The International Fund for Animal Welfare established August 8th as International Cat Day in 2002. Eighteen years later, the British NGO, International Cat Care, took over the custodianship of the day. This August, WellBeing International suggests celebrating the day by reading one of Rudyard Kipling’s...
India probably has the most extensive laws and institutions addressing animal welfare globally. The Indian national animal welfare infrastructure likely owes its existence to ahimsa or non-violence, a doctrine addressing the treatment of other beings in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions. For example, the...
The early 1970s in the USA saw a flurry of articles and media comments calling attention to an out-of-control pet population. The Humane Society of the United States estimated that approximately 13.5 million dogs and cats were euthanized in US shelters in 1973. At the...
Joyce D’Silva is a longtime animal advocate, having worked for Compassion in World Farming in various positions (including CEO) for over thirty years. She has also had a long-standing interest in the different faiths’ approaches to how humans should view and treat animals. Her career...
For those of us who enjoy playing with our dogs, such as tossing a ball or stick for them to fetch, the world offers many more challenging exercise opportunities. Now, a new human-pet dog sport has appeared – CANICROSS or CANI-X. In canicross, the owner...
Book ReviewDr. Chris Pearson, a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Liverpool, focuses on animal and environmental history. Dogopolis is his recent book published by the University of Chicago Press that explores the impact of dogs and dog management on primarily...
In June 2020, WellBeing News included an article on sustainable fisheries that mentioned the 1990 collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery off the coasts of the USA and Canada. A moratorium on catching cod was established in 1992 with the hope that the cod...
Many African cultures believe it takes a community to raise a child. It also takes a community of people, organizations, and supporters to rescue eleven lions from Ukraine and bring them to their forever homes for the holidays. The end-of-year holidays are traditionally a time...
The first edition of Regarding Animals, authored by Arluke and Sanders, was published in 1996 and received the 1997 Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction for its important contribution to the perspective of symbolic interaction. When the book...
Thanksgiving is perhaps the most important family holiday in the United States. As we head into the coming week and the gathering of family members, it seems appropriate to reflect on our families and who is included at this critical time. In the Rowan household,...
