“[A]t school, she pretended that she was a horse. This did not help integrate her into the mainstream of child society, but privately she expressed confidence in her choice.”

In an excerpt from her new memoir, The Body Papers, Grace Talusan fondly remembers the badly behaved dog that won her skeptical father’s heart.

Highway BR-262 cuts through Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest freshwater wetland. After studying the road for two decades, biologist Wagner Fischer can say with certainty that it’s one of the world’s deadliest roads for wildlife. “Ecologists are very worried,” Fischer said. “The authorities pretend to be worried.”

“They are determined to get rid of us, and we can no longer rely on our community’s miraculous evolution alone to protect us. We cannot expend all our energy every day just to survive, just to see another morning, like a desert animal.”

Photojournalist Daniel Berehulak documents the killings of dozens of people as part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines. (Warning: graphic images of violence.)

Halberstadt meets Dr. Vint Virga and explores the scientific research into the feelings of animals. “He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobic zebras. ‘Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states,’ Virga told me. ‘But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.'”

The dilemma of The Food Movement: Can we be “conscientious carnivores” by humanely raising animals if the end result means butchering the animal for our own consumption?

Some skeptics have wondered whether any of the Food Movement’s reforms are even remotely achievable if reformers continue to ignore the ethical considerations involved in eating meat. Simply put, when it comes to the Food Movement’s long-term viability, could it be that changing what we eat is more important than improving its source? Might the only way to reform our food system—rather than simply providing alternatives—be to stop raising animals for consumption? Pollan has addressed these questions by explaining, “what’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” But what if he’s got that backward? What if, when it comes to eating animals, the Food Movement’s principles are out of whack?

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The Morning News, VQR, All About Birds, and Open Spaces Magazine.