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All in Animal Welfare
Great apes in Africa are threatened by habitat destruction and poaching for bushmeat. Now there’s a new and growing threat: their babies are kidnapped and trafficked to supply a global for pets and zoos.
The UK government has allowed animal testing for makeup ingredients to resume despite a ban that’s been in place since 1998. The High Court ruled last week that the Home Office acted legally when it lifted its ban to align with EU chemical rules.
The Scottish wildcat is on the way out. There are now too few wildcats to sustain the population, according to a five-study completed by conservation group NatureScot. A separate study recently declared Felis silvestris “functionally extinct.”
A 3-year-old chestnut colt named Mage won the 149th Kentucky Derby, but there were seven losers – that’s the number of horses that died at Churchill Downs in the runup to the big race.
A bear in the north Italian province of Trentino is in lockdown after mauling a jogger last month on Mount Peller. The jogger didn’t survive the attack; the bear, a 17-year-old female, was captured and about to be killed herself, but has won a reprieve while the courts decide her fate.
The Norwegian authorities responsible for killing Freya the walrus can’t be too happy about a new statue of the beloved visitor just unveiled in Oslo. The statue is titled “For Our Sins,” lest anyone forget the rash decision to euthanize Freya for the crime of sunbathing in public.
The future looks shaky for the lesser prairie-chicken, whose federal protections under the Endangered Species Act are under siege. Last week the House Committee on Natural Resources voted to use the Congressional Review Act to reverse the lesser prairie-chicken's listing under the ESA — the first step toward stripping the species of federal protection.
The eastern hellbender, the largest salamander in North America, faces various threats to its existence. One threat turns out to be the eastern hellbender itself, as researchers have observed an increase in cannibalism in the species.
Following in the flight path of Flaco the owl, a peacock escaped from the Bronx Zoo this week and spent the night hanging out in the city, then (unlike Flaco) returned to its confines the following day. As the New York Times reported, rather ominously, “the Fire Department did not confirm reports it had bitten someone.”
Nzou was only two years old when her family was slaughtered by ivory poachers in Zimbabwe. Rescuers tried to reintroduce Nzou to other elephants, but she never fit in. “Her need for a family never faded,” intones Natalie Portman, narrating National Geographic’s new series, Secrets of the Elephants, “So she took matters into her own hands …”
How do you keep elephants and humans apart? In Africa it’s an urgent problem, as human populations grow and encroach on elephants’ wild habitat. Now conservationists are trying out a novel form of deterrence: “technologically generated bee sounds.”
Australia has a few million too many cats: feral cats, which kill an estimated two billion animals annually; and outdoor house cats, which whack some 83 million native reptiles and 80 million native birds every year. To address the latter carnage, many municipal councils are imposing nighttime curfews on the furry murderers.
When we last checked in on actor James Cromwell, he was super-glueing himself to a Starbucks counter to protest the inflated price of plant-based milk. This week he is attending to a new cause: a baby pig that had fallen (jumped?) off a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse.
The term “Big Five” once described Africa’s trophy animals that resisted easy slaughtering by high end tourists: lion, elephant, leopard, rhino, and buffalo. They still exist but generally killing defenseless animals is frowned on (except in Texas). Shooting with a camera is preferred.
Resist the temptation to give a duckling, or any other baby animal, as an Easter present. This week National Geographic raises the alarm (“Why Easter Is Bad for Ducks”), noting that after the holiday, often weeks or months later, there’s an uptick in abandoned adult ducks in local parks and ponds. There’s no official count, but it’s estimated that tens of thousands of domestic ducks are dumped each year throughout the US. Rescue operations like Duck Defenders save as many as 500 abandoned ducks per year in the New York City area alone
Cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar has been dead for thirty years but at least part of his legacy lives on in the form of voracious hippopotamuses, which the Colombian government now has to deal with.
Researchers from the University of Utah have been studying the rare Colorado checkered whiptail lizard (Aspidoscelis neotesselatus), in particular how living on a US army base affects the little reptiles. Turns out the lizards stress-eat when they hear loud noises.
A young female osprey made a shocking transatlantic journey from Scotland to Barbados recently, becoming the first UK osprey ever observed in the Americas. The intrepid bird had been tagged last summer in Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park in Renfrewshire.
It’s been a banner week for zoo escapes. First up, a young male zebra named Sero busted out of his enclosure at the Children's Grand Park Zoo in Korea. Sero was born at the zoo in 2021 but apparently wondered about the outside world that supplied all the gawking hordes and went on the lam.
The US Defense Department is funding experiments on ferrets to determine if exposure to radio frequency waves could be the cause of “Havana Syndrome,” a mysterious suite of symptoms that affected hundreds of government personnel in recent years.
