Dogged by persistent allegations of animal cruelty – some proven to be true – greyhound racing tracks near and far have lost the public’s puppy love.

Rack ‘n’ Roll

Though greyhounds have been bred to be canine companions for thousands of years, the first modern greyhound racing track with grandstands opened a mere century ago in Emeryville, CA. By the mid-1920s the sport had spread to Great Britain, and today at least a half-dozen countries around the world allow gambling at greyhound races. That’s not to say the bloom has come off the mechanical hare – it has. Closed and abandoned dog-racing tracks aren’t at all uncommon nowadays, with one of the most notable being the stadium above in Black Canyon City, AZ. Flickr members MARLON SEPPALA and Thomas Schultz snapped the moribund “DOG _RACK” in July of 2008 and September of 2010, respectively.

The Finished Line

Owen Patrick Smith, the “father” of modern greyhound racing, invented the mechanical hare not to beguile Bugs Bunny but to remove actual live bunnies from the equation. Society has progressed further in recent years – some dog tracks have dispensed with the robo-rabbit entirely, in favor of a windsock-like device. Still, for many operations the changes were too little and too late. Flickr member Katy Warner captured the grim atmosphere surrounding this dog-tired abandoned dog racing track near Florida’s Daytona Speedway in February of 2009.

Swansea Song

Smith’s vision was to get the public to see “greyhound racing as we see horse racing”, and that included monetizing the operations through gambling receipts. It was a winning proposition… for a while. In the UK, greyhound racing was a hit with the public: over 40 tracks affiliated with the Greyhound Racing Association were up and running by the end of 1927, just a year after the first organized race was run.

The popularity of greyhound racing in the UK reached its peak just after the end of the Second World War. By the early 1960s, however, the industry as a whole entered a long period of decline. One of the main contributing factors was the passing of the Betting and Gaming Act in 1960, which permitted off-course cash betting. Flickr member Alexander Jones visited the much-deteriorated remains of the Swansea Greyhound Stadium in June of 2012.

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Hounded 7 Abandoned Greyhound Racing Tracks

These closed and abandoned pet shops eerily echo with the long lost sights, sounds and smells (oh, those smells!) of what were effectively urban retail zoos.

Why Not Both?

It’s a pet shop, it’s a seafood store, it’s… both? It would appear so! Sure, Donna’s Aquatic Pet Shop and Lee’s Seafood Co., Inc may sport different signs but, as Flickr member Fuzzy Gerdes‘ horrified friend Erica reportedly and repeatedly shouted, “It’s the same phone number!” Our lead image of the fenced-over Chicago store(s) dates from April of 2008 while the second photo from Flickr member crowbert depicts a slightly more active scene from a couple of years previous.

Old Age of Aquaria

The hell is an “aquaria”? Also, shouldn’t that golden creature on the sign be a fish and not a bird? Looks like a “screaming chicken” from a Trans-Am’s hood ended up as roadkill and was painted over by a lane-line paint truck. So much for this broke-ass Bird of Paradise… Paradise Pets, to be exact. Flickr member Jon Southcoasting captured the closed not-quite-fish-or-fowl shop from Shoreham-by-Sea, UK, in April of 2014.

Reptile Needsssss

Much like a snake shedding its skin, Godiva Reptiles in Coventry, UK seems to be sloughing off its signage to reveal – no, not its final form – a previous incarnation as a video rental store. Unlike the apocryphal serpent, however, the sign’s piecemeal decomposition was a harbinger of things to come. According to photographer and Flickr member Hazel Nicholson, “As of May 2017 the shop has closed down and the former owner has been found guilty of trading without a licence.” Guess the most important “reptile need” is a license to trade in reptiles. Who knew?

Our Fur Feathers

According to photographer and Flickr member shrinkin’violet, “the number 9 in the telephone number on the signage is different from the rest. This was probably added after 1995 when Bristol received the new area code.” In related news, this rather bland “petfoods” (is that even a word?) shop in beautiful downtown Bristol, UK, managed to stay in business for well over 20 years. Still plenty of fur-lorn feathered customers (or freeloaders) hanging around outside the shop, though.

Zoohaus, Raus!

Sorry, Fur & Feathers, but the pet store longevity prize goes to the former Zoohaus-Altrock, a pet shop in Wiesbaden, Germany. From 1919 to 2011 – an incredible span of 92 years – Zoohaus-Altrock pet shop supplied the local Hessians with “erlebniswelt heimtiere” (“adventure world pets”) typified by the intrepid tuxedo kitty doing an adventurous spider-cat imitation just to the right of the sign. Flickr member Arjan Richter snapped the shop’s charming two-piece (three, including the cat) signage in March of 2011.

IAMS Abandoned

Ah, the pride of Pittsgrove Township… seriously, that is one sharp shop! From the outwardly-angled brickwork buttresses framing the store entrance to the snazzy Mid-century Modern eggcrate-grill window framing, this shop has got it all. Well, except for a tenant, of course. Flickr member Thomas captured this former Jersey store (near what appears to be a Jersey shore) in June of 2008.

Non-Starter

STOP me before I sell pets again… or buy POTS back from previous customers, whatever. Kudos to Flickr member Victor Reynolds for posting an explanation: it seems the store’s original name was “PET STOP” but once the store stopped selling pets, they removed the “PET” from the sign. You’ll find this abandoned pet shop in Pohatcong, New Jersey, where the photographer stopped to snap the sign in the summer of 2015.

Considering that it produces such controversial projects as human-sheep embryos, it’s not surprising that biotechnology is often at the center of thorny ethical debates. It’s one of those fuzzy areas of scientific study that routinely prompts headlines like Has Science Gone Too Far? While a lot of biotech simply consists of studying and modifying living cells in a lab, plenty of it concerns the welfare and use of animals, too. We read stories about how animals raised for livestock have been genetically modified to grow too quickly for their legs to support them, but on the other side of the coin, there are advancements that could alleviate suffering, like lab-grown meat and leather or new ways to reduce the need for animal testing.

The broad definition of biotechnology is simply technology involving the use of living organisms, which covers thousands of years of inventions and discoveries ranging from the brewing of beer to today’s controversial developments in genetic engineering and the use of stem cells. Ethical questions have always plagued science and medicine, with good reason – a lot of testing is done on subjects that can’t consent, whether because knowledge of the testing was kept from them or they simply didn’t have the agency to fight back (the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, injecting orphans with tuberculosis, performing surgeries on enslaved African women without anesthesia) or because the subjects are animals. Biotech solves some of these issues while constantly raising new ones as we grapple with the question of just how much humans should modify ourselves and the world around us.

When it comes to animals in particular, a lot of biotechnology research and development is focused on removing living animals from the production line of various industries. This has resulted in the creation of a cellulose-based biosilk that’s stronger than dragline spider silk, which is considered the strongest bio-based material, as well as the debut of lab-grown leather, which counters concerns about the negative impact that producing and disposing of synthetic fabrics can have on the environment. Companies like Modern Meadow “biofabricate” real leather using strains of yeast engineered to produce collagen for a strong yet flexible result.

It’s clear that demand for certain animal bodies and parts can result in catastrophic reductions in population or even extinction, whether it’s for food, ornamentation or medicine. In the Tiger Penis Project, Kuang-yi Ku uses emerging biotechnology to create lab-grown animal parts commonly used in Chinese medicine to “prevent the further destruction of both animals and traditional cultures.”

Meanwhile, lab-grown meat grows ever closer to being an everyday option on menus and in grocery stores. Just a few years ago, one of the world’s first lab-grown burgers had a $330,000 price tag, but a number of companies are now on the cusp of releasing affordable cell-cultured meat products that don’t harm animals in any part of the production process. Creating it involves retrieving muscle stem cells from adult animals and allowing them to multiply in a nutrient-rich liquid.

While it’s not hard to imagine lab-grown meat becoming just as mundane as soy milk, it may face resistance from people who prefer their food to have a closer connection to natural processes. In that case, scientists ask, what about using genetic engineering and selective breeding to produce animals that are naturally more resistant to disease, or that contain more nutrition per pound? But here’s where the double-edged sword comes in: the same technology is used to produce effects that are better for the breeder than the animals (or the people eating them.)

Pigs and chickens that grow extra fast produce more profits, but also result in animals that can’t stand up or move around, even when they have the space. Plus, people are bound to worry about genetically modified animals just like they worry about genetically modified crops (though supporters of the technology maintain that it’s essential to feeding a rapidly growing human population.)

Similar concerns come up in the area of animal testing. Currently, biotechnologists often breed animals specifically for the purposes of research, which can mean modifying them to intentionally produce painful defects like musculoskeletal conditions or susceptibility to cancer. But biotech could also produce artificial or lab-grown means of testing medical treatments and consumer products to reduce the need for painful testing on living subjects. Human and animal stem cells could help researchers test for toxicity, disease resistance and other factors in a way that “could not only replace animal models but outperform them altogether with better reproducibility and predictability.”

Back to that human-sheep embryo, which is a prime example of why none of these questions are easily answered. Researchers at the Roslin Institute are working on finding ways to grow human organs within the bodies of other animals to save the lives of people who wait for transplants that never come. Their approach introduces human stem cells into early pig or sheep embryos. In the latter case, about one in 10,000 cells in the sheep embryos are human. To successfully produce animals that grow organs that could be transplanted into human bodies, they’ll have to find ways to make about 1% of the embryo’s cells human. The end goal may be noble, but what if these chimeras end up with human characteristics in their brains?

Just like any other form of technology, biotech has its pros and cons, its potential to do good in the world and its potential to send us down a dark path that we might never be able to walk away from. Where we draw those lines remains subjective.

Swiss street art duo NEVERCREW recently completed ‘Sensing Machine No.3,’ a mural outside the historic Paris institution of street art known as Le M.U.R., depicting a whale reflecting the city. The eye-catching piece is the latest in a series of thoughtful large-scale works of art examining the interplay between nature and our built environments, often from the perspective of the damage we’ve done in the form of pollution and species extinction.

“NEVERCREW’s work focuses on the relationship between mankind and nature and on the relationship between mankind and the system, in particular on the effects of human attitudes on the environment, on social injustices and on the relationship between the concept and the forms of “systems” and an essential, natural, human and animal truth,” they explain.

Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni began working together in 1996, and these themes have emerged from their work ever since. They don’t just aim to create a pretty image with each piece; instead, they seek a dialogue with the surroundings, both in the form of human residents of the city and the urban environment itself. They see the surfaces they paint on, and the elements that surround them, as important elements of each graphic composition.

Imagery is often repeated as the artists draw from visual components in their catalogue of past works. Whales come up pretty often. Though this animal’s own experiences may seem far from those of humans, NEVERCREW explains, they’re part of our collective imagination and linked to the past and present history of civilization.

“The history of the relationship between mankind and cetaceans is in fact particularly emblematic of what is still the relationship between systems’ policies and natural resources. The whale, for NEVERCREW, brings with it all its history, the excessive power of industry, exploitation, dehumanization, pollution, while maintaining a strong empathic and communicative value as a living being in an absolute, almost iconic and decontextualized sense.”

In ancient times, after their domestication by the Egyptians, cats may have saved many humans from starvation and disease, which might help explain why we still worship them to this day. Or maybe it’s because they’re the perfect combination of haughty, mischievous, playful, mysterious and affectionate. Or maybe it’s because they’re actually controlling us through parasites transmitted by their poop. Whatever the explanation, people tend to love cats, and when we’re not busy feeding, petting, entertaining and otherwise serving them, our reverence often takes the form of art and design.

Neko Sushi

Two of Japan’s favorite things come together as one in ‘Neko-Sushi,’ a series by the company Range & Nakimushi Peanuts placing a variety of cats atop rolls of sticky rice and wrapped in seaweed. Each one has its own particular ‘flavor,’ with funny improvised props meant to represent raw fish and sushi fixings. This photo series is available for sale as a series of postcards and posters.

Feline Faces Swapped With Their Owners

Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani swaps the faces of humans with those of their cat friends in the series ‘Undercats,’ producing a series of funny images in which the cats are unusually well-coiffed and accessorized.

Cat Graffiti

Felines are a popular subject for Parisian street artist C215, who’s known for painting them on virtually any kind of urban surface, from walls to trash cans. Though he uses stencils, and often repeats the same designs, each one manages to feel like its own distinct personality thanks to the textures and colors of the surfaces.

Edible ‘Glass’ Cat Dessert

The Kinseiken Seika Company in Hokoto, Japan – which pioneered the transparent ‘miss Shingen mochi’ dessert made of mineral water and agar – delighted the internet with a cat version of its renowned delicacy. It’s an extraordinarily delicate dish, melting away in about 30 minutes.

Cardboard Landmark Cat Houses

Cats invade Russia’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the White House, the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx of Giza and other internationally renowned architectural monuments for Studio Poopy Cat’s ‘Landmark’ series. These intricate pet houses are made of cardboard and feature unexpected details, like a snack elevator inside the Eiffel Tower.

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Cats Cats Cats 20 Fun Feline Focused Works Of Art Design