Tag: animal cruelty

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz wants Congress to OK killing rare whale

Of all the movies ever made in Florida — “Body Heat,” “Cocoon,” and “Spring Breakers,” to name a few — the one with the oddest concept was “The Truman Show.”

Jim Carrey plays a man with a sunny disposition who has no idea that secret cameras are recording every moment of his life for the entertainment of millions.

“Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night,” he’d cheerfully tell his neighbors, not realizing they were actors.

This movie was filmed in a seaside Florida town named Seaside. The town is real, not a movie set. I know someone who grew up in the house that Carrey’s character occupied in the movie, and so do you. His name is Matt Gaetz, and he’s the pompadoured U.S. congressman representing a chunk of the Panhandle.

Lately, though, Gaetz, R-Venmo, seems to be copying a much dourer fictional character. He’s been styling himself after Captain Ahab from “Moby Dick.”

He’s set a course to take out a whale. Or several.

Not a white whale, of course. No, he wants to harm the rarest whale on earth.

The Rice’s whale is the only one that lives entirely in the Gulf of Mexico. The species, discovered only recently, is definitely endangered. Scientists estimate that there are fewer than 100 of them — maybe as few as 51.

And Gaetz wants Congress to OK the military bombing the heck out of them.

Even though the military doesn’t want to do that.

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Badger culls to continue in England despite lack of scientific evidence

Badger cull licences have been issued by the government despite its own scientific adviser saying there is “no justification” for doing so.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs this month issued 17 new licences to continue culling badgers, overruling Dr Peter Brotherton, the director of science at Natural England, the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England.

Badgers are culled to the point of local extinction because they spread bovine tuberculosis (bTB) to cattle, and the disease can wipe out entire herds. Last year, figures released by Defra revealed more than 210,000 badgers had been killed since the cull began in 2013. However, scientific reports have shown that killing badgers is not the most effective way to end the disease.

Brotherton told Defra that while in previous years a cull could be justified, “based on the evidence, I can find no justification for authorising further supplementary badger culls in 2024 for the purpose of preventing the spread of disease and recommend against doing so”.

Defra officials said that in response they were pushing ahead with the cull because farmers who were most affected by bTB would lose confidence in the government if it was ended abruptly.

Sally Randall, Defra’s director general for biosecurity, food and trade, said in a letter to Natural England: “Those most affected by the disease must have confidence in both the process and the trajectory. Changes need to be carefully timed and communicated, whilst balancing a range of potentially opposing views. Any abrupt changes to policy would seriously undermine our ability to engage constructively with the industry on future disease control interventions.”

Brotherton said the badger population was likely to remain low for at least seven years, during which time vaccinations could be deployed to stop the spread of the disease.

He told Defra: “The balance of evidence has shifted. In my opinion it is now clear that badger vaccination can provide an effective alternative to [culls].”

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Terrible: Police Officer Shoots Small Deaf, Blind Dog At Point-Blank Range

Bodycam video captured the moment a police officer in Sturgeon, Missouri, shot and killed a small blind and deaf dog for no apparent reason last week.

Responding to a call about a loose animal, the officer can be seen lazily trying to place a lasso around the canine’s neck before choosing to shoot it in the head instead of continuing to make attempts at leashing the animal.

Later in the video, the dog’s owner approaches the officer and confronts him over the unnecessary shooting.

When the sobbing owner tries getting answers, the cop is defensive and offers half-assed apologies.

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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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