Many millions of people have considered going vegetarian at some point in their life, and millions have. (Hundreds of millions including those who do so as part of their religion.) As climate change, fisheries collapse, desertification, and other crises become less ignorable, many of us will have to consider eating less meat, if not forgoing many animal products entirely.
In my experience, there are four reasons that people go veg:

Personal Health
Weight Loss
Planetary Health
Compassion for Animals
There is a fifth reason that may remove the choice for many: Economic. Meat and animal products may simply become too costly.

Keep reading Brain’s reasons for going vegetarian.

Here’s the site, and here’s why:

In cosmetics and household products research, painful experiments are carried out on hundreds of thousands of animals every year in the UK, including dogs, rabbits, pigs, mice, rats, guinea-pigs, fish and birds. This includes tests for skin or eye irritation, skin sensitisation (allergy), toxicity (poisoning), mutagenicity (genetic damage), teratogencity (birth defects), carcinogenicity (causing cancer), embryonic or fetal genetic damage and toxicokinetics (to study the absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of the substance).

Every year is a good year for ethical consumerism!

Two researchers from Victoria University have published a new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. In that book they compared how much carbon a pet produces compared to automobiles and they conclude that it’s best to keep pets that you plan on eating (if you don’t eat meat then I guess you can keep being awesome).

In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.

They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.

Professor Vale says the title of the book is meant to shock, but the couple, who do not have a cat or dog, believe the reintroduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas would help slow down global warming.

“The title of the book is a little bit of a shock tactic, I think, but though we are not advocating eating anyone’s pet cat or dog there is certainly some truth in the fact that if we have edible pets like chickens for their eggs and meat, and rabbits and pigs, we will be compensating for the impact of other things on our environment.”

Read more here

Whenever you find yourself needing to see something cute just head over to The Cute Project to get your cuteness fill.

The Cute Project is dedicated to collecting and featuring the world’s cutest photos, art, games and videos. Updated daily, the goal is not only to develop an ever growing collection of overwhelmingly cute art, but to build a community of people (Cutizens!) who appreciate and love to share their captured cuteness.

“This decision is a huge step towards a day when chimpanzees are no longer used in invasive biomedical research and testing,” Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society said in a statement.

Cats are cute, and lolcat culture has it’s own grammer. Why is this good you ask?

Well, it’s cute and really neat that someone took the time to dissect this subcultre.

The new cat, now dubbed the Bornean clouded leopard and given the species name Neofelis diardi, is darker than the mainland clouded leopard, Neofelis nebulosa. It also has slightly different markings on its pelt. But the real differences between the two species are in their genes.

The ads ask the simple question: if you don’t preserve nature, who will?