I have recently completed the manuscript for a book on The History of the Development of Alternatives to Animals in Research and Testing, which is scheduled to be published by Purdue University Press in July 2024. Andrew Rowan has asked me to write a short...
In 1995, Anthrozoos (vol 8(4):199-205) included an editorial by Gary Patronek (then completing his Ph.D. on companion animal demographics at Purdue Veterinary School) and A. Rowan that discussed estimates of the pet dog and cat populations in the United States. G. Patronek reviewed the various...
In 1995, the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy released a report that claimed, inter alia, that laboratory animal use in the USA had declined by 50% since its peak in the 1970s. Several animal activists criticized this claim. However, various data sets indicate...
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...
Crowded 21st-century city streets carrying high-speed traffic are inappropriate places for horses. This seems obvious, but 2,000-pound horses may still be observed weaving through heavy traffic daily in cities across the US and worldwide, to the peril of themselves and all the pedestrians, motorists, and...
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...
After the ban on logging in Thailand, thousands of elephants became "unemployed." Some roamed the big cities like Bangkok, where mahouts sold fruit to citizens and tourists to feed their elephants. A city is not a good place for an elephant, but the elephants could...
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...
