2026-02-06 23:45:00
21岁的伊利亚·马林宁（Ilia Malinin）被认为是美国在米兰-科尔蒂纳冬奥会夺金的热门人选。花样滑冰需要紧张感，运动员在光滑的冰面上高速滑行，依靠薄薄的金属冰刀保持平衡并做出急转弯。他们似乎违背物理定律，腾空跳跃并旋转身体，快得让人难以置信。毫厘之差可能决定成功或失败，风险与回报并存，胜负往往取决于小数点后的数字。
观看美国选手马林宁滑冰的悖论在于，他技艺高超，常常让比赛失去悬念。他完成最难的跳跃，打破得分纪录，当他在最佳状态时，唯一的问题就是谁会获得第二名。这位被称为“四转跳之神”的21岁选手已成为一种令人敬畏的稳定存在。他的惊人跳跃能力和标志性的四转跳（quad axel）使他成为2026年米兰-科尔蒂纳冬奥会夺金的热门人选。马林宁正在改变美国人对花样滑冰的认知，以及他们认为这项运动中可能实现的极限。如果他赢得金牌，这将是一个历史性的成就。而令人惊讶的是，观看马林宁在这些奥运会上的表现时，他还有可能变得更强。
为什么四转跳让马林宁成为花样滑冰金牌的热门人选？无论你是否喜欢花样滑冰，你都可能听说过这项运动最著名的跳跃动作——三周跳（triple axel），这是一种三又二分之一圈的技巧，曾在奥运历史上留下无数传奇和遗憾。1978年，加拿大选手文·泰勒（Vern Taylor）首次在国际比赛中完成这一动作，之后许多选手尝试并最终掌握了它。三周跳被认为是所有跳跃中最难的，因为它多出半圈，而且起跳方向是面向前方（其他跳跃则是背向冰面起跳，因此被认为更容易，这也是为什么三周跳比三周跳的其他变种得分更高）。随着时间的推移，其他五个跳跃（翻转、后内跳、后外跳、勾手跳、后外跳）逐渐增加了旋转次数，但四转跳（quad axel）似乎难以实现。日本选手羽生结弦（Yuzuru Hanyu）在2022年北京冬奥会上尝试了四转跳，但未能成功。也许人类的身体并不适合跳得那么高、转得那么快、承受那么大的扭矩，同时还要在冰面上滑行。在羽生尝试四转跳44年后，马林宁在2022年 Skate America 冰舞比赛上完成了历史上第一个四转跳，当时他只有17岁。自那以后，马林宁只在一次重要比赛中失利，即2023年法国大奖赛中获得银牌。如果有人能解释为什么马林宁能完成四转跳而其他人不能，他们将获得整个滑冰界的高度关注，甚至可能被当作“天才”来追捧。
专家认为，马林宁之所以能完成四转跳，是因为他具备出色的技巧，能够最大化跳跃的高度和旋转次数。同时，科学家研究发现，马林宁在四转跳中的垂直跳跃高度比其他选手的三周跳更高。这些无法用物理定律完全解释的技巧，正是马林宁的“魔法”。
“四转跳是区分选手的关键因素，”滑冰记者兼分析师、Rocker Skating网站创始人吴杰基（Jackie Wong）在飞往米兰之前告诉Vox，“它让马林宁能够建立巨大的优势，从而在比赛中以远超世界顶尖选手的分数获胜。”
吴杰基还表示：“马林宁的特别之处在于他敢于挑战高难度动作，并且能够完美执行。”
目前的评分体系鼓励运动员冒险，最难的动作得分最高。完成越多、越好的动作，得分越高。而在男子滑冰项目中，没有比马林宁的四转跳更难、得分更高的动作了。
吴杰基指出：“过去我们见过一些运动员敢于挑战高难度动作，但往往无法成功。而马林宁的特别之处在于他不仅敢于挑战，还能成功完成。”
我问吴杰基是否可以把马林宁的天赋与篮球界的斯蒂芬·库里（Steph Curry）或体操界的凯蒂·克拉克（Caitlin Clark）相提并论。他回答说，虽然库里和克拉克的远距离投篮能力令人惊叹，但篮球比赛不会允许他们同时得分超过3分。因此，马林宁更像体操界的西蒙·拜尔斯（Simone Biles），尽管拜尔斯在体操领域的统治力无法复制，但马林宁同样在做其他选手无法做到的事情，并且在长节目中共完成多达七个四转跳，这在比赛中非常罕见。
马林宁的出现，让比赛变得异常激烈，甚至在2025年世锦赛上，他以超过31分的优势击败了世界银牌得主米哈伊尔·谢伊多罗夫（Mikhail Shaidorov）。吴杰基表示：“我认为在过去三年里，他只输过一次比赛，这在花样滑冰界是非常罕见的。”
马林宁和四转跳的出现，可能在米兰奥运会上为美国男子滑冰带来历史性突破：如果他赢得金牌，这将是自1988年以来，美国首次在连续两届奥运会上获得男子滑冰金牌。此外，马林宁可能象征着美国男子滑冰的回归，并为新一代美国选手带来新的范式转变。
在1984年斯科特·汉密尔顿（Scott Hamilton）夺冠和1988年布莱恩·博伊塔诺（Brian Boitano）的精彩表现之后，美国男子滑冰曾经历了一段金牌荒。直到2010年，埃文·利萨切克（Evan Lysacek）才赢得金牌，但当时被认为是一次意外。此后，直到2022年，美国才再次获得金牌，由纳坦·陈（Nathan Chen）完成。陈在比赛中完成了五个四转跳，这一成就在当时令人震惊。他不仅战胜了对手，还以超过20分的优势夺冠。
马林宁虽然没有参加2022年冬奥会，但据美国滑冰协会的高级教练贾斯汀·迪隆（Justin Dillon）所说，他一直在关注陈的比赛。迪隆表示：“当我们在某个项目中拥有值得学习的运动员时，所有年轻选手都会想，‘我也可以做到。’马林宁的出现让伊利亚成为可能，而下一代选手则会因为他的成功而受到激励。”
迪隆和其他专家指出，美国拥有像陈和马林宁这样连续两届的天才选手，这在花样滑冰界是罕见的。两人都是“一代人”的代表，美国在连续两届奥运会上拥有这样的热门选手，就像中了彩票一样。即使美国在接下来的四年里找不到马林宁的接班人，他的存在也能激励新一代滑冰选手，扩大潜在人才的池子。
在2016年担任美国滑冰协会发展主管之前，迪隆曾负责发现年轻人才。他指出，过去美国滑冰协会从未真正拥有专门的青年人才选拔机制。他走遍美国，寻找有潜力的年轻选手。马林宁、阿莉莎·刘（Alysa Liu）和伊莎贝拉·利维托（Isabeau Levito）等2026年美国奥运滑冰队成员，都是他发现的潜力股。
当被问及美国滑冰协会在寻找下一个陈或马林宁时关注什么，迪隆表示关键在于找到那些能在空中快速旋转的年轻选手。旋转速度比跳跃高度更能体现四转跳所需的技能。
“四转跳通常在青少年时期发展，因此需要在那个年龄段就识别出天赋，”迪隆说，“大概在8、9、10岁左右。”
这意味着，美国滑冰协会需要在三、四年级的小学生中就发现潜在的四转跳选手。这是一种培养人才的策略，与过去的方式有所不同。但滑冰分析师吴杰基指出，现在在青少年比赛中完成四转跳的选手并不一定比以前的选手更有天赋，只是他们更早地接受了训练。
四转跳决定了得分，得分决定了奖牌，而奖牌又决定了滑冰协会的训练方式。一旦四转跳成为比赛的关键，所有教练方法、对年轻选手的培养方式以及他们的训练目标都会随之改变。
“一旦这些连锁反应开始，所有关于年轻选手的训练和培养方式都会发生变化，”吴杰基说，“这是一个整体的连锁反应，不是一蹴而就的。”
马林宁的天赋和潜力令人惊叹。过去三年，他让最难的动作变得像家常便饭一样，使比赛变成了一场场“加冕仪式”。而想到他还有可能变得更强，这或许会为他的滑冰生涯带来久违的紧张感。
Figure skating is nothing without tension. Humans speed across slick ice, balancing on a thin metal blade and making sharp turns. The athletes defy physics, jumping and twisting their bodies in the air, seemingly faster than you can blink. Millimeters can mean the difference between success and splat, risk goes hand in hand with reward, and winning or losing can come down to decimal points.
The paradox of watching American Ilia Malinin skate is that he’s so good, there often isn’t any suspense. He lands the most difficult jumps. He breaks scoring records left and right. And when he skates his best, the only real question is who is getting second place.
The 21-year-old “quad god” has become a staggering, intimidating constant.
Malinin’s astonishing jumping ability and his vaunted quadruple axel make him the heavy favorite to take home gold at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. Malinin is already changing the way we think about figure skating in the US and what is believed to be possible within the sport. If he wins, it would be a historic achievement.
And the one staggering thing to keep in mind watching Ilia Malinin in these Olympics? He could get even better.
Whether you’re a fan of figure skating or not, you are probably aware of the sport’s most famous jump: the triple axel, a three-and-a-half revolution trick that has immortalized and haunted so many routines in Olympic history.
Canadian Vern Taylor became the first person to land it in international competition in 1978, and many attempted and then perfected the jump in the decades that followed. The axel is considered the most difficult of all the jumps across skating’s four levels, mainly because of its extra half revolution and its forward-facing takeoff. (Skaters launch themselves back-first in all the other jumps, which is considered easier, and why a triple lutz is less difficult and thus worth fewer points than a triple axel.)
As time went on, skaters began adding more and more turns to the sport’s other five jumps — flip, loop, lutz, toe loop, salchow — but adding an additional revolution to the axel seemed too difficult.
Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, arguably the greatest figure skater of all time, attempted a quad axel at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, but did not land it. Perhaps the human body simply wasn’t made to jump that high, spin that fast, absorb that much torque, all while carving through ice.
Forty-four years later after Taylor’s first triple axel and months after Hanyu’s Olympic try at a quad, Ilia Malinin did the impossible.
Malinin, then 17, landed the first quadruple axel in history — the International Skating Union only counts jumps if they’re landed in a competition — about 22 seconds into his long program at Skate America in Norwood, Massachusetts. Malinin has only lost one major competition since that 2022 season, coming in second at the 2023 Grand Prix de France.
If someone could explain exactly why it is that Malinin is able to hit the quadruple axel when no one else can, they’d have the entire skating world knocking on their door, pulling up in armored trucks filled to the brim with money. Generational athletes — Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, LeBron James, and Malinin — are the greatest because they can do things that we can’t fully explain.
Figure skating experts told me that Malinin is a master technician, which allows him to maximize the height and rotation on his jumps. Meanwhile, scientists have studied Malinin’s quad axel and believe the secret is that he jumps higher vertically on it compared to his peers’ triple axels. The stuff that physics still can’t explain is Malinin magic.
“It is a differentiator,” Jackie Wong, a skating journalist, analyst, and founder of the website Rocker Skating, told Vox right before flying to Milan, where he’s covering the 2026 Games. “It is something that allows Ilia to build up such a huge advantage that he can win competitions by a massive number of points over the best skaters in the world.”
“The amazing thing about Ilia is that he puts this really hard stuff out there and executes it.”
Jackie Wong, skating journalist and analyst
The way skating is currently scored puts a high value on and ultimately rewards risk. The trickiest elements of a program are worth the most points. The more you land and the better that you land them, the higher the score. And there is nothing in men’s skating that is trickier or worth more than Malinin’s quad axel. (I say it’s his because he’s still the only person in the universe that can land it.)
“We’ve seen skaters in the past who have done the risk and reward thing and put out a whole bunch of hard stuff, but then they don’t land it,” Wong said. “The amazing thing about Ilia is that he puts this really hard stuff out there and executes it.”
I asked Wong to compare Malinin’s talent to other star athletes. Is he the Steph Curry or Caitlin Clark of figure skating? Wong said no, because even though only a few players can shoot from the distance they do, basketball doesn’t allow Curry and Clark to score more than three points at a time. Wong finally settled on one example, with a few caveats: Simone Biles, arguably the greatest American athlete of all time.
To be clear, Wong said, Biles’s dominance over gymnastics cannot be compared or replicated. Her superiority and longevity is singular. But Malinin, like Biles, is doing things that no other competitor can do and hitting these elements — potentially seven quadruple jumps in his long program — at a consistent clip. Malinin, like Biles, has taken a sport that’s judged to the decimal point and turned competitions into blowouts. At the 2025 World Championships, Malinin outscored world silver medalist Mikhail Shaidorov by more than 31 points.
“He’s lost, I think, one competition in the last three years,” Wong said. “In figure skating, that’s pretty rare.”
Malinin and his quad axel have the chance to do something special in Milan: If he wins, it will be the first time since 1988 that the United States will have won gold in men’s figure skating in consecutive Olympics Games.
Malinin may also symbolize what skating experts see as not only the US’s return to dominance, but a paradigm shift for the next generation of American skaters.
After Scott Hamilton’s win in 1984 and Brian Boitano’s dazzling performance in ’88, the US men went through a gold medal drought. Evan Lysacek won in 2010, but that was largely considered an upset. After Lysacek, the US wouldn’t get on top of the podium again until Nathan Chen in 2022.
Chen landed five quadruple jumps on his way to victory — a feat considered staggering at the time. Chen didn’t just eke by the competition; he won by more than 20 points. Malinin, who was not selected for those Games, was paying attention, according to Justin Dillon, the US Figure Skating’s chief of high performance.
“When we have an athlete in a discipline to look up to, all of the young athletes that watch the Olympics think, ‘I can do that too,’” Dillon told Vox. “Ilia watching Nathan makes Ilia possible, and then the next generation watching Ilia makes them possible.”
Dillon and other experts I spoke to said that having a talent like Chen immediately followed by one like Malinin is a figure skating anomaly. Both Chen and Malinin are considered generational athletes, and the US having both athletes as favorites in consecutive Olympics is akin to winning the lottery.
Even if US Figure Skating doesn’t find Malinin’s successor during the next quadrennial, the fact that a new generation will be watching him at these Games helps broaden the pool of potential skaters — athletes that Dillon and US Figure Skating want to cultivate and grow.
Before taking on his current role, Dillon was hired as US Figure Skating’s development director in 2016. He was tasked with spotting young talent, a space that Dillon says “never really existed” in the federation. Dillon traveled across the US and scouted juniors, looking for strong skaters that the US could develop. Several members of the 2026 US Olympic figure skating team, including Malinin, Alysa Liu, and Isabeau Levito, are athletes he saw on the trail.
I asked Dillon what US Figure Skating is looking for when trying to identify the next Chen or Malinin. The key, he said, is finding kids who can quickly rotate in the air. The speed of their rotations — more than the height of their jumps — is the skill that most directly translates to quadruple jumps at the next level.
The idea that he could get even better might, for the first time in quite a while, inject real tension in Malinin’s skating.
“Quads are usually developed in the teenage years, and you need to identify the talent before that age,” Dillon said. “Eight, nine, and 10 years old — pretty much around that age.”
Yes, that means spotting potential quad jumpers when they’re third- and fourth-graders. It’s a good strategy to develop talent, and it’s a departure from how things may have been done in previous eras. But Wong, the skating analyst, noted that the kids who are now doing quad jumps in juniors aren’t inherently more talented than their forebears. “It’s that they were prepared to do these jumps at a much earlier age,” he says.
Quads dictate scores, which dictate medals, which then dictates the kinds of training and development that figure skating federations are employing.
“Once those dominoes were set, all of the coaching techniques, how you think about young skaters, and what you prepare them for — all of that changed,” Wong said. “It’s a whole chain effect. It didn’t happen overnight.”
The conventional wisdom of figure skating is that there will always be tension between athleticism and artistry — that the more that the sport values one, the less care will be paid to the other. And it makes sense that the more points quadruple jumps are worth, the more skaters will focus on them as opposed to layback spins or spirals.
But Malinin is so good, he doesn’t necessarily have to choose. He has the potential to be both a master technician and a wonderful artist. It’s probably not a coincidence that Malinin cites Hanyu Yuzuru as his inspiration. What made Hanyu so special was that he was able to blend artistry — the shapes he created with his body, the position of his arms and legs, his connection to the music, creating beauty in between the jumps, his step sequences, etc. — with sheer athleticism.
Sandra Bezic, a Canadian champion pairs skater and choreographer, believes Malinin has a desire to get better at all facets of the sport, not just the quads.
“He’s such a charismatic performer. He cares about his connection to the audience. He cares about his music. He cares about his choreography,” she told Vox. “We’re all a little blinded by his incredible jumps, the multiple quads.” But she believes it’s worth keeping an eye on his artistry too, especially as he gets older. “From what I’ve observed, I think he’s excited to continue to develop in that way.”
“You can’t be an artist without living,” Bezic said, noting that, at 21, Malinin is still young. (Hanyu was 19 when he won his first Olympics.) “You have to live. You have to experience life and loss and love. You can have innate qualities and feel the music and have that in you, but you won’t reach your potential until you’ve lived.”
That there’s still more for Malinin to learn and untapped potential left for him to fulfill is wild to think about. During the past three years, he’s made the sport’s most difficult tricks look routine and turned competitions into coronations. The idea that he could get even better might, for the first time in quite a while, inject real tension in Malinin’s skating.
2026-02-06 21:30:00
利用希望六号（HOPE VI）资金在辛辛那提建设的住房项目。| 摄影：Torti Gallas + Partners
美国上世纪的大规模公共住房项目是一场雄心勃勃的实验，但其受欢迎的时间却非常短暂。这些简朴、常常是高层建筑的住房项目在数十年内迅速遍布美国各大城市，主要集中在1930年代到1960年代之间。然而，随着这些住房项目逐渐陷入长期的维护问题和贫困集中，政治界很快便形成了拆除它们的共识。1992年，国会设立了希望六号计划，为美国各地的许多受损公共住房建筑提供资金，以拆除它们并重建为新的、混合收入社区。这些新社区通常由公共住房、补贴住房以及市场价住房组成，多为低层联排别墅和较小的公寓楼，更加融入城市街道网络。这被《城市研究所》（Urban Institute）的一份报告称为美国住房政策的“重大转变”。
然而，这一政策转变也引发了广泛的反对声音，一些人担心低收入居民会被迫搬迁，而且并非所有被拆除的住房单元都会被替代。为了了解这一政策转变对过去几十年家庭生活的影响，包括哈佛大学经济学家拉吉·切蒂（Raj Chetty）在内的学者团队，研究了美国各地约200个通过希望六号计划重建的住房项目，从亚特兰大到西雅图再到埃尔帕索。他们发现，希望六号计划显著提高了低收入儿童未来收入的可能性，关键在于这些儿童能够与更富裕的儿童建立友谊。这些发现发表在最近由美国国家经济研究局（NBER）发布的一份工作论文中。
这种跨阶层的融合对贫困儿童的好处似乎并不令人惊讶。儿童天生善于吸收周围环境的期望和榜样，对世界能提供什么可能性极为敏感。但切蒂和他的合著者们使用了比以往更严谨的社会科学研究方法，展示了住房项目如何传递优势或加剧劣势。这些发现与美国中世纪城市规划失误的经典批评相呼应，解释了美国公共住房为何失败，并为建设促进社会联系和广泛共享繁荣与尊严的城市提供了蓝图。
研究人员主要关注了约109,000名1978年至1990年间出生、成长于希望六号项目中的儿童。与那些继续居住在未被改造的公共住房中的同龄人相比，这些儿童有17%的可能性进入大学，而男孩后来入狱的可能性则降低了20%。每多住一年新住房，儿童未来的收入平均增长2.8%，这意味着那些整个童年都住在重建住房中的儿童，收入平均增长了50%。
然而，低收入成年人并未从中获得同样的好处，这反映了形成期的同伴群体和生活期望的重要性。研究人员将儿童的成果归因于他们与附近高收入同伴建立的早期社会联系。他们发现，这些成果并不能用其他因素来解释，比如当地学校改善；在未被项目改造的邻近社区中，同样没有观察到这种收益。因此，这些成果依赖于混合收入住宅区，使儿童的日常社交世界得以接触。
研究人员通过多种实证方法验证了这些联系，包括使用Facebook数据来衡量跨阶层的友谊。相比之下，原始的住房项目并未促进混合收入的社会互动，实际上，它们将贫困家庭与城市其他部分隔离开来，仿佛有意为之。论文作者写道：“这些受损的公共住房项目本质上是与周边社区几乎没有社会互动的孤岛。”这些项目不仅将富人和穷人社区分隔开来，其物理设计也带有污名化和敌意的色彩：常常是大型塔楼聚集在一起，周围是隔离的空旷空间。
20世纪的作家和城市规划者简·雅各布斯（Jane Jacobs）曾严厉批评这种中世纪的城市设计理念，其中公共住房项目是其一部分。她认为这种做法忽视了人类的需求，将城市视为可以自上而下重新组织的机器。雅各布斯指出，这些住房项目的贫困影响不仅源于贫困的高度集中，还源于一种根本上反城市、破坏城市生活的设计方式。
也许将公共住房项目的住宅塔楼称为“反城市”听起来奇怪。难道高耸的建筑和密集的住房不是城市生活的本质吗？但请考虑一下普莱特-艾戈（Pruitt-Igoe）这个臭名昭著的圣路易斯公共住房项目，它在1970年代开始拆除之前只存在了不到二十年。与周围的街道网格相比，这个项目缺乏人性化的小街巷、便利的商店或其他嵌入式目的地，以实现雅各布斯所说的“复杂的街道芭蕾舞”。该项目更像是一个荒凉的、空间不确定的孤岛，将低收入家庭与城市其他部分隔离开来，并通过大片死区使这种隔离更加严重。
这些住房项目所引发的犯罪问题，雅各布斯认为并非源于居民的道德缺陷，而是源于空旷空间剥夺了普通城市社区中家庭所拥有的安全保障机制。雅各布斯的问题并不在于密度，她实际上赞扬密度是城市活力不可或缺的一部分，而在于这种建筑风格。如今，她的批评已被希望六号计划的成果所证实，该计划认识到孤立的超级街区的问题，并试图将公共住房重新融入街道网络中。
当然，美国的公共住房并非仅仅是一场阴谋，将穷人纳入不人道的设计实验中。它与当时许多世界城市中心兴起的现代主义公寓楼一样，源于对拥挤、低质量住房的现实需求，旨在用提供基本现代安全设施和便利设施（如室内厕所和暖气）的住房来替代它们。从理论上讲，这是一个美丽而乌托邦的想法，但其雄心却因结构性种族主义、投资不足以及强化隔离和社会孤立的设计理念而受到损害。
尽管切蒂和他的合著者没有深入探讨现代建筑的优劣，但他们以明确的量化方式呈现了那些定性学者早已观察到的现象：我们所处的建筑环境设计对我们的生活轨迹有着深远的影响。
希望六号计划的花费高达170亿美元，听起来似乎令人望而却步。但研究人员发现，这些儿童未来的经济收益远超政府对每个住房单元进行重建的成本，而且相当一部分税收负担最终也会被抵消（不过，他们并未声称该计划的收益能完全弥补所有成本，包括那些因原住房项目被拆除而无法返回的居民所承受的成本）。
我们今天仍然面临着阶层隔离和糟糕的城市规划带来的后果。研究指出，美国今天的平均低收入社区与希望六号计划帮助重建的那些破旧项目一样孤立。这些项目的遗留问题削弱了公众对公共住房的信任，但政府在帮助那些无法负担私人市场住房的人提供住房方面，仍然有重要的作用。帮助他们融入城市结构并连接到多样化的社会网络，是政府应尽的责任。毕竟，这种跨阶层的生活和流动性，正是城市生活最伟大的承诺。
America’s era of big public housing projects was a grand experiment whose period of favor was remarkably short-lived.
The austere, often high-rise complexes rose across US cities in a few decades, mostly from the 1930s to 1960s. But as they became marooned by chronic disrepair and concentrated poverty, the political consensus to tear them down formed just as quickly. By 1992, Congress had created the HOPE VI program, which provided funding to demolish many distressed public housing buildings in cities across the US and replace them with new, mixed-income developments.
These newer neighborhoods have been made up of a mix of public housing, subsidized housing, and market-rate units, often consisting of low-rise townhomes and smaller apartment buildings that were much more integrated into surrounding city street grids. It was a “dramatic turnaround” in US housing policy, as a report from the Urban Institute, a social and economic policy think tank, put it. It also drew a chorus of opposition at the time, from those who feared — not entirely incorrectly — that residents would be displaced and not all demolished housing units would be replaced.
To understand how that policy shift has impacted the lives of families in the intervening decades, a team of scholars, including Harvard economist Raj Chetty, known for his field-defining work on the drivers of economic mobility in the US, looked at some 200 housing projects revitalized under HOPE VI in cities across the US — from Atlanta to Seattle to El Paso. They found that HOPE VI dramatically increased the future earnings of low-income children who grew up in the rebuilt neighborhoods — crucially by allowing them to form friendships with more affluent children. The findings are reported in a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
That cross-class integration greatly benefits poor kids may not sound like a surprising discovery. Children are sponges for the expectations and examples that surround them, exquisitely sensitive to what the world trains them to believe is possible. But Chetty and his co-authors show these effects in housing projects with more rigorous social-scientific methods than has been done before, representing a new generation of causal evidence on how neighborhoods can transmit advantage, or heighten disadvantage.
The findings harmonize with canonical critiques of America’s midcentury planning mistakes, together offering an explanation for what went wrong with US public housing, and a blueprint for building cities that enable social connection and broadly shared prosperity and dignity.
The researchers focused primarily on the outcomes of about 109,000 children born between 1978 and 1990 who grew up in HOPE VI public housing. Compared with their peers who remained in non-revitalized public housing, children in the HOPE VI cohort were 17 percent more likely to go to college, and boys were 20 percent less likely to later become incarcerated. For every additional year that they lived in the new housing, children’s future earnings grew on average by 2.8 percent, which corresponds to a 50 percent increase for those who spend their entire childhoods in revitalized housing.
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Low-income adults in the new developments, though, did not see these same benefits, reflecting the importance of the formative years when peer groups and life expectations take root. The researchers attribute children’s outcomes to the early social connections that low-income kids formed with nearby higher-income peers. And the results were not, they found, explained by other factors, like improvements in local schools; the same gains were not observed for nearby children who lived in non-project neighborhoods but likely attended the same schools. Rather, the results depended on the mixed-income residential areas that put kids’ day-to-day social worlds into contact. The researchers validated these ties using a number of empirical methods, including data from Facebook that they used to measure friendships across class lines.
The original housing projects, by contrast, did not facilitate mixed-income social interaction; in fact they obtrusively cordoned off poor families from the rest of the city as if by intention. “Distressed public housing projects were essentially islands that had limited social interaction with nearby communities,” wrote the paper’s authors, who include researchers from Harvard, Cornell University, and the US Census Bureau.
These projects did not merely segregate rich and poor neighborhoods — their very physical design was stigmatizing and hostile: often large towers collected together, set back amid isolating open space. The 20th-century writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs excoriated this midcentury urban design philosophy, of which public housing projects were a part; she argued this approach disregarded human needs and treated cities as machines that could be reorganized from the top down.
The impoverishing effects of housing projects, she argued, were not just the product of hyper-concentrating poverty, but also a consequence of a particular approach to cities — one that was fundamentally anti-urban and destructive to city life.
It might sound strange to call the residential towers characteristic of public housing projects “anti-urban.” Aren’t tall buildings and dense housing the essence of urban life? But consider this image of Pruitt-Igoe, a notorious St. Louis public housing project that lasted not two decades before its demolition began in the 1970s:
Unlike in the surrounding city street grid, this complex lacked human-scale streets, convenient businesses, or any other woven-in destinations to facilitate what Jacobs called the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of a healthy city. The project was instead a desolate island of indeterminate spaces that separated low-income households from the rest of the city, and made that segregation all the worse with vast dead zones that repel normal activity. The crime that came to define the public image of housing projects like this one was a product not of the moral failings of residents, Jacobs argued, but of the emptiness that stripped families of the safety mechanisms that ordinary city neighborhoods possess.
Jacobs’s problem was not with density, which she celebrated as indispensable to city vitality, but with this style of building. And her critique has now been validated by the outcomes from Hope VI, which recognized the problems with isolated superblocks and aimed to integrate public housing back into the street fabric.
Of course, American public housing was not merely some conspiracy to conscript poor people into an experiment in inhumane design. Similar to the modernist apartment blocks going up across many urban centers around the world at the time, US public housing stemmed from a real need to replace overcrowded, substandard dwellings with homes that offered basic modern safety features and amenities like indoor plumbing and heat. In the abstract, it was a beautiful, utopian idea, but its ambitions were marred by structural racism, underinvestment, and a design philosophy that reinforced segregation and social isolation.
Although Chetty and his co-authors don’t dive into debates about the merits of modern architecture, they put into stark quantitative terms what qualitative scholars have long observed: The design of our built environment can have profound effects on the course of our lives.
At $17 billion, the cost of HOPE VI might sound daunting. But the economic gains to the children who grew up in the new housing greatly exceeds the costs to the government of revitalizing each unit, the researchers found, and a significant share of the cost to taxpayers is ultimately offset, too (they don’t, however, claim to know whether the program’s benefits make up for all of its costs, including costs to the residents who were displaced from original public housing units and unable to return). We can learn from these lessons today — we are, of course, still living with the consequences of class segregation and poor urban planning.
The average low-income neighborhood in the US today, the study notes, is just as isolated as the decrepit projects that HOPE VI helped rebuild. The scarred legacy of the projects has strained public faith in public housing, but there is still an important role for government to play in providing housing to people who can’t afford it on the private market, helping them weave into the city fabric and connect to diverse social networks. This kind of cross-class living and mobility is, after all, the great promise of city life.
2026-02-06 20:00:00
米兰-科尔蒂纳2026冬奥会吉祥物蒂娜和米洛在2026年2月5日的奥运火炬传递活动中亮相。这则新闻出现在《今日解释》（Today, Explained）的每日通讯中，该通讯旨在帮助读者理解当天最重要的新闻和故事。欢迎订阅。
我们热爱奥运会，它触及了人类广泛的兴趣，从地缘政治到气候、名人和文化。为了了解奥运会的看点，我采访了同事并参与了一些筹备会议。在本期中，我们将汇总可能定义米兰-科尔蒂纳冬奥会的有趣人物、开放性问题和新趋势，包括“滑雪登山”（skimo）这一新项目，以及支持美国队的道德困境。
奥运会正式开幕时间为今天下午2点，晚上8点将有黄金时段的转播。我确信Vox的许多同事都会观看。美国粉丝是否会被视为“坏人”？我认为观察他们如何应对这一问题将非常有趣。尤其是在冰球比赛中，美国和加拿大是主要对手，而美国队可能并非“不起眼的弱者”，他们可能不是观众的最爱。这会带来什么样的感受？
“滑雪登山”（skimo）是新增的项目，它结合了滑雪和登山，运动员需要在途中切换不同阶段，看起来非常精彩。
21岁的花样滑冰选手伊利亚·马林金（Ilia Malinin）首次参加奥运会，但已经打破了多项纪录。他在2022年首次完成国际比赛中的四跳转，去年12月又在一次节目中完成了七次四跳。他的表演令人惊叹。
美国花样滑冰选手马克西姆·纳乌莫夫（Maxim Naumov）的父母是世界冠军，他们在去年1月美国航空公司的飞机与直升机相撞事故中不幸遇难，这起事故对美国花样滑冰界造成了巨大冲击，导致28人丧生。纳乌莫夫的参赛令人同情。
美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）人员的参与引发了意大利的抗议。米兰市长称ICE是“杀人部队”，并表示不欢迎他们。
美国运动员来自政治动荡的国家，他们可能会面对关于代表特朗普政府的质疑。许多美国运动员是移民或移民子女，可能会公开反对ICE。此外，还有来自以色列、乌克兰、俄罗斯、伊朗和委内瑞拉的运动员，他们的国家局势也可能引发争议。
随着全球变暖，冬季奥运会的雪和冰条件变得越来越难保证。国际奥委会正在考虑将冬季奥运会提前举行以获得更冷的天气。但今年的早期滑雪训练因大雪而取消。
蒂娜和米洛是“第一代Z世代”代表，他们的设计灵感来自意大利学生。
20岁的美国滑雪选手艾莉莎·刘（Alysa Liu）在回归赛场后，希望用自己的音乐和设计自己的服装参赛。
19岁的加拿大冰球选手凯尔·庆祝（Celebrini）将成为NHL中最年轻的冬奥会选手，与多位NHL巨星同场竞技。
41岁的美国滑雪选手辛迪·冯（Lindsey Vonn）在上周受伤，但坚持参加第五次冬奥会，她将成为历史上最年长的女子高山滑雪选手。
美国滑雪选手乔伊·金（Chloe Kim）在1月受伤，但已恢复参赛。她是否还能保持最佳状态？
22岁的美国女子冰球选手莱莉·爱德华兹（Laila Edwards）是首位代表美国参加冬奥会的非裔女性。她的父母也来到米兰。
22岁的自由式滑雪选手谷爱凌（Eileen Gu）在2022年冬奥会崭露头角，她选择代表中国参赛，引发了中美之间的讨论，但她的成功并未受到影响。
意大利总理吉奥尔吉娅·梅洛尼（Giorgia Meloni）是该国首位女性总理，她与特朗普关系密切，但同时也要面对特朗普对欧洲的批评。冬奥会将再次将她推向全球聚光灯下。
意大利还举办了全国文化奥林匹克活动，包括展览、戏剧和音乐表演、艺术装置、节日和工作坊。洛杉矶官员担心他们在2028年奥运会的文艺项目准备不足。
2024年巴黎夏季奥运会曾因“环保”问题引发争议，而2026年冬奥会则更注重实际建设，如米兰-科尔蒂纳奥运村采用低碳建筑方法和预制外墙板。
“毫米之战”：挪威滑雪跳台队的三名工作人员因修改运动员服装而被停赛，这在滑雪跳台等项目中，微小改动可能带来巨大影响。
奥运村的“网红美食”：虽然奥运村的美食与运动无关，但巴黎的巧克力松饼曾成为热门，而米兰的“奶奶蛋糕”（torta della nonna）似乎也有潜力。
西班牙花样滑冰选手托马斯-洛伦茨·古亚里诺·萨巴特（Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté）因使用《小黄人》电影音乐而与环球影业发生争议，但最终胜诉。
AI音乐在冰上运动中兴起，由于版权问题，一些选手开始使用AI生成的音乐。
AI技术在米兰-科尔蒂纳冬奥会中也将被用于评估运动员动作，如跳高、长度和空中时间。
NHL球员首次参加冬奥会，这将吸引新的观众群体。
体育博彩的兴起：今年的奥运会可能成为自预测市场流行以来的首个大型赛事，人们已开始下注比赛结果。
健康与安全：与五年前东京奥运会的防疫措施相比，如今运动员在旅行中几乎不再戴口罩。想象一下在狭小的宿舍里生病或在职业生涯巅峰时身体不适的场景。
由于诺罗病毒爆发，女子冰球比赛曾被推迟。
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Vox loves the Olympics. Absolutely loves them. We briefly debated popping up a limited-run Winter Olympics newsletter this week, but then remembered that we are not in fact a sports site and have no actual sports reporters on staff.
No matter! The Olympics are fun (and, occasionally, inspiring and heartbreaking and anxious and weird) because they touch a wide range of human interests, from geopolitics to climate to celebrity and culture. And in that spirit, I’ve polled my colleagues and poked my head into a few planning sessions to see what Olympics storylines everyone is watching.
In today’s edition, we round up the interesting characters, open questions, and emerging trends that could define the Milan Cortina Games, from the debut of skimo (fascinating! fun!) to the complicated moral calculus of rooting for Team USA right now (nuanced, uncomfortable, in short: a bummer).
The whole shebang officially kicks off this afternoon at 2 pm ET, with a primetime broadcast at 8 pm. You can absolutely bet that I and many others at Vox will be tuning in.
Are we the baddies? I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how American fans react to, well, being global villains. I think it could be particularly interesting around Olympic hockey. Probably the most famous moment of American underdogness — at least since the American Revolution — was the 1980 Olympics hockey win. The Americans and the Canadians are the top rivals in Olympic hockey, and these Games will be intense. We’re not plucky underdogs — the US team probably has the second-best chance at the gold after Canada — and we will not be the crowd favorite. What’s that going to feel like? —Bryan Walsh
Skimo. I’m still rooting for the Winter Olympics to add two of my favorite sports — cross-country running and cyclocross bike racing, both of which are great in the snow — but for now, I’m plenty excited about the new sport we did get: skimo, or ski mountaineering. As the name suggests, it involves summiting a climb (partially with skis, partially without) and then tearing back down it. Athletes have to transition between phases along the way, triathlon-style, and it looks thrilling. —Cameron Peters
Ilia Malinin. Twenty-one-year-old figure skater Ilia Malinin is competing in his first Olympics this year, but he’s already broken a ton of records. In 2022, he became the first (and still only) skater to land a fully rotated quadruple axel in international competition, and in December, he landed a record seven quadruple jumps in a single program. In other words, Malinin is a mind-bogglingly aggressive, physical skater — The Atlantic dubbed him “the man who broke physics” — and his programs will be really fun to watch when they kick off this weekend. —Caitlin Dewey
A figure skater’s tragic backstory. Maxim Naumov is a member of the US Olympic figure skating team whose parents — world champions in skating themselves — were among the 67 people killed when an American Airlines plane and a helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington, DC, last January. As much as the plane crash affected DC, it was even more devastating for the figure skating community, which lost 28 parents, skaters, alumni, volunteers, and more. It’s hard not to root for Naumov in the aftermath of such sadness. —Libby Nelson
US immigration agents. The Department of Homeland Security often has a presence at the Olympic Games, providing security services and monitoring criminal activity. But the news that some ICE agents would deploy to Milan has sparked outrage and protests in Italy. Milan’s governor called ICE “a militia that kills” and said “they are not welcome” in his city. —CD
Possible political demonstrations. Hundreds of athletes competing in Milan hail from one of the world’s most politically volatile nations: the United States of America. As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos has written, American athletes are bound to face questions about representing the nation of Donald Trump. It seems likely that some US Olympians, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants, will speak out against ICE; I will be watching to see who does and what they say. At last year’s Four Nations men’s hockey tournament, pro-MAGA and anti-Trump sentiment colored the US-Canada final, with Trump himself calling the men’s team and raising the tempers of Canadian players and fans with his calls to annex what he was calling “the 51st state.” —Seth Maxon
…and not just from Team USA. There are four Israelis competing at these Games who may face protests or become fulcrums of controversy. And there are Ukrainians, “unaffiliated” athletes from Russia, a couple of Iranians, and even a Venezuelan cross-country skier competing. Whether any of them speak up or are confronted about their nations’ turmoil will be worth watching out for. —SM
Winter weather. Many Winter Olympic events hinge on ideal outdoor snow and ice conditions that are becoming harder to achieve as the planet warms up. The IOC said they are now considering moving the Winter Games earlier in the year to chase the cold weather. On the other hand, some of the early ski sessions for the current Games were canceled due to too much snow. —Umair Irfan
Milo and Tina. I don’t think any Olympic mascots will ever top Paris’s anthropomorphic hats, but keep an eye out for the scarf-wearing, short-haired weasels that organizers have called the Games’ “first openly Gen Z” representatives. The open Gen Z-ness relates to their backstories (Milo and Tina are reportedly teenagers) and their design origins (Italy invited primary and secondary school students to submit mascot proposals). —CD
Alysa Liu. Not only is 20-year-old figure skater Alysa Liu competing on the biggest stage in the world after a nearly two-year hiatus from the sport, but Liu told her coaches that she wanted to design her own costumes and skate to her choice of music. So far, that’s involved a lot of Lady Gaga, a smiley piercing, and halo-striped hair. I can’t wait to see what she and the rest of the US figure skating team accomplish. —Sydney Bergen
Macklin Celebrini. The term “generational talent” gets tossed around a lot when hockey watchers talk about the 19-year-old forward from Vancouver. He’s made a stagnant, struggling team (my team, the San Jose Sharks) competitive once again. Celebrini is set to become the youngest player to represent Canada in a Winter Olympics featuring players from the National Hockey League — where he’ll play alongside NHL icons like Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, and Connor McDavid. Celebrini has been a fascinating player to watch when an entire team relies on him, so I can’t imagine what he can accomplish when he’s playing alongside his sport’s biggest stars. —Christian Paz
Lindsey Vonn. The 41-year-old American skier completely ruptured her ACL in a fall last week, but has insisted that she’ll compete in her fifth Winter Games despite the (severe and debilitating!) injury. If she competes as planned, Vonn will be the oldest female Alpine skier in Olympic history. As a person around Vonn’s age, and as the owner of a fully reconstructed ACL, I am both vaguely horrified for Vonn and very invested in her competition. —CD
Chloe Kim. The American snowboarding superstar suffered a shoulder injury in early January that has prevented her from training in the weeks that have followed. Thankfully, she has recovered enough to still compete. But is she still in top form and able to contend for gold as expected? I hope so! Either way, I’m sure NBC and Peacock are already preparing their scripts about how much adversity she’s overcome to get back on the podium. —SM
Laila Edwards. The 22-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin made history in Italy by just being there: Edwards is the first Black woman to play for the US women’s Olympic hockey team. And thanks to a successful GoFundMe campaign — which included a donation from the Kelce brothers, who are from her hometown of Cleveland Heights, Ohio — Edwards’s parents and other family members have made the trip to Milan as well. —Esther Gim
Eileen Gu. A breakout star at the 2022 Olympics is back to compete in freestyle skiing. At the last Games, she ignited debate in both the US and China as an American who chose to compete for China, her mother’s home country. But the controversy hardly hurt her success; she’s become a huge celebrity in China with millions of dollars in endorsement deals, and she won three medals, including two golds, in Beijing. She’s only 22 years old and is gearing up for even more success, and stardom, in Milan. —SM
Giorgia Meloni. Italy’s first woman prime minister already occupies an odd place on the world stage: She’s a right-wing populist who enjoys a close relationship with President Donald Trump and his administration… but she’s also, obviously, a European leader who’s had to grapple with Trump’s attacks on the continent. The Olympics, Italy’s first since 2006, will put her in the global spotlight once again. (That, and a comically Italian scandal wherein a partisan art restorer snuck Meloni’s face into a church fresco.) —CD
Cultural initiatives. Alongside the athletic events, Italy is hosting a nationwide Cultural Olympiad with exhibitions, theater and music performances, artist installations, festivals, and workshops. Los Angeles should be watching closely, as local officials are concerned that the city is way behind on planning and fundraising for arts programming for the 2028 Games. Can LA showcase itself as an entertainment mecca and a capital of cultural diversity, as it did when it last hosted the Games in 1984? The clock is ticking. —Avishay Artsy
Greening the Games. Remember during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris when organizers were getting heat for how they approached “greening” the competition? At the time, organizers focused on nudging behavioral choices, such as defaulting toward climate-friendly foods (read: no meat) or no AC, which wasn’t popular. So I was excited to hear that this year’s Winter Olympics focused its energy on the actual construction of the Milano Cortina Olympic Village instead. According to the architects behind the project, the village employs a modular design made with low-carbon construction methods and prefabricated facade panels. It might be a model for future Games. —Izzie Ramirez
“The battle of millimeters.” Last month, a cheating scandal rocked the ski-jumping world when three staff members on the Norwegian team were suspended for modifying the crotches of the outfits of two jumpers, including the reigning Olympic champion. In sports like ski jumping, small changes like extra stitching can have big aerodynamic impacts — part of what one ski jumping enthusiast described to The Athletic as “the battle of millimeters.” We’ll see what that means for Norway’s athletes in these Olympics. —Cameron Peters
Olympic muffins. The best TikToks from the Olympic Village have nothing to do with sport: They’re the clips of globe-trotting, carb-loading, world-class athletes reviewing mid-range cafeteria food. Chocolate muffins stole the show in Paris. (Can confirm: These muffins are good.) And while the Milan Cortina Games have yet to produce a breakout foodstuff, the torta della nonna looks like a contender. —CD
The Minions guy. Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté is not expected to medal at this year’s Games, but he’s already a winner in one regard: He triumphed over film production company Universal Pictures in a petty, comical dispute the internet dubbed #Minionsgate. Sabaté, who skates to music from the Minions movies, was briefly blocked from using his signature soundtrack over copyright concerns, which the Olympics have taken much more seriously since a 2022 lawsuit. —CD
AI music on ice. Figure skating is trying to stay relevant by encouraging figure skaters to make contemporary music choices: classical music out, pop bangers in. But it’s led to a music licensing nightmare in the sport, as Minion Guy found out the hard way. Some skaters are turning to an ethically dubious solution: AI music, which avoids expensive fees and prolonged negotiations. As AI slop hits Spotify playlists and Billboard charts, will things get sloppy on the ice too? We’ll be watching, er, listening to see. —Peter Balonon-Rosen
New sports tech. Gymnastics judges for the 2024 Paris Games got a leg up from a novel tool: an AI system that could automatically capture, model, and evaluate athletes’ movements against standard parameters. AI tools will also be in use at the Milan Cortina Games, where they’ll do things like capture the height, length, and air time of figure skaters’ jumps. A number of teams have also enthusiastically embraced AI-informed training… though only time will tell if that gives them the edge that some have claimed. —CD
NHL stars. Men’s hockey will be a particularly splashy event this year: It’s the first year in more than a decade that the National Hockey League has allowed its players to participate in the Games. And following the breakout success of the Canadian gay sports romance series Heated Rivalry, there’ll be a new audience of fans and casual viewers that will be tuning in. (Thank you, Shane Hollander!) —Christian Paz
The rise of sports betting. This year’s Olympics arguably mark the first event since prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket became a mainstream phenomenon. Already, Polymarket users have traded millions of dollars’ worth of bets on individual competitions and overall medal counts. Notably, the Milan Cortina Games come just as these platforms face a wave of new scrutiny related to sports cheating scandals. —CD
Health and wellness. It’s increasingly hard to believe that, a mere five years ago, the Tokyo Olympics mandated masking, social distancing, and other Covid protocols. Now, most Olympic athletes don’t even mask routinely during travel. Personally, I’d be so stressed about illness. Imagine how awful it would be to get sick while sharing a tiny dorm room with your teammates or not feeling 100 percent healthy during the biggest moment of your career. Organizers already had to push the women’s hockey game between Canada and Finland because of a norovirus outbreak. —Lauren Katz
2026-02-06 19:30:00
Bad Bunny的音乐中融入了强烈的政治理性，他经常探讨波多黎各的政治议题。作为首位在超级碗中场秀上担任主角的独唱拉丁美洲艺术家，他的表演正值其人气巅峰。此前一周，他凭借专辑《Debí Tirar Más Fotos》获得了格莱美最高荣誉，该专辑涉及殖民主义、城市化以及复杂的人际关系等主题，同时展现了波多黎各及拉丁音乐的多元根源。
31岁的Bad Bunny（本名Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio）因其直言不讳的政治立场而广受关注。他拒绝在美国巡演，以避免将拉丁裔粉丝暴露于移民与海关执法局（ICE）的搜查之下。在获得最佳城市音乐专辑奖时，他公开表示：“在感谢上帝之前，我要说‘ICE滚出去！’” 他强调波多黎各人是人类，也是美国人。
Bad Bunny是波多黎各“危机一代”的代表，这一代人经历了自然灾害、经济危机、政府丑闻以及与华盛顿就紧缩政策和灾害援助的冲突。他的音乐经常反映这些经历，例如2019年的抗议歌曲《Afilando Los Cuchillos》表达了对腐败的不满，成为反对时任州长Ricky Rosselló的抗议歌曲。此外，他的歌曲《El Apagón》展现了波多黎各人在频繁停电中的自豪感，而《Bokete》则用岛上道路的坑洼比喻一段应避免的恋情。
2024年，波多黎各州长选举中，支持独立的候选人Juan Dalmau获得第二名，这是独立运动的一个重要进展。Bad Bunny支持Dalmau，并在公开场合批评主要政党，鼓励粉丝投票给Dalmau。尽管Jenniffer González-Colón（支持州权）赢得了选举，但Dalmau的得票率显著上升，达到31%。
独立运动的兴起部分源于年轻人对政府的失望，以及Bad Bunny的专辑《Debí Tirar Más Fotos》对波多黎各文化与历史的探讨。然而，独立之路仍面临诸多挑战，包括失去出生公民权、基础设施问题、以及对联邦援助的依赖。此外，美国政府对波多黎各的财政干预，如2016年通过的《波多黎各财政监督法案》（PROMESA），也加剧了当地居民的不满。
尽管独立支持者认为当前的政治环境对独立运动有利，但多数民意仍倾向于州权或联邦属地地位。在2024年的投票中，州权的支持率高达59%，而独立的支持率仅为12%。独立支持者认为，这些投票结果反映了美国政治对波多黎各的忽视，而Bad Bunny的影响力正在帮助改变这种局面。
Bad Bunny的歌曲《Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii》表达了他对波多黎各成为州的反对，他希望避免波多黎各经历像夏威夷那样的命运。他的政治立场和音乐正在激励更多年轻人关注独立议题，并推动波多黎各在国际上的可见度。许多粉丝，包括在海外的波多黎各人，都希望在超级碗表演中看到代表独立的旗帜，以表达对这一议题的支持。
Rapper Bad Bunny will perform Sunday at the Super Bowl halftime show, becoming the first solo male Latin American artist to headline. He’s arriving at the peak of his popularity: The performance comes just a week after receiving the Grammy’s highest honor for his genre-defining album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which deals with themes of colonization, gentrification, and difficult relationships, all while honoring the diverse roots of Puerto Rican and Latin music across the diaspora.
The 31-year-old superstar, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is also developing a reputation for his outspoken politics. He’s refused to tour in the United States since President Donald Trump took office again, for fear of exposing Latino fans to ICE raids.
“Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say, ‘ICE out!’” Bad Bunny said while accepting his Grammy for Best Música Urbana Album. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”
The president is not a fan. “I’m anti-them,” he said of Bad Bunny and fellow Super Bowl performers Green Day, who have also been critical of his administration. Earlier, Trump claimed not to know who the Puerto Rican artist even is, calling his halftime selection “absolutely ridiculous.”
He should probably start paying more attention.
While Trump has been obsessed in his second term with expanding the US into new territories like Greenland, or even Canada, his neglect of Puerto Rico is ironically one factor in reviving a long-dormant independence movement there. And Bad Bunny is considered one of the most high-profile cultural figures who will help determine just how far it can go.
While casual listeners may have first learned about the artist’s activism when he called out ICE onstage last week, Bad Bunny’s outspokenness is nothing new. And he’s been especially engaged with the archipelago’s unique politics.
As Bad Bunny reminded Grammy viewers (and apparently some confused NFL players) in a jokey bit with host Trevor Noah on Sunday, Puerto Rico is “part of America” — a phrase he said with air quotes. The United States gained control of Puerto Rico in 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War, granting its residents citizenship in 1917. The archipelago adopted its own constitution in 1952, officially becoming a self-governing US territory with an elected governor.
Since then, Puerto Rico’s two historic major parties have divided themselves in part based on the question of its status. The New Progressive Party (PNP) is historically pro-statehood, which would give Puerto Ricans voting representation in Congress and in presidential elections as well as more control over their affairs. The Popular Democratic Party (PPD) typically favors remaining as a commonwealth, which supporters argue will allow Puerto Rico to better maintain its unique culture along with US citizenship and certain economic benefits, like an exemption from most federal income tax.
In 2024, the governor’s contest featured Jenniffer González-Colón, a former Resident Commissioner who caucused with House Republicans, on the PNP ticket. Jesús Manuel Ortiz ran for the PPD. But the election featured a surprising third-party dark horse, Juan Dalmau, secretary-general of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), which favors independence from the United States after a period of transition.
González-Colón loves Trump. Bad Bunny despises him. So it was no surprise that they were at odds. The singer sponsored anti-PNP billboards with messages like, “Quien vota PNP no ama a Puerto Rico” — “someone who votes for PNP doesn’t love Puerto Rico.” But he also went further by publicly rejecting both major parties, who he said were jointly responsible for Puerto Rico’s struggles — and instead directed fans to vote for Dalmau at the candidate’s closing rally.
While González-Colón won, Dalmau more than doubled his share of the vote from the prior election and ended up in second place with 31 percent of the vote after allying with another minority party, a performance that was considered a massive step forward for the party and independence movement.
Independentistas are still fueled by momentum from their second-place election results, dissatisfaction with the federal government’s lack of investment over the past decade, and, yes, Bad Bunny’s album about Boricua culture and history. The rapper’s breakout success and political voice have cleared a space to spread their message further — even as he steers clear of explicitly calling for independence himself.
“The political landscape in Puerto Rico is changing, regardless of what’s happening in the United States,” said Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who collaborated with Ocasio on his album rollout, providing historical context and guidance to the artist. “We need to hone that, and that gives me some hope as well.”
Puerto Rican independence movements — including limited armed resistance in the 1950s on both Puerto Rican and US soil — fluctuated in their reach over the 20th century depending on the political moment, but were considered marginal until recently.
But the surge of interest in independence, while still a clear minority position, is partly seen as a story of younger voters’ disillusionment with the government. Bad Bunny is a part of Puerto Rico’s “crisis generation,” a cohort of Boricuas who experienced high financial fragility, austerity measures that stagnated the archipelago’s economy, political corruption, natural disasters, school closings, and the effects of gentrification within a short period of time. His journey as a former grocery store bagger and university dropout to one of the world’s biggest artists is directly tied to those struggles, Meléndez-Badillo, the Wisconsin professor, said.
Bad Bunny’s songs frequently explore these topics. His 2019 protest track “Afilando Los Cuchillos,” with legendary Calle 13 members Residente and iLe catalogued a generational frustration with corruption, and became an anthem at mass protests against then-Gov. Ricky Rosselló — a pro-statehood official who resigned after a trove of Telegram messages leaked that were filled with inflammatory, sexist, and homophobic statements. His anthem “El Apagón” notes the pride Boricuas have amid constant blackouts, while insisting they “don’t want to leave here / let them go, let them go.” Even the romantic ballad “Bokete” uses the endless, oft-unaddressed potholes found across the island’s roads as metaphors for an ex-lover who should be avoided at all costs.
Questions of gaining sovereignty have also become more acute as Washington takes a bigger role in its finances. In 2016, Congress enacted the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) to help the archipelago tackle over $70 billion in debt. The fiscal oversight board — whose members are appointed by the US president, with no say from Puerto Ricans — quickly implemented austerity measures that critics say impacted access to social services like retirement funds and education.
Residents receive food assistance and health care through capped federal block-grant systems, which are different from the flexible funding pools awarded to the continental United States by Congress that expand to meet increased needs. Those aid dollars go significantly less far on the archipelago because the funding is fixed. Residents also face barriers to shipping through the Jones Act, which raises prices and forces dependency on US trade by requiring Puerto Rico to use American-built and -operated vessels for shipping between the two shores.
Many point to Trump’s mishandling of Maria during his first term in office as a major turning point for both politics on the archipelago and trust in the US government to handle the territory’s affairs. When the hurricane hit in September 2017 and caused catastrophic ruin to infrastructure and the local economy — with nearly 3,000 deaths and over $90 billion in damages — residents deemed the federal responses beyond disappointing.
One lasting image among Boricuas: Trump tossing paper towels into a crowd during a delayed visit to San Juan as millions remained without power or adequate cellular signals. Two years later, he berated Puerto Ricans for having “squandered or wasted away” their federal funding, even as locals noted much of the promised aid had not yet been disbursed.
“This all goes hand-in-hand with the natural events of Hurricane Maria, earthquake swarms,” Meléndez-Badillo said. They “were massive disasters for Puerto Rico — the hurricanes themselves are natural, but the disasters are human-made. This is all the product of the compounding colonial crises in Puerto Rico.”
Instability has caused residents to move to the US in droves over the past two decades, intensified by the debt crisis and later by Maria. The nearly 6 million diaspora members are almost double Puerto Rico’s current population of 3.2 million, and the ongoing economic and social upheaval could push more to make the same decision.
All the while, Boricuas still face regular and sweeping power blackouts on an aging and damaged electrical grid, and an influx of tourists and visitors who some see as sucking up valuable real estate and resources — issues Bad Bunny regularly touches on in his songs, like “Una Velita.”
“We can’t continue to depend on federal funding packages in a forum we don’t even have power in — we have to beg to get $2 million to repair a highway,” Jenaro Abraham, a pro-independence professor at Gonzaga University, said. “We’re depending on something that is, in and of itself, the disease. It’s like when a smoker is smoking all his life, and doesn’t know how to stop. They feel like they’re going to get sick if they stop smoking. It’s like, well, I think you should probably stop smoking.”
Independence advocates acknowledge that the process would not happen overnight. They just want the chance to try.
Their solution is simple on the surface: Supporters want to guide Puerto Rico on a series of steps in conjunction with the US, starting with a consensus vote, a lengthy transition, and terms negotiation process with Congress, all leading to eventual sovereignty over affairs.
If that sounds not so simple, you’re not alone in thinking so. Critics have a number of immediate concerns.
Boricuas could lose birthright citizenship, potentially lowering their ability to travel freely with a powerful passport, an especially major concern given their close connections to large mainland communities in cities like Orlando and New York. There are also infrastructure and logistics issues. Residents would have to finance their own retirement programs, which are currently handled by Medicare and Social Security, even as residents are exempt from income taxes. Puerto Rico has more than double the poverty rate of the poorest American states in a system where many already cannot access adequate social services and face skyrocketing prices at the grocery store.
Self-sufficiency on an archipelago with a failing power grid, remote rural areas, and an agricultural industry decimated by María is still hard for many Boricuas to envision, even if they’re not happy with the current level of federal support.
Some have suggested a “free association” model of independence, which would give Puerto Rico sovereignty in international relations while maintaining some federal aid and still allowing the US military access. Some former Pacific Island territories have successfully split from the US through Compacts of Free Association in recent memory — the Marshall Islands and Micronesia in 1986, and Palau in 1994 — but they have a fraction of Puerto Rico’s population size and economic capacity, and are much further geographically from the mainland.
So far, independence has not been especially popular when put to voters. In six out of seven ballots on the issue since 1967, statehood has always been the majority opinion, reaching almost 59 percent in the most recent 2024 ballot. (Independence with free association garnered 29.5 percent, and independence alone just under 12 percent.) However, these polls are never conducted the same way. The 2024 vote didn’t include the status quo as a choice, for example, instead only giving options presented in the House’s Puerto Rico Status Act from two years prior: statehood, independence, and sovereign free association. In 2020, voters chose between a simple “yes-or-no” vote on statehood, with “yes” winning out narrowly with 52.5 percent of the vote.
Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, who belongs to the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October that Puerto Ricans’ relationship with the US was similar to that of Quebecois in Canada or Catalonians in Spain — they’re protective of their distinct culture and don’t want to see it subsumed into the US by becoming a state.
“Then why not pursue independence?” he wrote. “Because Puerto Ricans value their US citizenship, close ties with the mainland, serving in the armed forces, and contributing to the American economy.”
Independence supporters argue the relationship is more like a colonial chain around Puerto Rico’s neck.
“Sometimes there’s some slack in that chain, and it’s a bit loose, and it seems like Puerto Rico is not suffering too badly, or maybe has some leeway to make its own decisions,” said Alberto Medina, who leads the pro-independence Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora’s board of directors in the US. “But at any time, the US can give that chain a very powerful yank and remind Puerto Rico who’s really in charge. Trump has been a prime example of some very, very painful pulls and yanks on that chain.”
For his part, Bad Bunny’s stance on statehood seems clear — he does not want it. In an emotional hymn off DTMF, the artist mourns “Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii” — “what happened to Hawaii,” which became a state in 1959. (“They want to take away the river and the beach / They want my hood and for Grandma to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget [our cry] / I don’t want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii.”)
“Bad Bunny has done such a beautiful job of making Puerto Rico be seen.”
Kiara Zamot, 21-year-old student
Independence proponents are hoping that Bad Bunny’s more direct participation in the political process will lead to increased interest in the issue among his many fans both on the archipelago and on the mainland. In Puerto Rico, the rapper personally urged disaffected young people to register to vote; activists also want to focus on registered voters in the US, who could potentially influence Congress and presidential candidates.
As millions dissected the references and symbols in DTMF, more were exposed to the idea of sovereignty as a political option than before, even if such a thing remains unlikely in the current political environment — which independentistas claim as a win.
“He gives an interview tomorrow, and it’s front-page news,” Medina said. “And if he says, ‘I don’t want Puerto Rico to be a state’ in those interviews, people who wouldn’t necessarily hear that message suddenly hear it because it’s Bad Bunny, so there’s 1,000 media outlets writing about it. Just breaking down that silo or that disconnection that’s existed sometimes between the island and the diaspora.”
Kiara Zamot, a 21-year-old university student whose parents are also part of the Puerto Rican diaspora, told me she often felt removed from her identity in a community of mostly white peers in Columbus, Ohio. But inspired by the 2024 governor’s race, she became increasingly active in the independence movement — changing her career path to public policy to advocate for the cause on a wider scale — and convinced family members in Ohio and Puerto Rico to join in.
“Coming from the middle of nowhere, when people start recognizing when I say, ‘Oh, I’m from Puerto Rico,’ and it’s no longer, like, ‘What is it?’ … I find that to be really nice,” she said. “Bad Bunny has done such a beautiful job of making Puerto Rico be seen, and not only in the tragedy of Hurricane Maria and the economy and the infrastructure, but to actually put it into this positive light that was never seen before in the media.”
Zamot is hosting a Super Bowl watch party on Sunday for Latino and non-Latino friends alike. She and other fans will be ready to shout if she sees la bandera con azul celeste, the once-suppressed 1895 light-blue version of the current flag associated with the pro-independence movement that Bad Bunny featured in the music video for “La Mudanza.”
“They killed people here for waving the flag,” he sings on that track. “That’s why now I take it everywhere.”
2026-02-06 19:00:00
美国动物虐待调查员Pete Paxton以化名进行调查，探访了多个“鸟类工厂”（即大规模繁殖鹦鹉以供宠物市场销售的场所），发现这些地方存在不卫生和不人道的条件。据世界动物保护组织（World Animal Protection）统计，美国约有1300万只宠物鸟，其中大多数是鹦鹉。这些鹦鹉的主人可能很爱它们，但将它们作为宠物饲养引发了诸多伦理问题，因为它们大部分时间都被关在笼子里，无法飞翔或进行其他自然行为，这可能导致压力和身体问题。
Paxton的调查揭示了鹦鹉繁殖业的黑暗面。他发现，这些鸟类常常被关在狭小、肮脏的笼子里，且缺乏足够的刺激和照顾。一些较大的鹦鹉被关在配对笼中，而小鹦鹉则被群养。繁殖者通常会将鸟蛋取出，放入人工孵化器，以促使母鸟多产蛋。雏鸟出生后由人类或成年鹦鹉抚养，之后被出售，价格从几百到几千美元不等。
此外，一些鹦鹉是直接从野外捕捉而来，而非人工繁殖。据美国生物多样性中心（Center for Biological Diversity）分析，2016年至2024年间，美国每年平均进口超过37,000只鹦鹉，其中5%来自野外。由于缺乏数据，实际数量可能更高。
鹦鹉的高智商使它们在圈养中更容易受到伤害。一项2021年的研究发现，鹦鹉的脑容量越大，越容易表现出压力行为，如异常重复的踱步和啃咬笼子。此外，鹦鹉在圈养中容易出现肥胖、关节炎、心脏病等健康问题，以及自毁行为，如拔羽。
尽管一些鹦鹉主人有良好的意图，但鹦鹉在家中仍面临许多问题。它们被限制自由，缺乏适当的环境刺激和医疗照顾。许多鹦鹉寿命长达50年甚至更久，当主人无法继续照顾时，这些鹦鹉往往被送往资源匮乏的收容所。
为了改善鹦鹉的处境，Paxton建议应停止繁殖鹦鹉作为宠物。目前，美国已有许多城市和县禁止宠物店出售猫狗，但尚未包括鹦鹉。世界动物保护组织正在推动相关立法，以期改变这一现状。同时，鹦鹉主人应提供充足的生活环境、丰富的刺激和适当的饮食，而那些想养鹦鹉的人应优先考虑领养而非购买。
对于希望帮助鹦鹉的人，Paxton建议将爱心投入到更积极的行动中，如参与野生动物收容所或鹦鹉救助组织的志愿活动。
Statistically speaking, a lot of your neighbors probably have a dog or cat. But there’s a decent chance that there are at least a few parrots in your neighborhood, too: About one in 20 US households owns at least one pet bird.
There’s the popular parakeet, a small parrot native to Australia and other regions south of the equator; there are the cockatiels, who appear to have perpetual bed-head, with a tuft of feathers springing from their forehead; and a diverse cast of other parrot species: macaws, lovebirds, amazons, conures, African Greys, cockatoos, and many more.
Some 13 million birds are kept as pets in the United States, making them the fourth most popular type of pet and a sizable share of the broader exotic pet market, which also includes fish, lizards, snakes, chinchillas, and frogs. Cats and dogs may get most of the attention, but these smaller, more wild animals account for around 40 percent of the US pet population.
As cute as they may be, however, a number of animal behaviorists, veterinarians, and ethicists are challenging the practice of keeping these smaller species as pets.
For one, they’re largely wild, undomesticated animals, who’ve evolved to thrive in rich and often vast habitats in nature. But as pets, they spend all or most of their life confined in a small cage or tank. Add to that the fact that owners often aren’t well equipped to provide the enrichment and individualized care these animals need, and keeping them as pets becomes much more ethically thorny than it otherwise might appear.
The harms of bird ownership stand out the most, if only for the stark reason that in captivity, pet birds can’t do what millions of years of evolution has propelled them to do: fly. And given their advanced cognitive capacities, captivity is likely particularly stressful for them — and exacerbated when kept alone, considering that many are highly social.
Liz Cabrera Holtz of the animal advocacy nonprofit World Animal Protection put it bluntly: ”These are wild animals whose physical and psychological needs are not even close to being met.”
But even before they’re bought as pets, the business of bringing the majority of these animals into the world often involves serious harm and neglect. A new investigation suggests that this might be common when they come from “bird mills” — high-volume, large-scale operations that breed birds for the retail pet market.
Last year, a prolific animal cruelty investigator who goes by the pseudonym Pete Paxton, due to the clandestine nature of his work, toured and covertly filmed several US bird mills and shared his investigation exclusively with Vox. He found dirty conditions, thousands of birds stuffed in cages, and alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act, a federal law that sets minimum welfare standards for some of the pet breeding industry.
Over the course of his career, Paxton has investigated some 300 factory farms and slaughterhouses, and more than 1,000 puppy mills. He has seen animals beaten, starved, hanged, and shocked. Even so, he was still surprised by what he saw in the bird breeding operations. “I did not expect it to be as bad as it was,” Paxton told me about his new investigation, which has been shared exclusively with Vox and is one of the first such exposés of the industry that supplies pet birds to millions of American homes.
Paxton’s investigation began last spring in South Texas, just 20 miles north of the Mexico border. He was there to visit a bird breeding operation called Fancy Parrots, which has more than 3,000 parrots of various species on site, including African Greys, macaws, and cockatoos, locked in rusting cages across 17 barns. (The descriptions of Fancy Parrots and the other facilities below come from Paxton’s investigation video.)
It was “very loud — lots of birds calling out to us,” Paxton said, comparing them to puppy mills he’s visited, the air full of bird screeches instead of dog barks.
On a tour of the facility, Paxton was told that a few years ago, some 20 birds died during a cold snap. The barns each had a roof but no sides, which meant they could get some fresh air and sunlight, but it also meant they were vulnerable to weather extremes not found in their native habitats.
Some of the birds had plucked some of their feathers out, which Alix Wilson, an exotic pet veterinarian, told me is abnormal. “Birds in their natural environment wouldn’t do that because their feathers are so vital for survival,” Wilson said.
The reasons for feather-plucking are often behavioral in nature, Wilson said, due to boredom, stress, or sexual frustration from the inability to mate, though it can also be brought on by disease or poor diet, according to UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
At bird mills, larger parrots are caged as mating pairs, and parakeets are caged in groups. The birds first mate in the spring, and a week or so after mating, the female will lay a clutch of about two to six eggs. The eggs of larger parrots are typically taken away and placed in artificial incubators, which can trigger the females to lay more eggs. After the chicks hatch, they’re reared either by humans or adult parrots.
Eventually, the juvenile birds are sold, usually at a few months of age, for hundreds to thousands of dollars each.
About two decades ago, Wilson briefly worked at a parrot mill. “I quickly became aware of the issues of just confining these animals and just basically breeding [them] for profit,” Wilson told me. Those issues included fighting, which resulted in wounds and missing eyes and toes; resource-guarding (some birds keeping other birds away from food); parent-chick separation, either immediately after birth or post-weaning; and cramming birds into crates for long-distance transportation to pet stores.
Bird breeders are legally required to provide enrichment for their birds, such as perches, swings, mirrors, and other objects the birds can manipulate to express natural behaviors. Fancy Parrots does provide perches, but when Paxton asked about other enrichment, he was told that the US Department of Agriculture “wanted toys in all the cages; how stupid.” They had suggested to the USDA inspector that they could give the parrots bamboo, which the birds like to chew on, though Paxton didn’t see any.
Fancy Parrots declined an interview request for this story.
During the tour, Paxton was told that Fancy Parrots supplies to a “Petco distributor.” Petco declined an interview request for this story, though a spokesperson said over email that “Fancy Parrots is not nor has ever been a Petco vendor.”
This may be true. But it is also possible Petco does sell birds from Fancy Parrots, which underscores a major issue in tracking exotic pets in the United States.
Breeders typically don’t market their juvenile birds directly to large retailers like Petco. Instead, the animals first get purchased by intermediary operations called brokers. The “Petco distributor” could well be a broker that Fancy Parrots sells to, which then sells to Petco. (Petco did not respond to follow-up questions about whether it might indirectly source birds, via a broker, from Fancy Parrots.)
Months after visiting Fancy Parrots, Paxton headed to Central Oklahoma, where he toured a massive parakeet breeding operation about 70 miles east of downtown Oklahoma City owned by a family named the Pletts. There, he found rows and rows of tiny cages stacked atop one another, each packed with birds, totaling some 7,500 animals. Some of the cages were caked in feces.
The parakeet mill, he said, reminded him of egg-producing operations, where chickens are crammed into stacked cages — “factory farm-like,” Paxton said.
Paxton documented a pile of dead parakeets and severed body parts in a trash can, including one dead bird placed headfirst into a red Solo cup.
One of the owners is heard saying on the video that some birds peck at each other, which causes injuries, and he can’t sell the ones that are pecked at. These ones are killed, the man explains, by suffocating them in bags.
“There are always some dead,” the man is heard saying. “Always.”
The owner of the facility didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Paxton visited another parakeet breeder in Oklahoma, some 60 miles farther east, run by relatives of the Pletts. The operation had two barns holding 1,500 birds total. In one barn, the birds allegedly had no perches or enrichment of any kind, which are required by the Animal Welfare Act. Paxton also found several dead, featherless chicks decomposing atop cages.
“Both facilities were filthy, with every surface I could see being dusty, dirty, and in some cases piled with manure and old feed,” Paxton said.
In 2024, an inspector with the USDA, which enforces the Animal Welfare Act, found at least six birds at the operation showed signs of heat stress, after the barn temperature had reached 93.4 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index of 110.7. At the time, they also found at least six dead birds.
The USDA classified it as a “direct” violation of the Animal Welfare Act, but only issued an official warning — which amounts to a slap on the wrist — rather than a license suspension or even a nominal fine.
When reached by phone, one of the owners of the operation answered but did not respond to requests for comment.
As terrible as the conditions were, they may well be typical of how most soon-to-be pet birds are reared in the US, rather than exceptions.
“These bird mills I filmed are not outliers,” Paxton said in his investigation video. “All of the places that I went to are USDA-licensed, government regulated. Essentially, these places are operating legally and [largely] in compliance, so when it comes to bird mills…that’s as good as a place can get.”
Paxton investigated the bird mills on behalf of the nonprofits World Animal Protection and Strategies for Ethical and Environmental Development. (Disclosure: In 2024, my partner worked on a short-term consulting project for the latter group.)
Beyond captive breeding, some birds that wind up in US homes have been taken directly from the wild, according to a new analysis by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity using federal government data. From 2016 to 2024, the US imported more than 37,000 birds on average each year, with 5 percent of them — 1,865 birds — plucked from the wild. It’s a small share, but the true number could well be much higher, as it’s not uncommon in the exotic pet trade for importers to launder wild-caught animals through captive-bred operations and mislabel them.
It’s unknown how many birds are captive-bred in the US, as neither the pet industry nor the federal government publish data on pet breeding.
Paxton’s investigation reveals a paradox in the exotic pet trade. Surveys show that people buy parrots in large part because they’re “fun to watch” and have at home, given their exotic looks, intelligence, sociability, and some species’ capability for human-like speech. But parrot owners are also highly motivated, surveys show, to buy a bird for companionship, love, and affection. And yet, they’re bought from businesses that frequently treat them with just the opposite.
Even if pet owners have the best of intentions, some of the same welfare issues found at breeders persist when the birds are taken home. The most pressing and obvious one is captivity, as it puts the animals in an unnatural environment and prevents them from engaging in basic natural behaviors.
“The cages in the [investigation] video — that’s the same size cage that people put a bird in in their house,” Wilson, the veterinarian, said. Some birds may be kept in bigger cages — and many are provided with a fair amount of time outside their cage, or even free reign of a room or entire home — but they’re still captive all the same, and deprived of meaningful flight. It’s common for parrot owners to clip or trim their animals’ wings to limit their flight capability in order to prevent escape or injury from, say, flying into a ceiling fan.
Caging is “a setup for problems,” Wilson said. Another one of those problems is unhygienic conditions.
“If you confine a bird, they’re just very messy — they poop a lot, and when they eat, they make a mess, and so it doesn’t take much for the birds to end up in a really filthy environment,” Wilson said, not unlike what Paxton saw at the bird mills. In a survey, pet bird owners rated “general clean up” as the leading drawback to having a bird.
Another is the sedentary lifestyle imposed by captivity, which — especially when combined with diets high in fatty nuts and seeds — can lead to obesity, Wilson said. It’s common among pet birds, and it makes them more likely to develop arthritis, heart disease, and other conditions.
Feather plucking and other self-destructive behaviors are common among pet birds, too, with estimates of it afflicting some 10 to 17.5 percent of these animals, suggesting general distress.
Parrots’ high intelligence could worsen the harms of captivity. A 2021 study found that the larger a captive bird’s brain, the more likely they were to develop behaviors that indicate stress, such as abnormal and repetitive pacing and cage bar biting.
Other issues include lack of enrichment and access to veterinary care, and bird owners’ lack of knowledge about what their pet needs.
Even the most devoted bird owners, Wilson said — the ones who are with their birds around the clock, who don’t go on vacation, and who even cook for them — will fall short: “There’s no way anyone could reasonably provide good welfare to those animals in captivity.”
And many bird owners, she said, aren’t prepared for these animals’ long lifespans: Some popular parrot species can live up to 50 years or longer. Long-lived pet species — parrots, but also some turtles and snakes — often end up shuffled around to different homes or to underfunded animal sanctuaries when their owner dies, divorces, moves, or can no longer deal with the difficulty of keeping them as pets.
Few understand this better than Karen Windsor, the executive director of Foster Parrots and the New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, a Rhode Island-based animal sanctuary. Windsor told me that a lot of people fall for these birds after seeing videos of parrots who seem to talk so conversantly with their owners. But not all parrots talk or like to be cuddled or handled, she said. Some are really loud, destructive, or aggressive. That leads to a lot of disappointed and desperate parrot owners asking sanctuaries like Windsor’s to take them in, but many don’t have the space and resources to accommodate most requests.
“We’re still dealing with birds that were bred in the ’70s and ’80s — they’re still in the system,” Judy Tennant, executive director of the rescue organization Parrot Partners Canada, recently told CTV News. And the industry is “still pumping out new birds,” Tennant said.
If it’s impossible to meet birds’ complex needs in captivity, then there’s only one logical conclusion: We should stop breeding them. But breaking the pet bird habit might be easier said than done.
Keeping parrots as pets was largely a niche hobby in the United States and Europe up until the 1970s, when interest began to surge. Bird ownership has declined a little in recent decades, though millions of Americans are still dazzled enough by their striking colors and high intelligence and sociability to buy one — and tens of millions more look on through short-form videos on TikTok and beyond.
So how can we start to shift away from bird ownership?
We could start by making their purchase a little harder. Hundreds of US jurisdictions — mostly cities and counties but also some states — have banned pet stores from selling cats, dogs, and sometimes rabbits, instead only allowing adoption, though none of these laws have yet included birds. World Animal Protection, the animal advocacy nonprofit involved in Paxton’s investigation, is advocating for that to change, and if successful, it could make a meaningful impact; nationally, more than half of all pet birds are currently purchased from pet stores.
Federal action is needed, too. For decades, bird breeding operations were exempt from the Animal Welfare Act, which means they weren’t inspected by the USDA for potential welfare violations. That changed a couple years ago. The move represents progress, but the USDA’s enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act has long been terrible. Improving it would help, and so would congressional action that requires all bird breeders be subject to inspection. Currently, smaller operations — those that sell fewer than 200 small birds annually, or eight larger birds annually — are exempt.
The pet industry as well as the pet bird keeping community could also step up more. For the millions of American households that already have a pet bird, they can give their animals as good of a life as possible. That would look like providing ample enrichment, adequate veterinary care, and balanced and diverse diets; a large cage and plenty of time out of it; learning extensively about their bird’s natural behaviors and needs; and paying close attention to their birds’ cues when it comes to handling, interaction, and time out of the cage or outdoors.
For those still seeking to get a pet bird, they should adopt instead of shop.
More fundamentally, according to Paxton, the investigator, avowed animal lovers can channel that love into more altruistic endeavors.
“If you want to buy a bird as a pet, the first thing I would say is, ‘I love that you love animals, that’s fantastic,’” he says in his investigation video. “But since you love animals, do something that’s going to help them…you could volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, or at a bird rescue. You can do something so at the end of the day, you know you have been part of the solution.”
2026-02-06 19:00:00
我从小在马里兰州郊区长大，童年大部分时间都在森林里度过。我喜欢翻石头寻找闪闪发光的蜈蚣，观察小群鱼在溪流中滑行，同时看着箱龟在岸边晒太阳。一只松鼠疯狂地寻找坚果也会吸引我的全部注意力。我非常喜欢这些小动物，因此希望家里一直有动物陪伴。于是，我请求父母带我去宠物店，那里有许多小动物，价格也不贵，我希望能拥有它们。
关键要点：
我最初对鱼类充满热情，至今仍能回忆起常去的水族馆商店：一排排鱼缸里装着来源不明的热带鱼，每只售价不过几美元。我用零花钱买了一些鱼，尽管严格按照喂养和水质指导进行照料，但它们总会几周或几个月后死亡，我也会再次回到水族馆商店买几条新的。最终，我放弃了养鱼，转而养了两只仓鼠，这很有趣——直到其中一只吃了另一只。后来我才明白，仓鼠是高度独居的动物，如果被关在一起，可能会变得残忍。而宠物店的员工并没有警告我这一点。当另一只仓鼠死去后，我放弃了小型宠物，转而回到森林中观察野生动物。（我曾试图赢得我们家猫“克洛弗”的喜爱，但失败了，因为它似乎只喜欢我爸爸。）
我的经历并不独特。每年，美国数百万家庭购买小型动物作为宠物，主要以鱼为主，还有仓鼠、蜥蜴、鸟类、蛇、青蛙、乌龟等。其中许多是美国本土繁殖的，但据估计，每年有9000万只动物被进口，其中三分之一是从野外捕获的。虽然许多人可能经历过类似的事情，但人们普遍认为小型宠物比猫狗更好，因为它们占用空间少，对孩子们来说照顾起来似乎更容易，即使被关在笼子里，它们的生活也比在野外好，对吧？但近年来，我开始认为宠物饲养比以往更具有伦理争议，而且远比大多数人想象的严重。我本人也是宠物主人，我和我的伴侣在新冠疫情初期收养了一只狗“埃薇”。但随着疫情缓解，她独自待的时间越来越多，甚至超过了我们工作和生活的时间。这意味着她无法做她最喜欢的事情：在社区里散步、在森林里奔跑、玩拔河游戏、和人互动。这让我开始更深入地思考宠物饲养的伦理问题，并最终写了一篇题为“反对宠物饲养”的文章。我指出，尽管宠物陪伴、爱和亲密关系是养宠物的温暖叙事，但背后隐藏着更黑暗的一面。这些包括明确的残酷行为，如虐待、囤积、狗肉工厂和斗狗。还有那些长期以来被社会接受但如今正在失去支持的残酷行为，如剪爪和剪耳。此外，还有许多日常忽视和伤害，常常未被察觉和讨论：厌恶训练、长时间关在笼子里、单调的饮食、缺乏运动和自主权，以及由此产生的无聊。
这篇文章主要关注狗和猫，它们占美国宠物的略多于一半。但它们只是故事的一部分。美国约有40%的宠物是小型、野生或“异国”动物，如鱼、鸟类、小型哺乳动物、两栖动物和爬行动物，它们的痛苦可能比我们的狗猫更严重。这些动物看似适合被关在笼子里，因为它们体型较小，似乎性格沉稳。但随着我们对它们的内在生活和野外行为的了解加深，这种安排的问题也变得越来越明显。例如，一只被关在城市公寓里的热带鸟无法飞翔；一只澳大利亚的“髯龙”在美国家庭地下室里靠加热灯生活；一只原产于非洲中部和西部的“球蟒”每两周只能吃一次冷冻解冻的鼠类；还有无数种类的鱼，它们在野外可以游数英里，但在水族箱里只能活动几英尺。
生物伦理学家兼《反对宠物饲养》一书的作者杰西卡·皮尔斯告诉我：“我认为这些动物的福利状况比其他动物更差。”然而，像宠物商店这样的商业机构，常常将这些动物作为儿童的入门宠物进行营销，说：“他们真的利用了小型动物……这些是他们赚钱的地方。”其他物种则在成年爱好者社区中找到了强大的市场，这些社区通过Reddit、Facebook群组和其他论坛分享照片和经验。由于短视频内容（如TikTok、YouTube和Instagram Reels）的兴起，人们对这些异国动物的繁殖和饲养兴趣也大幅增加。现在，甚至虾、蟑螂、巨型蜗牛和稀有等足动物也被当作宠物饲养。
我毫不怀疑，数百万美国人饲养这些动物作为宠物时，是真心喜爱它们，并尽最大努力为它们提供尽可能好的生活。事实上，根据一项关于宠物饲养的大型调查，陪伴、爱和社交是人们养小型宠物的主要动机。但同样的调查也显示，人们养小型宠物的首要动机是“有趣、好看”。这表明，这些动物的生活安排可能更多是出于我们自己的需求，而不是它们的需要。
皮尔斯指出，许多动物与人类的互动是非常具有压力的，尤其是当它们被儿童照顾时，这些儿童可能缺乏处理这些动物的适当技能。她说：“我认为动物所经历的很多互动对它们来说都是极其压力的。”换句话说，被困在笼子里不好，但被带出笼子也可能不好。
虽然一些小型宠物主人确实与他们的宠物建立了深厚的情感联系，深入了解它们的需求和行为，并对它们的行为非常敏感，但研究显示，许多人无法正确解读宠物的行为，察觉它们的压力迹象或评估它们的健康状况。网络上充斥着可疑的建议和相互矛盾的护理指南，导致了所谓的“民间护理”现象。兽医威尔逊指出，所有出现健康问题的动物，都是人类造成的，例如对爬行动物的光照和温度不足，以及对异国宠物的不当饮食。她说：“这两个例子——乘以一千倍。”这些动物的需求和痛苦常常被忽视，因为人类倾向于将进化树上更远的动物视为更不聪明、更无法承受痛苦。
小型宠物饲养成为更大问题的情况： 去年，兽医兼动物倡导组织“Our Honor”的创始人克里丝塔尔·希思参加了美国南加州的“爬行动物超级展”（Reptile Super Show），在那里她看到大量蛇类被关在比外卖盒还小的笼子里出售；乌龟努力从狭小的容器中逃脱；蜥蜴被关在比它们身体还小的笼子里。她描述的氛围与汽车展类似，人们展示他们的稀有品种和定制作品。（爬行动物超级展未回应采访请求。）宠物商店也有类似的感觉，动物被展示的方式与维多利亚时代收藏奇珍异宝的展览相似，只是用活体动物代替了死物。
“如果我回顾自己的经历……人们普遍对野生动物充满好奇。”华克说。他认为这种对野生动物的兴趣是健康的，但问题在于它可能会走向极端。阅读宠物论坛和调查宠物饲养情况后，你会发现事情可能出错：笼子逃脱、咬人、异味、自残和噪音（鸟类尤其吵闹，许多小型宠物是夜行性或晨昏性动物）。
一些小型宠物主人可能对饲养这些动物感到失望，他们可能发现一些鹦鹉并不会说话，许多并不喜欢被抱，也不愿意被触摸。这导致他们试图将鹦鹉丢给像希思这样的组织，但这些组织收容的鹦鹉数量远远超过其能力。一些绝望的宠物主人甚至将动物遗弃在野外，而这些动物要么无法适应野外环境，要么过于适应，从而对当地生态系统造成破坏。
在Reddit上，一些用户会分享关于饲养小型宠物的伦理反思。一些其他宠物主人也会表达类似的不安，但大多数人认为只要他们为宠物提供食物、水、娱乐、干净的笼子等基本条件，就足以让它们过上比在野外更好的生活。然而，这种观点并不正确，因为问题不在于是否将动物养在家中还是丢在野外，而在于这些动物是否本应被繁殖出来（或从野外捕获）以供在如此密集、不自然的环境中生活。
小型宠物的来源： 根据非营利组织“生物多样性中心”（Center for Biological Diversity）使用联邦政府数据进行的新分析，美国每年平均进口超过9000万只动物作为宠物，其中大部分体型较小。约有30%的这些动物直接从野外捕获，而许多属于濒危或受威胁物种。它们的交易受到动物洗白计划、美国较弱的贸易限制和对野生动物法律执行的资金不足的推动。该组织在报告中指出：“野生动物的利用，包括宠物贸易，是全球灭绝危机的主要驱动因素之一。”然而，大多数从野外捕获的动物从未进入人们的家中。
2009年，PETA的调查员在德克萨斯州一家主要的异国宠物进口商处进行秘密调查，记录了令人震惊的条件，包括树蛙被装在2升的汽水瓶中运输，蛇类被剥夺食物数月。当时，PETA声称该公司是宠物店Petco、PetSmart和一家认证水族馆的供应商。PETA将证据提交给美国鱼类和野生动物管理局（US Fish and Wildlife Service），该机构从该公司没收了26,400只动物。在该公司记录被没收后，专家对这些记录进行分析发现，通常情况下，其动物在六周内有72%的死亡率，相当于每天数百只动物死亡。这似乎是一个异常高的死亡率，但在该公司对法律诉讼中，专家指出其死亡率与整个行业相当。
即使在美国本土繁殖的小型宠物也并不安全。鱼类、爬行动物和两栖动物的繁殖设施不受美国农业部（USDA）的监管，而鸟类和小型哺乳动物（如兔子和银狐）的繁殖设施虽然受到一定监管，但仍有大量漏洞，USDA的执法也相当薄弱。PETA也揭露了一些大规模繁殖设施的恶劣条件，这些设施繁殖了鬃龙、各种爬行动物、老鼠和其他许多物种。而今天发表在Vox上的新调查则突显了宠物鸟类繁殖业的残酷。
异国宠物繁殖者也纷纷涌入社交媒体，一些繁殖网红向观众展示他们的繁殖设施，并指导他们如何进入这一行业。他们展示的设施往往看起来比秘密调查中发现的干净得多，但它们仍然从事最令人担忧的高产量宠物繁殖活动：将数百甚至数千只野生动物关在狭小的笼子里。
我们该如何处理美国数以百万计的小型宠物？ 当然，将美国数以百万计的小型宠物放归野外是不可想象的，因为大多数都会死亡。对这些已经在我们家中生活的动物来说，最好的选择是为它们提供尽可能好的生活。建造大型、复杂的水族箱环境，提供丰富的娱乐，喂食合适的饮食，了解它们的需求和行为，并根据它们的喜好来处理互动和户外活动时间。
为了创造更好的未来，我认为是时候减少大规模、工厂式的小型宠物繁殖，并彻底停止从野外捕捉动物。我认为，将我们对陪伴、动物可爱或教孩子责任感的需求置于这些动物的痛苦之上是明显不道德的。宠物商店至少应该停止出售特别小的水族箱和笼子，停止宣传任何动物为低维护宠物，并要求新宠物主人参加课程，学习基本的宠物护理知识和如何解读宠物的行为。因为专家指出，缺乏物种特定知识是动物福利问题的根本原因之一。奥地利已经要求宠物主人必须参加此类课程，而瑞典则规定，由于兔子是高度社会化的动物，必须成对或成群饲养（瑞士则进一步将鹦鹉等高度社会化的物种也纳入类似法律）。
其他政策行动也可能有所帮助。例如，联邦政府应严厉打击非法异国宠物贸易，美国农业部应显著加强《动物福利法》的执行力度，该法律涵盖部分动物繁殖活动。国会应修改该法律，使所有宠物繁殖者都接受检查；目前，一些豁免条款导致大量动物在几乎没有监管的情况下被繁殖。
目前，已有数百个司法管辖区禁止宠物店出售狗和猫，一些地区也禁止出售兔子。鉴于其对鸟类繁殖工厂的调查，动物倡导组织“世界动物保护”正在推动纽约市将宠物零售禁令扩展到包括鸟类。欧洲有12个国家已经制定了允许饲养的物种清单，即所谓的“正面清单”，默认禁止饲养清单之外的物种。欧盟正在考虑在整个大陆实施正面清单。
目前，或许最有效的办法是利用供需法则，让那些渴望拥有某种宠物的人选择领养而不是购买。虽然动物收容所并不一定有大量被遗弃的仓鼠、狐狸、鱼和蛇，但一些受欢迎的宠物领养网站和专门的救援组织还是有这些动物的。最终，我认为我们需要从根本上改变我们对动物的看法。我知道这种转变是可能的，因为我已经经历了这样的转变。我回想起小时候，通过拥有动物来表达对它们的爱，而现在我则通过为保护动物及其栖息地的组织提供时间和金钱，而不是为宠物店和繁殖者提供支持。我通过书籍、纪录片和最重要的是在自然中度过时间来了解动物。二十年后，我仍然通过这种方式获得满足。我很幸运地住在离一个落叶森林步道系统不远的地方，每周几次，我都会像小时候一样进行长时间的散步。我仍然经常看到乌龟、鱼、松鼠和蜈蚣，有时还能看到青蛙或鹭鸟。它们按照自己的方式生活，这比看着它们在笼子里生活更让我感到满足。
I grew up in the Maryland suburbs and spent much of my childhood in the woods. I would turn over rocks to find shiny centipedes and watch small schools of fish glide through the creek as box turtles sunbathed on the banks. A squirrel’s frenzied search for a nut would capture my full attention.
I liked these critters so much that I wanted animals around all the time. So I asked my parents to take me to the pet store — a place where many small animals, for a small price, could be mine.
Fish were my first passion, and I can still picture the aquarium store I frequented: rows of tanks holding tropical fish of unknown provenance, their lives just a couple dollars apiece. I bought a few with my allowance, and despite closely following the feeding and water quality instructions, the fish would inevitably die a few weeks or months later, and I would reliably return to the aquarium store to buy a few more.
Eventually, I moved on from fish and bought two hamsters, which was fun — until one ate the other. Hamsters are highly solitary, it turns out, and can turn cannibalistic when confined together; no pet store employee warned me.
When the other one died, I gave up on small pets, and resigned myself to observing animals in the woods. (I tried — and failed — to win the affection of our family cat, Clover, who only ever really liked my dad.)
My experience was hardly unique. Each year, American households buy tens of millions of small animals to keep as pets — mostly fish, but also gerbils, lizards, birds, snakes, frogs, turtles, and more. Many are bred in the US, but an estimated 90 million individuals are imported annually, one-third of whom are taken from the wild.
While many people have probably experienced something like I did, there’s still a general sense that small pets are good — compared to cats and dogs, they take up less space, they’re ostensibly easier for kids to care for, and even if they’re kept in confinement, surely their lives are better than they would be in the wild. Right?
But in recent years, I’ve come to believe that pet ownership is much more ethically fraught than I once did, and more than most would assume. I say this as a pet owner myself. Like so many people, my partner and I adopted a dog, Evvie, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. But as the pandemic subsided, she spent more time alone, even beyond the hours we worked on our laptops and tended to the rest of our lives.
That meant less time to do her favorite things — walk around the neighborhood, run in the woods, play tug of war, and meet new people — and more time bored on the couch.
It compelled me to look more closely at the ethics of pet keeping, and eventually, I outlined those concerns in a story provocatively titled “The case against pet ownership.” I argued that beneath the warm and fuzzy narrative of a life with pets — companionship, love, and mutual affection — lies a darker side.
There are the unambiguous cruelties, like physical abuse, hoarding, puppy mills, and dog fighting. Then there are the cruelties that have long been socially acceptable but are falling out of favor, like declawing and ear cropping. But there’s also more casual neglect and harm that often goes unseen and unspoken: aversive training, prolonged crating, monotonous diets, lack of exercise and agency, and the ensuing boredom of captivity.
The article focused on dogs and cats, which make up the slight majority of the US pet population, but they’re just part of the story. Around 40 percent of America’s pets are small, largely wild or “exotic” animals — fish, birds, small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles — and they likely suffer far more than our canine and feline companions.
These animals might seem logically poised for captivity, given their typically smaller sizes and seemingly stoic dispositions. But as we learn more about their inner lives and consider the behaviors they evolved to have in the wild, the serious problems with this arrangement quickly emerge.
Think of the tropical bird caged in a city apartment, unable to fly; the Australian bearded dragon languishing in a suburban American basement under a heat lamp; the ball python native to Central and Western Africa with a diverse diet and impressive hunting finesse subsisting off one frozen-thawed rat every other week; or the countless species of fish whose miles-wide ranges in the wild are shrunk down to a couple of feet in a tank.
“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told me. Yet pet stores, who often market these animals as starter pets for children, “really capitalize on small animals…that’s where they make a lot of money.”
Other species have found strong markets in dedicated communities of adult hobbyists who share pictures and trade tips on Reddit, Facebook groups, and other forums. Given their exotic looks, the rise of shortform video content — via TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels — has driven even more interest in breeding and owning them.
Even shrimp, cockroaches, giant snails, and rare isopods are kept as pets now.
I have no doubt that many of the millions of Americans who keep these animals as pets love them and go the extra mile to give them as good of a life as they can. Indeed, companionship, love, and company is a top motivator to get a small pet, according to a large survey on pet ownership. But the same survey also shows that the top motivator to acquire small pets is “fun to watch/have in household.”
It all suggests that these living arrangements might be much more about us and what we want than what animals need.
“People are happy because they have animal companions,” Pierce has written. “Animals are happy because … well, we don’t ever really ask this question. If we did, we might not like the answer.”
After working with exotic pets as a veterinarian in New York City for nearly 20 years, Alix Wilson told me she’s “become a firm, strong believer that most of these animals shouldn’t be pets.”
And long before they reach our homes, many of these animals are bred in neglectful conditions. A new investigation into bird breeding operations for example, shared exclusively with Vox, reveals the cruelty behind the supply of some of these pets.
Given the complexities of these animals’ needs in the wild, and the inability for us to give them comparable lives in captivity, to some veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and ethicists, our massive small pet population represents a quiet, invisible crisis of animal suffering.
As a young boy in 1970s North London, Clifford Warwick developed a “stamp collector mentality” when it came to animals.
“I wanted as many different species as possible,” Warwick told me — especially reptiles and amphibians. But eventually he felt there was something wrong with his hobby because “these animals would spend so much time…trying to get out of their enclosures, and although I wasn’t necessarily the smartest kid in the world, I was able to work out if something wants to get out, there’s something wrong.”
When he was 14, Warwick traveled to Central and South America to see animals in the wild, and he was struck at just how hard it was to find them. The amount of space available to animals in their natural environments compared to how little space his pets had in London caused a sudden change of heart: When he got home, he gave away or sold off all of them.
He went on to earn degrees in biology, animal behavior, and medical science, and has published a wide-ranging collection of academic papers, articles, and books on the welfare of exotic pets. One thing he said to me in our conversation sums up his viewpoint: “Just because you can keep an animal captive doesn’t mean you should.”
It’s difficult to make sweeping generalizations about the welfare harms of keeping small animals as pets, because this group is composed of wildly different phylogenetic classes and hundreds of species, each with distinct behaviors and needs that have evolved to survive in a diversity of ecosystems. For example, think of how some of the most popular pet species live in the wild:
Despite the vast range of wild lives these animals have evolved to have, what most clearly unifies the harm of keeping all of them as pets, according to Warwick and others, is the fact that all of them will be confined in cages for nearly their entire lives.
“Control over the environment is something that all animals, including humans, need in order not to be stressed — it’s a fundamental,” Warwick told me. “The way we punish people is to take away their control, i.e. we incarcerate them, and they’ll do anything to get out.”
Very few pet owners would think it’s fine to confine their dogs or cats in a cage, or even a whole room, for most of their lives. It shouldn’t be a huge moral leap to extend that concern to smaller animals we might assume are fine with such confinement.
It especially irks Pierce, the bioethicist, that major retailers like PetSmart — which sell live animals and pet supplies — call cages and tanks for smaller animals “habitats.” “That’s another part of tricky advertising,” she told me. “They are not habitats; that’s a lie. But it sounds nice.”
PetSmart and its competitor Petland didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, nor did Pet Advocacy Network, a pet industry lobbying group. Petco, another pet retailer, declined an interview request.
“Just because you can keep an animal captive doesn’t mean you should.”
Clifford Warwick
In the wild, most of these animals have ranges that span miles and miles, yet in people’s homes, they’re often given a few square feet in a tank. (If they’re “lucky”; PetSmart even sells a half-gallon fish tank, which is about six inches wide.) Some non-aquatic animals might be given free reign of a home, and many get to spend some time outside the cage — a poor substitute for a sprawling savanna or jungle, though better than nothing. But most have little outdoor time, or none at all, out of a fear they’d fall ill, become prey, or, perhaps most reasonably, escape.
Cage confinement also deprives animals of the opportunity to engage in the range of natural behaviors for which they’re evolved. One of those is hunting and foraging for food. It turns out that one of the most basic elements of caring for a pet — regularly giving them enough food — isn’t so straightforward.
“We think, ‘Oh, well, it’s just a kindness to give animals food for free, and they don’t have to do any work,’” Pierce said. “But that’s just such a profound misassumption on our part.” She pointed to research on contra-freeloading, the idea that “if given a choice between a free lunch and working for their lunch, animals will always choose to work for their lunch, except sometimes cats…” Pierce said. “And it makes sense if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, because we have to work hard in order to get what we need to survive, so there’s going to be some chemical-physiological reward for hard work.”
Some pet-critical experts will make exceptions for small pets that have largely been domesticated, reasoning that it’s easier to meet the needs of species that have been habituated to humans, like rabbits and guinea pigs.
It sounds like a reasonable enough line to draw, though surveys have found that large swathes of the owners of these more domesticated small animals don’t follow basic care recommendations, such as keeping rabbits in large enclosures and vaccinating them against fatal diseases, or for guinea pigs, raising the highly social animals in pairs or ensuring they have constant access to hay for proper digestion.
And Pierce argues that it’s a mistake to silo “animals into wild versus domestic, and having different ethical frameworks” for them. “There’s this very sneaky transition from, ‘domesticated equals comfortable around humans’ to ‘domesticated equals comfortable in captivity.’ And that’s a very different thing.”
Other near universal welfare issues among small pets — which apply to our cats and dogs, too — include monotonous and unnatural diets, boredom, and lack of enrichment. Pierce said that handling can also be a problem, considering many small pets are cared for in part by children who may not have the proper motor skills to gently manage them.
“I think a lot of the interactions that animals experience are extremely stressful for them,” Pierce said. In other words, being stuck in a cage is bad, but being taken out can be bad too.
While some small pet owners certainly form close bonds with their animals, learn extensively about their needs, and become highly attuned to their behavior, research shows that many are unable to properly interpret their pet’s behavior, notice signs of stress, or assess their health. The Internet is riddled with questionable advice and conflicting care tips, leading to what Warwick described as “folklore husbandry.”
“All the animals that were coming in with problems, they were all human-created problems,” Wilson the veterinarian said, and mentioned inadequate light and heat for reptiles and improper diets for exotic pets more broadly as examples. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Wilson said: “Those two examples — multiply that by a thousand.”
Their needs, and their suffering, might often be overlooked because humans tend to view animals who are further from us on the evolutionary tree as less intelligent and less capable of suffering, according to a 2024 paper published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. As the study authors put it, this long-entrenched viewpoint likely leads to “unequal treatment of … perceived lower-evolved pets, such as reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates.”
Last year, Crystal Heath — a veterinarian and founder of the animal advocacy nonprofit Our Honor — attended the Reptile Super Show, a pet expo, in Southern California.
There, she found tables and tables of large snakes for sale in enclosures hardly bigger than restaurant takeout containers; turtles trying in vain to escape tiny bins; and lizards confined in cages barely larger than their own bodies.
She described the atmosphere to me as similar to that of a car show, where people display their rare models and custom work. (Reptile Super Show didn’t respond to an interview request.)
Pet stores can have a similar feel and experience, with animals on display in a fashion not all that different from Victorian-era curio collections, just with live specimens instead of dead ones.
“If I go back to my own experience…there’s a general sort of fascination with wildlife,” Warwick said about exotic pet owners. “I think that underpins the drive for many, and I see that as perfectly healthy. The problem is it can go very wrong.”
Spend enough time reading pet subreddits and pet ownership surveys, and you’ll see how things can go awry: cage escapes, bites, unpleasant odors, self-mutilation, and excessive noise (birds can get especially loud, and many smaller pets are nocturnal or crepuscular). It’s not unusual for children who once clamored for a snake or a bird to lose interest in their new pets, and lots of owners are unable or unwilling to take care of long-lived species, like parrots and turtles, for the full length of their lives, which results in difficult rehoming.
“Inevitably, the situation for the owner changes over time,” for long-lived species, Wilson, the veterinarian, said. “They get old or they get divorced, or they have a kid or they get sick, and they can’t care for that animal anymore…and there are very few resources for rehoming exotic pets.”
Some people don’t get what they expected in the animal they’ve bought.
Karen Windsor is the executive director of Foster Parrots and the New England Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, a Rhode Island-based bird and exotic pet sanctuary, and knows this all too well. Windsor told me that on social media people see “that really smart African Gray who can practically have a conversation with you,” and they want one. But after acquiring their parrots, people might quickly learn that some parrots don’t talk at all, and many are not cuddly and don’t want to be handled. That results in disappointed parrot owners trying to dump their birds on organizations like hers, but the inflow of unwanted parrots is far too great for them to take in.
Some desperate pet owners even abandon their animals in the wild, where they are either poorly adapted to survive or far too well adapted and can wreak havoc on local ecosystems.
Occasionally, Reddit users share soul-searching posts about their ethical concerns of keeping small pets. Some fellow pet owners respond with similar feelings of unease, but most say that as long as they provide their animal with food, water, enrichment, a clean cage, and other basics, they should feel good about it — that they’re giving them a better life than they would if they were in the wild.
It’s a curious response, because the choice isn’t whether someone should keep that animal in their home or toss them out into the wild; it’s whether that animal should’ve been bred into existence (or taken from the wild) only to live their life in such intensive, unnatural captivity.
Each year, the US imports on average more than 90 million animals — mostly on the smaller side — to keep as pets, according to a new analysis using federal government data by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. Around 30 percent of them are taken directly from the wild, and many of these are species that are threatened or even endangered. Their trading is facilitated by animal laundering schemes, weak US trade restrictions, and insufficient funding to enforce US wildlife laws.
“Wildlife exploitation, including for the pet trade, is a major driver of the global extinction crisis,” the organization said in its report. And most of these animals who are taken from the wild never even make it into people’s homes.
In 2009, a PETA investigator worked undercover at a major exotic pet importer in Texas and documented shocking conditions, including tree frogs packed and shipped in 2-liter soda bottles and snakes deprived of food for months. At the time, PETA alleged, the company was a supplier to Petco, PetSmart, and an accredited aquarium.
PETA turned its evidence over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which seized 26,400 animals from the company.
In a peer-reviewed analysis of the the company’s records in the aftermath of the seizure, experts found that, typically, 72 percent of its animals would die during a six week period — equaling hundreds per day — from cannibalism, dehydration, starvation, crushing, disease, injury, and a range of other problems. It may seem like an abnormally high mortality rate, but in judicial proceedings against the company, it cited an expert who confirmed its mortality rate was similar to the rest of the industry’s.
But even animals bred in captivity in the US are hardly safe. Facilities that breed fish, reptiles, and amphibians aren’t subject to US Department of Agriculture oversight, and while those that breed birds and small mammals, including rabbits and chinchillas, do face some oversight, there are plenty of loopholes, and USDA enforcement is notoriously weak.
PETA, for example, has also exposed horrific conditions at some of these large-scale facilities that breed bearded dragons, various reptiles, rats, and numerous other species. And a new investigation, published today in Vox, highlights the cruelty involved in the pet bird breeding business.
Exotic pet breeders have also flocked to social media, where a cottage industry of breeding influencers walk viewers through their operations and how they, too, can get into the biz. Their facilities as they present them often appear much cleaner compared to what has been found in undercover exposés, but they engage in the most troubling aspect of high-volume pet breeding all the same: confining hundreds to thousands of wild animals in small cages.
It is, of course, out of the question to throw America’s tens of millions of small pets out into the wild, where most would surely perish.
The best option for these animals already in our homes is to give them the best lives possible. Build large, complex tank environments, provide enrichment, feed them appropriate diets, learn about their needs and behavior, and follow their lead when it comes to handling, interaction, and time out of the cage or outdoors.
But to shape a better future, I think it’s time we wind down the mass, factory-style breeding of small pets — and certainly end their capture from the wild. I think it is plainly unethical to prioritize our need for companionship, our feeling that animals are nice or pretty to have around, or our desire to teach children responsibility over the undeniable fact of these animals’ suffering.
Pet stores could — at minimum — stop selling especially small cages and tanks, stop advertising any animal as a low-maintenance pet, and require new pet owners to take classes to learn the basics of good pet care and how to read their animals’ behavior, given how much experts cite a lack of species-specific knowledge as a root cause of poor welfare.
Austria has gone so far as to mandate such courses, while Sweden requires that guinea pigs — because they’re highly social — be kept in pairs or groups (Switzerland goes further and includes parrots and other highly social species in a similar law).
Other policy actions could help, too.
The federal government should crack down on the illegal exotic pet trade, and the USDA ought to significantly step up its enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, which covers some animal breeding operations. And Congress should amend this law so all pet breeders are subject to inspection; currently, a number of exemptions result in an untold number of animals being bred essentially without any oversight.
Already, hundreds of jurisdictions have banned the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores, and some have banned rabbit sales, too. In light of their own investigation into bird mills, the animal advocacy nonprofit World Animal Protection is pushing for New York City to expand its pet retail ban to include birds.
A dozen European countries have developed short lists of species that are allowed to be kept as pets — what are called “positive” lists — which, by default, prohibit owning any species not on the list. The European Union is considering a continent-wide positive list.
For now, the law of supply and demand is perhaps the strongest law that can be exercised to help small pets in the US; people who have their hearts set on owning a particular species should adopt instead of shop. That’ll be hard, because animal shelters aren’t necessarily overrun with orphaned chinchillas, ferrets, fish, and snakes, but there are some available on popular pet adoption sites and through specialized rescue organizations.
Ultimately, though, I think we need a fundamental shift in how we view animals. I know this shift is possible, because I’ve undergone it. I think back to my younger self, who expressed his love for animals through a pursuit of possessing them — subjecting them to confinement for my pleasure.
In time, I came to express that love by giving my time and money to organizations that protect animals and their habitats, instead of to pet stores and breeders. I learned about animals through books; documentaries; and most importantly, time in nature.
Two decades later, that’s still how I get my fill. I’m fortunate enough to live a short drive from a trail system that winds through deciduous forests, and a few times a week, I take long walks as I did when I was a child. I still regularly spot turtles, fish, squirrels, and centipedes, and if I’m lucky, I might see a toad or a heron. They’re living life on their own terms, which, ultimately, is far more satisfying for me to witness than watching them from the other side of a cage.
