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That is the possibility missing from much of the discussion around the country’s transition to cage-free eggs.

China raises approximately 3.3 billion egg-laying chickens, 90% of whom are confined to conventional battery cages. According to new research, companies operating there have made 106 commitments to source cage-free eggs. Just 16 have been fulfilled. The researchers interviewed corporate representatives about their difficulties meeting these commitments. Unsurprisingly, money featured prominently. Cage-free eggs cost more, supply chains are complicated and consumers aren’t necessarily willing to pay extra. But there’s a considerably bigger problem with replacing billions of caged chickens while maintaining egg production.

Cages are efficient.

Chickens imprisoned in intensive systems generally require fewer resources to produce the same number of eggs. Give them more space and maintaining production can require additional chickens, feed and land.

A 2026 Royal Society study examined what would happen if Britain eliminated cages while maintaining egg output. Replacing caged production with free-range systems increased projected greenhouse gas emissions by 5.84%. Switching to barns increased them by 13.55%. The free-range transition would also result in approximately 440,000 additional chickens dying on farms annually. A complete transition to organic free-range production was even worse. Emissions increased by almost 61%, while approximately one million additional chickens died on farms every year. These are modelled British outcomes using older production data, not predictions for China. But the relationship between production efficiency, resource consumption and the number of animals required cannot simply be ignored because removing cages sounds compassionate.

And China has billions of chickens.

None of this justifies keeping them imprisoned. Battery cages deny chickens opportunities to forage, dust-bathe, perch, nest and move freely. The physical and psychological consequences are substantial. But replacing cages without reducing egg production risks exchanging one collection of harms for another, potentially increasing the number of victims.

The Chinese study even discusses allowing corporations to purchase cage-free credits while continuing to buy eggs from caged chickens. Apparently, companies can fulfil their commitments on paper without changing the eggs in their products.

Both studies illustrate the same underlying problem. Researchers and businesses spend considerable effort examining how to maintain egg production under different conditions. Reducing demand receives remarkably little attention. But reducing demand would mean fewer chickens needing to be bred, confined and eventually killed, without requiring the environmental compromises associated with maintaining production under less intensive systems. The ambition shouldn’t be to make China’s enormous egg industry cage-free at any cost.

It should be to make that industry smaller, so fewer chickens need rescuing from cages in the first place.

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Indonesian authorities returned 20 green turtles to the ocean after police intercepted a suspected smuggling operation off Bali. Officers found 22 turtles aboard an apparently abandoned boat near Serangan Island. The suspected smugglers had escaped. Two turtles were too sick to be released and required further treatment.

In June 2026, authorities had intercepted another 21 green turtles during a raid on Bali’s Pegametan coast. A 67-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of holding them for illegal distribution. That’s 43 turtles recovered in 2 operations, despite decades of legal protection. Indonesia strengthened its protections in 2018 and prohibits trading turtles. But legislation cannot eliminate demand simply by declaring an animal protected. Bali was historically a major centre for green turtle trafficking, partly because turtle meat was used in Balinese Hindu religious offerings.

Tradition helps explain the demand, but being part of someone’s culture doesn’t make an act morally defensible. Plenty of practices have survived for generations without anyone seriously considering the interests of those subjected to them. And those interests are conspicuously absent when turtles are treated as products to be captured, transported and sold.

Protecting green turtles because their populations are threatened is important. But an individual turtle doesn’t suddenly become less deserving of freedom because there are plenty of others.

The 22 turtles found aboard that boat were not merely representatives of a protected species. They were 22 individuals whose lives had been interrupted for someone else’s benefit.

Police official Gusti Agung Purnama Wirahadi expressed hope that nobody would dare capture, keep or trade these animals again. After 36 years of legal protection, that remains a hope rather than a reality. Returning 20 turtles to the ocean was a success for those individuals. But their freedom should never have depended on someone reporting suspicious activity and the police arriving before they could be sold.

They belonged in the ocean long before anyone decided they were worth protecting.

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There are an estimated 1.7 million foxes in Australia, and the country’s proposed new national strategy acknowledges they cannot be eradicated from the mainland. The problem is serious. Foxes are estimated to kill 367 million native mammals, 111 million birds and 88 million reptiles annually. Endangered quolls, bandicoots and bettongs are among those particularly vulnerable. Australia has lost around 40 mammal species, with predation by introduced foxes and cats identified as the overwhelming cause. Doing nothing is hardly a defensible position. But neither is pretending that recognising the danger requires declaring war on every fox.

The draft strategy proposes a 30-year effort to prevent further extinctions. Poison baiting, the traditional response, remains part of the approach, alongside fox-free islands, fenced sanctuaries and other indirect methods. Crucially, CSIRO researcher Matthew Rees says threatened species can persist even where fox predation occurs. That suggests a more useful measure of success than the number of foxes killed. If the objective is protecting vulnerable populations, interventions should be judged by how effectively they achieve that protection, including the suffering and deaths they inflict. The difficulty is that conservation has a habit of treating one kind of death as a tragedy and another as an administrative procedure.

An endangered eastern quoll deserves protection from predation. But a fox does not cease to be an individual because she belongs to an introduced species.

As we’ve previously argued about Australia’s rabbits, humans created these ecological conflicts. The animals now being targeted had no say in any of them. The Invasive Species Council worries that Australians who become fond of foxes may undermine efforts to protect native wildlife. But this presents a false choice. Caring about a fox does not mean dismissing the quoll she might kill, any more than caring about a quoll requires indifference to a fox dying from poison. And that distinction becomes particularly important when considering the timescale. This is not a short intervention intended to eliminate a temporary threat. It is a three-decade strategy addressing a problem its authors acknowledge cannot be eliminated. Lethal control could therefore become an indefinite response to a permanent ecological reality. Generation after generation of foxes could be killed without ever achieving the landscape some conservationists say we must demand.

Protecting Australia’s threatened wildlife is essential. The research increasingly identifies ways to achieve that protection without relying exclusively on killing. If foxes cannot be eradicated, conservation needs to focus on helping native wildlife survive alongside them wherever possible.

Otherwise, refusing to accept foxes as part of the landscape risks becoming less a conservation objective than a permanent justification for killing them.

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Julie was taken from the wild in southern Africa when she was just five. She joined the Víctor Hugo Cardinali circus in 1988, spending most of her life performing tricks for audiences. Portugal voted to ban wild animals from circuses in 2018, with the prohibition taking full effect in 2024. But Julie had nowhere suitable to go. It wasn’t until Pangea Elephant Sanctuary could accommodate her that she finally left.

Her arrival completed the country’s transition away from wild animal circuses. Not a single wild animal remains in a Portuguese circus. And Julie is already making the most of her retirement. Within a day of arriving, she was exploring her surroundings, wallowing in mud and taking dust baths. Her carers have since shared footage of her splashing, digging and enjoying fresh food. She’s even grown comfortable enough to lie down for mud bathing.

After decades of standing on command, she can finally decide when she’d rather lie in the mud. Of course, Julie hasn’t returned to the wild. After so long in captivity, she can no longer survive independently. She has health and mobility problems, and her last elephant companion died in 2024. But that doesn’t mean she must spend the rest of her life on display.

Pangea provides space, specialist care and opportunities for companionship. Another wild-caught elephant, Kariba, who has been living alone in a Belgian zoo, was identified as a prospective companion. Crucially, the sanctuary remains closed to visitors. Julie’s needs determine how the space is used, rather than the expectations of paying spectators.

Elephants in Britain still face the gawping public. We banned elephant exploitation in circuses, but continue confining them in zoos. The justification has changed from entertainment to education and conservation, but the elephants remain exhibits.

As we explored in The Elephant in the Room Is Captivity, Britain’s response has been to introduce larger minimum enclosures rather than question the continued confinement of these wide-ranging, socially complex animals. A reasonable objection is that elephants who have spent decades in captivity cannot simply be released. Julie proves the point. She needs lifelong care, not an idealistic attempt to return her to a life she can no longer manage. But her new home also challenges the assumption that captivity must involve public exhibition. A sanctuary cannot return Julie’s stolen decades, but it can give her greater control over those she has left.

Britain has already decided elephants shouldn’t perform in circus rings. Our petition calls for an end to their captivity in UK zoos, too. Julie’s retirement demonstrates that giving an elephant a permanent home doesn’t have to mean giving humans somewhere to buy a ticket.

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A study published in Facets examined decades of wildlife recovery efforts. The 4 best-funded species received a combined CAD $25 million, more than the $20 million allocated to all the others combined. But only one of those 4, the wood bison, had moved into a lower extinction-risk category. The problem wasn’t necessarily how much money was being spent. It was what happened, or failed to happen, alongside that spending.

Researchers examined 36 species among the first assessed by Canada’s endangered wildlife committee. Just 8 were considered better off than when first assessed, while 14 remained in the same extinction-risk category and 11 had deteriorated. The remaining 3 lacked sufficient assessments to establish a trend. Of the 9 species whose original causes of decline had been mostly or entirely addressed, seven had improved and two remained in the same category. Not one species whose extinction risk had increased had seen the original cause of decline sufficiently addressed.

Funding, recovery team size and the time taken to produce recovery plans showed no statistically significant relationship with improvement. Addressing the original threat did.

It turns out that stopping the thing killing animals is a remarkably effective starting point for saving them.

Conservation Without Restraint

Consider the wood bison. By 1893, hunting had reduced their numbers to approximately 250. Canada halted hunting, and their population doubled by 1914. The response wasn’t particularly sophisticated. Humans were killing them, so humans stopped killing them.

Other successful recoveries followed similar patterns. Restrictions on exploitation helped create conditions in which sea otters could recover, while simultaneous bans on the agricultural insecticide DDT in Canada and the United States helped peregrine falcons recover. These examples don’t establish that legislation alone can restore threatened populations. Sea otters benefited from reintroductions, while captive breeding and release programmes supported peregrine falcons. But those interventions became considerably more useful once the threats responsible for the original declines had been addressed.

Conservation is often discussed as though recovering wildlife were primarily a technical challenge. We need more funding, better monitoring, larger recovery teams and increasingly elaborate interventions. Sometimes we do. But no amount of expertise makes continued destruction compatible with recovery. A breeding programme cannot compensate indefinitely for killing animals faster than populations can replenish themselves. Reintroductions achieve little if the conditions responsible for the original disappearance remain unchanged.

The researchers found precisely this problem with attempts to reintroduce black-footed ferrets, whose recovery was undermined by insufficient numbers of their principal prey, black-tailed prairie dogs. Producing more animals isn’t much use if there’s nowhere viable for them to live.

Protection on Paper

Canada’s conservation problem extends beyond deliberate killing. Habitat loss and degradation are major threats to wildlife, yet declaring somewhere protected doesn’t necessarily mean removing the activities threatening its inhabitants.

Among the 16 species examined in greater detail, 15 had received some form of habitat protection. Dedicated habitat restoration, however, was documented for just one. Protection varied enormously in effectiveness. Some designated areas failed to encompass crucial habitats, while others continued experiencing damaging human disturbances. The cerulean warbler illustrates the difficulty. These birds have suffered habitat destruction in southern Ontario and in the Andes, where they spend winters. By 2006, an estimated 60% of their habitat had disappeared. Protecting one location cannot guarantee recovery when destruction continues somewhere else.

This is particularly unsettling for a country whose economy depends heavily on extracting natural resources. Canada is a major exporter of crude oil, timber and minerals, while its government has committed to reversing biodiversity loss. The contradiction isn’t necessarily that resource extraction and conservation can never coexist. It’s that protecting threatened species sometimes requires restricting activities that governments and industries would otherwise prefer to continue.

Conservation plans cannot resolve that conflict by pretending it doesn’t exist.

What Counts as Saving a Species?

In a separate analysis involving 422 species assessed multiple times between 2000 and 2019, just 8, approximately 2%, met the researchers’ definition of successful recovery. That definition required both an increasing population and a decreasing risk of extinction. Meanwhile, 55 species, or 13%, experienced the opposite: declining populations alongside increasing extinction risk. These figures cannot be directly compared with the earlier analysis because the researchers used different datasets and definitions. Nor does the 2% figure mean that every other species was deteriorating.

But the distinction exposes an important weakness in how conservation success can be presented.

A species moving into a lower extinction-risk category isn’t necessarily experiencing population growth. Likewise, an animal population can improve without immediately qualifying for a less threatened classification.

If the objective is to restore populations of living animals, changes in administrative categories cannot be our only measure of success. Nor should the findings be interpreted as proof that conservation funding is ineffective. The researchers identified associations rather than demonstrating direct causation, and recovering species facing multiple interacting threats can require substantial investment.

Climate change, habitat fragmentation and pollution are considerably harder to address than a single identifiable source of mortality. Nevertheless, the underlying principle remains remarkably consistent: successful recovery requires conditions in which animals can actually survive.

The Part We Keep Getting Wrong

There is nothing inherently wrong with funding conservation, restoring habitats or reintroducing animals whose populations have collapsed. These measures can be essential, and the study provides examples of their effectiveness. But they cannot substitute for confronting the causes of destruction.

When hunting threatens a population, restricting hunting matters. When habitat destruction drives decline, protecting the remaining habitat matters. When pollution makes survival difficult, addressing that pollution matters. The researchers’ findings suggest that the effectiveness of conservation depends not simply on how much humanity is prepared to spend helping threatened wildlife, but on how much harm humanity is prepared to stop causing. And perhaps that’s why this apparently straightforward lesson remains so difficult to implement.

We are comfortable discussing what we should do for threatened animals. The harder conversation concerns what we must stop doing to them.

Until we’re prepared to have that conversation, we risk treating conservation as an expensive exercise in repairing damage we’re still actively causing.

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The buffy-headed marmoset was discovered by biologist Gabriel Falquetto, who was monitoring wildlife along a highway through Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. He had already encountered several other animals killed by vehicles that morning. We call this roadkill, a remarkable word for what happens when humans drive tonnes of machinery through someone else’s home. And it happens on an almost unimaginable scale.

An estimated 9 million mammals are killed on Brazilian roads every year. That’s 9 million individuals whose lives end beneath vehicles travelling through landscapes their ancestors inhabited long before anyone thought to lay tarmac. Roads are generally celebrated as symbols of progress. They connect towns, facilitate trade and make human lives more convenient. But that same stretch of asphalt can divide a forest, separate families and turn an ordinary attempt to find food or a mate into a potentially fatal encounter. What connects us can imprison everyone else.

The particularly infuriating thing is that preventing many of these deaths doesn’t necessarily require revolutionary technology. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a bridge made from ropes. In the Amazonian town of Alta Floresta, 8 canopy bridges installed in 2024 have provided animals with a way to cross roads without descending into traffic.

Over 15 months, cameras recorded an astonishing 15,000 safe crossings. Not a single roadkill was recorded there during that period. Spider monkeys, howler monkeys, capuchins, marmosets and titi monkeys have all been documented using the structures. Other animals, including sloths and opossums, have also crossed using the bridges. These aren’t elaborate concrete structures requiring years of engineering. The bridges use interconnected ropes arranged across multiple levels, allowing animals with different ways of moving to travel between fragmented forests.

A spider monkey can swing across using their arms. Others can walk across the ropes. The bridges accommodate the animals rather than expecting the animals to accommodate us.

What a radical concept.

Of course, 15,000 crossings don’t mean 15,000 lives saved. Not every animal using a bridge would otherwise have been killed. Nor does the absence of recorded deaths prove that every danger has disappeared. But it demonstrates something rather more important: animals can and will use alternatives when we provide them.

The project also exposes the absurdity of treating wildlife deaths as an unavoidable consequence of development. We’ve built highways through forests, divided habitats that animals depend upon and then largely left those animals to negotiate the consequences. When they fail, we count their bodies. The bridges reverse that expectation. Instead of demanding that a monkey somehow understand speeding vehicles, humans have modified their infrastructure to accommodate the monkey.

Even then, the animals need time.

According to the researchers behind the project, tufted capuchins took 7 months before using one of the bridges. On another Brazilian highway, structures installed in 2021 have recorded approximately 1,250 primate crossings over 5 years. That slower uptake doesn’t make the bridges failures. Animals aren’t infrastructure consultants. They cannot be expected to immediately understand an unfamiliar structure suspended over a dangerous road, particularly when their survival may depend on avoiding unfamiliar situations. And the consequences of roads extend far beyond the individuals killed by vehicles.

Fragmented habitats can isolate populations, restrict opportunities to reproduce with unrelated individuals and reduce genetic diversity. The loss of fruit-eating primates can also disrupt seed dispersal and other ecological relationships. Conservationists understandably worry about these wider consequences. But there’s something uncomfortable about discussing a dead monkey primarily in terms of the ecological services they can no longer provide. The marmoset found on that road wasn’t valuable only because her species is critically endangered. She wasn’t valuable because she might have dispersed seeds or contributed to genetic diversity. She was an individual with a life of her own. A common species doesn’t experience a less significant death simply because millions of others remain alive.

Fortunately, the canopy bridge initiative could expand. Brazil’s national transport infrastructure department designated the design as a recommended highway standard in 2026, while legislation proposing a national road safety plan for wildlife has passed the country’s lower house and awaits a senate vote.

The proposed measures include wildlife crossings, underpasses, warning signs and speed-reduction devices. These are encouraging developments, but they also raise a question about the thousands of roads already dividing habitats. If we know roads kill animals, and we know measures exist to reduce those deaths, why should preventing them depend on individual conservation projects finding enough support?

Nobody is suggesting that every road can be replaced with a rope bridge. Different animals face different obstacles, and some crossings will require entirely different solutions. Preventing deaths demands careful planning, investment and long-term monitoring. But those are human responsibilities, arising from human decisions. The animals didn’t choose where we built our roads. They didn’t consent to having their territories divided or their movements restricted. And they certainly didn’t agree to surrender their lives whenever our transport networks intersect with theirs.

In Alta Floresta, thousands of successful crossings offer a glimpse of what happens when we finally stop treating animals as obstacles to human movement. The bridges haven’t restored the forests that roads divided. They haven’t eliminated every danger. But they have given animals something that should never have been taken away: a way to move through their own homes without risking death beneath our wheels.

We keep calling these deaths accidents. But we know where the roads are, we know animals need to cross them, and increasingly, we know how to help them do so. The marmosets aren’t crossing our roads. Our roads are crossing their homes.

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The latest WWF report reveals that monitored vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. Freshwater populations have suffered an 85% collapse. And the biggest culprit isn’t some mysterious environmental catastrophe. It’s how we produce food.

Agricultural expansion drives almost 90% of global deforestation. Forests are cleared, habitats fragmented and wild animals displaced or killed to make room for farming.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, humanity devotes 4.8 billion hectares to agriculture. Two-thirds of that land, approximately 3.2 billion hectares, is permanent pasture. Include crops grown to feed farmed animals, and the picture gets considerably uglier.

A Chatham House report found that animal agriculture occupies 78% of agricultural land while supplying just 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein. We’re sacrificing an extraordinary amount of the planet to produce a relatively small proportion of our food.

And wildlife pays the price.

A 2026 study published in Nature Food found that animal-sourced foods were responsible for 71% of the biodiversity losses attributed to food consumption through agricultural land use. Bovine meat and milk alone accounted for 41%. That’s an astonishing amount of destruction for something we don’t even need to eat.

Of course, not every hectare of pasture is suitable for growing crops. But that’s precisely the point. We don’t need to replace every pasture with another field. Reducing animal agriculture could allow enormous areas to be restored as wildlife habitats. Chatham House explicitly identifies dietary change as essential to making that restoration possible.

Meanwhile, conservationists are rightly celebrating recovering tiger, sea turtle and tuna populations. These animals deserve every chance to survive, but protecting individual species while maintaining the industries destroying their habitats is a painfully inadequate response. We cannot keep congratulating ourselves for saving wildlife while demanding that their homes be used to breed, raise and kill other animals. The tigers are recovering because humans intervened to protect them. Imagine what could happen if we stopped taking so much of the planet away from everyone else.

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Superior Hotels has secured a 99-year lease on 12 hectares of Rocky Point, with plans for a 200-room hotel and privately owned villas. The surrounding trees aren’t decorative. Their shade keeps the nesting sand cool, while their roots protect the coastline from erosion. Removing them could destroy the very conditions that make this beach suitable for turtles to lay their eggs. Construction runoff could also damage the nearby coral reef.

More than 100 people submitted objections. Environmentalists warned about habitat destruction. The developers made relatively minor adjustments, and the authorities granted environmental clearance anyway. With approximately 20 pages of mitigation measures attached. Twenty pages of instructions on how to make destroying an existing habitat slightly less destructive. What a triumph for environmental protection.

Of course, Tobago needs economic opportunities. But why must the answer involve sacrificing somewhere other animals already depend upon? Smaller, community-led tourism alternatives already exist on the island. We’re expected to accept that the turtles’ nesting grounds are negotiable because someone has proposed a sufficiently expensive hotel. But no amount of environmental paperwork changes what happens when a mother turtle reaches a beach where the trees that once shaded her nesting grounds have been cleared.

The resort still needs further planning approvals. There’s an opportunity to stop this before the damage is done.

A 200-room hotel is a choice. A turtle’s need for somewhere suitable to lay her eggs isn’t. The beach is already occupied. Leave it alone.

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When Animal Equality investigated, 3 government bodies confirmed they conducted no routine or mandatory inspections of fish slaughter. The Animal and Plant Health Agency referred the charity elsewhere, while the Food Standards Agency and Fish Health Inspectorate confirmed they weren’t responsible either. The APHA subsequently defended the government’s oversight, pointing out that fish farms are inspected and reports of cruelty investigated.

Which is reassuring, provided nobody was asking about slaughter.

Inspecting farms and inspecting how animals are killed are different responsibilities. An investigation into suspected cruelty cannot establish whether routine killing practices comply with standards that haven’t even been introduced. And this extraordinary arrangement isn’t some recently discovered administrative oversight.

Government advisers recommended legislation governing fish slaughter in 1996. They revisited the issue in 2014 and 2024, eventually recommending compulsory stunning and inspections. In December 2025, the government promised new requirements. Almost a year later, there’s still no draft legislation.

For 30 years, the government has had enough information to recognise that fish need protection from suffering when they’re killed, but apparently not enough urgency to provide it. Compulsory stunning and meaningful inspections could reduce suffering. Animal Equality is right to demand action. Leaving potentially painful deaths unexamined while officials shuffle responsibility between departments is indefensible.

But consider what the proposed protection actually means.

The government recognises that fish can suffer, that their treatment warrants legislation and that those responsible for killing them should be accountable. Their interests are important enough to regulate the method of killing, but apparently not important enough to challenge the decision to kill them.

The distinction is built into the purpose of the inspection. An inspector could determine whether a trout was stunned correctly, whether procedures were followed and whether their slaughter complied with legislation. What they couldn’t determine, because the rules would never ask them to, is whether killing that individual was justified.

Indeed, a perfectly compliant slaughterhouse would still be somewhere animals were deliberately deprived of their lives for human consumption. None of this makes inspections pointless. The difference between a painful death and one involving less suffering is consequential for the individual experiencing it.

But we shouldn’t mistake compliance for compassion, or a regulated death for a justified one. After 30 years, the government is still struggling to establish who should check how fish are killed.

Even when it finally succeeds, the most consequential decision will remain outside the inspector’s remit: whether those fish should have been killed at all.

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The proposals would reduce annual kingfish catches from 250 tonnes to 120 tonnes, alongside new restrictions on snapper fishing. The intention is to allow populations to recover while continuing to permit commercial and recreational fishing. Unsurprisingly, people who make money from catching and selling fish are unhappy. Businesses warn of rising prices, falling profits and customers abandoning fishing trips when they can no longer take home as many dead animals. But among the objections is one that exposes something considerably more disturbing than the industry’s concern for its profits.

Commercial fisherman Noel Gogerly warned that snapper caught beyond the proposed limits would have to be returned to the ocean, where many would die anyway. Fish pulled from deep water can suffer internal damage from the sudden change in pressure. Returning them to the ocean does not necessarily save their lives. They may simply float on the surface until they die or are eaten by sharks. Gogerly described this prospect as “a good product that’s going to go to waste.”

A snapper has been dragged from the depths, suffered potentially fatal injuries and lost any chance of continuing their life. But the tragedy, apparently, is that somebody might not get to sell their body. The implication is extraordinary. A fish who dies and becomes someone’s dinner has fulfilled a purpose. A fish who dies and feeds a shark has been wasted.

Except the fish has lost exactly the same thing in either scenario.

There is, however, a legitimate criticism buried beneath this commercial understanding of death. If restrictions only limit how many fish can be kept, rather than how many can be caught, animals may continue to die without those deaths contributing to the permitted catch. Conservation measures that are supposed to protect fish populations could consequently deliver less protection than intended. But allowing fishers to retain those bodies would merely make the deaths commercially useful. It would do nothing for the individuals who died.

The obvious alternative is to prevent those fish from being caught in the first place. Instead, much of the opposition revolves around preserving the benefits humans derive from catching them.

Charter operator Craig McGill complained that restricting recreational fishers to one kingfish per boat, rather than five per person, could destroy his business. Four paying customers might have to share a single fish. Apparently, the opportunity to spend time on the ocean becomes considerably less attractive when everybody cannot take home someone they have killed.

Meanwhile, fisheries management director Heath Folpp explained that the government wanted to distribute restrictions fairly between commercial and recreational fishers, ensuring both experienced approximately the same economic pain. The interests of the fish themselves are conspicuously absent from this calculation. Even the government’s conservation proposals ultimately treat their continued existence as a means of sustaining future fishing. Populations must recover so that humans can continue removing individuals from them.

Reducing catches may spare lives and help depleted populations recover. Those are worthwhile outcomes. But conservation remains fundamentally different from recognising that individual fish have an interest in remaining alive, regardless of how many others of their species exist. And the industry’s own objections demonstrate precisely why that distinction is necessary.

If fish are dying because people insist upon catching them, deciding who gets to keep their bodies is not the solution.

The solution is to stop catching them.

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A bill introduced by Senator Esmeralda Hernández Silva proposes banning intensive farming of octopuses, squid and cuttlefish before commercial operations become established in the country. Crucially, the legislation would also prohibit imports from intensive cephalopod farms overseas. Businesses couldn’t simply shift production abroad and continue supplying the Colombian market. And Colombia is far from alone.

Washington became the first US state to ban octopus farming, followed by California in 2024. Similar legislation has been pursued in Chile and Mexico, while campaigns have launched in Peru and Ecuador. What began as opposition to an emerging industry is becoming an international movement to prevent its expansion.

Colombia’s legislative proposal cites a Mexican farming operation where mortality reached 52%, with 30% attributed to cannibalism. It also documents aggression, mutilation, self-injury and attempted escapes associated with intensive farming systems. Even keeping octopuses alive in captivity presents serious difficulties. Killing them introduces another. According to the bill, no scientifically validated stunning method exists for octopuses, with documented slaughter methods including cutting, suffocation, striking and immersion in ice. And the exploitation wouldn’t stop with the octopuses themselves.

The Aquatic Life Institute, which helped develop the Colombian legislation alongside Plataforma ALTO, warns that farming these predators would increase demand for other aquatic animals caught to feed them. It’s quite an achievement to propose an entirely new industry that depends on catching animals to feed other animals before killing those animals too.

The commercial ambitions behind octopus farming have already suffered a significant setback. Spanish multinational Nueva Pescanova announced plans in 2021 to bring farmed octopuses to market. Its project was reportedly abandoned in 2026.

None of this guarantees Colombia’s proposed legislation will pass. But the growing opposition demonstrates something that animal-rights campaigners rarely get the opportunity to prove. Industries built upon animal exploitation are not inevitable.

We have become accustomed to campaigns demanding bigger enclosures, different killing methods or restrictions on practices that should never have been permitted. Once an industry exists, the debate tends to revolve around how animals should be exploited rather than whether they should be exploited at all.

Colombia’s proposal starts with the second question.

It wouldn’t end the killing of wild octopuses, but it could prevent countless others from being bred into captivity, confined and slaughtered for an industry that currently has no established presence in the country. And if these international efforts succeed, octopus farming could become a rare example of an exploitative industry stopped before it has the opportunity to become entrenched.

Imagine how many animal-rights campaigns we’d never have needed if more industries had been challenged before the first farm was built.

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Nitrite-free bacon sales are booming. Waitrose has doubled its range over the past year, with sales increasing by more than 34%. Denhay, a Devon-based manufacturer, has introduced two new products across 570 Tesco stores. British shoppers spent £34.8 million on bacon made without added nitrites in the year to September 2026, an increase of 11.4%, while conventional bacon sales declined.

There’s just one problem. Nobody has established that nitrite-free bacon is safer. Nitrites help preserve meat, prevent dangerous bacterial growth and maintain its familiar pink appearance. They can also contribute to the formation of nitrosamines, compounds suspected of harming human health. Removing them might sound sensible, but the Food Standards Agency says there’s currently no evidence that processed meat made without nitrate or nitrite additives is safer. Their removal can actually introduce new food safety challenges.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization classifies processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning there is sufficient evidence that consuming it causes colorectal cancer. Tobacco belongs to the same category, although that reflects the certainty of the evidence rather than an equivalent level of danger. Eating approximately 50 grams of processed meat daily, roughly two rashers of bacon, is associated with a 16% increase in the relative risk of colorectal cancer. Scientists haven’t established which components of processed meat are responsible. Nitrites may contribute, but removing them doesn’t automatically remove the danger. Equally, we cannot assume nitrite-free bacon carries exactly the same risk. That hasn’t been established either. What we have is a proven carcinogenic food being reformulated to address one suspected contributor, then sold to consumers who increasingly associate the absence of that ingredient with improved health. And they’re paying more for the privilege.

Denhay’s managing director, Marlene Godwin, explained that the company’s new products responded to demand from supermarkets and consumers.

“We definitely don’t want to be telling people what to eat,” she said, describing the expansion as offering “choice, not replacement.”

That phrase neatly captures the industry’s approach. Consumers express concern about bacon, so manufacturers provide another version that allows them to continue eating it. Whether that change delivers the health benefit customers might expect remains uncertain. Of course, companies can offer alternatives, but the existence of a market for supposedly healthier bacon shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that healthier bacon has been produced.

Cancer Research UK recommends reducing processed and red meat consumption to lower bowel cancer risk. It doesn’t recommend shopping around for a different curing method. This is particularly relevant as researchers investigate rising rates of bowel cancer among younger adults. UK incidence among people aged 25 to 49 has increased by more than 50% since the early 1990s. The reasons remain uncertain, and it would be irresponsible to attribute that increase to bacon. But we don’t need to identify every cause of early-onset bowel cancer before acting on established evidence that processed meat causes colorectal cancer.

More importantly, the entire debate exposes an extraordinary contradiction in how we understand choice.

The bacon manufacturer says that it doesn’t want to tell customers what to eat, while advertising it heavily, that their customers preferences deserve accommodation, and satisfying those preferences means developing entirely new product ranges. How generous.

But consider whose preferences are never accommodated.

The pig isn’t an incidental ingredient that manufacturers can remove or replace. He or she is an individual whose body has been turned into the product. We’re apparently reluctant to interfere with someone’s freedom to choose breakfast, while accepting that another individual can be bred and killed to provide it.

That’s a rather selective interpretation of personal freedom. And it explains why so many proposed improvements to animal products leave the underlying injustice untouched. People can demand better conditions for pigs, different methods of killing them, fewer additives in their flesh or more reassuring labels on the packaging. Some changes may reduce suffering or risks to consumers, but none establishes an entitlement to kill pigs in the first place.

Indeed, the supposedly healthier alternative can make the original practice easier to defend. Someone worried about cancer can buy nitrite-free bacon. Someone concerned about animal suffering can buy a product marketed around improved treatment.

Both can feel they’ve addressed their concerns while continuing to pay for pigs to be killed. Meanwhile, the fundamental assumption that these individuals are ours to use goes unchallenged.

We can demand better public health information, particularly when manufacturers benefit from consumers associating an unproven reformulation with improved safety. UK readers can sign this parliamentary petition. Everyone, wherever they live, can also demand cancer warnings on processed meat and support removing processed meat from British hospitals.

But warnings and institutional changes address only part of the problem. Bacon isn’t merely a food carrying a recognised cancer risk. It’s the remains of an individual who was killed to satisfy someone else’s preferences. Manufacturers can change the preservatives, the packaging, the price and the promises.

Apparently, everything about bacon is negotiable except the pig’s life.

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The calculation only includes pig and chicken farms large enough to fall under environmental permitting rules and report more than 1,000kg of ammonia emissions a year. Cattle farms are missing entirely, despite cattle being responsible for more than 40% of UK ammonia emissions. Pollution from animal waste transported away from farms is also excluded, even though emissions from spreading or handling that waste can exceed those produced at the farms themselves.

So £131 million is not the full cost of animal agriculture’s air pollution.

We have covered this problem before. In 2024, agriculture produced 89% of UK ammonia emissions, with most coming from farmed animals, their waste and fertiliser. Factory farming concentrates enormous numbers of animals in relatively small areas. Their waste does not disappear. Ammonia escapes into the air, where it can react with other pollutants to form tiny particles known as PM2.5. Those particles can enter the lungs and bloodstream.

The Bureau spoke to Dr Helen Wood of Queen Mary University of London, who explained that once these particles enter the blood they can travel around the body. They can worsen lung conditions, increase inflammation, exacerbate asthma and contribute to cardiovascular disease. People can become chronically ill, require long-term care, become unable to work and lose years of healthy life. The public pays for that through NHS treatment, lost productivity and premature deaths.

The animals breathe it first.

Inside industrial units, thousands or tens of thousands of individuals live surrounded by the waste produced by bodies humans have deliberately concentrated together. Ammonia builds up inside the same system before spreading beyond it. Factory farming creates the pollution, exposes the animals to it, releases it into surrounding communities and then hands part of the resulting healthcare bill to everyone else.

One former pig farm worker interviewed by The Bureau described repeatedly struggling to breathe while working near the pollution. Even after retiring, he said pollution from the nearby farm could blow across his home and village, forcing him indoors.

This is not necessarily a local problem either. Ammonia can travel hundreds of kilometres through the atmosphere. The pollution produced by industrial animal farming does not respect farm boundaries. Previous research has estimated that halving agricultural ammonia pollution in the UK could avoid thousands of deaths each year. The new investigation found the highest reported emissions from intensive pig and chicken farms in East Anglia, followed by Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, and the West Midlands. But even those numbers leave huge holes.

Cattle farms currently do not require the same environmental permits, meaning the sector responsible for a substantial share of ammonia pollution remains outside this reporting system. The government has previously said it plans to consider extending environmental permitting to intensive beef and dairy farms. That may improve monitoring. It will not remove the underlying problem.

We already know the financial consequences stretch far beyond this latest £131 million estimate.

Earlier analysis estimated that UK pig and chicken factory farming imposes more than £1.2 billion a year in hidden costs, including pollution, health impacts, subsidies and lost rural employment. That analysis estimated ammonia air pollution alone at around £458 million a year. The figures are not directly comparable because they use different methodologies and scopes. The new £131 million calculation is tied to reported emissions from farms captured by the environmental permitting system.

What both reveal is the same problem.

The price on the supermarket shelf is not the price society pays.

We have seen the same thing with disease. Industrial chicken farming creates conditions where bacteria can spread and evolve, while intensive production is associated with heavy antibiotic use. As we explored in Chicken Farms Are Spreading Dangerous Bacteria, supposedly cheap animal products can generate costs that surface elsewhere in healthcare, environmental damage and biological risk. Factory farming survives partly because those costs are separated from the product.

The company sells the chicken. The public pays for the pollution. The NHS treats the disease. Communities breathe the air. Rivers receive the waste. Animals endure the system from inside it.

Industry representatives can talk about better infrastructure, reduced emissions and improved regulation. Those measures may reduce particular harms, and preventing pollution is better than allowing more of it. But cleaner exploitation is still exploitation.

The root problem is breeding enormous numbers of sentient individuals because humans have decided their bodies are commodities. Once animals become production units, everything around them is organised around extracting value as efficiently as possible. Their waste becomes an environmental problem. Their confinement becomes a disease problem. Their emissions become a health problem. And everybody else receives the invoice.

£131 million is not evidence that factory farming needs slightly better accounting. It is another reminder that the apparent efficiency of animal exploitation depends on hiding who really pays for it.

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The case is not simply that these experiments cause immense suffering. They have also failed to produce the treatments humans desperately need.

Sepsis kills more people in the UK each year than breast, bowel and prostate cancer combined. Despite decades of animal experiments, targeted and effective treatments remain elusive, while hundreds of drugs that appeared to work in animals have failed in humans. Sepsis is estimated to cost the UK between £7.4 billion and £15.6 billion every year.

Mice do not develop sepsis in the same way humans do. They require much larger bacterial loads to trigger inflammation, producing an acute response rather than the milder, more prolonged inflammatory response seen in humans. Important features of human sepsis, including changes in blood pressure and blood flow, can also be absent.

The animals used are often young, inbred and kept in sterile conditions. Human patients are genetically diverse and include infants, older people and people with underlying health conditions. Animals may also be denied fluids, pain relief and ventilation routinely given to human patients. They endure pain, fever and organ failure before being killed.

This is suffering imposed in pursuit of a model that researchers themselves acknowledge poorly reflects the human disease.

US agencies are already moving away from using animals to model human sepsis. The open letter calls on the UK to follow, setting clear objectives and deadlines while investing in methods that reflect human biology instead.

Animals should not have their intestines punctured, be deliberately infected or be made to endure organ failure for experiments that cannot reliably answer human medical questions.

Better science is needed. But animals also have a more fundamental claim: their bodies are not ours to experiment on.

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Writing on BlueSky, Mamdani said, “The horse carriage industry is coming to an end in New York City. Our administration will make sure workers and owners are protected and the horses are safe.”

The legislation, known as Romanch’s Law, would also provide career support for carriage drivers and require the horses to be rehomed. It’s a potentially enormous victory for animal advocates who have spent decades campaigning against the industry. Unfortunately, renewed momentum followed another tragedy. Earlier this year, 18-year-old tourist Romanch Mahajan died after falling from a carriage in Central Park. Menin subsequently described horse-drawn carriages as a growing public safety liability. But the horses have been paying the price for this tradition for considerably longer.

Earlier this year, Deniz collapsed and died in Central Park after eating a toxic plant while carrying passengers. In 2025, 15-year-old Lady collapsed and died while returning to her stable. In 2022, Ryder collapsed while working in extreme heat and was later euthanised.

Their deaths illustrate the dangers these animals face. But even if every horse survived, forcing them to pull tourists around a city would remain exploitation.

The question isn’t simply whether horse-drawn carriages can be made safer. It’s why horses should be subjected to this work in the first place. New York’s proposed ban recognises that the industry can end while supporting workers through the transition. And that raises an uncomfortable question for another city.

What’s Palma’s excuse?

The Mallorcan capital promised to replace horse-drawn carriages with electric alternatives by 2024. Two years after that deadline, horses are still pulling tourists through its streets, with no legally binding date for ending the practice. Meanwhile, nearby Alcúdia introduced electric carriages in 2025, and Muro is preparing to follow in 2027, subject to final approval. Palma cannot credibly argue that alternatives are impossible when neighbouring towns on the same island are already introducing them.

New York hasn’t passed its legislation yet, but the city is moving towards a concrete legal deadline. Palma made its promise years ago and continues relying on voluntary agreements. Neither city needs horses to pull tourists around. The technology to replace them exists, and so do arrangements to help drivers move into alternative employment.

What Palma needs is the political commitment to turn its overdue promise into law. More than 1,900 people have already signed our petition demanding Palma ban horse-drawn carriages.

Help us reach 2,000 signatures and demand a legally binding deadline.

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The Bank of England has selected four species for its next generation of banknotes: European hedgehogs, barn owls, buff-tailed bumblebees and Atlantic puffins. Nearly half a million people participated in the consultation.

Lovely. Britain adores wildlife.

Unfortunately, wildlife appears to be having a rather less enjoyable time in Britain.

The Hedgehogs Are Disappearing

The research published in Ecology and Evolution examined five national monitoring schemes covering different periods between 1981 and 2024.

The findings are devastating.

One rural abundance index declined by 70.7% between 1981 and 2023. Another survey found an 80.4% decline in rural hedgehog occurrence between 2002 and 2023. Worse, the estimated annual rate of decline in the longest-running index accelerated from an average of 2.88% across 1981–2023 to 6.81% during the final decade. These are estimates from monitoring schemes, not a census of every hedgehog. But independent datasets tell a broadly consistent story: hedgehogs are disappearing from large parts of rural Britain. Some urban surveys offer more encouraging results, with estimated abundance increasing in gardens and other built-up environments. The researchers caution that monitoring differences complicate interpretation, but the contrast is striking.

A country famous for its “green and pleasant land” (deforested and turned into pasture) increasingly appears to offer hedgehogs better prospects in selected residential gardens than across vast stretches of its countryside.

The study identifies several potential pressures, including habitat degradation, declining invertebrate prey, road deaths and interactions with badgers. Their relative contributions remain uncertain.

What isn’t uncertain is that being sufficiently adorable to win a national popularity contest hasn’t protected hedgehogs from decades of decline.

And they aren’t alone.

The Birds Aren’t Doing Much Better

Five days after the banknote announcement, new government figures revealed that Britain’s wild bird population index had reached its lowest recorded level. Across 132 native breeding species, average populations have fallen by 19% since 1970. Nearly half of the monitored species declined over the most recent five-year period.

Farmland birds have suffered a staggering 63% decline since 1970, including a further 12% since 2020.

Seabirds have declined by more than a fifth over five years, with avian influenza devastating some species. Turtle dove populations have more than halved in five years, while swifts have declined by approximately a quarter.

And the Atlantic puffin, one of Britain’s newly appointed monetary mascots, is already classified as vulnerable internationally.

Some species, including red kites, have experienced substantial recoveries.

Celebrating 4 animals as representatives of Britain’s natural heritage while that heritage deteriorates rather spectacularly deserves more scrutiny than whether Winston Churchill should lose his place on a fiver. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called replacing historical figures an erasure of history. Nigel Farage considered the decision ridiculous.

Apparently, which faces appear on our money warrants considerable outrage. The disappearance of the living animals doesn’t always command comparable attention.

We’ve Known What We’re Doing for Years

The government’s own bird statistics identify changes in agriculture, including increased pesticide and fertiliser use and the removal of hedgerows, among the drivers of long-term farmland bird declines. And Britain’s relationship with animal agriculture is damming.

The government’s commissioned National Food Strategy, published in 2021, reported that approximately 70% of the UK’s landmass was devoted to agriculture. Even more remarkably, animal agriculture occupied approximately 85% of the agricultural land used to feed Britain, including land overseas, while providing just 32% of our calories. We dedicate an extraordinary amount of land to breeding, feeding and killing some animals while lamenting the disappearance of others.

The Strategy even recommended reducing meat consumption by 30% by 2032 as part of meeting environmental commitments. This wasn’t some radical vegan manifesto. It was a government-commissioned review recognising the enormous environmental consequences of our food system. Nor are those consequences confined to abstract national statistics.

In a 2025 Guardian article, Chris Packham highlighted Natural England findings that just 26 hectares out of 22,494 hectares of Dartmoor’s protected sites were in ecologically favourable condition. He also described more than £32 million paid to Dartmoor commoners through environmental stewardship schemes over a decade, without improvements to the commons. We can spend public money supporting land management that damages habitats, then celebrate the animals struggling to survive the consequences.

And animal agriculture’s environmental footprint extends far beyond the land directly occupied.

As we examined in Britain’s Hottest Summer Is Burning Away Bird Habitats, extreme heat and wildfires have already destroyed important habitats used by threatened British birds. A 2025 climate study, using an alternative method of accounting for historical emissions and land use, attributed 0.74°C of global warming between 1750 and 2020 to agriculture, with 86% of that attributed to animal agriculture. That is not the conventional estimate, and the researcher acknowledges substantial uncertainties. But the broader evidence that animal agriculture contributes to climate change and occupies vast areas of land is hardly controversial. Reducing its environmental footprint would benefit wild animals. It would also mean confronting our treatment of the animals being farmed, rather than treating their lives as a necessary sacrifice.

We Love Animals When It’s Convenient

Perhaps none of this would be quite so infuriating if Britain didn’t so enthusiastically congratulate itself on loving animals.

The Vegan Society’s latest Empathy Index found that 85% of respondents described themselves as animal lovers.

Some 65% considered factory farming unacceptable. But 82% ate meat, despite estimates suggesting that 85% of farmed animals in Britain live within factory farming systems.

We dislike animal suffering. We admire wildlife. We celebrate conservation.

But ask us to reconsider the industries responsible for exploiting animals or damaging their habitats, and suddenly the principles become considerably more negotiable.

It’s the same mentality behind spending £54 million on accelerated adaptation research, including efforts to engineer butterflies capable of tolerating agricultural insecticides. Protecting butterflies from pesticides is worthwhile. But perhaps not poisoning them in the first place deserves rather more consideration. None of this means conservation efforts are pointless. Protecting habitats, restoring ecosystems and helping threatened populations recover can save lives. But preserving wildlife while refusing to challenge the unnecessary exploitation of other animals leaves an enormous contradiction unresolved.

Why should some animals deserve protection because they’re attractive enough for a banknote, while others are bred into captivity, killed for food or shot for recreation?

Britain even releases an estimated 60 million non-native gamebirds annually for shooting. The government is currently examining the industry’s environmental impacts, including habitat damage and bird-of-prey persecution.

One bird gets national recognition. Another gets bred specifically so somebody can shoot them.

What Is Our Wildlife Actually Worth?

There is one final detail about Britain’s new banknotes worth considering.

British polymer banknotes have previously contained tallow, a substance derived from animal fat. Will the next generation contain it too? The announcement doesn’t establish whether they will, but it would be quite something to celebrate wildlife by printing animals’ faces onto a material containing the remains of other animals whose captivity kills the animals on the notes. Perhaps the Bank of England will avoid that particular embarrassment.

The larger contradiction won’t disappear so easily. Hedgehogs need functioning habitats, not portraits. Birds need somewhere to nest, feed and raise their young, not national recognition after their populations have collapsed. And the chickens, cows and sheep whose exploitation helps drive environmental destruction deserve lives of their own, not merely more efficient methods of being used.

Britain has no shortage of affection for wildlife. Nearly half a million people helped choose which animals should decorate our banknotes. The question is whether we’re prepared to reconsider what our money supports when we spend it. Because putting wildlife on our money means remarkably little if we keep paying for a world in which they cannot survive.

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These are gas chambers . That’s not an analogy. That’s literally what they are.

Animal rights organisation Viva! recently put advertisements on London buses featuring a young pig alongside the words: “Next stop, the gas chamber.”

Following complaints from some Jewish passengers distressed by the phrase’s association with the Holocaust, Transport for London decided to remove the advertisements. Apparently, forcing millions of pigs into gas chambers is acceptable, but telling people about those chambers is a step too far.

Nobody needs to question the sincerity of those passengers’ distress. The Holocaust was an atrocity, and its historical significance deserves recognition and respect. But acknowledging that suffering should not require us to silence discussion of suffering happening right now.

Viva! didn’t compare pigs with Holocaust victims. The advertisement didn’t mention Jews, Nazis or the Second World War. It just described what happens to pigs. You don’t even need to compare what humans do to other animals with what humans have done to each other. You can simply describe the violence, and people start making those comparisons themselves. We shouldn’t have to invent alternative terminology for something horrific simply because humans have previously inflicted something horrific upon one another.

That’s hardly the victims fault.

The government’s own Animal Welfare Committee has recommended ending carbon dioxide stunning since 2003. More than 2 decades later, the chambers are still operating, and millions of pigs are still being forced inside. But it’s the advertisement that’s been removed. Even replacing carbon dioxide with another method wouldn’t address the fundamental injustice. Pigs don’t want a more comfortable slaughterhouse. They want to live.

Historical atrocities deserve to be remembered. Current victims deserve to be defended. These aren’t competing obligations. TfL has removed an advertisement because people found its language disturbing. Perhaps the more disturbing question is why gas chambers remain perfectly legal.

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