Stuffed in a sports bag in Johannesburg, South Africa, the small pangolin was far from her natural environment. She’d been poached from her home and held without food or water for around 10 days, and now she was up for sale. In February 2020, wildlife traffickers brought her to an arranged meeting...

(BETHESDA, MD)—As thousands of families celebrate the first anniversary of adopting their beagles following their historic rescue, some beagles and their adopters joined the Humane Society of the United States at Bark Social for a “Beagleversary Bash” reunion. The event marks one year since the HSUS...

Minnow It makes sense that her best friends are turkeys. Minnow spent the first five months of her life on a dog meat farm in South Korea before she was rescued by Humane Society International in 2015 and adopted by Abbie Hubbard, who worked at a Virginia shelter where the rescued dogs were flown...

WASHINGTON— In a long-awaited victory for sharks across the globe, the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act passed the U.S. Senate Thursday night by a vote of 83-11 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 7776). This critical measure prohibits the commercial trade of shark fins and...

BALTIMORE, Maryland—On Tuesday, a Maryland federal judge ruled that the National Institutes of Health cannot lawfully refuse to retire federally owned chimpanzees formerly used for research to Chimp Haven, the federal chimpanzee sanctuary. The decision was issued in a lawsuit brought by the Humane...

Flying back and forth over Cape Cod Bay, a survey plane spotted a half dozen of the world’s rarest creatures: North Atlantic right whales. Such sightings are good news. The species hovers near extinction—by one estimate, fewer than 360 remain. Each time researchers locate a whale, they take pictures...

The public display industry keeps many species of marine mammals captive in concrete tanks, especially whales and dolphins. The Humane Society of the United States believes that these animals are best seen in their natural coastal and ocean environments instead of being held captive simply to...

It began, almost certainly, in a bat. Then, just as SARS jumped to civets from bats, the virus that causes COVID-19 passed to another mammal, possibly a pangolin. Finally, late last year, the new coronavirus most likely jumped to humans in a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, a densely populated city...

The first time Joni Conley saw her new furry family member run around her hay farm, it was clear that he’d spent most of his former life in a cage. “It was like he didn’t know where his legs were,” she recalls. “When he got the zoomies, I thought he was gonna blow a knee out!”

When the U.S.-based rescuers from Humane Society International touched down in Seoul in mid-October, they faced the usual jet lag. But rather than tackle it by jumping head-first into their work—shutting down their 17 th South Korean dog meat farm—they went straight to a hotel … and straight into...