Moving Animals

Interview in Trouw

Interview in Trouw

On September 19th, 2021, Willem Schoonen interviewed Raf de Bont for the newspaper Trouw. You can read the interview (in Dutch) here: https://www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/vogels-wezen-de-vroege-natuurbeschermers-de-weg~be9adb5e/ *Credits picture: Yrjö Jyske (2001),...
Blog post for NiCHE: “Incest at the Zoo”

Blog post for NiCHE: “Incest at the Zoo”

On 16 August 2021, Monica Vasile published a blog post for NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment, titled “Incest at the Zoo: Saving and (in)Breeding the Przewalski’s Horse.” Incest is more common than one would expect amongst zoo-bred...
Extinct in the Wild?

Extinct in the Wild?

How does one become certain that a species is no more? How does one document extinction? Monica Vasile tackles these questions in a blogpost for Mosa Historia. In particular, she discusses how scientists tried to find out whether there were still surviving free-living...
Harmful Hamsters

Harmful Hamsters

The wild hamsters of the Dutch province of Limburg are currently cherished as a cute-yet-threatened indigenous species and a marker of local identity. This has not always been the case however. In a blogpost for Mosa Historia, Raf De Bont discusses how the Dutch...
Before Hamsters Became Cute

Before Hamsters Became Cute

On 15 December, Raf de Bont published a blog post for Mosa Historia on changing perceptions of European hamsters from harmful to cute, a shift which only occured in the 1960s and 1970s. The full blog post can be read here:...