In mid-June, a giraffe named Gracie escaped from a ranch in Texas located about 100 miles west of San Antonio. An intensive search — including helicopters and drones — is still underway in Texas Hill Country, and a $5,000 award awaits whoever finds her. Like many charismatic animals who’ve escaped their confines, Gracie has gone […]

You might have particular feelings about snakes, but for millions of Americans they’re a member of the household. And their popularity as pets has only been growing: From 2018 to 2024, the number of households that own a pet snake rose from about 810,000 to 1.3 million. And the share of snake-owning households with more […]

A flesh-eating parasite that the United States spent decades eradicating, and even longer trying to keep at bay, has now shown up in Texas. Federal officials confirmed this week that New World screwworm, a fly whose larvae burrow into living tissue, had been found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County in Southwest Texas. It […]

In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off […]

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat. Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her […]

Last year, nearly 130 million pigs were raised for meat in the US, but they didn’t come out of nowhere; they had parents. Or as pork producers call them, “breeder pigs.” Since the 1970s, producers have been keeping most of the breeding females — known as sows — in tiny enclosures called gestation crates. It’s […]

Pádraig Mac Niocaill from PBP Mid Ulster branch describes the damage done to the largest body of freshwater on the island, which also supplies 40% of the drinking water in the six counties. 40 years on the fight continues. Join us this Sunday.

Last week, in a video interview with Elle magazine, the pop star Billie Eilish was asked the following question: “What’s one hill you’d die on?” “Y’all not gonna like me for this one,” Eilish said. “Eating meat is inherently wrong.” She then added that it’s hypocritical to say you love all animals but also eat […]

Sentience is hot these days. Partly because of the development of impressive new AI systems, everyone seems to be asking: How do we know if something is sentient? While consciousness means simply having a subjective point of view on the world — a feeling of what it’s like to be you — sentience is the […]

It’s exceptionally rare that the tiny, perpetually marginal, and politically outmatched animal rights movement manages to capture national attention. A lack of attention is that movement’s core problem and central organizing question. How can it convince the public to make space in their minds for something they’d really, really prefer not to: the industrialized torture […]

For nearly a decade, Lauren served as the animal control manager for a county in North Georgia. It was a round-the-clock, always-on kind of job, in which she and her employees responded to animal cruelty and neglect cases, dog attacks, and animal escapes. Saving animals was, and still is, Lauren’s passion in life. But some […]

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from […]

Over the weekend, I attended an event staffed by dozens of volunteers, mostly women. As things wrapped up, one woman was looking for another specific person. She was standing with her legs firmly planted to support her frame as she sorted through something or another on the table in front of her, a pair of […]

In January, a 24-year-old nutrition influencer named Jacob Smith made the grave mistake of becoming a little too curious about tofu. Smith had read a study about the health benefits of eating less meat and figured he’d try to replace a small amount of the animal products he ate with plant-based foods. So, as content […]

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today. The dairy industry uses cows to make two things: milk and baby cows. The milk, we know its fate. But what of those 9 million babies born to dairy cows each year? Many […]

Earlier this month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico eked out victory in a heated race to become Texas’s Democratic nominee for the US Senate race this November. Texans haven’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, and a lot of hopes are riding on Talarico’s longshot campaign to change that. But this week, an […]

Over the last two decades, the availability of plant-based foods has exploded. You can get a meat-free patty in your Burger King Whopper if that’s your thing, buy realistic “chicken” nuggets at your local grocery store, or order marbled plant-based steak from food startups. But one animal-free food category has truly escaped containment from the vegan […]

“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.” This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken. […]

Outside the rural town of Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, about 2,000 dogs await their fate in small wire cages. They are confined at Ridglan Farms, a large-scale breeding operation that supplies beagles for research labs across the country. The current law treats the dogs as property of the company. We and others suggest that the conditions […]

Nearly half of the eggs sold in the US today come from cage-free farms. That’s an astounding turn, considering that in the early 2000s, just a few percent did. But according to pledges made by many of the country’s largest food companies — from McDonald’s to IHOP to Starbucks — most of the 94 billion […]

I grew up in the Maryland suburbs and spent much of my childhood in the woods. I would turn over rocks to find shiny centipedes and watch small schools of fish glide through the creek as box turtles sunbathed on the banks. A squirrel’s frenzied search for a nut would capture my full attention. I […]

Much like their human cousins, baby macaques crave comfort. Punch, a forlorn-looking young Japanese macaque monkey, went viral last week after being pictured clinging to an orange IKEA orangutan plushie at Japan’s Ichikawa City Zoo. Abandoned by his mother after being born in captivity, baby Punch has struggled to make friends in his concrete enclosure, […]

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a strikingly cruel policy, even for this administration: speeding up the kill lines at America’s chicken, turkey, and pig slaughterhouses. The plan will make one of the country’s most dangerous jobs — working in a meat processing plant — even more unsafe, labor advocates argue. The new […]

The Trump administration’s scientific agenda has been widely characterized — rightly so — as a war on scientific progress. But, hear me out here: There is more to the story. This administration’s science policy is being shaped not solely by anti-science ideologues, but also by a motley coalition of players who have distinct criticisms of […]

Statistically speaking, a lot of your neighbors probably have a dog or cat. But there’s a decent chance that there are at least a few parrots in your neighborhood, too: About one in 20 US households owns at least one pet bird. There’s the popular parakeet, a small parrot native to Australia and other regions […]

After decades of declining sales, whole milk consumption has been on the upswing in recent years. Its return was crowned when, last month, the Trump administration published updated federal dietary guidelines that recommend full-fat dairy, like whole milk, and passed a new law that allows public schools to serve whole milk, which had been effectively […]