My wildlife friends and I often talk about what species we would bring back from extinction. I am torn between the dodo and the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. This was once a speculative…
- Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Salford
One of the common problems we have in wildlife biology is knowing how many of an endangered species there are in a particular area. For example, how many orangutans are there in a particular national park…
The mascots for the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics and Paralympics have been announced. The yellow chap above is the Olympic mascot, apparently an amalgam of all Brazilian animals, which surprisingly only…
A big cat is apparently lurking in the countryside near Disneyland, Paris. After reports of a tiger on the loose, 200 police and military officers backed up by a helicopter, and a special “wolfcatcher…
A mystery bidder recently paid US$50,000 to name Dallas zoo’s latest baby giraffe. As we humans know, your name significantly affects your life. It has been shown to influence your career choice, a phenomenon…
What do Beyonce, Hitler, David Attenborough, Darth Vader and GoldenPalace.com all have in common? They all have species named after them. In the case of Beyonce it is an Australian horse fly whose striking…
It may surprise you to know that man’s best friend is not a friend of wildlife. Or that those cute cats from online videos are often mass killers. The dark side of pet ownership is something not usually…
A few weeks ago I was visiting a colleague in Brazil who told me he had a new post-doctoral researcher working for him from West Africa, but that he was in 21 days quarantine. I asked him if the newest…
I run 50km per week on my treadmill and eat a calorie-restricted diet; this is something our ancestors didn’t have to do. But then they didn’t sit at a desk all day and certainly did not have access to…
Brazilians head to the polls in October to decide on their new president. The country’s votes always produce surprises such as the election of a clown in 2010 and in 1959 the election of a rhinoceros named…
Ever had one too many at the zoo and thrown your beer at a tiger, or stripped off and attempted to jump into the penguin pool? I’d hope not, but these are just two examples of inappropriate behaviour by…
The history of zoos is eccentric, erratic; spotted with the spectacular as well as the cruel. But one of the more interesting beginnings of a zoo has to be that of Chester Zoo. And this is the story that…
The Sydney Opera House is proof that Danish architects like to do things differently. As do some Danish zoos, who kill giraffes for conservation. And now there is a Danish proposal to create a zoo there…
When my six-year-old daughter is stressed she bites her fingernails. Children in maths lessons often respond to the anxiety that doing mathematics causes by swinging their legs. Arturo the polar bear at…
One of the reasons Brazil took its loss to Germany in the World Cup semi-finals so hard was because many Brazilians wrongly believe the rest of the world only looks up to them for their footballing skills…
A Japanese jeans maker has found a new way of capitalising on zoo animals. Zoo Jeans are producing jeans “designed by dangerous animals”. Denim is wrapped around tyres, which are then thrown to the lions…
Charles Darwin ate one on his trip to Brazil. Apparently it tasted more like pork than chicken. My nine-year-old, football-mad, half-Brazilian son could identify one on his World Cup merchandising and…
For a biologist like me, the interesting questions about religion have always been where did it come from and why did it evolve? I taught evolutionary biology in a Catholic University in the most Catholic…
More than 20 years ago, the university department where I was doing my PhD was fire bombed by animal rights activists. At the time, I was conducting research into animal welfare, as were many of the staff…
The experience of visiting a zoo is about to change dramatically. The Next Generation Zoo concept is based on how animals use space in the wild, giving them more freedom and better using the resources…
Animal welfare is a term that frequently pops up in headlines, most recently in the debate over how animals are killed for kosher and halal food. But the concept of animal welfare is often misunderstood…
The reaction to the euthanasia of Marius the giraffe at Copenhagen Zoo has highlighted cultural differences in attitudes to animals and death between the UK and Denmark. I first visited the Copenhagen…
Contact Robert for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Consulting / Advising
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision
- Location: Salford, UK
- Website
- Article Feed
- ORCID
- Joined
