In England, so often dubbed a nation of animal lovers, close to 177,000 native badgers, a protected species under UK law, have been shot under license since 2013, ostensibly to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis in cattle. There is no doubt that bovine tuberculosis (bTB)...
An extensive study of the genetics of dog behavior (including individual dog personality) and appearance (physical traits) has just appeared in the major academic research publication, Science. The research team reviewed the behavior and genes of 2,000 dogs who had had their entire genomes sequenced....
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...
Lions face many challenges in the modern world. We have written about lion breeding and conservation and lion trophy hunting in previous WellBeing News posts. But lions also suffer the consequences of human-wildlife conflict, and many are poisoned or killed by exasperated livestock owners when...
It was to be the trip of a lifetime. For decades, I’d imagined how thrilling it would be to walk among the Mountain Gorillas in their natural habitat. I’d been on several safaris elsewhere in Africa. Those were amazing, transformational experiences, yet there were still...
One of my special projects is catching uncatchable dogs! These are dogs that have been lost after a car accident, on a mountain hike, or as a new adoptee that did not know the adopter intended to provide them a forever home. After such dogs...
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...
In the January 2022 WellBeing News, we wrote about the proposed wolf hunt in Norway. We mentioned that there had been a court injunction barring the Norwegian Government from issuing permits to shoot 51 of the estimated 80 wolves in the country – an estimated...
In 2000, international animal protection organizations were spending around $110 million annually on global animal protection, with perhaps 10-20% of that total going to dog projects. By 2020, these groups were spending around $400 million globally on animal protection, with approximately $50 million spent on...
The first two parts in WellBeing International’s series on saving tigers recounted just how America arrived at a situation where it had twice as many captive tigers as wild tigers in the world (Part 1) and who owned or housed those captive tigers (Part 2)....
