In 1992, I attended two conferences in Canada. The first was organized by the AAZPA (now known as the AZA – Association of Zoos and Aquariums) in Toronto. Animal rights philosopher Tom Regan participated in a panel discussion and was challenged on his views. In his...
In 2002, Google launched an ambitious project to scan a large portion of the world's books and create a digital library accessible to everyone. However, this library has not yet materialized due to legal challenges from authors and publishers. Although the public cannot currently access...
If the animal protection movement were to anoint an official cartoonist, it would most likely have selected Gary Larson and his iconic "The Far Side" cartoon series. From early in the 1980s, it was virtually impossible to attend an animal protection conference without seeing a...
These two books deal with the same topic, animal research and testing, in quite different ways. Both describe very personal explorations of the topic, grounded in the two authors' interactions with laboratory animals. Melanie Kaplan, author of Lab Dog and a journalist, adopted a beagle, Hammy,...
Introduction In the previous two parts of this WellBeing International Beaver series (Part 1 and Part 2), we examined the history of human exploitation of beaver and their partial recovery, and noted that, as they return, beaver are increasingly coming to be viewed in a positive...
Approximately fifteen years ago, The Lancet, a British medical journal, launched a series of Commissions to produce expert reports on health issues and related policy questions. The Lancet website now lists ninety-seven such commissions ranging from reports on specific health issues – e.g., Covid-19 –...
Livestock and wildlife live along the Ewaso River in Kenya's northern rangelands, a region frequently affected by prolonged droughts. Livestock are existential for the Samburu people in the region. In the words of Lavias Lekuuk, a Samburu elder: "We are a pastoralist community. Cows are...
The true story, A Street Cat Named Bob, is an international best-seller about twin redemption: that of a homeless tabby street cat and a homeless Englishman who adopt each other and help one another heal, leading to celebrity status for both cat and human. The author,...
COP30: Context The 30th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP30) is the annual United Nations conference on climate change, established under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty. This year's 2025 conference will take place in Brazil, from November 10...
In the first part of this series, an ancient relationship between humans and beaver, largely exploitative, was noted., Almost gone from Western Europe by the early Middle Ages, beavers were found to be abundant and available in the New World. There, they were exploited for...
