Tag: animal cruelty

Syrian Hamsters Dead After Chinese Scientists Engineer Horrific Ebola-Enhanced Virus

A group of Chinese scientists have engineered a new virus in which they took a common animal disease (vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV) and added parts of Ebola in order to mimic Ebola symptoms in a lab setting using animals.

The result? A group of Syrian hamsters that received the lethal injection “developed severe systemic diseases similar to those observed in human Ebola patients, including multi-organ failure, the Daily Mail reports, citing the team’s study.

The team studied five female and five male hamsters that were three weeks old – all but two of which died between two and three days. The females – all of which died, showed decreased rectal temperature and up to 18% weight loss, the males lost 15% of their weight and died – except two, which survived and gained 20% more weight than they started with.

Some of the infected hamsters developed disgusting secretions in their eyes, which impaired vision and resulted in scabs on the surface of their eyeballs.

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Australian high school class explicitly explains bestiality as part of LGBTQ lessons

A high school in Australia is under investigation by the South Australia Department for Education after it hosted an unsupervised presentation for young girls that explicitly explained bestiality as part of a sex ed lesson about LGBTQ+.

Renmark High School’s principal, Mat Evans, issued a letter of apology to parents who heard that their children left in disgust during the session on March 22 given by a third-party presenter and put on by Headspace Berri.

The apology read that the school was “taking this matter very seriously” and had “raised concerns” with the speaker from Headspace located in Berri who has been suspended from operating in government schools while the Education Department investigates, per The Advertiser.

Evans also stated the school had launched an internal review due to the normal procedure of “notifying parents of specific presentations was not followed.”

“I apologise unreservedly for that,” he said in the letter sent on March 25.

“I acknowledge that some of the students felt uncomfortable with this content, and there have been a number of complaints from parents,” he said.

“I’d like to thank those parents for raising these concerns with me directly and apologise to those families.”

He said that the internal review would “ensure that processes around such notifications, and procedures with regard to third parties attending at our school are always met in future.”

Horrified parents learned that their daughters in year 9 at the school had been pulled from their regular lessons and placed in a separate classroom with the Headspace Berri facilitators and the speaker without the supervision of a teacher. They had not been notified of the presentation or had consented to it.

“We had a teacher that told us to grab a chair and sit in front of the board, and then the Headspace people came in and then [the teacher] left, so then we’re sitting in front of a board alone with no teachers, just the Headspace people,” 14-year-old student Courtney White said, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The title slide of the presentation read “You can see queerly now. Now point in hiding.” 

14-year-old Emelia Wunderberg said all the girls felt extremely “uncomfortable” as the presenter went into graphic detail about their sexuality and then showed a slide about what each component in “LGBTQIA+” meant.

“There was a slide for what the ‘plus’ means, and they just started randomly saying words that no-one knew, like bestiality,” Emelia said. “They said [the queer community] just accepts all of it, even though … isn’t it illegal?”

“We’re all just sitting there like, ‘What the hell? What are we doing here? Why are we learning about animals having sex with humans?'” she said.

“It was really disgusting, it was really uncomfortable.”

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Wuhan on the Rockies? Biosafety committee found dozens of accidents at NIH-funded lab in 3 years

Bats and hamsters and cats, and mice!

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

The “incident reports” from Colorado State University’s Institutional Biosafety Committee minutes, obtained by Colorado Open Records Act request, detail 64 lab accidents from 2020 through 2023, the White Coat Waste Project said this week.

The National Institutes of Health chipped in more than $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new CSU bat lab and import bats with Nipah virus and SARS-related coronaviruses via the EcoHealth Alliance, WCW discovered last fall, dubbing the campus “Wuhan West.”

The 2023 grant came months after the Agriculture Department found CSU committed animal cruelty by subjecting rabbits to temperatures above “the humane endpoint” and failed to report “a protocol for [26] rabbits that required the withholding of anesthetics and analgesics for scientific purposes.”

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No monkey business here! Tiny Georgia town in uproar at plans to build a huge $400 MILLION breeding farm for 30,000 long-tailed macaques that will be sold off for animal testing

A tiny Georgia town is in uproar amid plans for a huge $400million breeding farm for 30,000 monkeys who will be sold off for animal testing.

Safer Human Medicine sparked fury in Bainbridge, in the south west of the state, by proposing the sprawling site for the long-tailed macaques.

It filed plans earlier this month to erect huge sheds across a 200-acre estate near the town of 14,000 people, which will hold the doomed primates.

But it has been met with fierce resistance, with locals claiming it will smell and depreciate the value of their homes.

Others raised fears the monkeys could escape during a hurricane or tornado while animal rights activists attacked the firm for selling them for animal testing.

Environmental impact is also a concern with locals cherishing the Flint River, which flows into Lake Seminole and whose waters reach the Gulf of Mexico. 

Safer Human Medicine is led by executives who formerly worked for two other companies that provide animals for medical testing. 

One of those companies, Charles River Laboratories, came under investigation last year for obtaining wild monkeys that were smuggled from Cambodia. 

The monkeys were falsely labeled as bred in captivity, as is required by U.S. rules, federal prosecutors have alleged. The company suspended the shipments from Cambodia.

Charles River had proposed a similar facility in Brazoria County, Texas, south of Houston, but it has been stalled by local opposition.

The Bainbridge facility would provide a domestic source of monkeys to offset imports, the company said. 

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Ted Lieu Wants To Criminalize Glue Traps

I have a mouse in my apartment, and he’s a clever one. Clever enough, in fact, that he’s managed to avoid the very tempting baited snap traps I’ve placed around the areas of the kitchen where I’ve seen him appear.

Since those snap traps haven’t been working, I recently swapped them out for glue boards. In my experience, these do a better job of catching mice and blocking off potential points of entry.

At the moment, the method of pest control I use to keep uninvited, potentially diseased rodents out of my home is a personal, private choice I have the freedom to make. A new bill from Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.) would make me a federal criminal.

Earlier this week, Lieu unveiled the “Glue Trap Prohibition Act of 2024,” which would amend federal pesticide regulations to ban the sale and use of glue traps.

The penalties for violating the specific subchapter that Lieu is inserting his glue trap ban into include fines of up to $5,000 per offense for commercial violators and $1,000 fines for individuals. That subchapter also allows criminal penalties—including up to a year’s imprisonment for commercial violators and 30 days imprisonment for private persons who violate the law.

Should Lieu’s bill become law, the three glue boards I have in my kitchen would open me up to $3,000 in fines and maybe a month in federal lockup.

The congressman justifies his glue trap ban on humanitarian and health grounds.

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Why Are California’s Animal Shelters Killing So Many Pets?

As I write this column, Marigold—my long-haired orange tabby who demands constant attention—is purring next to me. She’s a delightful creature that I adopted at a local shelter’s Five Dollar Fridays, where they adopt out vaccinated and spayed adult cats for that modest fee. I got her (and Fluffy) when my wife was out of town, so she’s now forbidden me from visiting a shelter alone.

I don’t blame my wife for setting some ground rules, given that I can’t wander through the aisles of forlorn animals and not bring at least one home. So I’ve been filled with disgust at California’s government-funded animal shelters, which claim to be models of compassion but really are killing fields that euthanize many healthy and adoptable animals.

In Orange County, critics complained that high euthanasia rates were the result of limited government resources. As a result, the county in 2018 opened a new $35-million Animal Care shelter in Tustin that includes all the cool features (dog runs, play areas) lacking at the decrepit former facility. One news report compared it to a five-star resort and noted that it had a paid staff of 140 plus 400 volunteers. That’s quite the operation.

Yet The Orange County Register‘s Teri Sforza reported on data analyzed by a former volunteer and found the “kill rate for adult dogs…has nearly doubled since 2018, and the amount of time they spend behind bars has jumped 60 percent.” During the pandemic, the shelter stopped walk-in visits and required appointments. That was understandable then, but even after the pandemic ended the shelter continued focusing on appointments and requiring accompanied visits.

Obviously, fewer people will fall in love with a purring or barking buddy if they can’t wander through the kennels and see which animal pulls at their heartstrings. You can no more pick out a pet based on a shelter’s photo than you can pick out a spouse solely on their dating website bio. Animal Care increased the number of walk-in visits amid criticism, but it’s still absurdly limited and I gave up trying to get info after a really long wait on its phone line.

The bureaucrats who run the facility—the largest municipal “animal-care” operation in the West—depict these customer-unfriendly, animal-harming policies as a means to protect the critters from stress and protect the public from animal bites. In reality, it’s just the latest instance of government putting the employees’ convenience above the public good—like the way public schools and teachers’ unions dragged their feet on school re-openings.

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‘I’m sorry dude… I had to do that’: Horrifying moment cop shoots dead family’s beloved dog before grabbing it by the collar and tossing it on lawn

A New Mexico woman and her family have reached a settlement with the City of Texico after their beloved family dog Pepper was shot dead by the city’s police chief.

Beverly Bentley was at work on November 10, 2021, when Police Chief Douglas Bowman, a 16-year veteran of the force, paid her a visit to tell her that he shot her dog.

‘He said something about shooting my dog, and it took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about because he said he was being aggressive,’ Bentley said. ‘That dog is the least aggressive dog I have ever owned!’

The grim execution was caught on Ring video, where Bowman stood some distance away on the lawn, staring at the dog as it barked from the porch.

The officer glanced over his shoulder in both directions before pulling out his pistol and firing. Afterwards, he walked onto the porch and stood over Pepper’s body.

‘I’m sorry dude, but I had to do that,’ Bowman said.

Grabbing Pepper by the collar, he dragged the dog onto the lawn before retrieving a hose from the property and washing away its blood.

After seeing the footage of the incident, Bowman filed an incident report, writing that a man called the station saying ‘there is a damn dog that almost bit me.’

He arrived on the scene and saw Pepper, who matched the victim’s description, and said the dog began ‘barking and snarling.’

‘The victim then came up to me and told me that was the dog and that it had almost bit him and he was afraid the dog might bite someone else if something wasn’t done about him,’ Bowman wrote.

Pepper took off and Bowman trailed the dog to the home.

As Pepper allegedly continued to bark and snarl, Bowman wrote: ‘At this point, I did not want the dog to run away again and bite or harm someone. I made the decision to shoot the dog for my safety and the safety of anyone else in the community.’

Bentley insists that her beloved dog was not aggressive. 

‘That dog got me through a lot of hard times, and then all of a sudden, he was taken away,’ she said. ‘My mother was bedridden, and she would put her hand down, and he would let her pet him.’

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Maryland Roommates File Lawsuit After Police Shot Their Dog During Alleged Illegal Home Search

“That’s what happens when you don’t answer questions,” a Prince George’s County police officer said as Erica Umana’s dog lay on the ground, paralyzed and bleeding out.

Minutes earlier, on a summer day in 2021, officers had shot Umana’s dog, a boxer mix named Hennessy, during a chaotic confrontation inside Umana’s apartment.

Now Umana and her roommates—Erika Sanchez, Dayri Benitez, and Brandon Cuevas—have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Prince George’s County Police Department and several of its officers, saying the police had no right to enter their apartment, shoot their dog, and detain them. The lawsuit seeks over $16 million for allegedly subjecting them to excessive force, unlawful search and seizure, and false arrest.

“This case is an outrage. It is disgusting, disgraceful, and despicable,” William Murphy, an attorney representing the roommates, said in a press release Monday. “These officers outright abused and mistreated our clients, lied to unlawfully break into their house, manhandled them illegally, and shot their dog. And in utter disregard for the severity of their intolerable behavior, they laughed about it.”

The incident began on June 2, 2021, when Prince George’s County police officers arrived at an apartment complex in Landover Hills in response to a 911 call from a woman claiming two dogs had allegedly jumped on her and bit her.

Prince George’s County Cpl. Jason Ball encountered Sanchez sitting outside of the apartments, but she refused to answer any questions. Ball then threatened to arrest Sanchez for trespassing if she didn’t leave. On body camera footage, Ball said into his radio that he believed Sanchez lived in the apartment complex but that he was about to arrest her anyway because she refused to answer his questions—the first of several retaliatory threats and comments from Ball.

Sanchez walked off, and Ball and his partner went to knock on the door of the apartment where Sanchez, Umana, and the other lawsuit plaintiffs lived. No one answered.

“This would be open by now, by the way, if it wasn’t…,” Ball said to his partner, trailing off and tapping his body camera. “I used to open them all the time.” 

“Times have changed,” Ball’s partner responded.

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‘No money would ever tempt me to kill my XL Bully’: Furious dog owners blast government £200 ‘puppy scrappage scheme’ to euthanise their pets – as charities face an impossible task to rehome animals before December 31 deadline

Livid Bully XL owners are refusing to accept a £200 Government handout to euthanise their soon-to-be-banned pets, branding the plan ‘absolutely disgusting’.

The breed will be banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act by the end of the year, following a spate of recent fatal and horrific attacks. 

Owners can apply to have their pets exempt from the crackdown – which means they would have to pay £92.40 for a certificate and the dog would need to be microchipped and neutered, among other rules.

The second option would be to have their dogs put down, with the government offering £200 in compensation to these owners. 

But news of the measures this week triggered fury from Bully owners, who branded the move a ‘puppy scrappage scheme’. 

Fuming Bully XL owner Ashley Oxley from Brighton told MailOnline: ‘No money would ever tempt me into putting my girl down she’s fine the way she is and that’s how it’s staying can’t believe in this generation this kind of brutality is even allowed.’ 

Mother-of-three Dani Harland added: ‘This breaks my heart. I own an XL Bully and I would never ever even dream of putting her down. I find this absolutely disgusting that they [the government] are even offering to pay people money to have their dogs put to sleep.’

The outcry comes as animal charities today warned they face an impossible task of trying to rehome hundreds of Bully XLs stuck in rescue centres before the December 31 deadline, after which it will become illegal to rehome, breed, or sell the dogs.

Mel Kermode, operations manager of Freshfields Animal Rescue in Liverpool, said: ‘It is a desperate race against time to try and save these dogs. The clock is very much ticking,’ 

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Fauci NIH lab infected bats with Wuhan coronavirus, obtained from zoo near Camp David, report

A15-minute drive from the Camp David presidential retreat, a low-rated zoo gave the National Institutes of Health several bats to infect with a coronavirus from the same Chinese lab that some federal agencies believe is responsible for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, according to a new investigation and published research.

The White Coat Waste Project, which fights taxpayer funding of “wasteful government animal experiments,” said Monday it’s using Freedom of Information Act requests to get more details about the taxpayer-funded experiments documented in a 2018 paper in the journal Viruses.

Former National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci oversaw the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana when it did the research with bats from Maryland’s Catoctin Wildlife Preserve, whose Director of Animal Health Laurie Hahn is a former NIH “lead veterinary technician” for animal research.

The Viruses paper, authored by Montana lab researchers and Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Ralph Baric, of the University of North Carolina, determined that the “SARS-like WIV1-coronavirus” first isolated from Chinese rufous horseshoe bats could not cause a “robust infection” in the 12 Egyptian fruit bats from the zoo. Four were euthanized and tested.

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