In 1995, I was a coauthor with Bob Hoage (then a Public Affairs Officer for the National Zoo in Washington) on the changing animal protection movement and on the evolution and role of zoos and aquaria. Bob contributed the section on zoo evolution and he...
This issue of “Tales of WellBeing” is focused on elephants. Kwatile’s story describes some incidents in the life of an old elephant matriarch in South Africa as well as her role in a project that demonstrated a humane and effective way to manage elephant populations...
Reviewed by Andrew Rowan - The human population of Africa is projected to climb from a little more than 1.29 billion in 2018 to over 2.5 billion in 2050. Unlike the rest of the world, where the population has leveled off or is even decreasing, Africa’s...
By any account, these are not good times for wild animals. Global climate change threatens many species (such as polar bears) with rapid habitat changes to which they might not be able to adapt. Poaching threatens many others, including the culturally significant rhinoceros and elephant...
In the last few months, a number of scientific papers have appeared that report declines—including some dramatic declines—in the number of wild animals sharing our planet. Most people familiar with this issue know about the finding that only 4 percent of mammalian terrestrial biomass consists...
The chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) is one of the largest of all monkeys and is a relatively common sight in the Cape Province in South Africa. In fact, the 500 or so baboons living on the mountain slopes of the Cape Peninsula (Cape Town, South...
Reviewed by Debra Firmani - If you share your life with a companion animal, or ever have – or if you simply love animals – Love Can Be: A Literary Collection About Our Animals will resonate with you. Thirty gifted and award-winning authors share stirring and...
There are approximately 800 million dogs in the world today. Around 300 million are street dogs, and the others are mostly either pets or household guard dogs. The interactions communities have with street dogs is changing (see Oct 26 blog on a shelter in Costa...
[caption id="attachment_643" align="alignleft" width="300"] Greyton, South Africa's Baboon Monitor Team[/caption]A recent posting on Facebook by a resident of Greyton, a town (and artists’ retreat) about 80 miles from Cape Town in South Africa, asked readers if they were wondering why they were not seeing baboons around or...
Human-dog interactions have been changing around the world over the past fifty or more years. In North America in the 1960s for example, a significant proportion of pet dogs were allowed to roam freely and there were estimates that maybe 25% of the dogs on...
