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...
[caption id="attachment_11965" align="alignright" width="300"] Endangered Hawksbill Sea Turtle caught in a discarded net[/caption] The Challenge The plastics revolution launched in the 1950s has led to the cumulative production of 8,300 million tonnes (MT) of plastic products and vast quantities of plastic pollution (6,300 MT). According to a...
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...
In 2000, international animal protection organizations were spending around $110 million annually on global animal protection, with perhaps 10-20% of that total going to dog projects. By 2020, these groups were spending around $400 million globally on animal protection, with approximately $50 million spent on...
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...
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...
