Vegans Love Carnivores

On Monday, I was interviewed by Arise TV (Sky channel 519) about the ongoing poaching crisis of African elephants and pangolins.  You can watch the interview in full below:

This morning I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 am to be interviewed on BBC Radio Wales.  I spoke about the international trade in endangered species and how the CITES meeting can help improve the conservation of pangolins.  You can listen to the clip here :  (My interview starts at 19 mins 50 seconds)

Today I was interviewed on BBC One's Breakfast show to talk about the start of the CITES conference on endangered species.  I spoke about WWF's positions on ivory and pangolin trade.  You can watch the clip below.

Impact. A word that causes most academics to get shivers down their spines. For American academics aspiring to get tenure , to Indian academics going for big grants , the impact factor of the journals you publish in could be the be-all-and-end-all for your entire career. Indeed, it can be the difference between getting that promotion/grant or not. Much has been written about impact factors in the past, so I am not going to reinvent the wheel here. Yes, we know there are problems with using impact factors to assess the standard of an academic's work. But, for now, it seems that this is one of the main metrics that your boss and your grant assessor is going to look at when determining how "good" an academic you are. However, let's not forget the real reason that most of us ever got into academia in the first place: to make a difference. To change the world. To improve technology. To save lives. To reduce pollution. To expand minds. And how best can...

Linking overpopulation to climate change can be a thorny issue, but on a local level some conservation charities are having great success integrating family planning advice into their environmental programming By Flora Bagenal, interviewing Niki Rust amongst others Reposted from  NewsDeeply It all began when some women asked for contraceptive advice from a pair of doctors working for a small international research group surveying the oceans in southern Madagascar. At the time, Blue Ventures was a conservation group made up of scientists and volunteers who were gathering data on coral reefs and fisheries in Velondriake, a remote and poverty-stricken part of the country. The doctors were there to provide medical assistance to divers, but they soon found their services were also required by women from the local villages. “The medics had women coming to them, talking about their reproductive health needs,” says Laura Robson, the health and environment partnerships manager for Blu...

Reposted from my BBC article . A male-dominated culture has meant that Samburu women rarely get a say in how their society handles big cats, but one project is trying to change that Lionesses have a lot of power in lion society. The females typically work together to hunt down prey, and form crèches to look after their cubs. This cooperative behaviour brings in lots of food, and ensure that plenty of lion cubs survive to adulthood. The female lions' empowerment stands in stark contrast to the human societies that live alongside the lions in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. There, as in many other cultures throughout history, women have been discouraged from taking control – in part due to a male-dominated culture. As it happens, lions – despite the lionesses' efforts – are  vulnerable to extinction . So what might happen if we took a leaf out of the lions' book and began to allow women to make more decisions? One Kenyan lion conservation organisation, Ew...

Repost from my BBC Earth article. In April 2016, there was a rare piece of good news about tigers. For the first time in over a century, the number of tigers went up . The latest global census counted 3,890 tigers, compared to just 3,200 tigers in 2010. There are lots of reasons for this increase. But one key factor is that, in some places, people are finding ways to live alongside tigers. India is home to around half of the world's tigers, and in several parts of the country, some local tribes co-exist fairly happily with tigers. That may sound surprising. After all, tigers sometimes kill people , so they might seem like the worst kind of neighbours. But people are living with them regardless. What's more, these tribal communities might be helping the tigers. Survival International, a charity aiming to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, says "tribal peoples are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world". That is a big claim, but the...