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...
Several well-being and happiness research centers and policy units have been established in the last decade at major universities. For example, Harvard’s School of Public Health established the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness in 2016, while Oxford University launched its Wellbeing Research...
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...
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...
The Letter from the President for September 2021 addressed climate change. This Letter is a follow-up to the previous Letter in September, but we revisit the topic because its importance and gravity to humanity cannot be overstated. We hope to provide a brief primer on...
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...
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...
