says Fergus Shanahan, professor emeritus of medicine at University College Cork, Ireland.
In 2016, a team of scientists from the US and Germany published a now-landmark study concluding that Amish children have a lower risk of allergies because of the way their environments shape their immune systems. In particular, the researchers found that the Amish children in their study had more finely tuned so-called regulatory T cells than those from Hutterite backgrounds. These cells help to dampen down unusual immune responses.
When the researchers scanned dust samples collected from the homes of Amish and Hutterite children for signs of bacteria, they found clear evidence that Amish children were being exposed to more microbes, likely from the animals that they lived among.
Around the world, other scientists have been making similar findings. A group of immunologists reported that children growing up on Alpine farms, where cows typically sleep in close proximity to their owners, seemed to be protected against asthma, hayfever and eczema. Other research has found that a child’s allergy risk at ages seven to nine seems to decrease proportionally with the number of pets which were present in the home in their early years of life, dubbed the “mini-farm effect”.
“It’s not a universal cure-all, and every time I give a lecture on this, someone goes, ‘Well I grew up on a farm and I’ve got allergies’, but we know that if you grow up physically interacting with farm animals, you have about a 50% reduction in your likelihood of developing asthma or allergies,” says Jack Gilbert, a professor at the University of California San Diego who was involved in the Amish study, and also cofounded the American Gut Project – a citizen science project studying how our lifestyles affect our microbiomes. “Even if you just grow up with a dog in your home, you have a 13-14% reduction in risk,” he says.
Protective pets
Since the Amish study was first published, the potentially protective effect of interacting with animals during childhood has been the subject of much fascination, with the New York Times even publishing an article asking whether pets are the new “probiotic”.
So what’s going on? Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tactile nature of humans and our fondness for stroking and fondling our pets, when we live with animals, microbes from their fur and paws have been shown to end up on our skin – at least temporarily.
This has led to suggestions that the “microbiome” could be colonised by bugs from our pets. This is the collection of vast colonies of microbes that live on our skin, in our mouths and most notably in the gut, which hosts a significant concentration of our body’s immune cells. According to Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease professor at the University of Wisconsin in the US, this concept has attracted interest from the pet food industry. The idea would be to develop products marketed as promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria in cats and dogs, which might then be transferred to their owners, she says.
“That angle has been an attractive one for people to fund, because for most of us, it’s the human condition that we’re interested in,” says Safdar. “So what role can the animal play in that?” she asks.
Safdar says she is considering running a study which would involve collecting faecal samples from both pets and their human owners when they come for repeated veterinary appointments to see if their guts become more microbially similar with time. She also wants to see if she can identify similar bacterial species which could confer health benefits.
However, others feel that the idea of dog or cat or any other kind of non-human animal microbes being incorporated into our microbiomes is dubious. “There’s zero evidence of that whatsoever,” says Gilbert. “We don’t really find long-term accumulation of dog bacteria on our skin, in our mouth, or in our guts. They don’t really stick around.”
In response to this, Safdar says that she still feels the study is very much worthwhile, stating she feels it is plausible that gut microbes can be transferred from pets to their owners and vice versa. “It’s worth studying and hasn’t been closely looked at yet,” she says.
Gilbert believes that pets are playing a different, yet equally vital role. His theory is that because our distant ancestors domesticated various species, our immune systems have evolved to be stimulated by the microbes that they carry. These microbes do not reside with us permanently, but our immune cells recognise the familiar signals as they pass through, which then keeps the immune system developing in the right way.
“Over many millennia, the human immune system got used to seeing dog, horse and cow bacteria,” says Gilbert. “And so when it sees those things, it triggers beneficial immune development. It knows what to do,” he says.
Studies have also shown that humans who live in the same household as a pet end up with gut microbiomes which are more like each other, and Gilbert suggests that the animal is likely acting as a vehicle to help transfer human microbes between its owners. At the same time, regular exposure to the pet’s own microbes will also be stimulating their immune systems to stay more active and better manage the bacterial populations in their own gut and skin microbiomes, keeping pathogens out and stimulating the growth of useful bacteria.
Ancient microbes
This is all good news for animal lovers, with research continuing to suggest that living with pets across our life course can be good for our immune system.
After reading the study on the Amish and the Hutterites, Shanahan was inspired to conduct his own research on Irish travellers, a marginalised population who typically live in confined spaces amongst multiple animals – from dogs and cats to ferrets and horses.
Shanahan sequenced their gut microbiomes and compared them with Irish people living more modern lifestyles today, as well as microbiomes sequenced from indigenous populations in Fiji, Madagascar, Mongolia, Peru and Tanzania who still live a lifestyle akin to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. He discovered that the microbiome of Irish travellers was more similar to the indigenous groups. He said that their microbiome also bore similarities to that of humans from the pre-industrialised world, which other scientific groups have been able to study by collecting ancient faecal samples preserved in caves.
“The Irish travellers have retained an ancient microbiome,” says Shanahan. “It’s far more similar to what you see from tribes in Tanzania who still live like hunter-gatherers or the Mongolian horseman who live in yurts, close to their animals.”
Shanahan believes that this may explain the low rates of autoimmune diseases in Irish traveller populations: conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, multiple sclerosis and other diseases, which like asthma and allergies, have become increasingly common in recent decades.
“This isn’t to say that their health is good,” says Shanahan. “Irish travellers are dying much earlier than the settled community. But they’re dying from things like alcoholism, suicide and accidents, driven by poverty and marginalisation and their culture being eroded. But go to an Irish rheumatologist and ask if they’ve ever seen a traveller with systemic lupus [an autoimmune condition], they’ve never seen it.”
Now researchers are looking to see whether introducing animals back into our lives in various ways can be beneficial for our health across the life course. Researchers at the University of Arizona in the US have explored whether rehoming unwanted dogs with older adults could help to improve their physical and mental health by boosting their immune systems. And results from an Italian research group which created an educational farm where children from homes with no pets could regularly pet horses under supervision suggested that the children’s gut microbiomes started to produce more beneficial metabolites.
Gilbert says it’s plausible that this could be a means of improving childhood immunity. “If you’re exposed to more types of bacteria, you are going to stimulate your immune system in more variable ways, which may then improve its ability to manage the microbes on your skin and in your gut,” he says. “But you’re not being colonised by animal bacteria, that’s not happening.”
Researchers point out that having pets throughout your life can also facilitate more microbial interactions with your immune system in other ways. For example, having a dog makes you more likely to go for regular walks, notes Liam O’Mahoney, professor of immunology at APC Microbiome Ireland, a microbiome-dedicated research centre at University College Cork.
“If you have a pet, you get out and about in the environment and go for walks in the park,” says O’Mahoney. “And by doing that, you’re also being exposed to microbes from the park, the soil, everywhere which can all be useful.”
In a landmark decision, the Lahore High Court has declared the killing of all stray dogs, by shooting, poisoning or other inhumane methods as illegal and unconstitutional across Punjab.
Continue reading this landmark decision in full here:
Between 10 and 12 dogs a month are being handed over to Dr Mark Afua’s animal shelter in Lagos – Kelechi Anozia / BBC
Preye Maxwell looks distressed as he leaves his beloved dog Hanks at an animal shelter in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub.
Fighting back tears, he says: “I can’t afford to take care of him. I can’t afford to feed him the way he should be fed.”
His two-year old American Eskimo barks as his owner turns his back and walks out of the St Mark’s Animal Rescue Foundation in the Lagos suburb of Ajah.
Dr Mark Afua, a vet and chairman of the rescue centre, takes Hanks and puts him in a big metal cage – one of many in the single-storey building designed for dogs, cats, snakes and other animals.
Hanks wheels around in circles in his cage – and Dr Afua tries to calm the distressed fluffy-haired dog.
Mr Maxwell, an online media strategist, was recently made redundant. His job-hunting means he is never at home and so feels unable to look after Hanks.
“I’m trying to get whatever I have to do to survive. I don’t even have the time now [to look after Hanks] because I’m always out looking for jobs,” he told the BBC.
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.
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. …..
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
World Animals Voice 