On October 15, the Endangered Species Preservation Act (P.L. 89-669) is signed into law. The Act provides for the listing of native threatened and endangered species by the Secretary of the Interior (additional protection for endangered species is granted with the enactment of the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973).
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) and Defenders of Wildlife (Defenders) filed a petition today with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to list the Northwest Atlantic population of the thorny skate (Amblyraja radiata), a species of fish, as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The Earth is now in the midst of its sixth major animal (and plant) extinction. The last mass extinction - approximately 65 million years ago - caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Although extinctions are naturally occurring, the current mass extinction is unique in that it is caused almost entirely by humans.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) filed anti-wildlife amendments to the energy bill that reached the Senate floor in early February. He, too, proposed removing gray wolves in Wyoming and the Great Lakes states from ESA protection, and prohibiting the US Fish and Wildlife Service from listing the northern long-eared bat as endangered under the ESA.
Rodents are often restrained for data collection procedures, such as blood collection and injection, by coaxing them into tubes, for example syringe cylinders or perspex tubes. Such enforced restraint/immobilization presumably exposes the animal subject to considerable stress.
Attending animal fights and bringing children to such spectacles would become federal offenses under the Animal Welfare Act as a result of provisions in the farm bills of both chambers of Congress.
In In the wild, foraging for food occupies much of a primate's day. Considerable energy is expended as the animal travels its range in its search for food. Primates have evolved special abilities which enable them to deal with food-gathering in a unique way.
At the Jane Goodall Institute Halfway House in Burundi 18 orphaned chimpanzees live in a one-acre yard near the shores of Lake Tanganyika, awaiting a new home in a sanctuary that has yet to be built. Ethnic problems in the small African country, coupled with a shortage of funds for all of the institutes' projects, have put plans for the 4-hectare semi-natural sanctuary on indefinite hold.
One of the goals of environmental enrichment is to encourage species-typical behaviors while discouraging abnormal behaviors. Assessing the effectiveness of various enrichment strategies can be a challenging endeavor, particularly for prey species who may exhibit freezing responses in the presence of people. The goal of our study, which was funded by an AWI Refinement Grant, was to determine if we could use various environmental enrichment strategies to promote species-specific behaviors, decrease potentially abnormal behaviors, and improve the overall welfare of rabbits in laboratories.
The author reviews improvements in the behavioral management of a colony of captive chimpanzees at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. Environmental enrichment techniques, such as providing increased opportunities for physical, sensory, and feeding stimulation, as well as improvements in management techniques, are discussed.
All animals held in confinement are psychologically and physically at the mercy of their keepers. Keepers include animal care and scientific staff. All keepers must abide by a code of ethics which promotes a sense of healthy respect for all the animals which are on loan to them. This includes respect for the species involved as well as respect for each and every individual.
Perhaps the most abusive trade in wild animals is that which serves no other purpose than human entertainment. Countless wild animals are removed from the wild for entertainment purposes every year. In far too many instances, an individual’s entire family is killed in order to obtain one juvenile. The kidnapped individuals are then subjected to (an often mercifully truncated) life of confinement, boredom, distress and abuse.
Ordinary feeder-boxes for macaques were converted into food puzzles by remounting them onto the square mesh (22 X 22 mm) of the front of the cages, away from original access holes. Feeding a standard ration of bar-shaped biscuits (40 X 24 X 16 mm; Purina Monkey Chow #5038; 236 g per animal), 8 adult pair-housed male rhesus macaques spent, on average, 61.0 ± 15.6% of the first 30 min retrieving biscuits from food puzzles, but only 0.5 ± 0.1 % from feeder-boxes.
In May 2022, a federal court in Virginia took the extraordinary step of granting the Justice Department a temporary restraining order—an emergency procedure used to halt ongoing misconduct threatening irreparable harm—against a facility in Virgini
Biomedical company Envigo made headlines in 2022 for atrocious conditions documented at its Virginia beagle-breeding facility, accumulating over 60 citations for noncompliance with the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) within one year.
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) is grateful that thousands of dogs will be rescued from abusive conditions following a settlement reached Thursday between the federal government and Envigo, a company that breeds and sells animals for laboratory experimentation.
To promote the well-being of previously single-caged adult (older than 5 years) rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and the quality of research done with them, the following environmental enhancement plan has been developed and implemented at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center.
This review supports the idea that enrichment is an attempt to ameliorate problems caused by containment, that the goals of enrichment are to alter behaviour so that it is within the range of the animals' normal behaviour, and that evaluation of the success of enrichment techniques is important.
Marmosets and tamarins are small (250-500 g) South American monkeys of the family Callitrichidae. They are forest living species with squirrel-like locomotion and, unlike typical monkeys, most of the digits have claws instead of nails. They live in small troops, most members of which are closely related; there is one breeding female and usually several other adult non-breeding females.
Today, a coalition of wild horse advocates, environmentalists, and academics filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Wyoming against the US Department of the Interior over a federal plan that would result in the largest-ever eradication of federally protected wild horses and elimination of 43% of designated wild horse habitat in the Red Desert area of Wyoming.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent decision to approve ZonaStat-D to manage deer populations was all the buzz at the 8th International Conference on Wildlife Fertility Control, held in Washington, DC, in mid-July.
