Grief, compassion fatigue, and the cost of being an animal rights activist
Grief, compassion fatigue, and the cost of being an animal rights activist
Many animal rights activists are living with compassion fatigue, moral injury, online harassment, financial precarity, and internal movement conflict that gradually erode a sense of safety and hope, not because they are weak or overly sensitive, but because human nervous systems are not built to hold this much unprocessed harm indefinitely. If you are struggling, reach out to people you trust and use the resources created specifically for activists and animal care workers. REVOLUTION PHILADELPHIA: Last week, we lost Adam Altman. Adam was an animal rights activist who showed up with care and consistency in work that is emotionally demanding […]
‘Punch’: Even when lab monkeys are given stuffed toys for comfort, they suffer miserable lives and deaths
‘Punch’: Even when lab monkeys are given stuffed toys for comfort, they suffer miserable lives and deaths
Amid all the media and social media attention devoted to the Japanese macaque Punch, many if not necessarily all of the reporters, commentators, and audience have missed the greater part of the story. Punch is representative of the many thousands primates still being used in sadistic experiments, still being held captive in zoos where they can’t express their natural behaviors. Punch shouldn’t just be a viral clip, he should be a reminder that animals aren’t ours to experiment on, or to display for human entertainment. ANIMALS 24-7: The most famous Japanese macaque ever is doubtless Panchi-kun, called Punch for short […]
STUDY: Animals’ perception of time is linked to the pace of their life
STUDY: Animals’ perception of time is linked to the pace of their life
A research study showed variation in time perception is largely driven by the pace of a species’s lifestyle. A cup falling to the floor, a car speeding past on the street or a series of lightning strikes – for us humans, an event on the scale of a second is typically a blur. But animals all process a different amount of visual information in a second. To us, a dragonfly may seem like Neo in the Matrix experiencing bullet time, seeing the world in slow motion. Hence while a second may be physically the same for every organism on Earth, […]
