Sentient Today

Let’s review: There are over 100 billion farmed animals alive today. That’s more than 10 times the number of humans, and in the U.S., where most humans live with enough space to flap their figurative wings, 99% of farmed animals live on industrial, large-scale factory farms in miserable health conditions. Earlier this summer, we spoke to Jacy Reese about the future of factory farming.

“When we combine the moral progress we've seen in the 20th and 21st centuries with new food technologies like clean meat,” said Reese. “It becomes clear that we can and will end animal farming. There's simply no need for us to be producing food in such an inefficient and unethical way. I think by 2100, our descendants will look back on animal agriculture as one of the worst crimes in history.”

Read more from Jacy Reese on why it’s time to end factory farming here.
 

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1. 🌱 General Mills led a $40 million funding round for plant-based cheese and yogurt maker Kite Hill. The company has seen demand soar in the past year, along with the rest of the plant-based yogurt (+54%) and cheese industries (+41%). [Business Wire]
2. 🦁 The ecotourism industry in Africa is worth $34 billion. But despite being the center of attention, native animal populations, like lions, aren’t growing. According to the experts, a lack of animal protection funding is at the center of Africa’s rewilding problem. As many as 94% of wildlife parks in Africa operate on budgets of less than 20% “of that required to perform effective conservation.” [New York Times]
3. 🐮 Consumers aren't buying enough cheese and yogurt to offset America’s massive milk surplus. Yogurt production peaked in 2013, following the popularity of Greek yogurt manufacturers like Chobani. But even when as the Greek yogurt fad began to fade, dairy farmers expanded their herds. In July 2018, farmers in the Northeast dumped 23.6 million pounds of milk, bringing the annual total to 145 million pounds of milk dumped through July. [Bloomberg]
4. 😡 Two years ago, the USDA issued 192 animal welfare warnings to breeds, exhibitors, and research labs. So far this year, the department has issued just 39. [Washington Post]
5. ✊ The United States government’s inaction on climate change is affecting animals in wilderness areas across the country. Finally, an animal rights advocacy group is taking them to court. [Climate Liability News]

Read This Book

All history books should start like The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Simon & Schuster 2019). David Quammen’s groundbreaking work sweeps across reams of real, scientific data to answer the questions: What are the role humans and animals in this cosmic wonder we call life?

Here at Sentient Media, we believe there are stories to tell from the intersections of human and animal lives. We hope to articulate them in precisely the right way, the most compelling way. Many times, putting a finger on that relationship is hard, but we’re reminded that the evidence humans leave behind is as strong, if not stronger, than that of the natural world. Human activity, like animal activity, can be as precise and objective as you want it to be.

As Quammen puts it, “It’s a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like grandmaster chess, it’s something gloriously imperfect that people do.” That process is exactly what this radical new history of life explains in beautiful, often charmingly pinpointed detail.

Bottom line: Part history of life, part life philosophy, The Tangled Tree marks a new chapter in the creative exploration of everything from the first sketch of life to the discovery of DNA. The tree of life has never looked so full of leaves.