Noted anthropologist and commentator on human-animal interactions and a great admirer of donkeys and their grit, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote the Foreword for a 2010 book by Andy Merrifield, "The Wisdom of Donkeys." Thomas has great admiration for donkeys and their fortitude. In her Foreword...
As the world's nations prepare to meet to discuss the Convention on Biodiversity in Montreal this December, the world is facing its sixth mass extinction event. Unlike the previous five events, which were triggered by significant earth climate disruptions, the sixth mass extinction is mainly...
Research indicates that we are less caring today than we were thirty years ago, leading former President Obama to argue in 2006 that Americans are suffering from an "empathy deficit." An empathy expert, Dr. Jamil Zaki, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford and the...
International Cat Day is celebrated every year on August 8. The day was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, but the current custodian is the UK-based International Cat Care.WellBeing International (WBI) has published several newsletter articles about cat management. WBI will...
The April 2022 Tales of WellBeing included a review of a book on human happiness written by social psychologist and professional ethicist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Haidt looked at happiness and how it might be achieved from the perspective of positive psychology. Professor Ng’s new (open...
Earlier this year, an open-access paper on One Health and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was published (in the CABI One Health journal). The authors (from institutions in the USA, Sweden, and Brazil) noted that human, animal, and environmental health are linked in the...
WellBeing International heard yesterday from Gregg Tully, the Country Director of Save the Dogs and other Animals in Romania and a partner in the U3R consortium, who reported the following: “The need for pet food in southern Ukraine has become overwhelming. Many people who fled the country left their pets...
This book is remarkable and deserves to be very widely read. The cover image is unusual – what on earth could be a man's relationship riding an elephant to happiness? Haidt uses the image to metaphor the human condition in which two systems govern our...
The mountain ranges north of India – the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram- have attracted adventurers and children's imaginations for centuries. Rudyard Kipling set his story of The Man who would be King in these ranges, and Huston used the Kipling story for his...
In 1987, when I was working on the first issue of Anthrozoos (the earliest surviving academic journal on human-animal interactions), the publisher and I agreed to carry reviews and brief abstracts of relevant books and scholarly articles appearing in other journals. Back then, this was...
