In 1989, T Berry Brazelton, American pediatrician and author of numerous popular infant development and child-care books, was a plenary speaker at an international human-animal bond conference in Monaco. His talk included comments on an infant's attraction to and affinity with animals. He noted that...
According to reports by the US National Academy of Sciences and the European Commission, published in May this year, the US and Europe are experiencing an acute shortage of monkeys available for medical research, vaccine development, and product testing.Medical research using primates began in the...
As the world trends more urban, the opportunities for animals that have evolved to live close to humans (e.g., house mice and black and brown rats) have also increased. The UN estimates that 55% of the world’s population is urban, whereas the EU estimates that...
The Thai Government has a long tradition of managing elephants. Thai laws regulating the treatment of elephants have been adapted to address elephants involved in the tourist industry. If one only seeks improved conditions for the elephants in the service of man, it is the...
The International Fund for Animal Welfare established August 8th as International Cat Day in 2002. Eighteen years later, the British NGO, International Cat Care, took over the custodianship of the day. This August, WellBeing International suggests celebrating the day by reading one of Rudyard Kipling’s...
(Extract from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, G. Byron 1818, verse 178)Lord Byron's narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, contains the line in the above title. The line captures the essence of the Rewilding concept. Rewilding is not about privileging Nature over humans but restoring Nature to vigorous...
My grandfather, Bernard Sax, emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1914. With his wife, Bluma, he purchased some abandoned farmland so inexpensively that it was almost free. The land was for a little community of Russian Jews, largely Communist, as a buffer between...
Part 1: The Asian elephant has been closely associated with people for perhaps six millennia. Still, there are conflicting views on whether the Asian elephant has been domesticated instead of being a tamed wild animal.For example, some animal protection organizations argue that a captive Asian elephant...
The early 1970s in the USA saw a flurry of articles and media comments calling attention to an out-of-control pet population. The Humane Society of the United States estimated that approximately 13.5 million dogs and cats were euthanized in US shelters in 1973. At the...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same)Historical Context. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I into space. I remember, as a boy looking for the moving light spot that was the satellite...
