Trans mice, bear hunts, plastic, piglets for art & spare parts, DOGE, lambing + 3/10/25

It’s been quite the week for animal media, with “transgender mice” making the news after last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, bald eagle hatchlings, an editorial against bear hunts with dogs, and concerns about ocean plastic, all in the Los Angeles Times, Whale watching in the Telegraph, a Danish art exhibit featuring real starving piglets making worldwide news, a New York Times piece asking DOGE to take a look at agricultural subsidies, and another in that paper on using pigs as spare parts for organ transplants, and a Sunday NPR “All Things Considered” piece on “lambing season.” That and more below!

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Because the issue is so touchy, before I address the “transgender mice” I wish to remind people that DawnWatch is an entirely politically nonpartisan animal advocacy organization, with no interest in dumping on trans folks but with every interest in making sure the horrors we visit upon other species get loads of coverage. The media’s response of utter disbelief to Donald Trump’s line last Tuesday reinforces what DawnWatch asserts – that most people have no idea, and find hard to believe, what our society does to animals, which is why DawnWatch is devoted to encouraging the media to do a better job of covering the issues.

While CNN was quick to announce Trump’s claim as false, with countless media outlets picking up their claim, the outlet’s quiet retraction got less coverage. I found the most thorough coverage of the debacle in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, on Thursday March 6, under the headline, “Trump said the US spent $8m on transgender mice – he was right.” For those who missed the speech and the controversy, I will share the full opening of the article:

“Donald Trump on Tuesday told Congress Elon Musk had rooted out ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of government waste thanks to Doge.

“Reeling off a long list of examples of apparent misspending , Mr Trump Donald Trump on Tuesday told Congress Elon Musk had rooted out said that $45 million had been spent on diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships in Burma, $20 million on the Arab version of Sesame Street – and ‘$8 million for making mice transgender’.

“’This is real,’ he said.

“Left-wing media outlets were quick to dismiss the claims as misinformation. After the White House released a statement branding CNN ‘fake news losers’, the outlet issued a correction to its fact check of Mr Trump’s speech, stating that ‘an earlier version of this item incorrectly characterised as false Trump’s claim’.

“The president was referring to an investigation by the White Coat Waste Project, a non-profit campaigning to stop animal testing, which investigates taxpayer-funded experiments on the effects of gender-affirming drugs in rodents.

“Justin Goodman, senior vice-president for the lobbying group, claimed it has documented ‘over $250 million spent on transgender animal experiments over the last couple of decades’.

“He added that ‘there are over two dozen active federal grants funding transgender animal experiments, worth a total of $64 million’.

“These include a National Institute of Health (NIH) funded project at Duke University that allegedly received $455,000 to study how HIV vaccines work in male mice subjected to female hormones – to imitate human gender transitions.

“In another experiment, scientists at the University of Michigan allegedly spent $2,588,000 of an NIH grant investigating the effects of hormone treatment in mice to imitate gender transition.

The article gives many more example.

Given that Elon Musk’s organization, Neuralink, has been under investigation for its treatment of primates, it’s ironic to read in the article:

“Mr Musk recently called government spending on research into the effects of hormone treatment on animals ‘demented’ in an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

“The Tesla billionaire said the scientists were ‘mutilating animals’, describing the experiments as the ‘worst thing you can possibly imagine from a horror show’”.

I have not listened to that episode but will now that I know that animal experimentation is discussed on it, grateful that the issue is being widely discussed, no matter what the motivation.

I urge you to check out the Telegraph article, and, if you are inclined to respond, to do so with a voice for animals rather than against any humans. Letters for publication in the Daily Telegraph can be emailed to dtletters@telegraph.co.uk. Please include your name, address, and work and home telephone numbers.

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The Daily Telegraph also ran a gorgeous double-page article in its Travel section on Saturday, March 8, which I have displayed on the DawnWatch X Feed and also shared on the DawnWatch Facebook page, so you can see the impact. And here’s a paywall-free Yahoo link. Though it is sickening to read, about Bowhead whales, “one individual, killed by whalers, was estimated to be 211 years old,” overall the article is joyous and I love that it guides us to make sure any tour company we engage adheres to local regulations because, “It is sometimes easy to forget that we are uninvited guests in the whales’ world and we have a responsibility to cause as little disturbance as possible.”

While this kind of tourism can surely cause problems for whales, it is incomparably kinder than holding them captive so that we can approach them.

To send a letter to the Daily Telegraph, you can email dtletters@telegraph.co.uk

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The Los Angeles Times deserves some major thanks for a Sunday editorial, (the paper’s opinion) titled, “Bear problem? Using dogs to hunt is no fix.” It includes:

“Whatever has happened with the bear population, we know for sure that reports of bear-human interactions have gone up. According to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, reports have been increasing for decades — not due to more bears but to more people living and vacationing in bear territory. According to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, reports have been increasing for decades — not due to more bears but to more people living and vacationing in bear territory. There were an average 674 reports annually from 2017 to 2020, but that shot up to 1,678 per year during 2021 and 2022. The Lake Tahoe Basin and the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were particular hot spots.

“California Assemblywoman Heather Hadwick (R-Alturas), whose district includes one of those hot spots, has introduced Assembly Bill 1038, which would allow hunters to haze bears — but not kill them — by having dogs chase them. Hounding of bears by hunters during bear hunting season was outlawed by the Legislature in 2012 and shouldn’t come back even if hunters don’t intend to kill the bears.

“As in 2012, it remains cruel to bears, who end up exhausted and clinging to a tree. Dogs and bears may fight. And it’s unclear how chasing a random bear, perhaps in a forest, is going to discourage it from foraging for food around humans. (The Department of Fish and Wildlife already allows, in limited situations, particularly problematic bears in communities or near livestock to be hazed by dogs.)

“Another part of Hadwick’s bill would authorize the Fish and Game Commission to decide whether hunters could use hounds once more to hunt and kill bears. The Legislature already banned this practice, and relinquishing its power over that ban to an appointed commission makes no sense.

“Although this bill’s proposals are not helpful, bear-human encounters are dangerous and should be minimized. There’s a better way to do that. The department and animal welfare advocates strongly urge Californians to find ways to make homes, cars, campsites and farms unattractive to bears. There are numerous suggestions. Bears love smelly food. Don’t leave any food outside. Use trash cans with bear-proof latches. Take all food out of your car and then lock the car doors. On doorsteps, put down mats that cause a mild electric shock when a bear steps on them; they’re called “unwelcome mats.” Crawlspaces under decks should be secured. Remove bird feeders from your yard.

“Livestock should be kept in secure pens at night. Electric fencing can be installed around chicken coops and enclosures. And for bears that keep snooping around houses or livestock, there are ways of hazing that don’t involve dogs chasing them. Motion-activated lights, noise makers and alarms can scare bears away.

“And don’t feed them….

And it ends with the welcome reminder that tourists must remember, ‘’I’m in bear country.'”

The paper would surely love some grateful letters sent in response to that editorial, which appeared yesterday, Sunday March 10.

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The same Sunday paper, carried a lead story, page B1, titled, “Governor thwarts implementation of law limiting plastics.”

Reporter Susanne Rust opens with:

“Gov. Gavin Newsom this week stymied implementation of landmark state environmental legislation that would have limited the amount of single-use plastics sold and distributed in California — drawing outrage from environmentalists.”

And we read:

“In a statement, representatives of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Ocean Conservancy and Oceana said Newsom’s decision ‘puts the interests of the plastics and fossil fuel industry above the wallets and welfare of Californians and the environment.’”

Here’s a Yahoo link for those who hit a paywall at the Los Angeles Times, which will fill you in on conjectured reasons for the Governor’s change of heart on the issue.

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Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday ran a sweet story about the birth of two eagles and has printed letters in response by the inimitable DawnWatch advisor, Elaine Livesey-Fassel, and by Bill Spitalnick. But today’s paper, Monday March 10, brings us news of another hatchling, under the headline,  “3 fluffy bundles of joy for eagles in Big Bear” (page B3), opening the door for more letters from any inspired by this topic. Here’s a Yahoo link to that happy story.

I urge you to respond to one of the above from the Los Angeles Times, as I thank Elaine for keeping is so well-versed on that paper’s coverage of animal issues.

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Saturday’s New York Times, page A26, carried a guest essay, by Michael Grunwald, (author of the forthcoming book “We Are Eating the Earth) ” titled, “Psst, Musk, Look Over Here” with the subheading, “The Department of Agriculture is exactly the kind of dysfunctional behemoth that Elon Musk and DOGE should reform.”

It opens:

“There’s one bloated federal government agency that routinely hands out money to millionaires, billionaires, insurance companies and even members of Congress. The handouts are supposed to be a safety net for certain rural business owners during tough years, but thousands of them have received the safety-net payments for 39 consecutive years. And tens of thousands of those recipients are actually city dwellers, including a resident of a Palm Beach mansion down the street from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

“The bureaucracy in question is the Department of Agriculture, and it’s exactly the kind of dysfunctional behemoth that Elon Musk and his waste-whackers at the Department of Government Efficiency, in their new advisory role, ought to recommend for downsizing and reform. Even though only 1 percent of Americans farm, the U.S.D.A. employs five times as many people as the Environmental Protection Agency and occupies nearly four times as many offices as the Social Security Administration.”

It tells us that “the supposedly ‘countercyclical’ agricultural subsidies that were conceived during the New Deal to get struggling farmers through future Dust Bowls but have become a perennial entitlement for growers of the Big Five commodities — corn, soy, cotton, wheat and rice. The Environmental Working Group has documented that 10,000 farmers have received those payments every year for four decades — even though the average food stamp recipient receives aid for under a year. And the payments are structured by farm size, so the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients receive three-quarters of the subsidies.

We later read:

“In December, a bipartisan spending bill to keep the government open included more than $30 billion in relief for farmers dealing with storms, droughts and low prices. Many of them had already been compensated for their losses; farmers in a large majority of America’s counties have “triple dipped,” raking in countercyclical payments, crop insurance payments and disaster payments in the same year.”

Many DawnWatch readers will know that the vast majority of soy and almost half of the corn sold in the USA feeds “livestock.”

Here’s a gift link to the full article online, under which the Times has printed:

“The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.”

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The New York Times has also released an online story, titled, “For Patients Needing Transplants, Hope Arrives on Tiny Hooves: Some scientists are confident that organs from genetically modified pigs will one day be routinely transplanted into humans. But substantial ethical questions remain.”

I posted it on the DawnWatch Facebook page with the following comment:

“Buried deep in this fluff piece about using pigs for spare parts, from The New York Times, we read: ‘Pigs can carry pathogens that can find their way to humans. If a deadly virus, for example, were to emerge in transplant patients, it could spread with catastrophic consequences. It might be years or even decades before symptoms were observed…

‘Indeed, a post-mortem on a Maryland man who was the first patient to receive a pig’s heart found a porcine cytomegalovirus in the organ that had not been detected before the transplant, despite rigorous testing. A closely related virus already infects humans.’”

I attempted also to leave that comment on the website a few hours ago but I can’t find it there. Perhaps “fluff piece” was too insulting to make the cut. I should follow my own advice and be nicer to the media. Here’s a gift link to the article. You can comment beneath it. The author, health reporter Roni Caryn Rabin, is responding to comments.

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In the March 9 Sunday Times (London), Rod Liddle offers this summary and comment on the Danish piglet art story:

“An artist called Marco Evaristti put on an exhibition designed to ‘raise awareness of the suffering to animals caused by mass meat production’. The centrepiece of this show, in Copenhagen, was three piglets kept in an upturned shopping trolley and gradually starved. The piglets – named Lucia, Simon and Benjamin, since you asked – were denied all food and water. Luckily some animal rights activists stole the three little piggies and they are now living their best lives, supposedly.

“I’m no great fan of the Danish pork industry. But it is one thing to countenance the death of a pig because you quite fancy a bacon sandwich. It is entirely another to kill piglets because you think your work is more important than their existence.”

Well, the Associate Press shared that it wasn’t “some animal rights activists” who stole the piglets – it was a friend of the artist. That has led me to suspect that the whole thing, including the happy ending for the pigs, was a publicity stunt. It sure got a lot of publicity, but I hope not everybody considering the matter will decide that fancying a bacon sandwich is a good enough reason to subject pigs to what they go through, for life, especially on factory farms.

You can respond to the Times at letters@thetimes.co.uk but we always have the best chance of getting published in papers local to us, and most large papers have covered the story.

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The weekend edition of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered included a piece that wasn’t quite as bad as I expected it to be – but warning, it might make your blood boil. Titled “Lambing Season.” Reporter Avery Keatley visits sheep farmer Amanda Cather during “lambing season,” as one of her sheep, named Daenerys, is giving birth. We hear from Cather:

“So these lambs, they’ll either be kept on the farm for breeding stock, or they will become butcher lambs. We’ll raise them until they’re 10 or 11 months old, and then we’ll take them to a butcher shop in Pennsylvania that does our butchering for us. That day that we load the lambs is always hard. It’s always a hard day, no matter how many times we do it. You know, we’re not religious people, but a blessing is not too strong of a word for what we send them with – and gratitude, just our intense, intense gratitude for their lives. Often, we get the question from people, how can you eat animals that you raise and you know? And at this point, I don’t eat animals that I don’t raise because I feel like I owe them the honor and respect of knowing that their life was a certain way. So we’re able to give them a life here that is stress-free as much as we can, and then we give them as stress-free of an end as we possibly can.

“I know that as a livestock farmer there are people who disagree with kind of the fundamental premise of eating animals and raising animals for meat. But if we are going to eat them, then I think we should raise them. And I think we should face what we’re doing head-on. And we do. I think as farmers, we’re fortunate to be just very connected to those threads of life and death that are very – you know, the line between them can be very thin. The cycle of energy is the thing I think that really stands out to me lately – is the way that the energy from the sun goes into the pastures, is consumed by the animals, turned into protein, goes into our bodies, and our bodies will eventually return that cycle. And that feels right. It doesn’t feel scary.

Our lives, they’re short. We don’t know the circumstances of their ending. And the best we can do is try to be good stewards while we’re here of whatever it is that we’re given to steward, and we’re all given to steward something. We’re all given something to contribute. This is our small way of contributing.”

If you think Cather is evil and the segment is horrifying (my instinctive but fleeting reaction) ask yourself how the world would be if people followed her lead and refused to eat animals they didn’t raise – how many billions less animals would be killed, with none enduring the horror of factory farming. While the segment doesn’t share a way of looking at the world that aligns with mine, given that DawnWatch is an unabashedly a vegan endeavor, I do think it is heading in the right direction. And I suspect Cather is a vegan in the making.

Now, if you think the segment makes perfect sense – including all that love lavished on the mama whose babies are going to be stolen for a roast dinner – I urge you to visit the brilliant Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat site, and watch their ad, and ask yourself what the difference is.

Here is a link to the NPR segment for those interested.

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In other major media animal news, which I have shared on the DawnWatch X Feed and DawnWatch Facebook page over the last week:

The Los Angeles Times covered the arrest of a man seen beating a sea lion who was suffering from domoic acid poisoning – no update on the condition of the rescued sea lion.

The Independent brought us a shocking report from the UK of a halal slaughterhouse where sheep are being dismembered while conscious.

High Country News tells us that despite statewide restrictions on these pesticides in California, a recent study found that as many as 13% of turkey vultures in the Los Angeles area tested positive for the chemicals.

The Washington Post covered PETA’s suit against the NIH, with PETA saying it has a right to hear and see rhesus macaque monkeys who express “physical and psychological pain and suffering” stemming from years of caging and experimentation. Here’s a gift link to that one.

The New York Post covered activists with NY Class who argue that New York’s live poultry markets, which have reopened, should be shut permanently not only on animal cruelty grounds but for public safety.

A Fox Weather story shared on AOL, about the appearance of orcas in Monterey Bay, California, shared that a marine biologist “noted that the salmon population and the health of many Southern Resident killer whales are so compromised that the whales could become extinct within 25-50 years.” (That one is to share with our pescatarian friends who love salmon.)

A CBS News report on discusses vaccinating poultry against H5N1 Avian Flu:

“Kennedy said the new opposition from his health agencies was based on concerns that vaccinating poultry without being able to provide sterilizing immunity would amount to ‘turning those birds into mutant factories,’ resulting in worrying genetic changes to the virus.

“’That could actually accelerate the jump to human beings,’ Kennedy said…

“The Biden administration opted against vaccinating poultry for different reasons, former officials said.

“Agriculture officials had worried it could lead to missed spread of the virus through asymptomatic birds, trigger bans on imports of U.S. poultry products and be logistically challenging to thoroughly administer to massive commercial flocks.”

And finally, with Okja being one of my favorite films of all time, I am delighted to share today’s Los Angeles Times review of Bong Joon Ho’s latest, Mickey 17, about which  Amy Nicholson writes, “’Mickey 17,’ a sloppy but enjoyable sci-fi comedy set in the year 2054, mashes together the monsterphobia of The Host, the animal-rights activism of ‘Okja’ the environmental doomsaying of ‘Snowpiercer’ and the social inequality of ‘Parasite,’ that last one the Oscar winner that handed Bong the blank check to make a combo platter of his greatest hits.”

Enjoy!

Yours and all animals’,
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch