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...
WellBeing News has carried several stories about global happiness (e.g., World Happiness Report), subjective well-being, and happiness research centers. Happiness (and subjective well-being) research is booming, but these are not the only ways to measure global well-being. The Social Progress Imperative is a US-based non-profit...
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...
In October last year, WellBeing International organized two webinars on animal sentience – specifically on the question of invertebrate sentience – as part of a project funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism. We were surprised by the level of interest in the topic. In...
As we bid goodbye to 2021, the world continues its struggles with Covid-19 and its new variants. It is only natural to focus on the present and tempting to reflect on periods in the past – a concept encapsulated in the "back to the future"...
In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act included language, supported by corporations and animal advocates, that authorized a new program to develop and validate toxicity tests that would replace and reduce the use of laboratory animals. Seven years later, that 1993 Act led to the passage...
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...
Kabul, AfghanistanAfghanistan recently experienced a change in government, leading to chaotic scenes at Kabul airport as countries evacuated their personnel and individual Afghan citizens sought to leave the country. Dogs were also caught up in this chaos as some animal advocates sought, mostly unsuccessfully, to...
On November 30th, we are holding the first webinar on dog homelessness and WBI's Global Dog Campaign (GDC), and it seems an appropriate time to review the background leading up to this moment. In 1983, I started working on dog/cat welfare and demographics in the...
