The importance of a house in enabling individuals and families to attain physical shelter from inclement weather, provide security, a ‘grounded’ attachment to place, and enhance the quality of life of residents is an idea that has universal acceptance. Particularly since the Second World War, it has become an integral part of the popular imagination. The almost iconic status of what a house rep...

OBJECTIVE To describe changes in WBC counts, plasma cortisol concentration, and fecal parasite shedding of dogs housed in an animal shelter and determine the effects of daily petting sessions on these variables. DESIGN Hybrid prospective observational and experimental study. ANIMALS 92 healthy dogs newly arrived to an animal shelter and 15 healthy privately owned dogs (control group). PRO...

We studied behavioral indicators of poor welfare in shelter dogs. Our research question was: How is the welfare of shelter dogs affected by length of stay at a shelter, age, sex, and breed? Data were collected on 18 dogs from October 2016 to March 2017 at a small private shelter in Marietta, GA. Data were collected in 15-minute sessions when the dogs were in their indoor enclosures. No signific...

Improvements in outdoor air quality that were achieved through the implementation of the Clean Air Act accentuate the quality of the indoor air as an important, if not dominant, factor in the determination of the total population exposure to air contaminants. A number of developments are adding important new determinants of indoor air quality. Energy conservation strategies require reductions i...

Taxes have major costs beyond the collected revenue: deadweight from distorted incentives, compliance and enforcement costs, etc. A simple market mechanism, the Equity Tax, avoids these problems for the trickiest cases: corporate, dividend, and capital gains taxes. It exploits the ability of the share prices to reflect the expected true annual return (as perceived by investors, not as defined b...

Millions of dogs enter animal welfare organizations every year and only a fraction of them are adopted. Despite the most recent American Pet Products Association (APPA) data that nearly half the US population owns a dog, only 20% acquired their dog from an animal welfare organization. Studies show that people consider adopting from an animal shelter more often than they actually do, which indic...

BACKGROUND Big environmental disturbances have big ecological effects, yet these are not always what we might expect. Understanding the proximate effects of major disturbances, such as severe wildfires, on individuals, populations and habitats will be essential for understanding how predicted future increases in the frequency of such disturbances will affect ecosystems. However, researchers rar...