Meeting Mary Harris after I retired and moved to Colorado changed my life. She's the chair of Roaring Fork Audubon and became my mentor for all things bird. Although I was a birdwatcher back in Maryland, I was not a birder. I enjoyed sitting on...
This book is an imaginative analysis of what might happen to the 800 million to one billion dogs in the world if humans suddenly disappeared. Still, there are probably few better scholars to describe and flesh out this imaginary dog’s world. Both authors -- Jessica...
Every year since 2014, the Katmai National Park in Alaska has run a competition over the internet to identify a Fat Bear winner based on votes cast by members of the public who watch the Brown bears in the park via webcams as they fatten...
I was immediately attracted to this book because of its title. As a boy, I devoured many of Aesop’s fables and the various folk tales featuring wild animal heroes in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. I am not sure why anthropomorphized animal characters were so...
There are many threats to the survival of elephants in the world today, with poaching and habitat loss being among the most obvious. Disease is also an important factor, especially for elephants under human care where a recently discovered herpes virus – elephant endotheliotropic herpes...
President Biden signed the awkwardly named 'Puppies Assisting Wounded Servicemembers for Veterans Therapy Act' or the 'PAWS for Veterans Therapy Act' (PAWS Act of 2021) into law at the end of August 2021. This Act requires the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to implement a...
The term sentience – referring to the ability to feel pleasures and pains – was used by philosophers in the 17th century to distinguish the capacity to feel from an ability to think or reason. This distinction was directly expressed in Jeremy Bentham’s famous phrase...
Michael & Dwight's arrival Two orange tabbies arrived at Wallis Annenberg PetSpace in November 2019 as a bonded pair. The Animal Care team quickly decided to name the duo Michael & Dwight, after another bonded pair from the staff-favorite TV show, The Office. The two companions...
There are many examples of animal evolution in which wild creatures adapt to take advantage of urban or industrial environments. A recent paper describes some details of urban fox evolution. As with many such findings, the story began with a researcher, Kevin Parsons, asking some...
In the late 1970s, North Korea developed a “technology” for obtaining (“milking”) bile from live bears, and the “farming” of bears for their bile began in earnest in Asia over the following decade. At the time, it was argued that bear bile farms would also...
