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All in Animal Welfare
This week the Missouri Department of Conservation hosted a birthday party for its beloved turtle Peanut. The old girl’s defining characteristic is her unusual figure-eight shaped shell, the result of getting stuck in a plastic six-pack ring when she was very young.
A man discovers purpose when he helps rescue a baby pangolin in South Africa. Their story, told in the Netflix documentary Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, is both soothing and difficult as the volunteer conservationist grows a deep emotional attachment to his vulnerable friend.
The Philadelphia Zoo welcomed nine more Galápagos tortoises this week, the latest output of Mommy and Abrazzo, the zoo’s oldest residents. The parents are estimated to be about 100 years old; Mommy has lived at the zoo almost as long, since 1932.
Gorillas are social animals that live in troops, typically headed by a dominant male, along with several adult females and their offspring. Often a female will leave the troop and relocate – a behavior primatologists call “dispersal.” New research shows that the females tend to seek out other females they already know when they join a new troop, upending a long held view that the males are running the show.
A man in Karnataka, India thought it might be fun to take a selfie with a wild elephant off the roadway in the Bandipur Tiger Reserve. It was not. He didn’t get the selfie, but he did get run down by the startled creature and was nearly stomped to death. Plus he lost his pants, briefly.
China’s surveillance state has arrived at the remote Hoh Xil area plateau of Tibet, although it’s not citizens being watched. Here conservationists are using a robot dressed up like an antelope to spy on the local herds.
Marine scientists who study orcas have been busy. They’ve seen the killer whales wearing fish as a fashion statement, using kelp to exfoliate, and of course harassing yachtsmen, just to be jerks. Now comes news that the apex predators are engaging in more altruistic behavior: they’re bringing us gifts.
Texas tycoon and trophy hunter Asher Watkins was stalking prey in South Africa this week when the prey turned the tables on him. In what Coenraad Vermaak Safaris describes as “a sudden and unprovoked attack by an unwounded buffalo he was tracking,” Watkins was killed.
A zoo in Denmark has once again disturbed the rest of the world with the way it feeds its meat-eating animals. Aalborg Zoo in North Jutland is asking patrons to donate their pets to the cause.
Conservationists in South Africa this week ramped up their fight to stop poachers with a new tactic: injecting rhino horns with radioactive isotopes. The implants do not harm the rhinos, but they will trigger alarms at airports if the horn is ever smuggled through security.
The Brookfield Zoo in Chicago announced the July 14 birth of a pair of extremely rare Amur leopards, the first litter born to a six-year-old female named Mina. Any addition to the population is crucial, as there are fewer than 100 of these big cats left in the wild.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service had big plans to cull hundreds of thousands of barred owls in an effort to keep them away from the habitats of an endangered species, the northern spotted owl. Now those plans face bipartisan pushback in Congress.
A 120-pound Turkish Kangal shepherd named Ziva survived the July 4 Texas floods, but only after a harrowing 16 hours trapped in a gully. The big dog owes his life to his GPS collar, which his owner accessed – from hundreds of miles away – to lead to his rescue.
This summer, a bald eagle in northwestern Wisconsin took flight after a long rehab for a leg injury. The key to the bird’s recovery was a first-of-its-kind skin graft treatment normally used for humans. The skin came from a North Atlantic cod.
Conservationists in southeastern Australia have figured out a non-intrusive way to monitor platypus in the wild. To navigate the waterways where the aquatic mammals live, they’ve trained paddleboard-riding dogs to sniff out the critters without disturbing them.
Firemen in Lacey, Washington were tasked this week with saving the life of a puppy, not from a burning building but from the dog’s proximity to fentanyl.
The US military is working on ways to prevent airplane-bird collisions, an expensive and dangerous consequence of basing operations in areas with wildlife. Now the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center has hit on a promising solution: wheeled drone vehicles that look like coyotes.
Flooding in central Texas this week has killed at least 80 people with many still missing, and the rain has not yet let up. The National Weather Service has issued a Flood Watch alert through at least Monday evening.
A 70-year-old Egyptian man traveling on a tourist visa attempted to smuggle more than 100 pounds of undeclared food in his luggage as he entered the country at Dulles International Airport. That was bad, but the man, Hamed Ramadan Bayoumy Aly Marie, made matters much worse when he kicked the dog that had sniffed out his contraband, a 5-year-old beagle named Freddie.
After months of rehabilitation, 17 sea turtles were released this week into the waters off Cape Cod. The loggerhead, green, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles – all victims of hypothermia and its attendant ailments – had been convalescing at the New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital in Quincy, MA.
