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All in Animal Welfare
Japanese researchers have observed a phenomenon that we thought was impossible: a nonhuman animal crying tears of joy. A new study reported in Current Biology this week demonstrated that our canine friends will well up with tears under certain circumstances, and it probably happens more often than we think.
A brown bear got into some hallucinogenic honey in Turkey’s northwestern Duzce province this week. It didn’t go well. The Guardian reported that the female brown bear was found wobbling and whining in the forest, where some good Samaritans rescued her. She had got into some mad honey, or “deli bal” in Turkish, produced by beekeepers who feed their honeymakers a kind of rhododendron nectar that packs a potent neurotoxin.
Scientists from Oregon State University have a (really) big idea. What if we dedicated nearly half a million square kilometers across 11 states to gray wolves and North American beavers? In a paper published in the journal BioScience, the researchers outline a plan to use portions of federal lands to create a contiguous network of wolf and beaver habitats. The plan is about two species, but the knock-on effects would positively affect perhaps hundreds of others.
“Euthanasia is out of the question,” said Frank Bakke-Jensen, Norway’s Director of Fisheries just a couple of weeks ago, referring to Freya, the 1300-pound walrus who spent much of the summer swimming and sunbathing around Oslo marinas. But that turned out to be a lie, because the authorities just put poor Freya down, claiming that her presence put humans at risk.
It’s been a year since Charlotte Maxwell-Jones refused to leave Afghanistan as the country fell into Taliban control. The woman from East Tennessee who founded the Kabul Small Animal Rescue would not abandon the many dogs, cats, sheep and parrots in the chaos of the US withdrawal.
Birds everywhere are swimming, nesting, and living in human garbage, most of it plastic. Crowd-sourced photos from all over the world in a project called Birds & Debris are documenting the mess.
Nearly all turtles born on Florida beaches over the past four years have been females. Climate change is to blame, as increasingly warming sand where turtle eggs incubate have churned out a 99% female-to-male ratio over that time.
Gillian Anderson, a longtime friend to animals and PETA, turns 54 today with a message for couture giants Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo: Stop harvesting hides from alligators, snakes, and lizards.
We don’t often cheer on organized animal slaughter, but what’s not to like about the Florida Python Challenge? For ten days (August 5-14), snake hunters will be allowed to stomp around the Everglades to capture and kill invasive Burmese pythons, which have infested the massive wetlands.
This week (August 7 through 13th) marks the 13th annual “Give a Dog a Bone Week” event arranged by Feeding Pets of the Homeless. The nonprofit has been raising both awareness and pet food for the unhoused for the past 15 years.
Hippopotamus amphibius is a semi-aquatic creature and one of the world’s heaviest land animals, weighing up to 4,000 pounds. There are between 115,000-130,000 stomping around 38 African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, but hippo populations in more than half of these countries are either in decline or unknown.
Conservationists in England have released three European bison into West Blean and Thornden Woods, a nature reserve near Canterbury. The Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust hope to bring some ecological balance to some 500 acres of woodland.
The highly respected Polish Academy of Sciences has declared the domestic cat an “invasive alien species,” citing the cheeky pet’s propensity for murdering birds and small mammals.
In England last week a beagle-mix named Bonnie had an adventure that reads like the plot of a children’s book. It began when the five-year-old pooch went on the lam from her Bolney, West Sussex home, making her escape while her wards were preparing her food.
The iconic migratory monarch butterfly is now, officially, “endangered,” according to the IUCN, which this week entered Danaus plexippus plexippus into its Red List of Threatened Species. The colorful flyer, known for its annual 2500-mile migration across the Americas, is being pushed to the brink of extinction by the twin forces of habitat loss and climate change.
At the Phoenix Zoo they call them “bloodsicles,” “fishsicles,” or just “frozen food.” In UK zoos “ice lollies” are on the menu. In Spain the celebrity giant panda Bing Xing (which means “star of ice”) slurps watermelon popsicles.
The odds are stacked against the tiny raptor known as the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl (Glaucidium brasilianum). The owl’s range in the US – in isolated chunks of the southernmost parts of Arizona and Texas – is under siege by development, invasive species, wildfires, and of course climate change.
It pays to be different. Employees at a Hollywood, Florida Red Lobster restaurant noticed there was something off about one lobster that came in for dinner, because it wasn’t in fact red. The rare bright-orange lobster was too strange to boil alive and eat, so the staff called Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach to rescue the flashy crustacean.
A “beagle breeding facility” in Virginia has been shut down, following two years of failed inspections that revealed horrifying living conditions. Inspections of the Cumberland, Va. facility run by the company Envigo, uncovered dozens of violations of federal regulations and revealed heart-wrenching cases of underfed, sick, injured and – in some cases dead – beagles. Last week a federal judge declared that some 4000 dogs are now up for adoption, giving authorities 60 days to move the beagles to safe havens.
In early June, a homing pigeon named Bob set off from Guernsey in the Channel Islands on a 400-mile route to Gateshead, a flight that’s supposed to take 10 hours. Several days and 4000 miles later, the four-year-old bird showed up on the other side of the pond, very lost in Mexia, Alabama.
