An earlier issue of WellBeing News explored the shifting historical baselines phenomenon. This phenomenon illustrates the tendency of ecologists to use recent wildlife population numbers as the baseline for their studies, even though the recent wildlife population may be much lower than the population 50...
The stars of the new Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, are Craig Foster, a film maker, and a small boneless creature, Octopus vulgaris or the Common Octopus. For most humans, the only view of an octopus will be in an aquarium. However, Craig Foster visited...
Pets provide constant companionship, emotional support and security for individuals who are homeless. It is estimated that approximately 10% of the homeless have one or more pets. Thirty or more years ago, it was commonly argued by animal advocates that, if a person cannot take...
Editor's foreward: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. As part of its mission, WBI advocates for the safety and care of the human and animal victims of domestic violence It is now widely recognized that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a ripple effect with unintended consequences...
During the last half of the 20th century, animal welfare moved from being a marginal issue to one that began to claim the attention of policy makers. From 1960 to 1985, laboratory animal issues were the main focus of animal advocacy in Europe and North...
In 2020, there were reportedly over 5 billion unique mobile phone users worldwide (two-thirds of the world’s total population). Of these, 2.9 billion are using smartphones. These numbers translate to the growing availability of an extraordinary global marketplace for ideas and influence. Every smartphone user...
Mostly, the news featuring orangutans is very depressing. In just sixteen years (1999-2015), wild Bornean orangutan populations have declined by over 100,000 according to a recent estimate. CITES reports that the Bornean orangutan population (changed to “critically endangered” in 2016) has declined by 86% since...
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of citizens from New Orleans and other coastal communities, many people with pets chose to stay behind because they could not find anywhere that would allow them to...
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...
WellBeing International is now focusing on the ways that we as individuals can modify our behavior to improve our own health and well-being as well as reducing our impact on the world around us – positively affecting what we have called the PAE Triad (People,...
