A new relationship with animals, nature and each other.

Posts by Michael Mountain

  • Introducing the Whale Sanctuary Project

    This blog is taking a break for the next few months so that I can devote my energies to the Whale Sanctuary Project. Here's why.

  • Is the Sloth Sanctuary a Zoo?

    The Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica was the first of its kind for these wonderfully engaging animals, and it was a model for others that followed. But questions have arisen. And…

  • Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary

    Tafi Atome looks like a typical forest in Ghana. The monkeys have been revered in this village for two centuries. But being “sacred” is no guarantee of survival.

  • The Great Irony of Animal “Rights”

    The great irony of the animal rights movement is there is still only one species that has any rights at all: humans. But the Nonhuman Rights Project is setting out to change that.

  • Why Mass Extinction Is Part of Human Nature

    Why would a supposedly “intelligent” species behave in a way that’s bringing about a mass extinction – one that will likely take us down along with so many other animals?

    Is the Stock Market a Global Ponzi Scheme?
    Sacred Activism in the Service of Animals
    Of Humans and Persons

    Reunited … 16 Years Later!

    Poldi the cat went for a walk from his family home in 1996. He reappeared … this week. For months after he disappeared, Poldi’s family searched their Munich, Germany, neighborhood for him. They finally gave up, thinking they would never see him again.

    Why Sparrows Are Changing Their Tweets

    They found that the pitch of the male white-crowned sparrow song has risen over the years – they’re singing at a higher frequency now in order to be heard better over the lower-frequency growl of passing cars, lawn mowers, etc. Their song overall has changed, too. The two researchers call it “the San Francisco dialect.”

    Arsenic and Old Feathers

    Today, yet another food revelation: Chickens on factory farms are routinely fed acetaminophen (as in Tylenol), along with the same antihistamine you find in Benadryl, the antidepressant that’s featured in Prozac, plus various antimicrobials, and, yes, arsenic.

    T-Rex Cousin Had Feathers

    She weighed a ton and a half, was at least 30 feet long, lived about 125 million years ago, and was an early cousin of the Tyrannosaurus family. But the really big thing about her is that she had soft, fuzzy feathers.

    But What Would Erik von Daniken Say?

    The high plains of southern Peru are famous for the Nazca Lines – animal shapes about an eighth of a mile long that were carved into the high plateau land around 400 C.E. and were once thought by some, like the controversial author Erik von Daniken, to have been landing strips for extraterrestrials.

    Pink Slime "Just a Symptom" of What’s Wrong with Meat Production

    What pink slime represents is an open admission by the food industry that it is hard-pressed to produce meat that won’t make you sick. Because, I hate to break it to you folks, but ammonium hydroxide is just one in a long list of unlabeled chemical treatments used on almost all industrial meat and poultry.

    What’s Killing the Dolphins of Peru?

    So far this year, according to the newspaper Peru21, more than 3,000 dolphins have washed up on the beaches of the northern Peruvian region of Lambayaque. Scientists are generally agreed that the cause of death is sonar from companies probing for oil.