James Gorman

Three-quarters of the billion dogs on the planet are not pets. A new book argues that they are more than strays and may tell us much about the nature of dogs.

When members of the Explorers Club gathered for their lavish annual dinner in New York City in 1951, one account said they feasted on meat from a prehistoric wooly mammoth that had been preserved in a glacier.

The scene was a lagoon on the shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The time about 10,000 years ago. One group of hunter-gatherers attacked and slaughtered another, leaving the dead with crushed skulls, embedded arrow or spear points, and other devastating wounds.

Scientists once thought that some visionary hunter-gatherer nabbed a wolf puppy from its den and started raising tamer wolves. The prevailing scientific opinion now, however, is that this origin story does not pass muster.

A warming planet means less ice coverage in the Arctic, leaving polar bears with less time and less ice for hunting seals. They depend on seals for their survival. But the polar bears of Canada's Hudson Bay have discovered a new menu option.

Should some of the most social, intelligent and charismatic animals on the planet be kept in captivity by human beings?