Animal Rights News

Police in Thailand last week detained a key figure in one of the world’s most notorious wildlife trafficking syndicates, accused of smuggling large numbers of rhino horns and elephant tusks…

PALEMBANG, Indonesia -- Wildlife activists in Indonesia suspect poachers poisoned an elephant found with its tusks hacked off in a protected forest in southern Sumatra. The body of the male…

MEDAN, Indonesia — Several NGOs in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province have established a joint team of legal experts to focus on addressing environmental crimes in the region. “This team is…

An animal advocacy group wants landowners with captive wildlife for hunt to be governed under the same rules that govern humane and legal treatment of animals in the US. A…

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to enshrine in its constitution the right of nature to exist and thrive. Then Bolivia passed its Law of the Rights of Mother…

Argentina Justice Elena Amanda Liberatori has the difficult and unprecedented task in the next few months of 2015 of deciding the basic question of whether the orangutan Sandra would be…

Frightened and malnourished female elephant calf in an enclosure in Zimbabwe prior to exportation to China. Photo courtesy of ELEPHANTS DC. A hundred thousand African elephants were killed by poachers…

  An orangutan in the forest of Central Kalimantan. Photos by Rhett A. Butler One question that desperately needs to be asked when we talk about the rights of an…

Company supplied Petsmart, Petco, as well as some zoos Nearly five years ago, a seven month long investigation, led by PETA, into an exotic animal wholesaler finally came to a…

In what appears to be corruption in high places, the international body charged with protecting endangered species has turned a blind eye to massive illegal trade of endangered Great Apes.…

In Sri Lanka, an underground wildlife racket has been simmering for a while. And a recent incident has brought it to a boil. On the night of May 1st, a…

In a world where extinctions are almost commonplace and global warming barely raises an eyebrow, very few of us can return to find the places we grew up in unsullied…

India’s last dancing bear has retired. As the stars of their cruel little roadshows, sloth bears danced to the piercing sounds of the damru for hundreds of years. Orphaned by…

A rehabilitation center for retired dancing bears sounds like a typo. Yet this is exactly what the animal rights NGOs Four Paws and Foundation Brigitte Bardot created 13 years ago…

In 2010, Bulgarian airport authorities confiscated 108 African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) from a smuggler. Last month, the 28 parrots who survived the stress of being stuffed into dog kennels,…

The 2013 Zoos and Aquariums: Committing to Conservation (ZACC) conference runs from July 8th—July 12th in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by the Blank Park Zoo. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com…

On March 21st, the organization Save the Elephants posted on their Facebook page that two African elephants had been poached inside a nearby reserve: "Sad news from the north of…

Slender loris. Photo by: Arun Kanagavel. Caught in a beam of torchlight, the eyes of the slender loris reflect back a striking glow. In an effort to better understand these…

Behind bars and waiting for science: the power of genetic testing for the Addis Fifteen. Male and female Addis lions in the Addis Ababa Lion Zoo. Photo courtesy of: Klaus…

Sun bear in a cage in Indonesia. Photo by: Chris R. Shepherd/TRAFFIC Southeast Asia. In the forests of Asia, bears are being captured. These captives will be sent to bear…