With the death of Dr. Jay Kirkpatrick, we lost one of the leading advocates for humane wildlife population control. His research, development, production, and long-term use of immunocontraceptives in the field and in zoos to control reproduction benefited a wide range of animals, from horses on Assateague Island to elephants in South Africa.
Member of the Scientific Committee of the Animal Welfare Institute since 1967, Dr. Marjorie Anchel-Rackow passed away on April 29, a week shy of her 99th birthday.
If Dr. Naomi Rose, who joined AWI’s staff in September as the organization’s marine mammal scientist, ever elects to pen an autobiography, she knows where to go for the “early years” outline. All she has to do is look in the index of the book Death at SeaWorld under “Rose, Naomi.”
Dr. Samuel K Wasser, acknowledged worldwide for developing noninvasive tools for monitoring human impacts on wildlife, was honored today with the Albert Schweitzer Medal. This prestigious award, established in 1951 by the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), recognizes outstanding achievement in the advancement of animal welfare.
The end of cruel confinement methods for veal calves in the United States is drawing ever closer. In 2007, the American Veal Association (AVA) pledged to transition away from solitary crates and neck tethers to group housing by the end of 2017.
Try as they might, hard-working wildlife officials cannot be everywhere at once. In remote areas, it is a depressingly familiar scenario for such officials to come upon grisly crime scenes strewn with the bodies of wantonly slaughtered animals. By the time they arrive, the killers have long since fled and the damage has been done.
AWI has been collaborating with Norway’s largest animal welfare group, NOAH, and Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) to oppose a dangerous experiment on wild minke whales that was to begin in late spring, last several weeks, and continue next year. The plan calls for researchers from the United States and Norway to capture up to 12 whales off Vestvågøy in the Lofoten area of northern Norway in order to study how their brains respond to ocean noise.
In today’s specialized food system, the majority of animals raised for food are transported to different locations based on their “stage of production” such as breeding or fattening. At minimum, animals are transported from the farm to the slaughterhouse, and many will be subjected to the additional stress of a livestock auction.
Born in Alabama, Dr. E. O. Wilson spent his formative years exploring forests and tidal pools, an activity that inspired a lifetime of inquiry and discovery. After completing his studies at the University of Alabama and receiving a PhD from Harvard, Wilson set off on a global expedition to study ants in Cuba, Mexico, New Guinea, and the islands of the South Pacific. His travels led him back to Harvard, where he served as an esteemed professor for 46 years, studying insects, natural selection, biological diversity, and animal behavior. Later in life, Wilson became a fierce advocate for the protection of wild places and endangered wildlife.
In his remarkable book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb recounts the impact of the fur trade in decimating a continent’s beaver population, followed by the gradual realization of conservationists that this large rodent provided more than the raw materials for men’s hats.
A recently published study in the journal Science (Slabe et al., 2022) documented alarmingly high levels of lead in bald and golden eagle populations across the United States.
EARTH A New Wild is an upcoming series that will air on PBS and document a five-year, global journey, capturing encounters between wild animals and the people who live and work among them. The five episodes focus on different habitats and aspects of human-wildlife interactions: Home, Plains, Forests, Ocean and Water.
At its heart an ethnography, Eating the Ocean, by gender and culture professor Elspeth Probyn, is a challenging and unexpected contribution to the growing “food politics” genre. Although focused on questions concerning the sustainability of eating (and growing) seafood, the book has a basis in storytelling.
In 1987, eight years before gray wolves were released into Yellowstone National Park, the US Fish and Wildlife Service performed their first successful attempt at reintroducing a top carnivore into the wild. This took place not in the remote backcountry of the Rocky Mountains, but in the flat and swampy terrain of eastern North Carolina, where the Service decided to release red wolves into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.
In the Summer 2011 AWI Quarterly, AWI reported on the Yasuni-ITT Initiative—whereby the Ecuadorian government sought US$3.6 billion in financial contributions from the international community in exchange for a commitment by Ecuador to forego oil drilling in Yasuni National Park.
Environmental enrichment is designed to promote the behavioral health of understimulated nonhuman primates by providing them with species-appropriate conditions for the expression of species-typical behavioral dispositions (cf. USDA, 1991; CCAC, 1993). Housing nonhuman primates in permanent social isolation in barren cages raises self-evident ethical concerns.
There is a growing awareness that non-human primates kept in zoos and laboratories deserve more species-appropriate stimulation because of their biological adaptation to a challenging environment. Numerous attempts have been made to effectively emulate the gathering and processing aspects of natural feeding. Whole natural food items, woodchips mixed with seeds, the puzzle ceiling and the puzzle feeder stocked with ordinary biscuits, cost little or nothing but induce sustained food gathering and/or food processing.
Autoaggression and stereotypies in individually housed cynomolgus monkeys were compared in a standard primate cage and an enriched playpen environment. Stereotypy and autoaggression were markedly reduced in the playpen, but reappeared on return to the home cage. Some of the various activities available in the playpen but not others engaged the animals' attention.
Once an animal has been removed from its natural habitat every effort should be made not only to simulate the natural environment but also to ensure that the animal displays ecologically valid behaviour (Forthman Quick, 1984). Neither natural settings nor natural behaviour can be duplicated in captivity; however, complex captive settings may discourage the development of abnormal behaviour, induce activity and facilitate normal social behaviour and reproduction (Clarke et al., 1982). Markowitz (1975-79,1982, cited in Forthman Quick, 1984) has agreed that captive animals should exert some form of control over their environment.
For captive primates, environmental enrichment may improve psychological well-being, as indicated by changes in the frequency of species-typical and abnormal behaviours. The effects of enrichment on physical well-being have also been examined, but little attention has been devoted to the relationship between enrichment and animal health. We therefore studied the health records of 98 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to measure the effects that enrichment and social housing manipulations had on the number of veterinary treatments and days of therapy required by the monkeys.
