There is just so much good reporting on animal-human relationships right now. I’m glad to see it.
Something that entertained me this week: Slate did a piece examining the ethics of eating lab-grown bald eagle (or other unusual) meat.
I have done sufficient work on lab-grown meat to be reasonably certain it won’t come to market at scale in my lifetime. In the magical someday? Sure. In small amounts, eaten by elites? Probably. In your grocery store? I really, really doubt it.
One of the things that lab-grown meat companies like to gloss over is the fact that, as this detailed analysis I consulted on unpacks, you’d need some very specifically raised animals to provide each biopsy of tissue that cell cultures would be grown from. They’d likely need to be part of a donor herd that lived in fairly sterile conditions.
I can’t imagine a sterile donor aerie of bald eagles would do very well. They don’t strike me as an animal that would lend itself to domestication.
Shortish
Plant-based diets crucial to saving global wildlife, says report (The Guardian; Damian Carrington; United Kingdom)
The approximate size of various ocean animals with a Bernie for scale. A Thread. (Twitter; Rebecca R. Helm; mittens)
New collaborative Global Burden of Animal Diseases program launched (ILRI (press release); Tezira Lore; international)
Decolonizing species names (The Revelator; John R. Platt)
Longish
In the oceans, the volume is rising as never before (The New York Times; Sabrina Imbler; under the sea)
New China swine fever strains point to unlicensed vaccines (Reuters; Dominique Patton; Beijing, China)
President Joe Biden can give more dogs like Major a second chance (USA Today; Arin Greenwood; Delaware & DC, United States of America)
Investigation: Dutch, Japanese pension funds pay for Amazon deforestation (Mongabay; Fernanda Wenzel, Naira Hofmeister, Pedro Papini, trans. Maya Johnson; Brazil)
Stuff from me:
My most recent work.
The last word:
I am never going to recover from learning, last year, that all aquatic mammals: Crawled out of the water and evolved into mammals, suited for living on land. Lost gills. Started sunbathing. > CRAWLED BACK IN and evolved into mammals with COMPLICATED WORKAROUNDS. (Twitter thread)
All images in The Quick Fox are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.