Year: 2025

It’s been a few weeks since I have reached out to the full DawnWatch list as I have been spending time on other animal advocacy projects and am also in the process of evaluating how I can best serve animals in this fast-changing world - all of which has kept me fully occupied. However, I have been posting regularly to social media (while working towards increasing the breadth of platforms DawnWatch uses). I will share those articles below so that DawnWatch email readers can catch up on animal media via that review.
First, I want to focus briefly on some profoundly significant coverage, on Science.org, looking at the battle between the White Coat Waste Project and Nicole Kleinstreuer, an NIH official. 

Canadians:
The Toronto Star has a striking and heartening front-page, above the fold, lead story today, titled, “Animal Instincts: Pioneering Course Trains Veterinary Students to Recognize Signs of Abuse.” The Waterloo Region Record, Welland Tribune, St Catherine’s Standard and Niagara Falls Review have the same story on their front pages titled, “How Training Veterinarians to Spot Animal Abuse Could Save Someone’s Life,” which is also the Star’s online headline. 

Canadians:
Yesterday’s Toronto Star, August 29, included a superb op-ed by Jessica Scott-Reid titled, “Animal Testing is Cruel and Unneeded” (page 15). It opens:
“Is the use of animal testing in science helping or hindering progress for humans? And can using animals in scientific testing ever be considered ethical?

Today I share today’s front-page Toronto Star story on people forced to give up pets due to financial hardship (Canadians should respond), plus today’s New York Times story on the damage our pets do to the environment (page D3),  and the awful news, also shared today by the New York Times, that former NFL player Leshon Johnson has just been convicted on dogfighting charges.  
Also online today, recorded yesterday, is my chat on the Mark Thompson Show about last week’s killing of 12 baboons at a German Zoo, which also notes that a Danish Zoo asks folks to donate small pets to feed its carnivores.

I send out this DawnWatch alert having just received the profoundly disappointing news that the owner of Ryder, the carriage horse who collapsed and then later died, has been cleared of animal cruelty charges. We have better news regarding owls, with a Los Angeles Times front-page story letting us know, “An owl-culling plan hits a roadblock.” That paper has also covered the impact of ICE raids on the Los Angeles pet shelter crisis. And media coverage from New York, including that in the Daily News, points to a shelter population crisis causing the Animal Control Center to close its door to new intakes.

Angelenos,
If you are as disappointed as I was to see a fluff piece on the Pamplona bull run in today’s Los Angeles Times, you may wish to weigh in. Titled, " Just a small stampede of women running with the bulls at famed Pamplona festival" the article, by Miguel Oses and Suman Naishadham, appears on page A4.

Sadly, the biggest animal news of the last week, likely to affect the most animals, is a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against the state of California, attempting to overturn the animal welfare laws based on Prop 12 (which the Biden administration unsuccessfully attempted to overturn) blaming them for the high cost of eggs nationally. In happier legal news we saw PETA sue the American Kennel Club for the harm done for French Bulldogs, a New York legislator is attempting to ban the sale of captive birds as pets, and the courts have denied a new trial for Joe Exotic, the star of Tiger King. I will also share, below, a new Washington Post story on the plight of immigrants working in the horse racing industry.

I hope you and all your loved ones of every species had a safe and happy 4th. We had cause...

We’ve suffered two heartbreaking losses over the last week – author John Robbins, and Fox rescuer Mikayla Raines, the latter...

Texans: The Dallas Morning News put dairy industry horrors on Sunday’s front page under the title, “Fairlife Accused Again of...