Green Options

For years and years parents have taken their children to zoos to see exotic animals, animals that they don’t get to see everyday. They want to see lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! High on the the list of animals to be seen are elephants, nature’s gentle giants. These cute, (hardly) cuddly animals are the largest of the land mammals. But all of that could change. Elephants could be removed from zoos forever if In Defense of Animals (IDA) [...]

The romantic imagery painted of Spanish bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s famous book The Sun Also Rises might soon be the stuff of history. Spain is edging ever closer to banning the sport.

Thanks to a petition with 180,000 signatures, the regional government of Spain’s northeastern Catalonia area will soon debate banning the sport tied so closely to Spain’s image. Recent polling indicates that less than 30% of Spanish citizens like bullfighting, reflecting an overall trend that animals should be treated more humanely.

Members of European parliament voted this morning to ban seal products, further tightening the noose on Canada’s archaic and cruel commercial seal hunt. With members voting 550 to 49 in favor of the ban, Europe has sent Canada a clear message: Europeans do not support the hunt.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) welcomed the EU decision. The ban represents a welcome victory in the IFAW’s forty year campaign to end the hunt.

Fishermen in the Philippines accidentally caught and later ate one of the rarest sharks in the world - the megamouth shark.

Only 40 others have been encountered, the World Wildlife Fund said Tuesday. The 1,100-pound, 13-foot megamouth died while struggling in the fishermen’s net on March 30 off Burias island in the central Philippines.

Okay, fishing nets kinda suck!

Nine monkeys escaped from an Oregon Health & Science University animal testing lab after a cage was left unlocked. Four were shortly re-captured and four others have been spotted on campus — but one has entirely eluded authorities.

“One of our cage cleaners accidentally left a lock off a cage,” said Jim Newman, a university spokesman. “The cage was closed; however, the animals were able to slide the door open and get out.”

Just Born — the makers of Marshmallow Peeps — says they’ll be producing whale-shaped, and whale-sized, Marshmallow Peeps in an effort to end Japanese whaling.

The Peep-maker said the joint effort is between Darryl Hannah, The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace, and that they are uniting under the moniker PEEP: People for Everything and Everyone on the Planet.

Did you hear about KFC’s offer to fill the potholes in Louisville and four other US cities? Well, they’ve asked to be allowed to stencil an ad onto the pavement in exchange. Predictably, PETA and their KFC Cruelthy campaign now want some of the action.

“KFC might concentrate instead on improving conditions for the chickens it abuses, but it won’t, so we’re offering to double the money that KFC offered the City of Louisville—if the city will use our ads against KFC cruelty on its potholes instead,” reads a post today on PETA’s blog.

The Humane Society of the United States has returned to court in attempt to stop the sea lion cull near the Bonneville Dam in Washington and Oregon.

Hundreds of sea lions may be trapped and killed in a program aiming to increase the salmon population in the river. The animal welfare group argues that the NOAA Fisheries Service has not sufficiently explained why the sea lions are being singled out despite other predators (like humans) having a greater impact on the salmon population.

A South Korean woman living in Los Angeles has been charged with importing bear bile from China to illegally sell as an aphrodisiac. She faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Investigators intercepted a package addressed the Seongja Hyun while waiting for transport to Los Angeles from a San Francisco sorting facility. Inside the package they found four containers of bear bile, leading them to further investigate Hyun.

Humane Society Canada has sent a representative to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to document and broadcast the commercial killing of over 300,000 young seals beginning today.

Rebecca Aldworth, who has attended the seal hunt for 11 years in a row, has arrived in the area. She will photograph the scene and send live updates through the Humane Society website and via Twitter (@humanesociety or #sealhunt09).

Despite evidence that increasing the seal hunt quota could bring the harp seal population down the dangerous levels, the Canadian government has approved a 55,000 seal increase to quota for the upcoming commercial seal hunt.

The increase brings the total to 338,000 young seals scheduled to be brutally killed. Canada’s Humane Society said the higher quota could bring the downfall of the species, much like times in the past when the population dropped two-thirds in a decade with an inflated quota.