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All in Animal Welfare
The friendly beluga whale known as Hvaldimir — a combo of the Norwegian word for whale (hval) and Vladimir (as in Putin) — has been charming crowds as he swims south down the coast of Norway, where he was first spotted by fishermen in 2019.
Wyoming’s Bear River State Park announced the arrival of a white bison this week, an event that occurs only once in ten million births.
Mundi is a 41-year-old African savannah elephant who spent 35 years alone in a small enclosure at Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez Zoo. The troubled zoo was closed for good this year, and Mundi was relocated to the comparatively luxurious Elephant Refuge North America in Georgia.
The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the Fish and Wildlife Service's authorization to kill up to 72 grizzly bears on public land outside of Yellowstone National Park violated federal law. The license to kill had been granted in 2019 as a sop to private grazing operations and would have allowed an unlimited percentage of females to be killed in response to livestock conflict.
There’s one basic rule at Yellowstone National Park: Don’t mess with the wildlife. Do not feed, attempt to ride, pose for selfies, or even approach the animals. And definitely do not try to “help” a bison calf cross a river.
The Oregon Zoo’s condor-breeding program deploys a devious method to monitor conditions in the critically endangered birds’ nests. When an egg is laid, the scientists swap it with a hi-tech fake, a 3D-printed “egg” packed with sensors.
In 2020 the project to reintroduce Tasmanian devils to the Australia mainland – after a 3000-year absence – included a female named Adventurous Lisa. This week the little devil did her part for the cause when she gave birth to three joeys.
Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who feathered his nest on Fifth Avenue, has died. He was about 33 years of age and leaves behind his significant other, Octavia.
While birders around the city enjoy the peak spring bird migration, stalking the wilds of Central Park and other green spaces in the five boroughs, tens of thousands of our feathered friends meet their untimely deaths by window collision.
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.”
