Marina Bolotnikova

We don’t have to accept all that death and waste for a dry, flavorless bird no one likes.

In Sonoma County and Denver, activists are putting animal welfare on the ballot.

The modern meat industry is cruel, unsustainable, and unnecessary. Here’s how we fight it.

The fight against the meat industry has been rocky. Can it be won?

Every five years, farm state politicians in Congress perform their fealty to Big Ag in a peculiar ritual called the Farm Bill: a massive, must-pass package of legislation that dictates food and farming policy in the US. At the urging of the pork industry, congressional Republicans want to use this year’s bill to undo what little progress the US has made in improving conditions for animals raised on factory farms. The House Agriculture Committee late last month advanced a GOP-led Farm Bill with…

H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so. The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply. One Texas dairy worker contracte…

Just outside St. Louis, in the inner-ring suburb of University City, there’s a little neighborhood often called the region’s unofficial Chinatown. Growing up in the area, it was one of my favorite places to be; reflective of the city’s diversity and vitality, it opened up the world to me. This past December, when I went home for the holidays, I discovered that what was once a beloved strip of immigrant- and minority-owned businesses there — a Korean grocery, a pho shop, a Jamaican joint with veg…

In a few generations, factory farming — the set of economic, genetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical innovations that enabled humanity to raise tens of billions of animals for food every year — has transformed America. It has polluted our water and air, ruining quality of life for people who live near animal confinements. It has altered entire landscapes, helping drive the conversion of much of the Midwest’s biodiverse prairie grasslands to soy and cornfields growing feed for billions of animals w…

We’ve been banging this drum at Future Perfect for a long time: Animal agriculture is terrible not just for animals, but also for the planet. And despite the meat industry’s ferocious greenwashing efforts, that message is finally, if haltingly, breaking into mainstream climate discourse. But there’s one big domain of livestock production that is often seen as exempt from the hard trade-offs of farming animals for human consumption: animals raised for clothing, like the more than 1.2 billion shee…

Genesis Butler has quickly become one of the world’s best-known animal rights activists — and she’s only 17. She’s leading a global movement of young people fighting factory farming’s impacts on animals and the climate. Butler’s story began, like it did for many animal advocates, when she was a small child: She stopped eating animals when she was 3, after finding out where her then-favorite food — chicken nuggets — came from. By 6, she’d converted her family to veganism. She has activism in her…

What are veterinarians for? Superficially, the answer might seem obvious: Vets are just like human doctors, but for animals. They care for our cats, dogs, and sick animals of all kinds. The reality is a lot more complicated, and it reflects a growing divide within the veterinary profession that’s shaping the treatment of tens of billions of animals raised for food on factory farms. Veterinary medicine, I’ve learned through two years of reporting, doesn’t always work in the best interest of anima…