David Attenborough today named the ten endangered species he would take onto a modern ark. He overlooked the well known endangered animals – tigers, polar bears, gorillas – for lesser known but equally spectacular ones. Two that strike me as quite amazing are the Olm Salamander and the Darwin frog. Like a creature drawn from the annals of science fiction the Olm Salamander lives to a...
Two days ago Sandy & I found ourselves travelling by speedboat to Selingan Island, a tiny island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo, famed for its turtles. We had just come from a night in Sandakan’s rainforest. There it was beautiful but I felt like an outsider. Here on the open water, with the buzz of an outboard in my ears and the salt spray across my face, I was right at home...
Chapter 5 from my book on ethical consumption. A few years ago I was guest speaker at a youth camp set on the shores of a beautiful lake on the north coast of NSW. One afternoon I saw a group of adolescent campers knee deep in the water herding puffer fish into seaweed. I watched as a young man excitedly grabbed a trapped fish by the tail and lifted it from the water. The fish’s defence...
A proper regard for animals is arguably a significant blind spot in contemporary Christian thinking. It is a blind spot Rev Dr Andrew Linzey, a member of the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has spent his life trying to correct. Linzey has written twenty books and over one hundred articles on the ethical treatment of animals. Creatures...