Breeding out bad genes to protect biodiversity

Although their presence in the landscape has been relatively short, the impact feral cats have made on Australia’s native wildlife has been significant, with estimates of nearly two thousand native animals – birds, reptiles, mammals, and frogs – falling prey to feral cats every minute. These cats are also considered to have been largely responsible […]

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Vets respond to environment report

Veterinarians around the country are responding to the latest State of the Environment report, which paints a grim picture of our nation’s environment under extreme pressure. The report, released in July 2022, found that “[o]verall, the state and trend of the environment of Australia are poor and deteriorating as a result of increasing pressures from […]

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Abstracts: Cognitive bias in animal behaviour science

Emotional states of animals influence their cognitive processes as well as their behaviour. Assessing emotional states is important for animal welfare science as well as for many fields of neuroscience, behaviour science, and biomedicine. This can be done in different ways, e.g. through assessing animals’ physiological states or interpreting their behaviours.

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Practice management: driving without destination

When veterinarians decide to get into practice ownership, they spend many hours analysing possible practices to buy or sites to start up in. They fill spreadsheets with costings and projections, competition analysis, ideas and business plans before they act. When they are in practice, they spend countless hours agonising over how they are going to […]

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Pigeon Post: Ian Neville reports from the UK

As one pestilence (coronavirus) finally subsided in the UK, the country found itself afflicted by another old adversary … no, not Yersinia pestis (causal agent of the Black Death/Bubonic Plague in 1348–9 and 1665–6 most notably), but economic inflation. The British economy was indeed plagued by high inflation rates during the 1970s when the annual […]

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