Crisis: Factory Farming (& Cruelty To Animals)

Louie Psihoyos' THE COVE pulled off a pretty remarkable feat tonight, winning the Writers Guild Award for Documentary Screenplay and thus becoming the first nonfiction feature to sweep all four of the guild prizes awarded for documentaries -- the Producers, Directors and Editors. The American Society of Cinematographers does not offer a documentary prize.

At 70, Ric O’Barry would love to be at home watering his bamboo and playing with his five-year-old daughter. Instead, he spends most of his time with people who hate him. 

In the award-winning documentary THE WITNESS, Eddie Lama explains how he feared and avoided animals for most of his life, until the love of a kitten opened his heart, inspiring him to rescue abandoned animals and bring his message of compassion to the streets of New York. With humor and sincerity, Eddie tells the story of his remarkable change in consciousness. 

Chinese legal experts are proposing a ban on eating dogs and cats in a contentious move to end a culinary tradition dating back thousands of years.

“We suspected the killing would resume once the initial publicity from the film died down,” said O’Barry. “Sadly, this is exactly what happened. Bottlenose dolphins are being hunted and killed in Taiji again. The no kill policy didn’t last and was most likely a strategic short-term publicity stunt aimed at quieting the international media.”

Originally published in Yale Environment 360, Sonia Shah writes that in the past dozen years, three new diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, honeybees, and -- most recently -- bats. Increasingly, scientists suspect that low-level exposure to pesticides could be contributing to this rash of epidemics.

Taking a cue from Pope Benedict XVI's message for the Catholic Church's World Day of Peace, in which he calls for "a real change of outlook which will result in new life-styles" as a means to combat damage to the environment, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals vice president Bruce Friedrich fired off a letter asking the pontiff to become a vegan and decree that only foods free of animal products be served in Vatican City.

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants -- their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar -- the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

As the year draws to a close I want to thank you for helping us win dramatic victories in our battle for dolphins, and also let you know that we still need your help! We have a real opening to end the dolphin bloodshed in Japan and need to grab this chance before it's gone.