Recognizing animal personhood in compassionate conservation

Promoting predators and compassionate conservation.

Recognizing personhood and the right to die with dignity.

Death cannot be viewed properly as either an event or a configuration. Indeed, multiple parts of the body can continue to live long after the disintegration of its central organization is recorded. Instead of collapsing at a moment in time, technological mechanisms are capable of sustaining the major bodily processes indefinitely--all designed to allow for the harvesting of needed organs for tr...

An Animal – Many Persons? Animal Personhood in Face of the Modularity of Mind

This essay analyzes how the Modularity of Mind impacts the anthrozoological argument that non-human animals are persons. Comparative research on human and animal minds suggests that human and other-than-human minds differ in their mental architecture such that animal cognition is largely modular whereas human thought fluidly integrates contents across modules. If animal minds are modular, then ...

Conservation physiology of animal migration

Migration is a widespread phenomenon among many taxa. This complex behaviour enables animals to exploit many temporally productive and spatially discrete habitats to accrue various fitness benefits (e.g. growth, reproduction, predator avoidance). Human activities and global environmental change represent potential threats to migrating animals (from individuals to species), and research is under...

Animal conservation, carbon and sustainability.

International conventions to reduce carbon dioxide levels focus on ecosystems and do not specifically recognize the need to conserve species. However, species are the building blocks of ecosystems, they are more widely understood among the public, and they provide means of capturing market values from ecosystems. Achieving successful conservation globally will require ensuring that the systems ...