Nigerian health officials waited anxiously for test results on two children feared to be the first Africans infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus. The virus broke out in early January among poultry in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, but the H5N1 diagnosis was confirmed only last week and authorities are struggling to contain it as it spreads rapidly to farms across the north.

People can catch the virus, which has killed at least 88 people in Asia and the Middle East since early 2003, from contact with infected birds, but it cannot yet be spread from one human to another. But experts fear the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain may mutate into a form that can spread from human to human and cause a global flu pandemic that could kill millions. The outbreak of H5N1 in Nigeria is the first known appearance of the virus in Africa.

Last week, just a month after the Japanese government decided to allow the import of U.S. beef into that country, it has once again halted shipments of American beef into Japan because animal spines were found in three boxes of frozen beef being brought into the country. The big question is if spinal matter is making it into exported beef, what is making it into beef we are eating right here at home?

Here's the question that U.S. officials have to answer... the question that we as consumers have to demand be answered: What will it take to get the U.S. government to decide to test every cow? What concerns us is not the cows they find infected with BSE. It is the cows that are not being detected, that are getting into the food supply. It could be one or two. It could be hundreds. We simply don't know, and that is unacceptable.

In a Seattle University law classroom, attorney Adam Karp plunks his feet on a bench, next to his chalkboard sketch of a three-legged dog. His shoes are not leather. His tie, the one with a picture of a giraffe, isn't silk. He wears no wool. His belt is plastic. And, he practices only animal law. "It's more a way of life than a philosophy," said Karp, the only attorney in the state whose practice is limited to cases involving animals.

"It began when I became a vegan, when I was able to open my eyes to injustices in the way we treat animals. It's a serious problem here, and the law is a ripe tool for affecting change." He said becoming a vegan - not eating meat or wearing anything made from animals - opened his eyes to the way animals are treated. Practicing solely animal law was a way to marry his personal and professional views.

[Meet] the founder of Whole Foods: hippie entrepreneur John Mackey. As he scans the menu in vain for a vegan muffin, Mackey asks: "Are you familiar with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs? His theory is that our first and most important needs are physical - food, water, sex. When those needs get met, other needs begin to assert themselves - safety, belonging, having a sense of love and friendship, then self-esteem. Beyond that it is self-actualisation." Whole Foods' journey to self-actualisation has taken time - some 25 years or so.

"Twenty-five years ago we were very much on the fringe," Mackey says. "It has only been in the last few years that we have moved into the mainstream. We have not really changed. What has changed is that the world has begun to move closer to us." The store is offering more than just food; the 2004 annual report spoke of a "virtuous circle entwining the food chain, human beings, and the earth; each reliant upon the others through a delicate symbiosis." All of which might have remained empty pieties had the young Mackey enjoyed more success sowing his own wild oats. In 1978, Mackey was a philosophy and religion student at Texas University in Austin. "I was in my early 20s and open to alternative lifestyles. I thought, 'I bet you get a lot of attractive, interesting women in a vegetarian co-op.'"

Three foreign-owned processing plants will be allowed to continue slaughtering horses for meat, the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced. The slaughterhouses sell the meat overseas as a delicacy and in the U.S. as food for zoo animals. Horses are supposed to be rendered unconscious prior to slaughter, usually by a stun gun. But sometimes, welfare workers say, it takes several attempts if the horse panics and tries to flee. Consequently, animal advocates assert, horses are improperly stunned, even with repeated blows, and are still conscious when their throats are slit.

The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, introduced last year, would permanently ban the sale and transport of horses to slaughter. The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is actively pursuing defeat of the legislation. Without meat processing as an option, many of the unwanted horses will be donated to rescue and retirement facilities, [an AVMA spokesperson] says, which are not regulated by any governmental body. Jerry Finch of Habitat for Horses, an equine-rescue facility in Hitchcock, Texas, said there really aren't enough unwanted horses to make this an issue. Less than one percent of the total U.S. horse population is sent to processing plants each year, and new owners could easily be found for those animals.

In the Year of the Dog, life for China's canines can mean wearing a Gucci coat and eating gourmet meals or becoming a fur coat and a traditional "warming" winter casserole. Mao Zedong's dictum that pets were a bourgeois conceit has long been brushed aside as China's new rich and middle classes buy dogs as pets and splurge on designer accessories, along with acupuncture, daycare and spa treatments, for them. But animal rights activists estimate that at least 10 million dogs are still being killed in appalling ways for food and their pelts.

France's Society for the Protection of Animals this week issued a new year appeal to President Hu Jintao to end the slaughter. The society and other animal rights groups charge that many animals are killed slowly to "enhance" the meat's flavour, a charge not denied by dog farmers who matter-of-factly state that bleeding a dog to death while it is conscious makes the meat more tender. "The cruelty isn't hidden here as it is in the West [in factory farms]; you can see it more blatantly in the markets," [a spokesman for the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in the Asia Pacific] said.