From Barbara King of the Friday Animal Blog:

When it comes to better understanding the behavior and emotions of animals, who should be the gatekeepers of knowledge? Is it scientists alone, those formally trained to observe animals in the wild or in captivity? Or should “regular people” who keenly attend to how animals act and feel also be trusted as contributors to knowledge about our fellow species on Earth?
In his new book, The Animal Manifesto, Marc Bekoff takes a bold stand on these questions. “Science,” he writes, “is catching up with what many lay observers already know from living with animals every day.” As a scientist and a person, Bekoff has spent many hours observing wolves, dogs, and other animals; he lives in Colorado in an area frequented by red foxes, mountain lions, and the occasional black bear.
Animals are sentient, feeling creatures, Bekoff says—no surprise to many of us animal people. Bekoff wrote once about the magpies he witnessed gathering around one of their own who had just died. These birds touched the dead body and flew off
to collect grass that they then laid at the corpse. Into Bekoff’s mailbox flew stories from people who had seen similar rituals in crows and ravens as well as magpies. “These stories,” he notes, “even from nonresearchers, are indeed data, and they challenge science to prove or disprove them.”
Scattered through the book are animal stories sent to Bekoff by animal lovers. I resonate with this approach. In my book Being With Animals, I report stories from my friend Nuala Galbari about her life with the injured crow Reggie. From Galbari’s stories, I learned about Reggie’s intelligence and emotion—she knows birds like I know apes—and I trust them.
What risks may accrue to admitting nonscientists into the sacred arena of data collection? Not necessarily what you might think: Bekoff, like Jane Goodall, the famed chimpanzee researcher, has no fear of anthropomorphism; when done carefully, it can aid rather than retard the understanding of animals.
Still, can everyone be a credible source? I’d have to say no. I’m often shocked when I replay videotapes of gorilla gestural interactions, only to realize that, watching them in real time, I completely missed significant movements. Through rigorous methodologies, and substantive checks and balances, science heads inexorably toward self-correction; if we are to rely on individual voices from outside science, we must find a way to fold them into that dynamic self-corrective process.
Once in a while, Bekoff goes too far himself in interpreting animal behavior. To say that Alex, the famous African gray parrot, “mastered” English surely cannot be right, and how literal should we take a passage such as this one: “Surely, a dolphin, a raven, and a human don’t look the same, move the same, or perhaps even think the same, but these differences are minor compared to what these animals share.”
These are only quibbles; I recommend The Animal Manifesto enthusiastically. Bekoff effectively urges all of us to increase our compassion footprint: We may eat less meat (or none), tell children that eating a burger means eating a cow, support only the very best zoos, and speak up for animals whenever and wherever abuse occurs.
Best of all is Bekoff’s continual optimism, his insistence that “we are wired to be good, we are wired to be kind, and we are wired to be compassionate”. When reading his chapter “Our World is not Compassionate to Animals,” a vivid log of cruelty to animals, I clung to his optimism as to a life raft. In the end, I conclude Bekoff is right: We have no choice but to believe we can turn things around.
If we gaze at animals together, and share stories, we can help animals as the result of our newfound knowledge. “Every individual action shines a light,” Bekoff notes, “whether it’s motivated by a desire to change society or simply to fix one injustice in the life of one animal.”

According to a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, how you answer that question is a “strong predictor” of what you think and know about the theory of evolution. They interviewed 400 college students taking an introductory biology class but not majoring in the subject and found that students who understand the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old are much more likely to understand and accept evolution.
This is an important finding, says Sehoya Cotner, a biology professor who led the study, because it means the “role of the Earth’s age is a key variable that we can use to improve education about evolution.” That said, the researchers recognize that deep time is a tough concept to grasp, and it’s a lot easier to teach and learn creationist ideas about the age of the Earth than it is to work through the scientific evidence and explanations.
The researchers also found that students who are more religiously and politically conservative are more likely to endorse young-Earth beliefs than students with more liberal views are, and they’re less likely to correctly answer questions about evolution. Yet, as the team writes in its paper:

Holding young-Earth views may not significantly impede a student’s ability to learn facts about evolutionary theory. Thus, although it is not the role of biology instructors to engage in political or religious proselytizing, there remains the possibility of changing what students know about evolution via academic instruction.

From Nidhal Guessoum of Irtiqa:

“Halal” normally means “Islamically permissible”; it’s an adjective that can apply to anything on which the Islamic law (Shari`ah) has some prescription. Nowadays, and especially when used in English, it refers to Islamic dietary rules, particularly the requirement that animals be slaughtered, in the name of Allah, for their meat to be lawfully consumed. In recent years, and especially with the appearance of mad-cow disease, some Muslim jurists added emphasis on the way the animals are fed.
This has not created any difficulty in traditional Muslim lands, where industrial meat production and packing is still not mechanized enough for such rules to pose problems. In the West, however, slaughtering has largely disappeared from the mainstream market, and the meat production process disturbs many people (Muslims and non-Muslims—see the enlightening but depressing documentary Food, Inc.).
This has opened up a huge area of discussion on various issues: (a) Why are Muslims required to slaughter animals to begin with? (b) What can science and technology tell us on this? (c) To what extent can the rules be relaxed a bit? (d) What roles do religion (jurisprudence), sociology (immigration), and politics (acceptance of religious vs. secular regulations) play in this?
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Jon Hanson, director of The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School, tells BigThink why ideologies are need to simplify the world and how they’re rooted in things like our desire for clarity and reaction to inequality—those who are less comfortable with uncertainty and more comfortable with inequalities, for example, are inclined to prefer conservative policies and tend to like markets.