I led my DawnWatch weekly round-up for 2-8-2026 with Kevin Morrison’s superb Los Angeles Times piece but wanted to give it its own post today, with room for a full printout and our podcast discussion.

That timing is fortuitous, as the piece is syndicated today, February 9, in all of the following McClatchy papers:

Sacramento Bee
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
The Kansas City Star
The State (Columbia, SC)
Fresno Bee
Lexington Herald-Leader
Wichita Eagle
Modesto Bee
Durham Herald-Sun
The Tribune (San Luis Obispo)
Bradenton Herald
Bellingham Herald
The Olympian (WA)
Merced Sun-Star
The Island Packet (SC)

If any of those is local to you, will you take a moment to send a quick letter to the editor in response? Just a few lines, as shorter letters are the most likely to be printed. You can Google “Send a letter to the editor Your Paper” to get the email address or form to fill out, and always include your full name, address, and phone number in case editors want to verify that you wrote it.

If you happen to subscribe to any of those papers and have access to a gift link to the article, please share it widely!

And Californians, please consider the Sacramento Bee to be local to you as the letters section is read by your state legislators!

You may be inspired by activist Valerie Belt’s perfect letter in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Mark Thompson and I discussed Kevin’s op-ed on Mark’s popular podcast last Monday, February 2. I disclosed that Kevin is a long-time dear friend whom I met when I was interviewing JM Coetzee up at Stanford for my KPFK radio show, Watchdog. Kevin was the engineer, and he was so moved by Coetzee’s reading that he went veggie on the spot!

I note that Kevin was concerned when the current government started shutting down research labs until he came to realize that the research was largely on animals. His own research led him to conclude that with regard to ALS, animal testing was largely a waste of money and all too precious time.

I think you’ll enjoy the podcast as the host is so passionate and eloquent on this issue.

Will you check it out?

And please don’t forget to hit the like button if you enjoy it!

Yours, and all animals’,

Karen Dawn of DawnWatch

Karen Dawn is the founder of the staunchly nonpartisan animal advocacy nonprofit organization DawnWatch — the Daily Animal World News Watch - which encourages the media to cover animal issues well so that people can make informed choices in line with their own values.

She is the author of Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals, and of columns published in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and more. Learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Dawn

Many readers will be familiar with the Buddhist fable of Sai Weng. When his horse runs away, his neighbors console him in the face of his “bad fortune” which he does not judge as necessarily bad. It just is. The next day his horse returns with a friend, so Sai Weng has two horses. Now he is congratulated by his neighbors on his “good fortune.” I’ll tie up that tale later, after I question the assumptions that have been widely applied by animal advocates to the federal government’s new dietary guidelines.

The new guidelines have greatly increased the protein intake recommended by longstanding official guidance. At first glance that would seem to be bad news for animals since a pitifully small proportion of the population gets the majority of protein from plants. But assuming that tiny proportion won’t now turn to animals for protein, the new guidelines may be, counterintuitively, good for animals overall.

Where previous guidelines ranked fish and poultry at the top of the protein list, the new guidelines tell us beef is back.

In 2016 Peter Singer and I co-authored an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled, in the print edition, “Suffering by the numbers: If you give up red meat but continue eating fish and chicken you may end up increasing animal cruelty.” We explained:

“Replacing pigs and cows with birds and fish, though, usually leads to the slaughter of many more animals, because, with a few exceptions, birds and fish are smaller. If you were to eat a pound of beef a day — say a huge steak or four beef patties — you might take a year to consume a single animal. If you were instead to eat a daily pound of chicken or salmon, you might eat hundreds of animals per year.”

The number of animals killed is not the only issue. As bad as cows have it, the lives of those raised for beef are generally less hideous than those of other animals in the food industry. We see cows grazing on hillsides because cattle raised for beef spend the first 6-10 months of their lives grazing with their mothers, before being sent to hideous Harris Ranch style feedlots to be fattened up for slaughter. Chickens and turkeys, by contrast, are mostly raised in huge, packed sheds and never see sunlight.

Under the new guidelines, whole eggs, rather than just egg-whites, are back for breakfast. Despite decades of activist efforts, the majority of egg-laying hens in the USA still live in small cages, meaning each egg consumed represents a full day of unmitigated misery for an animal. So isn’t it better for animals if folks who eat eggs get back to 3-egg omelets rather than 6 egg-white omelets?

Whole milk is back too; nonfat milk is now yesterday’s news. Given the exploding market for plant milks, of course it’s disappointing to see the powerful dairy lobby get such strenuous backing from the government. Two decades ago, my op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, “Got Milk: You’ve got Problems,” spelled out the many reasons for dumping dairy, a product best-suited for baby cows. But if folks drinking nonfat milk swap to whole milk, there’s a good chance they’ll drink less of it, given it is so much more calorie dense and satiating. So regardless of the impact on human health, moving those people from nonfat to full-fat doesn’t hurt animals.

Sure, pushing beef and dairy is not great for the environment, which is an irony I explored in my Substack piece, “RFK Jr and Animals: The Good, the Bad and the Beef Tallow.” But the fish and chicken pushed so hard in previous dietary guidelines were bad too. Peter Singer’s contribution to the “co-authored” piece I shared above was the point:

“We recognize that people may avoid red meat on environmental grounds. Research suggests that pound for pound chicken is responsible for less environmental degradation than beef. Though some people may snicker about the impact of methane, or ‘cow farts,’ the warming potential of methane is 30 times that of carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, a diet that is responsible for hundreds of times more suffering is not made ethical by producing a lower level of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The late, great, Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns objected, rightly, to those lines in her letter published in the Los Angeles Times, noting that in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States where her chicken sanctuary is situated, “More than 5,000 chicken houses hold a half a billion birds at any given time on a tiny strip of land. The 750,000 tons of waste produced annually by these captive birds has made the poultry industry the primary polluter of the Chesapeake Bay and coastal bays of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia.”

Killing waterways kills fish, just as eating fish does, thereby killing marine mammals and birds who are starving for lack of fish.

The fish themselves suffer horrendously, as our op-ed explained:

“While the differences between the nervous systems of fish and other animals have long been used as the basis for the argument that fish do not feel pain, recent experiments have left no doubt that they do. Fish who have irritants injected into their lips will rub their lips incessantly against their tank walls — unless those irritants are accompanied by pain relievers.”

For those who are not aware of the significant danger to human health of increasing animal protein intake, I wholeheartedly recommend The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health. Even better might be the fun documentary based on its findings, Forks Over Knives. But as increased cancer growth and heart disease among humans is not an animal advocacy issue, I will sidestep it here.

I will return instead to Sai Weng who now has two horses and is being congratulated by his neighbors. The next day his son works with the new horse, gets thrown, breaks his leg, and therefore can’t work on the farm for months. As Sai Weng’s neighbors console him, Sai Weng remains circumspect.

Then an army comes to town, rounding up the young men for the front line. But Sai Weng’s son is not taken, his life spared by his broken leg.

I’m a fan of Sai Weng’s circumspection. It’s natural to feel disappointed by a step backwards in guidelines that had been increasingly embracing plant-based diets. But all forward movement encounters setbacks, and this one, the move away from fish, chicken, yolkless eggs, and copious quantities of nonfat cow’s milk, could be a boon for animals overall.

Yours, and all animals’,
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch

If you enjoyed this post, please don’t forget to give it a thumbs up so that it is shown to more people. Subscribers to this Substack can comment, and engagement is profoundly appreciated.

Karen Dawn is the founder of the staunchly nonpartisan animal advocacy nonprofit organization DawnWatch- the Daily Animal News Watch - which encourages the media to cover animal issues well so that people can make informed choices in line with their own values.

She is the author of Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals, and of columns published in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and more. Learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Dawn

Wicked reworks the story of The Wizard of Oz, framing Elphaba, the Wicked Witch, as a misunderstood animal rights activist. I watched Part Two, Wicked: For Good, the night after Brigitte Bardot died. I was struck by their parallel experience as I saw Elphaba skywrite a warning about the Wizard, only to have another sorceress edit the letters into a threat against the people of Oz.

Brigitte and Elphaba’s core concern was society’s cruelty to animals. Our most lucrative industries rely on that cruelty, so anybody who calls attention to it must be silenced. Or the voice they give animals must be distorted as it is amplified so that the real message gets lost.

Bardot left acting at the age of 39, with the New York Times choosing as its quote of the day on December 28^th, 2025,

“I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”

In a 1994 interview she said, “I only live in the world of animal protection. I speak only of that. I think only of that. I am obsessed.”

That is so like Elphaba’s obsession. The Wizard offers to grant Elphaba a wish, assuming she will want to lose her green skin and appear normal. She says,

“No. My heart’s desire is for you to help the Animals. Something bad is happening to them. They need you.”

We read in the Times article of Bardot’s work “denouncing cruelty to animals”:

“And her list of enemies is long: the Japanese and Norwegians for hunting whales; the Spanish for fighting bulls; the Russians for killing baby seals; the Filipinos for eating dogs; the Chinese for not stopping tiger hunting; pharmaceutical companies for vivisection, and furriers, hunters and circus operators the world over….”

In that light, it’s unsurprising to see Vogue Magazine denounce Bardot upon her death. Could that animosity have anything to do with her attempts to shut down an industry the magazine promoted for decades, contributing to the tortured lives and deaths of millions of innocent beings?

I often advise fellow animal rights activists that it is wisest to stand for animals without standing against other humans. Animals will be better served if their representatives avoid making enemies with the larger public. And so I wish that in Bardot’s open letter, condemning animal sacrifice and goat beheadings on Reunion Island, she hadn’t chosen language that makes us recoil. I wish she hadn’t referred to “aboriginals who have kept the genes of savages” and a “degenerate population still soaked in barbarous ancestral traditions.”

Yet I better understand the offensive language having read Bardot’s line:

“Sometimes I cry myself to sleep thinking about the suffering of animals.”

What an uncanny parallel we see with Elphaba, who, in deep grief, gives up on the idea of doing good deeds and sings, “Let all Oz be agreed — I’m wicked through and through.” Both Elphaba and Brigitte got to the point where they couldn’t care less what humanity thought of them.

Too often we see racist sentiments surface through pain. On the Mark Thompson Show I compare the lines in Bardot’s letter to the way people rail against “The Chinese” or “The Koreans” because of how some people in China and Korea treat dogs. I fear generalization, and even xenophobia, may be human nature, whereas measured reflection is less so and requires effort. I am sad for that, because when animal rights activists hurt people, they inadvertently hurt animals.

Like Elphaba, Brigitte judged allies and enemies by whether they would hurt or help animals. We saw that metric in action as she backed Marine le Pen of France’s National Front. Much has been made of that support, often with little understanding of Le Pen’s intentional efforts to court animal advocates as a distinct constituency. Bardot wrote to Le Pen, “Finally a party which will take into account animal suffering!” Given that note, and Brigitte’s vow to speak and think only of animal protection, we would be mistaken to attribute her support for Le Pen to a wholesale wider support of right-wing issues.

Finally, I wish to address Bardot’s supposed ”homophobia.” I was shocked to read about that on the day she died, having never known a Hollywood actress who is not surrounded by, and thoroughly comfortable with, gay men. As it turns out, in her 2003 book, “Un Cri dans le Silence,” Bardot used unnecessarily harsh language to express her distaste for a specific style of gay man. She wrote:

“Some homosexuals have always had a finer taste and a greater talent, a class, a stature, an intelligence, a wit, and an aesthetic sense that set them apart from the masses—until all that degenerated into cheap queens, extravagant drag queens of all kinds, and fairground freaks (phénomènes de foire), who were unfortunately encouraged in this decadence by the lifting of bans that once curbed the most extreme excesses.”

To clarify that, responding to some well-deserved outrage, she wrote:

“Homosexuals are people like any others, with their qualities and their defects, and among whom I find my best friends. I find it a pity for all gays that some of them behave like fairground freaks, jiggling their bottoms, putting their little fingers in the air and with their little castrato voices moaning about what those ghastly heteros put them through.

“Apart from my husband—who maybe will cross over one day as well—I am entirely surrounded by gays. For years they have been my support, my friends, my adopted children, my confidants.

“My book is not a message of hate. It is the cry of an alert... a cry for help for a society that is falling apart.”

(Some translations of her clarifying letter keep the word “homo,” where I have used gay, but if you put the original French lines into Google Translate, the word homo is indeed translated as “gay.” That’s because homo does not have the pejorative connotations in France that it has in English, so leaving it as “homo” misrepresents the tone.)

Again, I don’t like the “fairground freaks” language and other harsh imagery and am sorry she chose to be insulting. But if you appreciate nuance and have powers of discernment, I think you’ll agree that labelling her a homophobe isn’t accurate. She was a woman who took great pride in her womanliness, hated seeing femininity ridiculed, and who didn’t like to see gay men, her most intimate social group, represented in what she felt was a bad light. And she expressed those feelings unkindly. That’s a shame.

In the last paragraph of my 2025 news Roundup, I question a social justice purity test for animal advocates. Aren’t those who objected to posts honoring Brigitte Bardot but didn’t rally against posts celebrating meat-eating Robert Redford revealing some inherent speciesism? More common were posts willing to commend Bardot’s stand for animals while claiming that she was awful on other issues. Extending the Redford analogy, that would be like celebrating his acting while thinking it necessary to mention he wasn’t vegetarian. I hope few of us did that.

As we discuss Brigitte Bardot, we must focus on her stand for animals. Her activism, like her life, was passionate rather than careful. She used rageful words against those whose cruelty to animals she could not forgive.

She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, and most important to her, she was a warrior for animals. Let’s remember her that way.

Yours, and all animals’,
Karen Dawn

Karen Dawn is the founder of the staunchly nonpartisan animal advocacy nonprofit organization DawnWatch- the Daily Animal News Watch - which encourages the media to cover animal issues well so that people can make informed choices in line with their own values.

She is the author of Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals, and of columns published in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and more. Learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Dawn

On the one hand, a fashion icon poses proudly with a bag made of elephant skin and maintains 354 million Instagram followers. On the other, the very real possibility that AI will wipe out humanity fills many with dread.

I admit to being conflicted.

I used to wonder what would happen if beings from another solar system came to Earth and chose to treat humans the way we treat the other animals on this planet. Now, as humans create beings likely to be able to assume power over us, we need not look to outer space to make that scenario worthy of consideration.

If I posted the photo above (from Sumnima Kandangwa’s thoughtful South China Morning Post piece) on Facebook or X, it would be to invite hatred of Kim Kardashian. Subtitle notwithstanding, that’s not my intent here on Substack, where interactions seem to be on a somewhat higher plane. I share it in the hope that some of you will share your thoughts, not on this one woman’s sorrowful fashion choice but on the questions this post raises.

Are you torn, as I am, as to whether the disappearance of humanity should be cause for grief or celebration? Do you love life, as I do, dearly, but find it impossible to accept that our easy lives matter more than the lives of abject misery visited upon billions of beings every year for human trivial pleasures?

Do my activist friends believe that we can persuade humanity to act differently? Can we convince people that they can’t claim to love elephants while revering and supporting a celebrity who wears them?

After twenty-five years of activism, I am not sure.

But I haven’t lost all hope yet.

I know that millions will be sickened by the photo above and all it represents, and that in a world of billions, it may only be millions who matter. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Right now, that small group is a few billionaires racing to bring us Artificial Superintelligence. Will they inadvertently achieve, in a few years, what we activists have been striving for over many decades?

Will they free the animals?

Today I share and weigh in on a superb article in the current issue (November 10, 2025) of The New Yorker magazine, titled “Cage Match: How Forty-Three Monkeys United Animal Rights Activists and the Right” (page 34). Penned by Ava Kofman, it covers the escape of most of a large troupe of macaques from the Alpha-Genesis primate breeding facility in South Carolina.

I borrowed and downloaded the e-edition of The New Yorker and listened to the piece podcast-style, for an utterly engrossing, if disturbing, seventy minutes. I understand if already committed animal rights activists wish to spare themselves if such tales enervate them and hamper their work. But if you know little about the primate testing industry, I urge you to read or listen to it and learn more.

It is fitting for it to come out this week, in the wake of the truck crash in Mississippi that led to the escape of eight monkeys, also headed for biomedical research, with five being shot by local law enforcement, two by local residents, and one sad survivor recovered alive after eight days.

LIVES WORSE THAN DEATH

I discussed the Mississippi incident this week in my segment on The Mark Thompson Show, along with Zoe Rosenberg’s felony conviction for chicken rescue, and the government’s planned massacre of barred owls. I share here a brief clip highly relevant to the New Yorker article, particularly to the point that the primates have ahead of them fates worse than death, and noting that some Republicans (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene) have been especially outspoken on this issue:

The New Yorker article focuses on whistleblowing veterinarian Kathy Strickland, whose attempts to improve life for the primates bred by Alpha Genesis faced strong pushback and eventually got her fired. In one section we are reminded of Harry Harlow’s notorious work, which I learned about in The Monkey Wars, by Deborah Blum, a gripping book, based on an evenhanded series of articles for which Blum received a Pulitzer, and which is invaluable for anybody who wants to take a deep dive into this issue.

Kofman writes:

“The psychologist John Gluck was once such a researcher, an experience that he recounts with great candor in a 2016 memoir, ‘Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey.’ Gluck came of age as a scientist in the nineteen-sixties, when the potential gains of primate research were widely viewed as worth any suffering that the animals might endure. As a graduate student, he trained under Harry Harlow, a psychologist who headed the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center. Harlow became famous for his studies of depression and maternal deprivation, some of which involved isolating baby macaques at the bottom of a vertical steel chamber that he’d nicknamed ‘the pit of despair’—an ordeal from which they never fully recovered. In study after study, Harlow, Gluck, and their colleagues found that their primates were sentient, self-aware, and severely distressed. This, Gluck realized, was the paradox: monkeys were celebrated as test subjects for their similarities to humans, but, when it came to the animals’ suffering, those similarities were ‘minimized, ignored, or denied.’

“When Strickland read about these kinds of experiments, she wondered if, by prolonging the lives of research animals, she was merely prolonging their suffering.”

That’s a fair, chilling, and heartbreaking question.

BAINBRIDGE BREEDING FACILITY

Kofman’s New Yorker article discusses resistance to plans to build a massive primate breeding facility in the town of Bainbridge Georgia, giving me an opportunity to wholeheartedly recommend the half-hour documentary, 30,000 Monkeys in Our Backyard, produced by Species Unite on that issue, now free on YouTube. My favorite segment might be the interview with a man whose previous views of PETA had been so negative that he had a “PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals” sticker emblazoned on his truck, and how their help fighting the facility had changed his views on the group. Folks who read my first Substack may recall that I covered the need to find common ground and work with anybody fighting for animals on any issue, regardless of their stance on every animal issue. If you missed it I hope you’ll check it out and comment.

The New Yorker article covers the same issue via a quote from Justin Goodman of the White Coat Waste Project, which Kofman notes “does not concern itself with what people eat, wear, or hunt. ‘We’re a fanatically single-issue coalition,’ Goodman said, ‘and that’s how we’ve been able to broaden the tent.’”

ENMITY FOR ACTIVISTS

I chuckled as Kofman shared the enmity between competing primate breeders, with one activist believing that some of his best anonymous tips against one facility were coming from the founder of another. I was far less amused when the topic moved to the enmity between animal rights activists, with folks at PETA, who, along the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), have done such fantastic work in this field, slinging insults at the White Coat Waste Project, by whom they have felt attacked.

I am a fan of the White Coat Waste Project and would love to tweak the New Yorker article’s subtitle, “How forty-three monkeys united animal rights activists and the right,” and argue that it is the White Coat Waste Project, founded by Republican Anthony Belotti, that has united animal rights activists and the right. Let me also give a shout-out to Animal Wellness Action, whose founder, Wayne Pacelle, mentored me in nonpartisan animal advocacy. That group, (whose work I refer to this week on the Mark Thompson Show, as I discuss of the impending barred owl massacre) has also actively reached out to the right.

The enmity between groups exploded when White Coat Waste, delighted by steps the Trump administration’s Pentagon, EPA and Veterans Affairs departments had taken to end animal testing, found the NIH to be the weak link, with more words than action. They blamed Nicole Kleinstreuer, a hold-over from the Biden administration, for the tepid response and have targeted her, to the great distress of other groups who have worked with Kleinstreuer over the years and see her as an ally.

I understand that fans of Kleinstreuer have hated the attacks, but let’s remember that they are nothing compared to what animals are going through in laboratories. I also understand that the more established groups may be concerned that the attacks on Kleinstreuer are counterproductive. But I firmly believe that social justice movements need good cops and bad cops, an issue I covered in a piece I wrote for the Guardian two decades ago, which the paper provocatively titled “Gandhi’s Way Won’t Do” and which I wish were no longer relevant, but sadly, still is. I wrote:

“But did the Black Panthers seriously damage the American civil rights movement? Rather, they amplified the still radical but sane and nonviolent voice of Martin Luther King.”

Please know that threats of violence are not the DawnWatch way! I even balk at undiplomatic communication, reminding activists in my introductory Substack piece that we can be honest without being insulting. But if other activists fail to follow that path, I know that expressing my anger towards them with even more virulence than I have shown the animal abusers is no way to help animals. We have to trust that all of us who care deeply and passionately have different roles to play and all do our best not to enervate other activists as we play our parts.

TRANSGENDER MICE

In discussing White Coat Waste’s work, Kofman writes, “DOGE terminated millions of dollars in grants for animal experiments, including specific line items that White Coat Waste said it had flagged: a $299,240 grant to create ‘transgender mice.’”

That brings back the whole debacle, with Trump having referred to funds being spent “to make mice transgender” during his State of the Union. CNN quickly fact-checked that, and told the world that the mice weren’t transgender, they were transgenic – the latter being common in animal experimentation. CNN was forced to issue a retraction the following day, because indeed the mice were tampered with to mimic transgenderism, as their write-up now grudgingly acknowledges, but, as brilliant vegetarian Mark Twain quipped, “A lie can make it half-way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.” The lie that Trump had confused transgender mice with Transgenic mice got a lot of help as it was picked up by comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel and Bill Maher the next night. Months later, during his chat with Charlie Kirk, where Kirk raised the issue, we learned that Maher never did get the memo. Harshly rebuked, Kirk said, “I stand corrected” but it is Maher who needs to get his facts straight on that one.

In such turbulent and sensitive times, I feel I must note that my urge to correct the correction should not be taken to mean I am unsympathetic to those who struggle with gender identity issues. I am just more sympathetic to animals being tortured in laboratories than to any other beings. I believe that reasonable people can disagree on whether animals should ever be used for work with the strong potential to save human life, but that the transgender mice experiment exemplifies their more common use – in experiments that get funding to keep the laboratories open by tying research to the hot topic of the day. For example, researchers got funding for hideous Harlow-style maternal deprivation experiments by tying them to drug addiction and AIDS research, decades after Harlow’s work had shown the experiments to be useful, but, for that very reason (the damage done and our similarity to other primates) ethically unacceptable.

Thankfully, as more and more people protest, some politely and some not so, an end to these horrors may be in sight.

ARTICLE STRENGTHS

The New Yorker article, “Cage Match,” covers the expectation that animal welfare violations will be self-reported by facilities to regulators, the lack of limits on “what scientists can do to animals once they enter experiments”, the joke that is the “enrichment” that facilities have been ordered to provide caged animals, and the unreliability of animal tests for predicting human response to drugs, noting, “Of the treatments that show promise in animal studies, around ninety per cent go on to fail in human trials,” with the predictive value achieved from all that suffering being, “little better than what would result merely by chance.”

I urge you to read it, or listen, as I did, and share it widely. Letters to The New Yorker are certainly in order! (Always include your full name, address, phone number, and any relevant professional affiliation to the topic.) And please remember that if you give this Substack a thumbs up, or subscribe (free) so that you can comment, your comments not only let me know that I am not sending these columns out into an abyss, they also encourage the algorithms to send them further. And please know that respectfully voiced disagreement is just as welcome as praise. All of your comments help animals.

Animal Testing

With passionate support from prominent Republicans such as Lara Trump, Laura Loomer and Nancy Mace, the current Trump administration has been talking about ending the horror that is animal testing. While the Washington Times reports that this may be more talk than action, at least there is a call for change. Politco tells us that RFK Jr is firmly on board.

While left-wing media writes RFK Jr off as a crackpot, anybody who watched, with either horror or delight, the speech in which he decided to abandon his presidential bid and undertake MAHA knows that whatever his eccentricities, he is not crazy. Those eccentricities have included treating the corpses of animals distastefully, animals whom it is important to note he did not kill. Surely of greater concern is how his policies are likely to affect live animals.

RFK’s stand for animals is in keeping with some previous attitudes expressed, for example in his endorsement of the beautiful book, “Dominion, The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy,” written by Matthew Scully while Scully worked as a senior speechwriter for President George w Bush. RFK Jr called the book “riveting.” His endorsement referred to “unspeakable and systematic animal cruelty,” and asked whether “we can foster human dignity in a society that treats other sentient beings as production units.”

Dairy Cruelty

How does one reconcile that with his passion for raw cow’s milk? Two thirds of US cows’ milk comes from farms with over 1000 cows, where sentient beings are indeed treated as production units. Even on the smaller farms, which may be more likely to produce some raw milk, a basic fact of the dairy industry remains: cows don’t produce milk without pregnancy and are forcibly impregnated in order to produce calves whose milk we can steal.

At a dairy farm, Oliver Sacks interviewed Temple Grandin, an extraordinary animal welfare advocate who is by no means an animal rights activist. He noted, “the bellowing of the separated calves and mothers, whose distress Temple seemed to feel in her bones….” One of Grandin’s comments on that distress was, “That’s one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby.”

Meanwhile the videos of mother cows, even on bucolic farms, chasing after calves being carted away (videos that appeared online long before AI had us questioning everything we see) would break even the hardest of hearts.

Dairy Pollution

The environmental issues around dairy production make RFK’s enthusiasm for it even more surprising. We saw the first Trump administration exempt “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, from “burdensome regulations” to which other industries must adhere, including reporting the atmospheric release of hazardous substances such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Soon after, the Biden administration cracked down on methane from every major contributing industry, except livestock, which, ironically, contributes the highest volume of that gas, which has 85 times the warming power of C02.

Two decades ago, in a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Got Milk? You’ve got problems,” I noted that an attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment said that in Fresno, in the center of the nation’s dairy industry, one in six children carries an inhaler to school. Now, according to the Central California Asthma Collaborative , it’s one in five.

Dairy cows belch and fart methane, regardless of whether their milk is pasteurized before human consumption. So how can an environmentalist wholeheartedly support the dairy industry?

Beef Industry

Then there’s his quest against seed oils. He endorsed Steak and Shake’s decision to “RFK” its fries by frying them in beef tallow instead of seed oil. Is that how we make obesity-plagued America healthy again? DawnWatch board member Josh Garrett (a world class vegan athlete with a masters in Exercise Science) and I are putting together a separate piece on the folly of swapping out seed oil, which is almost ubiquitous in highly processed food, for beef tallow, instead of choosing to cut out highly processed food -- so I won’t get into the weeds on that here. I will note what should be obvious - if we replace our massive overconsumption of seed oils with massive overconsumption of beef tallow, it will be bad for us on top of being bad for cows and the planet.

Let’s acknowledge that regenerative farming, the buzz word of the moment in elite circles, barely addresses methane and is not a practical way to provide beef for billions worldwide. Even here in the United States the Sierra Club tells us, “The US could not convert to regenerative grazing practices and produce the amount of meat we eat now without using more than twice as much land.”

And let’s remember that about 1.5 million head of cattle are grazed on US public land, with the government, at the behest of the wealthy cattle ranching lobby, running mustangs off that land into hideous holding pens, with those animals too often ending up in slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. A recent Los Angeles Times story about a plan to round up wild horses in California’s Eastern Sierras notes, “Ranchers say the animals are gobbling down plants needed to sustain their cattle.”

Harmful Legislation

As much as RFK Jr’s stand against animal testing is commendable, his so far unmitigated support for beef and dairy is troubling. Those industries hurt animals and decimate the planet, while being highly questionable for human health.

Legislation making its way through Congress, pushed by Big Ag and opposed by small farmers, intends to undo California’s groundbreaking animal welfare laws. RFK Jr could help animals and the planet by taking a stand against the thinly veiled power grab by Big Ag. The rest of us could help by supporting that stand.

Let’s rise above partisan politics to acknowledge the good, no matter who does it, and to apply nonpartisan pressure when more must be done.

Insects

Though most famous as a primatologist, she was deeply concerned with the suffering of all animals. Speaking with strange prescience just a week before she died on what she hoped her legacy would be, she discussed the sentience and emotions we share with all animals, including insects. That reference is crucial given the growing interest in farming insects for food, which is likely to cause even more individual suffering than current factory farming of larger animals (against which she also spoke forcefully) given the numbers involved.

While I imagine men in white coats rolling their eyes at her comments on insects as they initially had about her interactions with chimps, it is common sense to those of us who chase the creatures out of our homes, rather than squashing them, that they experience fear. As usual, Jane Goodall was way ahead of her time: ants have now passed the mirror test, considered a gold standard test for self-awareness.

Meat

Goodall said, “In the late 60s I stopped eating meat. I stopped eating meat when I learned about the intensive animal agriculture and these terrible factory farms and the next time I looked at meat on my plate I thought, this symbolizes fear, pain, and death. So I stopped eating it.”

It is disappointing that lengthy obituaries in the Washington Post and New York Times didn’t even mention that passion, which she spoke about often, even producing a vegan cookbook. One New York Times piece that explored her good health and longevity (she died at 91 while on a speaking tour) failed to even mention her diet though a Business Insider piece focused on it, which would have pleased her.

Winky Smalls

Jane Goodall’s favorite animals were not chimps (too much like us), they were dogs, which Winky Smalls and I learned firsthand on a trip to Washington DC in 2019.

Here’s a little background on Winky:

I visited the Best Friends NKLA (No Kill Los Angeles) shelter in 2016 for a blind date with a different adorable pittie, who, it turned out, was not dog-friendly. That was a dealbreaker, as I take my dogs everywhere, including to off-leash trails and beaches daily, a lifestyle opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted.

Strolling through the shelter I saw a brindle beauty staring up at me out of one eye.

I was so struck by his adorableness that I kept walking. I wanted to provide a home that was sorely needed. I knew that at shelters the tripods often go first, taken by those who assume nobody will want them. Meanwhile the infamous BBDs (Big Black Dogs) and nondescript medium-size mutts are left to languish.

With each dog more beautiful than the next to this beholder, I finally went up the front desk and asked, “Who’s been here the longest, who is great with other dogs?”

The gal at reception said Smalls, then went on about him like a waiter who’d been asked to describe the best dish on the menu.

I learned he was so good with other dogs that they used him as their tester dog to assess new arrivals, because no matter what lunacy the other dog pulled it never turned into a fight.

He’d been there 8 months.

Then she asked me if I had seen him, the one-eyed brindle. My heart leapt.

An attendant brought him into a room where I invited him onto the bench next to me. He curled up with his head against my chest.

I couldn’t believe he had been such a long-standing resident. Were people blind? But after taking the angel home I realized that his immediate comfort with me had been an exception. He was notably standoffish upon meeting strangers and had surely been stuck at the shelter for so long having interviewed poorly with potential adopters.

I was compelled to call the one-eyed wonder Winky but didn’t want him to lose his gangsta roots (he was placed in the shelter when his daddy was arrested) so Smalls became Winky Smalls, and we became inseparable. So much so that when Karen O’Connell (now a DawnWatch board member) and Patrick McDonnell of Mutts invited me to the opening performance of Patrick’s play about Jane Goodall, at the Kennedy Center in D.C., Winky Smalls was my date.

I had met Dr Jane once before, but despite having lived surrounded by celebrities in Pacific Palisades for decades, and counted numerous animal-friendly actorvists as friends, I was so starstruck upon meeting her I could barely put a sentence together. I embarrassed both of us.

At the reception after the play, I got a second chance when Winky and I went up to our hero, who crouched down immediately to greet him. My sweet but utterly standoffish dog marched up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. If I hadn’t caught it on camera, nobody who knows his personality would believe it happened. And if I hadn’t posted the video back in 2019, they’d be forgiven for guessing AI was the secret to the uncharacteristic greeting.

Emboldened by Winky and Jane’s bond, this time I got to chat with my hero for a few minutes, before she was called off to make her welcome address, which began with:

“I’m just so pleased and honored to see all of you here, and so especially pleased that there’s a dog here!”

That dog had never greeted a human the way he had Jane Goodall and has never done so since. My little Buddha, who is kindness canineified, has always struck me as what new age folks call an old soul. Watching him greet Dr Jane was like watching two old souls reunite on this go-round.

On death and legacy

Dr Jane noted in a recent interview that she believed in such things – that there was “something” after death. With Winky almost eleven and slowing down fast, the thought of losing him is unbearable. But since Dr Jane surprised those who loved her by beating him to the rainbow bridge, at least when his time comes I can urge him to run across it and find the only human he ever greeted upon first meeting, at least in this life, with a kiss.

I bet every animal would have done the same if they’d been given the chance. Jane Goodall was a force of good like no other in our broken world.

I close this column with part of a video interview designed to be seen after she died, in which she says that was the role she felt she had been sent here to play, and a song by Stevie Nicks saying much the same: “There are angels here on Earth, sent by God… Up against the world.” And, with much love, a trailer and link to an utterly engrossing documentary about an angel named Jane

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