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Captive wild animal encounters are hugely popular, thanks partly to social media. But our investigation shows many creatures lead dismal lives.

Give the Bronx Zoo’s pachyderm freedom. Soon the Bronx County Supreme Court will have the opportunity to consider the rights of a species loved and respected around the world for the extraordinary beings they are: elephants.

“One Planet” appeals to the sense of wonder as viscerally as any of its predecessors, but to a purpose. Here is this beautiful, rare thing, each episode says. It didn’t used to be rare! But it is now. And here is how we’re responsible. And here is a tangible thing we might do to fix it. The arc of each installment runs from beauty to loss to a concrete, hopeful example of a battered ecosystem that’s recovered.

Time may be running out for California’s most infamous fish. Despite a decades-long rescue effort, the tiny delta smelt appears closer than ever to vanishing from its only natural home, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Now, some worry it won’t be long before the only place the once-abundant species exists is within the confines of an artificial tank.

Federal wildlife officials are proposing to strip endangered species protections from the gray wolf populations in the Lower 48 states, citing significant increases in their numbers across much of the nation. The decision, announced on Wednesday by David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the Interior Department, is likely to set off another round of court battles.

The 18-wheeler’s driver listlessly stared ahead as about 60 animal rights activists, who had silently amassed across from the huge slaughterhouse, swarmed his double-decker livestock trailer. Baby boomers and millennials, black-clad anarchists and Patagonia-sporting Westsiders pushed water bottles through the trailer’s grates to the startled hogs. People with pump-action sprayers splashed the upper deck. Two men lighted everyone with floodlights as others recorded the action, took photos or offered gentle massages to doomed 250-pound Yorkshires.

National Butterfly Center employees are watching in horror as their 100-acre butterfly sanctuary in Mission, Texas, faces immediate seizure by the federal government for the erection of Trump’s “beautiful” border wall.

Over the last week, Marianna Treviño Wright has watched work crews drive through her butterfly sanctuary in Texas to a nearby site where brush is being cleared for a planned six-mile stretch of border wall. Homeland Security has planned to build an 18-foot-tall steel and concrete barrier across the National Butterfly Center, cutting it in half. Those plans were blocked, at least for now, in the spending bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed Friday, which specifically bars construction at the 100-acre site.

Despite reforms, the territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal parts.

As the fight continues over President Trump’s demand to extend the border wall between the United States and Mexico, one thing is clear: Whatever the wall’s effect on immigration might be, it would have an impact on the environment of the borderlands.

What should we eat? Depends on who is eating. That’s one of the principal conclusions of a comprehensive report that sets out targets on how to feed the world in a way that’s good for human health and the health of the planet. Its lightning-rod recommendation is around beef and lamb, the two forms of livestock that require enormous amounts of land and water and produce heaps of methane.

They arrive in California each winter, an undulating ribbon of orange and black. There, migrating western monarch butterflies nestle among the state’s coastal forests, traveling from as far away as Idaho and Utah only to return home in the spring.

In the video, Ms. Gill zoomed in on a six-foot-long, stiff, glistening dolphin carcass, its mouth frozen into a toothy smile. The creature was one of more than 20 dead bottlenose dolphins that had washed up on local beaches in recent days.

The underwater forests — huge, sprawling tangles of brown seaweed — are in many ways just as important to the oceans as trees are to the land. Like trees, they absorb carbon emissions and they provide critical habitat and food for a wide range of species. But when climate change helped trigger a 60-fold explosion of purple urchins off Northern California’s coast, the urchins went on a feeding frenzy and the kelp was devoured.

The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted.

Authorities keep arresting people said to be bosses of wildlife trafficking, but that isn’t making a dent in the problem.

An estimated 7,000 to 14,000 lions are held in captivity and bred in South Africa. Increasingly, the animals are slaughtered for their bones and other body parts, many of which are sold in Asia for their purported — and scientifically discredited — health benefits.

Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction.

The Eastern monarch is in trouble, and this is the time to help (no science degree needed).

Eight critically endangered black rhinos are dead in Kenya following an attempt to move them from the capital to a national park hundreds of miles away, the government said Friday, calling the toll "unprecedented" in more than a decade of such transfers.

Hundreds of turtles, dolphins and whales become stranded every year on Thailand’s beaches after plastic impedes their mobility or clogs their insides. Some are lifeless on arrival, biologists say, and their deaths barely register with the public.

This year's list includes a rare great ape, a hitchhiking beetle, an extinct omnivorous marsupial lion and many species that are critically ...

Conservation superstar Jane Goodall talked about her early life and the need to protect other species and our environment and ecosystems.

A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions.

Something ominous was happening in the turquoise waters of Sepetiba Bay, a booming port outside Rio de Janeiro. Beginning late last year, fishermen were coming across the scarred and emaciated carcasses of dolphins, sometimes five a day, bobbing up to the surface.

The Asian nation is a hot spot of biological diversity, but local and international conservation groups are struggling to halt what amounts to animal genocide.

A beached whale found in the Philippines on Saturday died with 88 pounds of plastic trash inside its body, an unusually large amount even by the grim standards of what is a common threat to marine wildlife.

Over decades, armed conflict has reduced animal populations in Africa more than any other factor, according to new research.