In 1964, Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison was published in the UK. The book described how farmed animals were kept closely confined in new industrial animal farming systems (commonly described as “factory farming”). The book launched an uproar in British society, prompting the government to...
The February and March issues of WellBeing News carried articles on the emergence of a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus. While the world is thoroughly sick of hearing about pandemic virus threats, we are adding another update because of the high risk to biodiversity of...
WellBeing News has carried several articles describing specific fisheries' rise and fall. Perhaps the most notorious overfishing example of a once-abundant fishery is cod's collapse and prolonged, slow recovery in the northwest Atlantic. But there are many other examples of the impact of over-fishing. Fisheries...
Approximately twenty-five years ago, the Dogs Trust in the United Kingdom began organizing annual conferences, now generally abbreviated as ICAWC (standing for the International Companion Animal Welfare Conference), in different Eastern European cities. The Dogs Trust 2016 Annual Report explains that these conferences share ideas...
Authors: Raffael Fasel & Sean Butler (Bloomsbury Publishing) The publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 led to the development of the modern animal rights movement. (Animal Liberation Now is the 2023 edition). One feature of this new social movement was the development of various...
A new book, The Rat Trap by Pandora Pound, has just been published, criticizing modern medicine's reliance on animal research. Pound is a medical sociologist now employed by The Safer Medicines Trust, a UK charity whose mission "is to make medicines safer by facilitating a...
The 12th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences ran from August 27-31, 2023, at a hotel in Niagara Falls, Canada. There have been many advances in reducing and replacing laboratory animals since the first of these World Congresses, an initiative...
In 1989, T Berry Brazelton, American pediatrician and author of numerous popular infant development and child-care books, was a plenary speaker at an international human-animal bond conference in Monaco. His talk included comments on an infant's attraction to and affinity with animals. He noted that...
According to reports by the US National Academy of Sciences and the European Commission, published in May this year, the US and Europe are experiencing an acute shortage of monkeys available for medical research, vaccine development, and product testing. Medical research using primates began in the...
As the world trends more urban, the opportunities for animals that have evolved to live close to humans (e.g., house mice and black and brown rats) have also increased. The UN estimates that 55% of the world’s population is urban, whereas the EU estimates that...
