The concept of developing “alternatives” to laboratory animals in biomedical sciences is usually considered to have been launched by the1959 book, Principles of Humane Experimental Technique by William (Bill) Russell and Rex Burch. Russell and Burch did not explicitly use the term “alternatives.” They discussed...
A journey into the alien mind of an insect Bees were once thought to be cleverly designed biorobots that can construct elaborate comb architectures, have labor divisions, and nest climate control. But all this engineering and complex behavior was considered to be delivered by reflex machines...
WellBeing International heard yesterday from Gregg Tully, the Country Director of Save the Dogs and other Animals in Romania and a partner in the U3R consortium, who reported the following: “The need for pet food in southern Ukraine has become overwhelming. Many people who fled the country left their pets...
A few weeks ago, a few family members and I visited Trinity site in New Mexico. Trinity site is where the first atomic bomb was detonated in July 1945 and is only open to the public twice a year. Other than the black obelisk monument...
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...
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...
One of my special projects is catching uncatchable dogs! These are dogs that have been lost after a car accident, on a mountain hike, or as a new adoptee that did not know the adopter intended to provide them a forever home. After such dogs...
In 1987, when I was working on the first issue of Anthrozoos (the earliest surviving academic journal on human-animal interactions), the publisher and I agreed to carry reviews and brief abstracts of relevant books and scholarly articles appearing in other journals. Back then, this was...
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)....
In the June 2020 Tales of WellBeing, Professor Alan Kazdin of Yale contributed an article promoting contact with nature to improve mental health. There is a growing academic literature on the importance of nature in promoting human subjective well-being. For example, in 2019, a paper...
