On 26 July, Shambo, a temple bull from Skanda Vale Hindu community near Carmarthen, was taken for slaughter by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), after testing positive for tuberculosis.
Sanjay Mistry from the Hindu Forum of Britain explains that the case was not a clash between western scientific and eastern mystical worlds.
The slaughter of Shambo high- lights a number of ethical dilemmas around nonviolence, veganism and animal rights as…
Campaigners have been in Antarctic waters in recent weeks, monitoring - and attempting to disrupt - the activities of the Japanese whaling fleet.
While they will not actively cooperate - due, publicly at least, to tactical differences in relation to interpretations of nonviolence - Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd have both had vessels in the area, and both campaigners and whalers took a few physical and verbal knocks in mid-February.
Search and rescueThe drama began on 8…
Recent weeks have seen two victories that should roll back years of deteriorating standards and ensure a healthy food environment for children across the country.
On 19 May, Education Secretary Alan Johnson announced new minimum nutrition standards that will be effective from September 2006. The first unhealthy victims are meals high in low-quality meats, salt, fat and sugar. Vending machines and tuck shops are also being given the boot. Meanwhile, the Nottingham-based Veggies…
Eating meat causes environmental destruction, damages human health and inflicts immense suffering on billions of animals. And the solution to all these problems is in our own hands: stop eating animals now. Through popular campaigns, solid research and undercover expose's, Viva! works to get the message out about vegetarianism and animal cruelty in the most imaginative and effective ways possible.
After launching 11 years ago with little money, some contacts, alot of experience and…
In December and January activists from environmental groups Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd battled with a Japanese whaling fleet in the ocean off the coast of Antarctica.
Each year Japan carries out its “scientific” whaling programme in the Antarctic and North Pacific. The 100-day hunt for Minke and endangered Fin whales is illegal and violates international conservation regulations.
The 2005/6 hunt began when six Japanese ships reached their destination off the coast of…
The back-cover blurb describes this book as "superbly accessible" - a phrase I greet with caution as it usually indicates a subject the publishers don't actually expect their readers to understand.
This time, however, it is the author's background rather than her subject which caused the publicity department to pull out the reassuring language. Alison Hills is a philosophy lecturer, so her book debates the status of animals against a formal framework of moral ethics.
As…
The Marine Connection, an international London-based charity dedicated to the conservation of dolphins and whales, regularly highlights its concerns about the use of dolphins in war. Iraq 2003 was no different.
Once again the US Navy used marine mammals from its Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Three (EODMU3) based in Coronado, California, and nine dolphins were flown to the Gulf, along with a number of trained sea lions from the navy's Mammal Maritime Unit in San Diego.…
