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)...
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...
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...
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)....
The Tristan da Cunha archipelago, a small group of volcanic islands in the middle of the South Atlantic, is characterized by the surrounding, largely undisturbed, temperate marine ecosystem. The largest island, Tristan, at 98 km2, has a population of approximately 260 permanent inhabitants and is...
While there may be as many as one billion domestic dogs in the world today, estimates of the global population of grey wolves (from whom domestic dogs evolved) put the number at a paltry 200,000-250,000. Once, there were an estimated 2 million wolves in North...
Tigers, Tigers Everywhere. The USA Tiger Sanctuary Challenge As previously reported in WellBeing International's Saving Tigers in America Part 1, the number of tigers held in the United States of America (USA) began to increase in the 1980s, driven primarily by the profit motive of entertainment...
There are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 tigers in private hands in America today – one estimate is that there are 7,000 privately held tigers or around twice as many as the total population of wild tigers (approximately 3,900) in the world today. None of...
