At the 87th Session of the UN Committee of the Rights of the Child held at the end of May 2021, Tunisia’s programs to address child protection were examined. The printed report of the session, issued on June 7, 2021, was fifty-five paragraphs long and...
Around 20-25,000 years ago, the earth was in the grip of an Ice Age. The sea level was around 400 foot lower than it is today, global rainfall was lower and approximately a quarter of the earth’s surface was covered in ice. The earth then...
The European Union (EU) was the first major economic and political union to ban the marketing of cosmetics tested on animals. This legislative initiative took decades to come into effect.The path started in 1993 when the first EU Directive addressing the issue was passed. However,...
On May 2 this year, the South African Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy, released a High Level Panel (HLP) report on the sustainable use of wildlife involving the management, breeding, hunting, trade and handling of elephant, lion, leopard and rhino. In...
It is now commonplace for any new report on global sustainability to recommend that people should eat fewer animal products to help address climate change, biodiversity losses, personal health and several other challenges facing the world today. The Dasgupta Review (see related article in this...
Every now and again, a publication or report comes along that changes how we think about life. In the animal space, Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) was such a publication. In the environmental space, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the Club of Rome’s Limits...
The Idaho legislature has just sent a bill to Governor Brad Little’s desk that would authorize the killing of up to 90% of Idaho’s estimated 1,500 wolves. This bill represents a swing of the wolf pendulum back to the early part of the 20th century...
In October 2018, a group of authors from Australia, Canada and the USA, published an article in Nature that opened with the following claim. “A century ago, only 15% of Earth’s surface was used to grow crops and raise livestock. Today, more than 77% of land...
There is minimal careful analysis of gross companion animal demographics and of the trends in animal shelter intake and outcome. The best current estimate of the USA dog and cat population is 135 million from a survey conducted every five years. Several other national surveys...
In 2013, a paper in the journal Nature Communications appeared that estimated that cat predation in the United States led to an estimated death of 1.3 - 4.0 billion birds every year. This large range in the predation estimate was due to the big uncertainties...
