Tag Archives: animals

In recent years, the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere has carried out some of the most brazen and tech-savvy operations and investigations to ever target the animal agriculture industry. It has rescued pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens from factory farms and slaughterhouses in midnight intrusions; captured virtual reality footage …

Lawrence Faucette, the 58-year-old patient with terminal heart disease who was the second person to receive a genetically engineered pig heart, died on October 30, according to a statement from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the transplant was performed. Faucette received the transplant on September 20 …

Feline researchers have long believed that purring is produced by voluntary muscle contractions, but a new report indicates that this vibration in the larynx of cats may be explained by the myoelastic aerodynamic theory of phonation. Studies on the complex action that produces a unique vibration in the larynx of …

In 2010, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker from Mexico arrived at a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana unknowingly carrying a deadly virus. His symptoms were mild at first: fatigue, shoulder pain, and numbness in one of his hands. As his condition worsened, he was admitted to a hospital in New Orleans. There, …

This story originally appeared on Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There was a time when we human beings used to put animals on trial for their alleged crimes against us. The earliest of these prosecutions in the Western tradition of law appears to be a case …

Consider the octopus. Smart and sophisticated, it has a brain larger than that of any other invertebrate. With 500 million or so neurons, its nervous system is more typical of animals with a backbone. In lab experiments, the octopus can solve mazes, open jars, and complete tricky tasks to get …

The tan macaque with the hairless pink face could do little more than sit and shiver as her brain began to swell. The California National Primate Center staff observing her via livestream knew the signs. Whatever had been done had left her with a “severe neurological defect,” and it was …

Eat almost anything. Sleep almost anywhere. These, it seems, are the secrets to surviving in the city as a wild animal. Among the species that dominate urban spaces—pigeons, cockroaches, rats, foxes—these are the most obvious characteristics successful city dwellers have. But they aren’t the only tactics for urban survival. A …

On a spring day in 1978, a fisherman caught a tiger shark in the lagoon surrounding Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the north Pacific. That shark, along with the remains of a green sea turtle it had swallowed, wound up in a natural history museum. Today, scientists …

Before Michelle Fournet moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a whale. She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface. For her entire life, she …