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All in Animal Welfare
The US Fish and Wildlife Service wants to enlist shotgun-wielding assassins to kill more than a half million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The object: to save the habitat for the invasive birds’ endangered cousins, the northern spotted owl.
This week the Colorado Parks and Wildlife released five gray wolves in the wild, the first phase in the state’s program to establish a permanent, self-sustaining wolf population. The project was set in motion by a 2020 voter referendum demanding the reintroduction of the wolves, which had been eradicated from the state nearly a century ago.
On the coast of southern Tasmania, a 1,300-pound southern elephant seal has been plopping his prodigious girth on beaches, in driveways, on the road, and on front lawns. The 3-year-old, dubbed Neil the Seal by the locals, has a special fondness for traffic cones, which he plays with and gnaws on like a toddler with a pram toy.
New Jersey Transit commuters were delayed last week when a bull was spotted pacing near the passenger platform at Newark Penn Station. The longhorn steer had escaped from a local slaughterhouse.
For weeks, bears in eastern Russia’s Amur region were having a hard time bedding down for the winter, as warm weather has kept the region unfit for hibernation. In a normal year, the bears will tuck in by the end of October, but the temperature didn’t drop until this week, so it’s time to say goodnight at last.
In September, eight African painted dogs were born in South Bend, Indiana’s Potawatomi Zoo, but the zookeepers saw right away that the mother wasn’t interested in her new brood. Fearing for the survival of the new pups, the zoo brought in a surrogate mom, a heroic golden retriever named Kassy.
The ten finalists in CNN’s Hero of the Year 2023 honors are involved in literacy projects, reef-building, children of incarcerated parents, and the like, described by Anderson Cooper as “Inspiring people who are making the world a better place.”
The problem with goldfish is that “they can eat anything and everything.” That’s according to Christine Boston, an aquatic research biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The voracious fish, which are in fact a kind of East Asian carp, are living large in the Great Lakes, to the detriment of everything else.
A very rare white alligator was born this month at Gatorland, an alligator-themed park in Orlando, Florida. The gator is a girl, born along with a normal-colored twin brother.
We have noticed rare lobsters before. An even rarer specimen – a half-red, half-blue, bi-gendered creature – has wandered into a Maine lobsterman’s pot.
Jonathan the giant tortoise turned 191 years old (or so) this week, reaffirming his title as the oldest-living land animal. He’s been living large on St. Helena, a British territory in the South Atlantic, sharing the grounds with the island governor at Plantation House since the Victorian era. (And the ghost of Napoleon who died here just 51 years of age in 1851).
In August a mysterious canine illness broke out in Oregon, affecting at least 200 dogs. Since then, the respiratory ailment has spread to 14 states, and vets still don’t know what’s causing it.
In western Thailand just outside Kanchanaburi, an elephant sanctuary is home to a few dozen rescued domestic elephants. They’ve had a difficult time, either born into a brutal life of logging or retirees from the slightly less degrading tourism trade.
In 2019, Cyclone Idai swept through Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, which was bad for the animals but good for researchers. The 1,500-square-mile park is one of the most ecologically diverse preserves in the world, as well as the most technologically sophisticated.
If you’ve never witnessed the birth of a rhinoceros, do we have a video for you. This month the Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England announced the birth of the extremely rare Eastern black rhino.
The orcas were still at it off the coast of Spain on Halloween when a small but persistent pod of the killer whales harassed a boat for a solid 45 minutes, causing enough damage to sink it.
No one had seen the extremely rare Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna since 1961, so it was assumed that the weird, egg-laying mammal was extinct. Earlier this month the beast that looks like a spiny anteater was rediscovered in Indonesia’s Cyclops Mountains, likely the only place on Earth the creature exists.
It’s been four decades since drug kingpin Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippopotamuses out of Africa to populate his lavish estate in Colombia with exotic animals. Escobar has been dead a long time but his hippos have flourished, with more than 150 of the beasts stomping throughout the Magdalena River basin.
On August 19, 71-year-old hiker Richard Moore of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and his 12-pound dog Finney had set out to climb Blackhead Peak just east of town. He never returned, and a several-days-long search did not find the missing man.
Last year at this time we reported the virgin birth of zebra sharks at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Now comes news that an epaulette shark at Brookfield Zoo – also near Chicago – has performed the same trick.
