In March 2014, the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy organized a conference in Washington on animal sentience. Following the meeting, several participants asked whether any follow-up was planned. Their queries prompted the establishment of a new, open-peer-commentary journal, Animal Sentience, with cognitive scientist...
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...
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...
On May 2 this year, the South African Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy, released a High Level Panel (HLP) report on the sustainable use of wildlife involving the management, breeding, hunting, trade and handling of elephant, lion, leopard and rhino. In...
“Dancing” bears were a common and popular form of street entertainment in Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages. Although there were still dancing bears in Western Europe in the 20th century (the 1911 UK animal protection law forbid the practice) but the dancing bear...
The UN World Tourism Agency published a report in 2015 on the importance of wildlife tourism to national economies in Africa. About half of global wildlife tourism involves a visit to an African country, resulting in 6 million tourists a year visiting Sub-Saharan Africa (about...
Following the recommendations of our esteemed colleague, Dr. Alan Kazdin, who has written in a previous WellBeing newsletter about the importance of being in natural settings for human mental and physical health, we bring you a tale about a relationship that has developed between one...
In June, the House of Representatives included dedicated funding in the INVEST in America Act (HR2) to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. Renee Callahan, Senior Policy Officer for our Partner, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC), noted that wildlife-vehicle collisions cost over $8 billion a year...
Over the past few years, news stories describing the global wildlife decline have generally referenced the Living Planet Index (LPI), which is based on methodology developed by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. The LPI indicates that wildlife populations have declined...
