From World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA)

A Wildlife Crime Hotline run by Vietnamese member society Education for Nature (ENV) is getting real results for bears. Tapping into public determination to stop the bear bile trade, tip offs have led to bears being removed from bear farms.

Radio, television and print advertising for the WSPA-funded hotline are clear: the bear bile trade is based on extreme cruelty and buying or selling products made from bears is illegal.

Most farmed bears are poached as cubs and held in tiny cages for the rest of their lives. The public can help prevent this by reporting any advertising they see for bear bile products to the hotline.

Although now banned in Vietnam, there have been reports of bile extraction from captive bears continuing. WSPA and ENV are working to help the authorities improve enforcement.

Watch advertisements for the hotline
(WARNING: these clips contain graphic images and sounds of bears in distress)

The Vietnamese government’s commitment to ending bear farming is the first stage in making this cruel trade part of the country’s history.

Alongside our member societies, WSPA is working with the authorities to offer expert advice and ensure that this important animal welfare goal is achieved.

For more information, visit Animals Asia

Thousands of pain experiments on animals are conducted every year across the world, including purposely inflicting pain on conscious animals such as rodents, sheep and primates. Such experiments are conducted mainly on rodents in Britain by drug companies like AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline as well as universities across the country. As well as being unethical, animal models of pain are simplistic and fail to replicate the multi-dimensional experience of human pain with its complex genetic, biological and psychological aspects.

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Non-invasive human neuroimaging technologies are relatively new but they are being rapidly developed, and their capabilities are improving with lightning speed. Advanced techniques such as fMRI, PET and MEG are already revolutionising medical research by identifying the brain areas involved in human pain processing, those affected by analgesics, and the duration and nature of these effects.

“It’s clear that experimenting on animals isn’t an ethical or even relevant route to study the complexity of human pain.” says Dr Gill Langley of the Dr Hadwen Trust, “It is critical that these often simplistic experiments are replaced with more advanced techniques that don’t involve inflicting animal suffering. Powerful brain imaging machines could help revolutionise pain research globally and speed up the development of pain-killing drugs, providing much needed hope for chronic pain sufferers. But the enormous potential of imaging approaches will only be realised if the government and the research funders make a concerted effort to invest in these human-focused technologies.”

One of the major advantages of these advanced techniques is that the species of relevance (humans) is studied and that volunteers are able to verbally communicate their experience of pain and pain relief in a way that is impossible with animals. Patients can also be stratified into sub-groups, to help develop more specific treatment strategies. For example, human studies are revealing gender differences in pain processing, and showing that painkillers appear to work differently in men and women.

We recommend replacing animal experiments wherever possible with an expanded programme of human-based pain research. We would like to see: the establishment of co-ordinated regional human tissue banks to make human tissues and cells more available for research, as well as a UK Human Pain Research Network to encourage collaborative research, greater dialogue and a strategy for multi-disciplinary human volunteer studies.

Full article on Dr Hadwen Trust.

Bat World Sanctuary saves thousands of bats around the world each year and provides refuge for bats retired from zoos, permanently injured, used in labs and confiscated from the pet trade. Amanda also started 17 volunteer bat rescue centers across the US. BWS and the rescue centers give educational programs to thousands of school children per year. Amanda teaches a week-long intensive workshop on the rehabilitation of bats that animal professionals attend from across the globe. She also saved 30,000 bats from destruction by purchasing a building bats had used as habitat for decades. The previous owner wanted the bats killed to sell the property. This building now serves as a permanent wild sanctuary.

What you can do to help? Go to Animal Planet’s Poll and vote for Amanda Lollar as the Animal Hero of the Year. Bat World desperately needs the $10,000 prize. Others will be voting for their favorite – animals much more popular than bats. But bats, too, deserve a chance for a better future. So VOTE!

In the early 20th century, the gray wolf was often hunted by settlers in the western United States who said the predators were killing off their livestock. By the 1970s there were no reports of a wolf population, according to the park’s Web site.

The wolves gained protected species status in the mid-1970s and about 20 years later, U.S. wildlife officials submitted a plan to reintroduce the wolf into the park, starting with 31 wolves let loose in Idaho. Today, there are more than 150 wolves in Yellowstone.

Having more wolves has helped rebalance the park’s ecosystem. Gray wolves hunt the large animals like elk that were eating so many plants that some of the fauna was in danger of disappearing. The wolves also hunt coyotes, meaning the growing bald eagle and hawk populations have more rodents to eat.

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Every year, 32 million acres – an area the size of England – is destroyed or degraded. The message is clear: our world is in grave danger of losing its life-support system. These forests, which straddle the equator in a belt around the world, contain not only some of the richest biodiversity known to science, which is crucial to human health and survival in the future, but are also home to millions of the world’s poorest people, whose livelihoods depend on them.

They also play a crucial role in cooling and cleaning the atmosphere and providing fresh water and rainfall. At a time when shortages of food are being experienced the world over and population continues to rise, this rainfall is more important than ever before. Amazonia’s forests alone, for instance, help to store the largest body of flowing freshwater on the planet, and they release 20 billion tonnes of water vapour into the atmosphere every day.”

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