WBI Studies Repository (WellBeing International)
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Do You Suffer Guilt Over Owning a Pet?
Get PDFWhile pet-owner guilt is common, it has only recently been studied. Many dog owners, for example, felt guilty when they returned to the office after the pandemic. Two new studies reported pet owner guilt resembles guilt experienced by parents of young children. Pet-related guilt is associated with depression, anxiety, and the conflicting demands of work and pet care
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza
Get PDFThe avian flu virus was the agent that caused the devastating worldwide influenza pandemic in 2018 that killed an estimated 50-100 million people, and health authorities continue to pay close attention to periodic outbreaks of avian flu. Currently, an H5N1 influenza virus is leading to millions of wild birds and domestic poultry deaths. Recently, this virus spread in a mink farm in Spain, raising the stakes that it might be able to spread among humans. While the current avian flu pandemic is a major economic problem for global farms and a major animal welfare concern for domestic poultry and wild bird populations, it is just a mutation away from becoming a major human health problem. Intensive animal farming systems could lead to the evolution of a new pandemic avian flu virus. While the world is discussing the global warming potential of modern food systems, it should also pay attention to the potential pandemic threats from concentrated animal feeding operations
Update – Food & Drug Administration’s Animal Testing Mandate
Get PDFFollowing the end of the Second World War, the World Medical Association developed new ethical guidelines regarding research involving human subjects. These guidelines included requirements to obtain informed consent from research subjects but also emphasized the importance of conducting animal research before engaging in human clinical trials and other human research. This principle was included in legislation mandating the FDA to require prior animal research before permitting human trials of new drugs. That mandate was recently eliminated by new US legislation cosponsored by Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul. The FDA can now encourage non-animal methods and no longer has to require animal tests. In 2016, Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH Director, predicted that the use of animals in the development and testing of new drugs would be primarily replaced by non-animal technologies that “are more accurate, at lower cost and with higher throughput” within ten years. The new legislation frees up the FDA to achieve that outcome
Reducing Deaths And Anxiety: Why Trees Should Be Cause Célèbre For Our Health And Well-Being
Get PDFPreserving trees is increasingly recognized as hugely important for our future happiness and well-being. Concerned citizens can play a significant role in looking after our natural heritage trees by being their eyes and ears, looking out for their best interests and thereby creating conditions for a better future at both local and global levels
Stress: An adaptive problem common to plant and animal science
Get PDFIt is very hard to determine whether plants have “felt states,” but they do have specific states, such as stress, that depend on sensory input from their environment. Plants do not have neurons or brains, but they do have xylem and phloem, as well as many signalling molecules that are dynamically distributed in their bodies, enabling them to produce systemic responses to environmental stimuli. One common topic in plant and animal science that may or may not prove to involve sentience but that does involve the same molecules is stress
Disentangling sentience from developmental plasticity
Get PDFPlants, like animals, display remarkable developmental plasticity, inviting the metaphorical use of terms like “decision” and “choice”. In the animal case, this is not taken to be evidence of sentience, because sentience is a complex product of development, not something that guides it. We should apply the same standards when evaluating the evidence in plants. It is hard to overstate the contrast with the case of invertebrates such as octopuses, where pain markers that were originally developed for use in mammals have been clearly demonstrated and plausible neural substrates for sentience have been identified
New Thinking and Policies on Animal Welfare
Get PDFAnimal welfare assessment has been a challenge for a decade. Read how humans might guarantee animals a life worth living
History of the Animal Welfare Movement in Madras-Chennai
No full textAnimal welfare in India enjoys considerable public support. Prashanth Krishna’s book details how this support was translated into government policy
Life of Willie B. - Public Policy & Psychological Well-being - Part 3
No full textThis tale is the last in a three-part series about Willie B., Atlanta’s iconic ape and one of the most famous gorillas in the world
Animal Welfare in World Religion by Joyce D\u27Silva
No full textThe major world faiths eloquently state how animals should be humanely treated but are largely silent on modern animal welfare challenges