Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Even Great Apes Get the Midlife Blues

Sad orangutan

We’ve all been there. The trees we enjoyed climbing as kids no longer beckon quite so beguilingly. The fruits and nuts that were such delicious treats have largely lost their appeal. If we’re honest with ourselves, we are forced to admit: We’re in something of a mid-life crisis. Yes, getting older can feel oppressive to an orangutan. We can now add the middle-age blues to the list of experiences we mistakenly thought were exclusive to humans. In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international research team reports the well-being of ... Read More

A New Breed of Therapy

(PHOTO: VIKARAYU/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ellen Kinney opens the barn door for Dahlia and Duncan. Two black-and-silver pygmy goats, each about a year old, prance out. Kinney has trained them to respond to a clicker, so that Dahlia seems to dance while Duncan jumps up and down from a plastic chair. Those aren’t their best tricks. Dahlia and Duncan work as therapy animals at the Barking C.A.A.T. (Center for Animal-Assisted Therapy) Ranch in Lakewood, Colo. Among the ranch’s clients is a teenage girl with severe social anxiety who works with the goats, getting to know and be comfortable with them, going for walks in the park with ... Read More

Rats, Enlisted

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IxU-MZ12VE&feature=plcp Anti-mining NGOs have known for awhile that a properly-trained rat can smell explosives and signal the threat's location to a human handler. Now the US Army Research Center has contracted a Virginia firm, Barron Associates, to look into training rats to accompany American soldiers. Stars and Stripes reports that two years ago, the Pentagon sent researchers to evaluate work being done by de-mining charity APOPO, which used rats to find thousands of land mines buried across Mozambique, recovering from a decade of civil war. (The ... Read More

Who Needs Dr. Phil When You Have Dr. Fido?

For some of us, dogs and cats are more than just pets. They’re blood pressure meds with wet noses. A new study suggests having your pet nearby—or even thinking about him or her—can boost confidence and reduce stress, along with its physical symptoms. But there’s a caveat: This dynamic only applies to owners who feel a loving connection to their feline or canine companion. If you think of Fluffy as a flea-infested nuisance, no benefits. “Proximity to a pet can empower its owner,” writes a research team led by psychologist Sigal Zilcha-Mano of the Interdisciplinary Center in ... Read More

When Extreme Animal Rights Activists Attack

This is the third of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community, which insists animal research is essential to medical progresss, and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. Earlier pieces included the effort to shift the debate from sidewalks to courtrooms, and efforts to establish the “personhood” of species like apes and whales. Daniel Andreas San Diego joined Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” watch list in 2009. Bin Laden is gone, but San Diego remains. Listed as “armed and ... Read More

Reducing the Use of Animals in Experiments

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation still using chimpanzees on a large scale for invasive experiments — which sticks in animal activists’ craws. More than 900 live in laboratories — most are warehoused, some for 50 years. The bipartisan Great Ape Protection & Cost Savings Act working its way through Congress would prohibit invasive research on chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos and ban breeding them for research. In September 2010, the European Union passed legislation that 27 member EU nations must find and use alternate research methods to reduce animals’ ... Read More

Insuring Livestock in Kenya, Via Satellite

Brenda Wandera’s iPhone buzzes in her lap. A text message has made its way through the blurry heat of Kenya’s Chalbi Desert, and it changes her next move. “As soon as we get to Kalacha, we have to go to Network,” she says. Go to Network, I wonder. That must be a Kenyan turn of phrase for “finding a cell tower.” I’ve been warned that Kalacha is off the grid, which would make it one of the more remote corners of Africa, where mobile-phone and Internet service in even far-flung villages can be stronger and more regular than in parts of the American Southwest or Appalachia. ... Read More

‘Orcas as Slaves’ Argument Sinks

Approaching Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, we now know that the Great Emancipator did not free the orcas. So ruled U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller on Wednesday, as he rejected an attempt to use the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment to free five performing animals at SeaWorld. The advocacy group PETA had sued SeaWorld, claiming that the five orcas — always referred to by the names Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka, and Ulises so as to emphasize their putative personhood — were being held in involuntary servitude, which violates the amendment enacted just after the Civil War to outlaw ... Read More

Five Orcas, Five Slaves or Five Persons?

In late December we asked the provocative question “Should Animals Be Considered People?” in exploring the philosophy of legal scholar Steven Wise. Since 1984, Wise has followed a 25-year plan to have animals declared “legal persons” and afforded basic common law rights. As we wrote then, “He hopes to bring the first lawsuit in 2012. A case, he says, will not be hard to find, although the exact plaintiff — circus elephant, research lab primate? — hasn’t been determined.” An adjunct professor at Oregon’s Lewis and Clark Law School, Wise is the founder and president ... Read More

Marketing the Mystery of the Giant Squid

The new canary in the coal mine could be a giant squid. Conservation efforts often rally around charismatic species like the African elephant or the bald eagle. Popular affection for these "flagship" animals can be leveraged into funding and political will. But who speaks for the 95 percent of Earth's inhabitants without a backbone? No worm has the rock-star appeal of a Bengal tiger. Enter the giant squid. Ángel Guerra, a research professor at CSIC (the National Research Council of Spain), makes the case for turning this unusual animal, the largest invertebrate in the world, into a ... Read More