Eco Hvar's aims for protecting animals and improving animal welfare, plus related articles
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The site contains articles and information on topics related to health, the environment and animal welfare.
While the focus is on Hvar Island in Dalmatia, much of the information is relevant to the rest of Croatia, and some to Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.
The main language of the site is English, but articles in Croatian are being added as quickly as possible. Some of the Croatian articles are translations, some original. Book reviews are in the language of the publication being reviewed.
To see all the articles archived in each category, click on the category name which is given below the title of each article (Environment, Highlights, Notices etc).
For further relevant news items and bits of interesting information, please refer to our Facebook page.
We are very grateful to Željka Horvat Kozulić for kindly and expertly designing the ECO HVAR logo, also to Jelena Bunčuga, Petra Mimica, Bartul Mimica, Ivana Župan, Dinka Barbić and Josip Vlainić for their generous help in translating articles into Croatian.
Special thanks are also owed to Mihael Magdić of Orion Informatika i Trgovina, Varaždin, for his excellent and patient efforts in designing the website.
Even as weather extremes worsen, the voices calling for the rolling back of environmental rules have grown louder and more influential
In the timeless week between Christmas and the new year, two Spanish men in their early 50s – friends since childhood, popular around town – went to a restaurant and did not come home.
Francisco Zea Bravo, a maths teacher active in a book club and rock band, and Antonio Morales Serrano, the owner of a popular cafe and ice-cream parlour, had gone to eat with friends in Málaga on Saturday 27 December. But as the pair drove back to Alhaurín el Grande that night, heavy rains turned the usually tranquil Fahala River into what the mayor would later call an “uncontrollable torrent”. Police found their van overturned the next day. Their bodies followed after an agonising search.
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Rising temperatures are forcing some ski resorts to close, while leaving others at greater risk of extreme weather
Avalanches kill about 100 people in Europe each year, with vast masses of ice, snow and rock regularly crashing down on hikers and skiers who have been caught unawares.
The structure of the snow, angle of the slope and variation of the weather can dictate whether a gentle disturbance – like a gust of wind or the glide of a snowboard – can trigger a deadly shift in the mountain.
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Australian collections of the endangered and notoriously unpredictable flowers have popped off in recent years, as ‘personas’ like Putricia, Stinkerella and Smellanie prove a hit with nosy spectators
From little things glorious fetid things grow. Corpse flower blooms, once vanishingly rare, are becoming more commonplace in Australia.
More than a dozen bloomed across the country in 2025, including the infamous Putricia in Sydney, Morpheus in Canberra, Big Betty in Cooktown, and Spud and co in Cairns. But with plants kept in gardens across the country, and blooming more frequently after their first flower, you could catch a whiff of one soon.
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Animal rights activists disagree with authorities on how best to handle boom in primate population near Table Mountain
At the edge of Da Gama Park, where the Cape Town suburb meets the mountain, baboons jumped from the road to garden walls to roofs and back again. Children from South African navy families living in the area’s modest houses played in the street. Some were delighted; some wary; most were unfazed by the animals.
A few miles away, overlooking a soaring peak and sweeping bay, Nicola de Chaud showed photos of food strewn across her kitchen by a baboon. In another incident, a baboon threw one of her dogs across the veranda. In January, a male baboon lunged at her and refused to leave the house for 10 minutes.
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Subspecies driven to extinction by hungry whalers returns after ‘back breeding’ programme using partial descendants
Giant tortoises, the life-giving engineers of remote small island ecosystems, are plodding over the Galápagos island of Floreana for the first time in more than 180 years.
The Floreana giant tortoise (Chelonoidis niger niger), a subspecies of the giant tortoise once found across the Galápagos, was driven to extinction in the 1840s by whalers who removed thousands from the volcanic island to provide a living larder during their hunting voyages.
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Romney Marsh, Kent: It’s a family outing, raking the wet sand looking for plump shellfish. Out of everyone, though, I’m the most enthusiastic
The vast tidal flats are empty save for the hunched figures of three black-backed gulls considering a decomposed dogfish, and four humans (one rather small) trudging through the endless silt. A light mist obscures the coast with its string of motley houses and, on the breeze, there is only the distant soughing of shallow waves chasing foam over the sand. There is the piquancy of seclusion and its attendant danger here, perhaps the closest thing Kent has to wilderness.
I’m relishing the long walk in this lonely place, but my children are less enthusiastic about our annual pilgrimage to the cockle beds, a typically cold affair as the quality of shellfish diminishes in spring and summer. We’re travelling well armed, brandishing handmade rakes with formidable tines of six-inch nails, while the youngest carries a hopeful white bucket. About half a mile offshore, our labour begins.
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Government announces tougher measures to tackle unlicensed sites as ‘prolific waste criminal’ is ordered to pay £1.4m
A new 33-strong drone unit is being deployed to investigate the scourge of illegal waste dumping across England, the government has announced.
The improvements to the investigation of illegal waste dumping – which costs the UK economy £1bn a year – come as the ringleader of a major waste crime gang was ordered to pay £1.4m after being convicted at Birmingham crown court.
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In an edited extract from her latest book, Hazel Sheffield sets out a new blueprint for community stewardship
It was a Saturday in February 2020 when the flood came. It had been a wet winter, so wet it seemed that before the month was out, the brown trout of the River Taff might be washed clean out into Cardiff Bay before the fishing season had even begun. But this is Wales. People are used to a spot of rain. No one realised how bad it would get.
For two days, it hammered on the windows of the houses at the top of the South Wales Valleys, where people tucked in their children before a sleepless night. It poured into the rivers at the bottom. By the time the rain departed again, many people would be standing in water up to their knees.
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Rivers drained dry to create artificial snow, a forest cut down for the bobsleigh track – IOC’s claims to prioritise sustainability at Milano Cortina exposed
On the foothills of the mountains, by the banks of the river in Cortina, there was a forest. It was full of tall larch trees. Arborists said the oldest of them had been there for 150 years and dendrologists that it was unique because it was unusual to find a monocultural forest growing at such a low altitude in the southern Alps.
The locals knew mostly it was the place where the old wooden bobsleigh run was, where you went on your walks in summer or autumn, or when you wanted to play tennis on the small courts built near the bottom. They called it the Bosco di Ronco and it isn’t there any more.
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A staple in African and Arab communities for millennia, camel milk is now being marketed as a ‘superfood’
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Caroline’s sultry and soulful eyes are hooded and heavy-lashed.
“She’s straight out of central,” Paul Martin whispers, gazing at his star performer with admiration.
Continue reading...A Stanford University team have tested their nasal spray vaccine in animals but still need to do human clinical trials.
The household cat could hold the key to understanding certain types of cancer, such as breast cancer.
Manjit Sangha, from Penn, near Wolverhampton, says her life drastically change in one weekend.
The decision from the Supreme Court, on the case of a child who sustained a brain injury at birth in 2015, could have significant cost implications for the NHS.
Around 1,000 operations a week rely on the product as patients are warned delays are inevitable.
The figure paid to Crawford & Company Adjusters is eight times the original estimate for the work.
A committee of MPs warns tighter restrictions on high-risk cosmetic procedures are needed immediately.
The patient was the victim of a "life-changing error" when a drill slipped during surgery.
Some health boards have told people using the painkiller to begin reducing their tablets by one a week.
Can boosting testosterone improve libido, or is much of the attention solely hype, profit, and placebo?
Deep in the mountains of Palawan, Conservation International scientists are capturing what few people ever see: the secret lives of the Philippines’ rarest species.
At Maido — the Lima restaurant recently crowned the best in the world — one of the star dishes is paiche, a giant prehistoric river fish.Its journey to the table begins on a small family farm deep in Peru’s Amazon.
“Jane Goodall forever changed how people think about, interact with and care for the natural world,” said Daniela Raik, interim CEO of Conservation International.
Conservation International’s Neil Vora was selected for TIME’s Next 100 list — alongside other rising leaders reshaping culture, science and society.
Climate change is happening. And it’s placing the world’s reefs in peril. What can be done?
After decades of negotiation, the high seas treaty is finally reality. The historic agreement will pave the way to protect international waters which face numerous threats.
The Amazon rainforest, known for lush green canopies and an abundance of freshwater, is drying out — and deforestation is largely to blame.
The ocean is engine of all life on Earth, but human-driven climate change is pushing it past its limits. Here are five ways the ocean keeps our climate in check — and what can be done to help.
In a grueling and delicate dance, a team led by Conservation International removes a massive undersea killer.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures might be worth even more. An initiative featuring the work of some of the world’s best nature photographers raises money for environmental conservation.
