AWI Quarterly » 2009 Spring

A snowstorm was in full force one wintry day last December when filmmaker Donny Moss decided to film the carriage horse drivers picking up tourists outside Manhattan’s world-famous Plaza Hotel - a tradition more than 70 years old.

War and pestilence ride together and there is no better place than an army camp full of recruits, stressed and far from home, for an epidemic to begin.

Sylvie Cloutier, Ph.D., and Ruth C. Newberry, Ph.D., present playful handling as social enrichment for laboratory rats When animals are used in research,there is seldom, if ever, a focus on affectionate or playful handling. However, based on what has already been proven about rats and their response to positive caregiver contact, we at the Washington State University Center for the Study for Animal Well-Being set out to explore management and husbandry factors in the laboratory that improve the welfare of the rats being studied and the outcome of the research.

Despite grim predictions that carbon emissions will only rise in the coming decades and threaten a vast array of sea life, a recent study published in the journal Science early this year has proven that fish are unwittingly helping to lower elevated CO2 levels in their ecosystems...through their excrement.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uncovered a correlation earlier this year between the interaction of the toxins DDT and domoic acid and the occurrence of epileptic seizures in California sea lions at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

The Member-Nations of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) were poised to make a critical decision at the 2009 Intersessional Meeting held in Rome in March.

Twenty years ago, the single-hulled Exxon Valdez tanker collided with the Bligh Reef in Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine and ecologically significant Prince William Sound. The massive spill—caused by human error and lack of oversight—ruined one of America's most treasured natural areas and caused the deaths of millions of animals, including more than 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250,000 murres, 14 orcas, and countless fish and benthic invertebrates. Some species are still unrecovered today, and the environment remains blanketed in oil.