Cosmetics companies must be banned from using plastic microbeads in scrubs, toothpaste and beauty products because of the marine pollution they are causing, say a group of MPs. Members of the environmental audit committee have called for a ban within 18 months after hearing that trillions of tiny pieces of plastic are accumulating in the […]
Category: Polls
POLL: Should Australia’s wild horses be culled?
A plan to cull more than 5,000 brumbies in the Snowy Mountains has received the support of leading scientists from around Australia. Forty-one scientists from 16 universities have written to the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, to support the proposed cull of 90% of the brumby population in Kosciuszko national park. They are backing […]
POLL: Should there be a worldwide ban on fur farms?
Fur seems to be making a high fashion comeback, the September issue of National Geographic reports. “The current revival is a story of the fur trade responding to its critics and often outmaneuvering them, combined with increased demand from the newly wealthy in China, South Korea, and Russia,” writes Richard Conniff. After the animal welfare […]
POLL: Should neonicotinoids be banned to save bees?
Pesticides used on oilseed rape crops, whose bright yellow flowers have become an increasingly common sight across the British countryside, are harming native populations of wild bees, scientists have conclusively proved. Species that feed most on the flowers of the now-profitable cash crop used for vegetable oils and animal fodder are down by as much […]
POLL: Should spear hunting of bears be banned?
Authorities in the Canadian province of Alberta have vowed to ban spear hunting and are weighing whether to lay charges against an American hunter after a video surfaced showing him killing a black bear with a spear. The video – one of several hunting videos posted to the YouTube account of Josh Bowmar – shows […]
POLL: Should the sale of elephant ivory be legalized?
World Elephant Day was not necessarily good news for Africa’s elephants: Pressure is mounting in southern Africa to lift the ban on the sale of ivory. In the mid-1980s, during the last great elephant poaching crisis, Africa lost nearly half its elephant population, roughly 600,000 animals, in a decade. But the world responded in 1989 […]
POLL: Should the killing of giraffes be outlawed?
Documentary filmmaker David Hamlin recalls the adrenalin rush when he was flying over the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Garamba National Park in late June and spotted three giraffes standing in a small clearing. “Seeing these giraffes from the air was really exciting,” says Hamlin, who was on assignment for National Geographic. “Seeing them anywhere […]
POLL: Should the coyote continue to be exterminated?
The howl of the coyote is America’s “original national anthem,” says Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. A totemic animal in Native American mythology, the coyote has lived in North America for more than a million years. But since the early 19th-century, when Lewis and Clark first encountered them, coyotes […]