Here's an easy-to-read blog post about the songbird trap that @verntasco.bsky.social and I designed (in case you don't want to read the journal article!).

‘What I cared about all along’: How Researcher Bonnie Flint’s interdisciplinary background led her to wild animal welfare — Wild Animal Initiative February 17, 2026 As an undergraduate biology student at Rice University, Researcher & Education Specialist Bonnie Flint was assigned a project: Find some wild animals, observe them for an hour…

Watching banded mongooses suffer from tuberculosis was a turning point for @dr-bff.bsky.social. Now, wild animal welfare research has led her to a whole field of questions that ecology isn't asking.

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WAI is hiring! If you know anyone who's great at building communities, coordinating programs, & supporting researchers—but doesn't want to be a PI themselves—send them our way. Remote, mission-driven, & a chance to help build a growing scientific field.

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Eyes on ICE: Document and Record · No Kings On Saturday, federal agents horrifically shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who cared for veterans, in the Eat Street neighborhood of south Minneapolis after brutally beating him in...

I'm attending No Kings's event, “Eyes on ICE: Document and Record” - sign up now to join me! www.mobilize.us/nokings/even...

Journal of Field Ornithology: Bye-bye bycatch: a remotely closing trap for targeted songbird capture Capturing and marking animals is often an essential component of studying wild populations, but the process of capturing and marking can have detrimental effects on captured birds. For instance, resea...

New ornithological method just dropped: capture only the birds needed for your study with the click of a button.
Pub from me & @verntasco.bsky.social
Bye-bye bycatch: a remotely closing trap for targeted songbird capture. Journal of Field Ornithology. journal.afonet.org/vol96/iss4/a...

I just heard the snippet of Dolly singing the song and burst into tears. Her voice captures the absolute despair and grief of the situation.

Hi all, if you haven't seen it, I'm doing an AMA here on BlueSky on the @wildanimalinitv.bsky.social feed. About 15 minutes left to submit questions! But you can watch the videos anytime.

Reminder: Live on Friday, September 5 at 11 am ET, Researcher and Education Specialist @dr-bff.bsky.social will be answering your questions about conducting welfare research on wild animals. Respond to this post or DM us to submit yours now.

Does poverty play into this? I'd love to see the same type of graph but with poverty instead of percent Baptist. higher or lower correlation?

A small pride banner on Christ Church in Dublin.

I was in Dublin in 2023 and they had a similar banner then. 🥰🏳️‍🌈

Hi Christine! I've got an idea for this. What's the best way for me to contact you to discuss it? Thanks!

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47 seconds is 10 years in dog time.

1917 Alexander Graham Bell: “[The unchecked burning of
fossil fuels] would have a sort of greenhouse effect.” “The
net result is the greenhouse becomes a sort of hot-house."

So irritating that climate change is veeeery old news and we still aren't fixing it.

1824 Joseph Fourier proposes greenhouse effect
1856 Eunice Newton Foote experimentally confirms greenhouse effect
1859 John Tyndall measures gases’
absorption
1896 Svante Arrhenius derives CO2 greenhouse formula

Hmm. Fair enough. I guess that's not how I've thought of it, I've always thought that the perp at least has to know that they are causing suffering for it to be cruel. But I'll accept your definition and update my thinking accordingly!

My point being, I don't think predators are cruel, even if they enjoy hunting, & they also make prey suffer. Theyre only cruel if they enjoy the suffering of the prey for the sake of the suffering itself. There may be some species that can & do, but I think it's rare, bc it's cognitively advanced.

So the dog is only cruel if the dog likes the squeak because it wants to make the prey suffer. It's more likely that dogs like the squeak because its associated with hunting & eating (evolutionarily pleasurable because it allows them to survive), not specifically with the suffering of the prey.

Agree. But I think of cruelty as enjoying the suffering of others (for the sake of the suffering itself)...

Agree 100%. Various types of evidence would be needed to decide that the emotions are the same for a given behavior. We also have no way to really understand what cat "happiness" truly feels like to a cat, even if we have a whole bunch of evidence that cat happiness exists!

Correct, and also there's no reason that the same emotion-behavior link can't exist in both cats and humans (similar neuroanatomy). Scientists look for more evidence than just "humans have emotion x thus cats do too." There are multiple ways to figure out an animal's emotional states.

Would appreciate a RT from the scientists for this one! We have 665 scientists in the spring database and I want to get us to about 1000 before we set the teachers loose on the database for January matches.

However, I think few animals enjoy causing suffering in others, b/c that is not fitness enhancing. So I agree that few other animals are likely to be as cruel as humans (& they also might not have the cognitive ability to understand the suffering they are causing).

The leading hypothesis for the evolution of emotions is to drive animals toward fitness-enhancing situations & away from harmful ones. So our best understanding of emotions is that they drive behavior (e.g. The suffering of hunger and the pleasure of eating driving foraging behavior).

I appreciate that you didn't assert this very confidently. So you will probably be interested to learn that scientists (comparative psychologists, animal cognition scientists, animal welfare scientists) are quite confident that at least mammals most likely have a similar emotional landscape as us.

I was honored to attend one of those lessons when I was in his area. He taught about being a humble servant, like the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem. Afterwards he graciously received each group who came to speak with him and let them take photos with him.

Progress on our house sparrow research project — Wild Animal Initiative December 12, 2024 I’m pleased to report back to you with an update on the house sparrow research project we launched last year. Through this project, we hope to gain insight on how varying…

Last year, we launched our house sparrow research project to learn how varying environmental conditions affect the welfare of these common birds. Here's an update on the project's progress:

Oxytocin and prolactin are the hormones that cause milk production and letdown.

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