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All in Animal Welfare
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.
An African serval cat tested positive for cocaine after escaping a traffic stop in Hamilton County, Ohio, and is now recuperating at the Cincinnati Zoo. The big cat bolted after its owner was pulled over by police in January; it leapt into a tree, where he was rescued by Cincinnati Animal CARE.
The Endangered Species Act turns fifty this year and it has had a pretty good run. Thank Richard Nixon who launched the ESA (along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act).
There’s a class of chemicals used to manufacture all kinds of consumer products that, in humans, are linked to cancers, reduced immune function, and other ailments. A new study reveals that the nasty pollutants are causing problems in nonhumans as well, and they’re everywhere.
The Daurian redstart, a migratory songbird living throughout much of Asia, has learned to avoid its cheeky nemesis, the cuckoo, by moving closer to human developments. The cuckoo, a notorious “brood parasite,” lays its eggs in other birds’ nests so that it doesn’t have to expend resources on raising its young.
The Prague Zoo has announced the arrival of a brand new Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), the first birth of the critically endangered species in captivity in Europe. The newborn had a rough start but is doing well, according to the zoo.
Last week, officials said they believed that the chemicals let loose in the Ohio train derailment had killed 3,500 aquatic animals. This week, they say the number of dead was more than 43,700 animals, all within a 5-mile area of the disaster.
This week the Central Park Zoo suspended its attempts to capture Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl that had been sprung from his confines at the zoo by vandals earlier this month.
Good news for the wood stork. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to remove the big bird from the federal list of endangered and threatened species. Forty years ago the wood stork population was down to fewer than 5000 nesting pairs, most of them in south Florida’s Everglades and Big Cypress ecosystems. Today there are twice that number, and the birds have spread to the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
On February 3 a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, necessitating the evacuation of many of the small town’s 4700 residents. Following a “controlled burn” of toxic fumes to neutralize the burning cargo that fouled local air and water, there were no reported casualties, yet.
For the first time in over 40 years a Peruvian Diving-petrel chick has hatched on Chile’s Chañaral Island. The rare seabird once thrived here but was pushed out by invasive species. Now a concerted effort by environmental groups and the Chilean government to make the island habitable again have paid off.
Hunting whales for meat has been losing its mojo in Japan for years, but a Japanese whaling firm is looking to revive the industry. Last month Kyodo Senpaku introduced three whale-meat vending machines in Yokohama aimed at re-whetting the nation’s appetite.
