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Tag: Animals

  • Endangered red wolves need space to stay wild. But there’s another predator in the way — humans

    Endangered red wolves need space to stay wild. But there’s another predator in the way — humans

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    ALLIGATOR RIVER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.C. — Jeff Akin had to bite his tongue.

    He was chatting with a neighbor about efforts to protect and grow the area’s red wolf population. The endangered wolves are equipped with bright orange radio collars to help locals distinguish the federally protected species from invasive, prolific coyotes.

    “If I see one of those wolves with a collar on, I’m going to shoot it in the gut, so it runs off and dies,” Akin says the neighbor told him. “Because if it dies near you, and they come out and find the collar, they can arrest you.”

    Akin is a hunter and the walls of his country house are lined with photos of the animals he’s killed. But what he heard made him sick.

    “I wouldn’t shoot a squirrel in the stomach if I was hungry,” he says. “It’s just not humane.”

    In a way, the anecdote sums up the plight of this uniquely American species.

    Once declared extinct in the wild, Canis rufus — the only wolf species found solely in the United States — was reintroduced in the late 1980s on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, just across the sound from eastern North Carolina’s famed Outer Banks. Over the next quarter century, it became a poster child for the Endangered Species Act and a model for efforts to bring back other species.

    “The red wolf program was a tremendous conservation success,” says Ron Sutherland, a biologist with the Wildlands Network. “It was the first time that a large carnivore had been returned to the wild after being driven extinct, anywhere in the world.”

    But the wild population is now back to the brink of oblivion, decimated by gunshots, vehicle strikes, suspected poisonings and, some have argued, government neglect.

    For the first time in nearly three decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to release an updated recovery plan for the red wolf. According to a draft, the agency proposes spending a quarter billion dollars over the next 50 years to rebuild and expand the wild wolf population.

    “It was done once before,” says Joe Madison, North Carolina manager for the Red Wolf Recovery Program. “And we can do it again.”

    But the effort depends heavily on cooperation from private landowners. And the passage of 36 years seems to have done little to soften locals’ hearts toward the apex predator.

    Out here, farming and leasing land to hunters are big business. The red wolf is seen by some as competition, and a threat to a way of life on a fragile landscape already imperiled by climate change.

    “They don’t belong here!” a woman shouted at agency staff during a recent public meeting on the program.

    Add to that a widespread mistrust of government and the road ahead looks long and perilous for “America’s wolf.” But allies like Akin and Sutherland say they have to try.

    “The red wolf, it’s ours,” Sutherland says. “It’s ours to save.”

    ___

    On a recent visit to Alligator River, Madison parks his truck beside a canal, climbs out and hoists an H-shaped antenna into the air. Faint beeps emanate from a radio in his left hand as he slowly swivels from side to side.

    “Based on the radio telemetry, there are six red wolves hunkered down in there,” says Madison, motioning to a patch of brush between two cleared farm fields. His bushy red-and-grey beard lends him an uncanny resemblance to his quarry.

    That’s roughly half of the world’s total known wild red wolf population.

    The red wolf once roamed from central Texas to southern Iowa and as far northeast as Long Island, New York. But generations of persecution, encroachment and habitat loss reduced them to just a remnant clinging to the ragged Gulf coast along the Texas-Louisiana border.

    Starting in 1973, the year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the last wolves were pulled from the wild and placed in a captive-breeding program.

    “By 1980,” Madison says, “they had declared red wolves extinct in the wild.”

    But the captive breeding program did so well that, after just a few years, officials felt it was time to try restoring the red wolf to the wild.

    They chose Alligator River, a 158,000-acre (63,940-hectare) expanse of upland swamp on North Carolina’s Albermarle Peninsula, not far from Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed “lost colony” of Roanoke.

    The program started in 1987 with four breeding pairs. Five years later, a second group was placed in Great Smoky Mountains National Park — 522,427 acres (211,418 hectares) of forest straddling the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.

    The inland experiment was ended in 1998, due to “low prey availability, extremely low pup survival, disease, and the inability of red wolves to maintain stable territories within the Park,” the government said at the time.

    But with the releases of adults and fostering of captive-born pups into wild family groups, the Alligator River population thrived.

    “It was the model for how gray wolves were returned to Yellowstone,” Sutherland says of the Western species, which has since been taken off the endangered list. “And it’s been the model since then for all kinds of re-wilding of projects all over the world.”

    By 2012, the population in the five-county restoration area reached a peak of about 120 animals. Then the bottom fell out.

    Shootings and vehicle strikes — busy U.S. 64 to the Outer Banks runs through the middle of the refuge — were the leading causes of death.

    Meanwhile, coyotes moved into the area and began mating with the depleted wolf stock. Around the same time, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission allowed nighttime spotlight hunting of coyotes, which are much smaller, but look similar to red wolves.

    In January 2015, the state commission asked Fish and Wildlife to end the program and once again declare the red wolf extinct in the wild. The federal agency suspended releases from the captive population while it re-evaluated the “feasibility” of species recovery.

    A 2018 species status assessment declared the wild population would likely disappear within six years “without substantial intervention.”

    With no new releases, the wild population eventually dipped to just seven known animals.

    In 2020, conservationists sued the agency, alleging the suspension of captive releases violated the Endangered Species Act. Releases and pup fostering resumed the following year.

    In early August, the agency settled with the groups, promising regular releases from the captive population, which currently stands at around 270, over the next eight years. Meanwhile, a new recovery plan and population viability analysis are due out this fall.

    The most recent draft called for spending of more than $256 million over the next 50 years. The red wolf could be delisted by 2072, the agency concluded, providing “all actions are fully funded and implemented” and with “full cooperation of all partners.”

    The service has yet to identify suitable locations for other wild populations and it’s unclear whether the North Carolina wolves have a half century.

    If Greenland continues to melt at the current rate, the East Coast could see more than 3 feet (0.9 meters) of sea level rise in the next 50 years, says Jeffress Williams, a senior scientist emeritus with the U.S. Geological Survey. The average elevation at Alligator River: about 3 feet (0.9 meters).

    “They ought to be factoring that in,” says Williams, who works at the Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center in Massachusetts. “Because within 50 years, a lot of the habitat areas that they’re looking at will very likely be underwater due to sea level rise or, certainly, underwater during the storm surge events such as such as hurricanes.”

    So, the wolves will have to roam farther and farther inland, into more densely populated areas. And that is only going to put them in more competition with what Akin calls the real “apex predator” — Homo sapiens.

    ___

    One of the big complaints around here is that the wolves will gobble up all the game, especially white-tailed deer, the main food source of Canis rufus. And that would eat into landowner profits.

    Although exact numbers for the recovery zone are hard to come by, the wildlife commission says hunting generated $1 billion statewide last year. Recent hunting leases posted online ranged from $861 for a 22-acre (8.9-hectare) property to $3,050 on 167 acres (67.5 hectares) with “everything deer need,” the site boasted.

    Sutherland believes fears of “a wildlife disaster” are unfounded, and he’s out to prove it.

    Braving snakes and brushing feeder ticks from his clothes and gear, he kneels beside a pine tree on the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and starts drilling holes. He bolts a wildlife camera about a foot up the trunk, secures it with a lock and cable, then uses pruning shears to cut down any brush that might obscure the camera’s view.

    “The animals the wolves eat, like rabbits and rats and deer and things and species like that, they like this kind of habitat,” he says. “Our job is to document whether this fire break is … creating more local abundance of these different wildlife species.”

    As for the wolves, their numbers are in constant flux.

    Two litters of four pups each were born in April at Pocosin Lakes, followed in May by five pups at Alligator River. Coupled with recent releases of captive-bred adults and the fostering of pups, one might assume the population is growing.

    But as of August, Fish and Wildlife said the known/collared wild population was 13, with a total estimated wild population of 23 to 25. That’s down from June, when the numbers were 16 and 32 to 34.

    “It’s certainly trending in the right direction,” says Ramona McGee, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit to restart the captive release program. “Although the population remains in dire straits.”

    “We’ve got a long way to go,” Madison concedes.

    Fish and Wildlife has launched numerous initiatives to cut down on human-caused deaths. Gunshots are top of the list.

    The wolves are outfitted with orange, reflective collars to make them more visible at night.

    “Most hunters and the general public know that bright orange, hunter orange, means, ‘Don’t shoot,’” says Madison. “It’s a safety color.”

    He also reminds people at public meetings it’s illegal to intentionally kill an endangered wolf that is not threatening humans, pets or livestock. The death must be reported to Fish and Wildlife within 24 hours.

    The agency enlists landowners to help trap, but preferably not shoot, coyotes.

    “You can’t kill your way out of a coyote problem,” Madison says.

    The coyotes are sterilized, but left hormonally intact. That way, they can act as “placeholders” for the wolves, Madison says.

    “They will continue to defend their territory,” he says. “They’ll hold that space for the rest of their lives and they won’t allow other coyotes to move in, but they also can’t reproduce.”

    Those coyotes get white collars, to further differentiate them from the wolves.

    To cut down on road kills, officials have placed flashing signs at both ends of the Alligator River preserve to warn motorists on US 64 to watch out for endangered wolves and “drive with caution.”

    But the biggest hurdle to red wolf recovery is space.

    The two refuges’ combined 270,000 acres (109,265 hectares) — roughly 422 square miles (1,093 kilometers) — of federal land might sound like a lot. But Madison says a single pack’s territory can be as much as 80 square miles (207 square kilometers), depending on prey availability.

    “There’s not a large enough land mass of public land in the Southeast within the historic range that can fully support a viable red wolf population,” he says. “We’re going to have to rely somewhat on private land for reintroduction.”

    That’s where Prey for the Pack comes in.

    ___

    Started in 2020, the program offers landowners incentives to make habitat improvements. The government will reimburse people up to 80% of the cost of thinning woods and planting the kinds of vegetation that will attract the types of prey red wolves prefer, says Luke Lolies, who runs the program.

    In exchange, Fish and Wildlife gets access to do such things as install wildlife cameras or come onto their land to capture coyotes.

    Basically, Lolies says, “They allow red wolves to peacefully live on their property.”

    But if a recent public meeting is any indication, Lolies and the wolves are facing an uphill battle.

    A crowd of about 60 braved thunderstorms and torrential rains to gather in the gymnasium of Mattamuskeet High School in Swanquarter, North Carolina.

    They listened politely as Madison and others gave an update on the program. But no sooner had the floor been opened to questions than things got heated.

    One man referred to the wolves as a “hybrid predator,” repeating a common belief here that all the animals are now mixed with coyotes. That’s despite a 2019 National Academy of Sciences report confirming the red wolf was a “distinct” and “taxonomically valid” species.

    Madison noted two hybrid litters were discovered last year and euthanized.

    Another concern was safety for humans and animals.

    There has never been a documented attack by a red wolf on a human, Madison says. And a “depredation fund” set up by the Red Wolf Coalition to reimburse people for animals killed by a wolf has only paid out one claim, coalition director Kim Wheeler says.

    A bearded man in a camouflage jacket questioned the program’s costs versus the number of jobs created in the five counties. Another wondered how landowners who make money off hunting would be compensated for all the game the wolves will eat.

    “If you do not get landowner cooperation in the five-county area, will you stop the program?” asked one man, who farms 15,000 acres (6,070 hectares) in the wolf-recovery area.

    An exasperated Madison says it wasn’t for him to say.

    “We all know what the answer is,” the farmer replies sarcastically. “You just can’t say it out loud.”

    Aspen Stalls, who recently started a wildlife guiding business in the area, says the wolves can benefit the local economy, but that’s not the point.

    “They have been here for a very, very, very long time, long before us,” says Stalls, who studied canid ecology in college and sports a wolf tattoo on her left arm. “And they are a vital part of keeping this ecosystem balanced.”

    The five-county wolf recovery area covers 2,765 square miles (7,161 square kilometers), which is nearly 1.8 million acres (728,434 hectares). But in three years, Prey for the Pack has managed to sign up only four landowners, for a total of just 915 acres (370 hectares).

    Of the four Prey participants, only one agreed to be identified: Jeff Akin.

    ___

    About eight years ago, the retired Raleigh real estate developer built a hunting and fishing getaway on 80 acres (32 hectares) of what he calls “Hyde County thicket: Sucker pines, loblolly pines, wax myrtles and briers.”

    “I had to use a machete to walk through it the first time to find the edges,” he says. “Snakes and mosquitoes love it.”

    With help from Lolies and his staff, he hopes the wolves will love it, too.

    Riding through the woods on an all-terrain vehicle, he points to areas of scorched scrub and tree stumps.

    “This has been thinned and burned,” he says. “And the burning should release the seeds, and the sunlight will grow the types of grass and plants that’ll bring in small mammals and game animals that would be ultimately prey for a pack of wolves.”

    New grasses and wildflowers are already coming up. Recently planted blackberry bushes are ready to bear fruit.

    A white sign bolted to a tree along the main road declares Akin a member of “Partners for Fish & Wildlife.” He suspects his neighbors aren’t too happy about it.

    Lee Williams, who lives just down the road, can’t believe the government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to protect what he considers “a mongrel.”

    “I never had it around here when I was growing up, and I really didn’t miss it,” the 74-year-old retired state marine patrol officer says. “I didn’t miss a dinosaur and I wouldn’t miss them.”

    About a week after the public meeting, a red wolf was found dead along a fence line in neighboring Washington County, shot in the torso.

    After witnessing the hostility in the school gym, Akin got together with another wolf supporter to try to develop a better “sales pitch” for fellow landowners.

    “We need to break down some resistance to wolf recovery and some existing fears about putting your land in a government program of any kind,” he says.

    He knows his 80 acres (32 hectares) are just “a drop in the bucket.” But he can’t just do nothing.

    “It’s not nature that’s taken the red wolf out,” he says. “It’s us. So, we are the ones to help them get back.”

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  • Lions, tigers, taxidermy, arsenic, political squabbling and the Endangered Species Act. Oh my.

    Lions, tigers, taxidermy, arsenic, political squabbling and the Endangered Species Act. Oh my.

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    The fate of the mounted lion, tiger, polar bear and gorilla that have long greeted visitors entering South Dakota’s largest zoo is grim after arsenic was found to be widespread in the taxidermy collection, creating a raging debate about whether the more than 150 animals should be destroyed.

    Some locals who grew up around the menagerie, which used to fill a hardware store, are fighting the mayor and zoo officials to keep the collection, marshaling activism online and in the Sioux Falls City Council. They are buoyed by experts who say the arsenic risk is overblown, the mounts nothing short of art.

    “They’re not stuffed animals. These were sculptures,” said John Janelli, a former president of the National Taxidermists Association, likening destroying them to scraping off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

    The arsenic, he adds, is a heavy metal, not something that wafts through the air.

    “Just don’t lick the taxidermy,” says Fran Ritchie, the chair of the conservation committee of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. “You’ll be fine.”

    Most institutions with older collections take safety protocols, like using special vacuums and wearing personal protective equipment while cleaning the taxidermy, said Gretchen Anderson, a conservator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

    But for Sioux Falls, there is “there is no acceptable level of risk when you are dealing with a known carcinogen,” City Attorney Dave Pfeifle told reporters last week.

    The mayor and zoo officials believe reason and safety are on their side. But even if they can convince the town to get rid of the animals, they’ll have to navigate a web of federal and state laws to do so.

    The Endangered Species Act protects animals even in death, so the collection can’t be sold. Under federal law, they could be given to another museum. But state law stipulates that exhibits like this must remain within the state.

    It wasn’t this messy 80 years ago when a Sioux Falls businessman embarked upon a series of international hunting expeditions chronicled in his eponymous book, “A True Safari Hunter: Henry Brockhouse.”

    “For walrus, you have to go out and travel the sea. If you see a head poppin’— one or two miles away — wherever it may be, you start shootin,’” one passage reads.

    He proudly displayed some of his prize kills at his West Sioux Hardware store. But by the time he died in 1978, international laws and the Endangered Species Act were cracking down. There was a growing concern that hunters were pushing some exotic animals to the brink of extinction.

    When the hardware store closed, Brockhouse’s friend, C.J. Delbridge, snapped up the collection and donated it to the city. The natural history museum that bore Delbridge’s name opened in 1984. An African elephant that was mounted after Brockhouse’s death added to the display. China also donated a mounted giant panda.

    In recent years the mounted animals showed their age, including some tears, said Great Plains Zoo CEO Becky Dewitz. As it considered what to do with them, her team had them tested.

    In August, the results came back: 79% of specimens tested positive for detectable levels of arsenic, the city said. The report, obtained by The Associated Press, showed that the contaminated mounts included a jungle cat and monitor lizard.

    With protective gear, taxidermy can be moved safely despite arsenic, said Jennifer Menken, the public collections manager at the Bell Museum of Natural History. Her institution moved 10 historic taxidermy dioramas to its new space at the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus about five years ago.

    Other steps can be taken to keep the public safe, she said, including encasing taxidermy in glass. That protects them against temperature, humidity and, of course, visitors licking them.

    But in Sioux Falls, cost was a barrier, said Dewitz. So now the animals are hidden behind barricades as the city considers its options.

    Some items are earmarked for the National Wildlife Property Repository near Denver, which stores a massive collection of seized wildlife items, including elephant tusks and crocodile skin purses. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which operates it, won’t take any with arsenic, said spokeswoman Christina Meister.

    Dewitz said she’s had a hard time finding other takers, and Mayor Paul TenHaken said he fears the city could still face liability even if it gives them away.

    “I know that’s a popular narrative to say that we would just take artifacts like this and treat it like a Papa John’s pizza box,” the mayor said, insisting that is not the case. He was critical of what he described as “misinformation.”

    Critics claim that the city and the zoo found the arsenic on purpose, as part of a ploy to replace the space with a butterfly garden and aquarium.

    Brockhouse’s granddaughter, Barbara Philips, suspects as much.

    “I am sick to my stomach,” she said.

    She wants the specimens to be repaired, and kept behind glass as her grandfather did. The 1981 donation agreement, which the AP obtained through a records request, said the mounts “shall be behind a partition of glass or other suitable material.”

    The mayor is fed up with the whole thing, and has chastised City Council members who opposed the closure.

    “There’s a million things I’d rather be working on right now than this,” the mayor said.

    A Facebook group marshaling fans of the exhibit has more than 1,400 followers.

    Group creator Jason Haack sells and displays a collection of “unique weird odd items” at his family-run Abby Normal’s Museum of the Strange south of Sioux Falls. He said three business area owners offered $170,000 to fight the closure. His attorney thinks it will be an uphill battle.

    “What they’re doing could cause a ripple effect throughout the whole world of natural history museums, and people now questioning the safety of them,” Haack lamented.

    The ultimate decision rests with the City Council, which is scheduled to hear a report and then vote at a pair of September meetings.

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  • Tiny Fish Reintroduced To Southern River After Vanishing 50 Years Ago

    Tiny Fish Reintroduced To Southern River After Vanishing 50 Years Ago

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    PINOLA, Miss. (AP) — A species of tiny fish that once flourished in a river running hundreds of miles from central Mississippi into southeastern Louisiana is being reintroduced to the Pearl River after disappearing 50 years ago.

    Wildlife experts say a number of factors likely contributed to the disappearance of the pearl darter from the Pearl River system, including oil and gas development, agricultural runoff, urban pollution, and dam construction. All are deemed detrimental to the pearl darter’s habitat and survival.

    Matthew Wagner, a biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, holds a threatened pearl darter fish, which haven’t lived in the Pearl River system for 50 years, as they are released in the Strong River, a tributary of the Pearl River, in Pinola, Mississippi, Monday, July 31, 2023.

    And even though pollution and other threats to habitat remain today within the Pearl River, more than 400 miles (644 kilometers) long, officials say the 1972 federal Clean Water Act has helped make it cleaner. Clean enough, in fact, that Mississippi and the federal government wildlife experts say there are signs that the pearl darter may be able to thrive there again.

    “This site has some of the highest species diversity in the entire Pearl River,” said Matt Wagner, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who last month joined workers wading into the Strong River, a headwater tributary of the Pearl. They dipped bowls into buckets full tiny pearl darters from a private hatchery and eased them into the water.

    “There’s more species here than most other places, and a lot of the species that we find here are what we call sensitive species. They are species that are not very tolerant of things like pollution, high disturbance and things of that nature.”

    Matthew Wagner, a biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, releases threatened pearl darter fish, which haven't lived in the Pearl River system for 50 years, in the Strong River, a tributary of the Pearl River, in Pinola, Mississippi, Monday, July 31, 2023.
    Matthew Wagner, a biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, releases threatened pearl darter fish, which haven’t lived in the Pearl River system for 50 years, in the Strong River, a tributary of the Pearl River, in Pinola, Mississippi, Monday, July 31, 2023.

    The presence of those species bodes well for the return of the pearl darter to the Pearl River, Wagner said.

    The pearl darter is a bottom-dwelling fish that measures about 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) long. It is named for the iridescent coloring around its gills, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which listed it as a threatened species in 2017.

    It had not vanished completely by 1973. It was still found in Mississippi’s Pascagoula River system. But that accounted for only about 43% of its historic range.

    Wagner is optimistic about its future in the Pearl River.

    “This is the biggest win of my career as a biologist so far,” Wagner said. “It’s very seldom that you get to restore a species back to its historic range. As a biologist, when you go to school, this is the type of day you’re all dreaming about.”

    Threatened pearl darter fish, which haven't lived in the Pearl River system for 50 years, are released in the Strong River, a tributary of the Pearl River, in Pinola, Miss., Monday, July 31, 2023.
    Threatened pearl darter fish, which haven’t lived in the Pearl River system for 50 years, are released in the Strong River, a tributary of the Pearl River, in Pinola, Miss., Monday, July 31, 2023.

    There will be regular sampling of the waters to see how the species is surviving. The hope is that they will thrive and spread throughout the Pearl system and federal protection will some day no longer be needed.

    “They should, ideally, get delisted from the Endangered Species Act,” Wagner said.

    McGill reported from New Orleans.

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  • New Delhi doesn’t want its monkeys to ruin G20. But it has a plan | CNN

    New Delhi doesn’t want its monkeys to ruin G20. But it has a plan | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Authorities in India are determined to keep a lid on any monkey business ahead of world leaders jetting in next week, by placing life-size cutouts of angry langurs across the capital to dissuade smaller pesky primates from wreaking havoc or hogging the limelight while the nation takes center stage.

    India is gearing up to welcome the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) countries in New Delhi next weekend, including US President Joe Biden, in an event that has been given utmost prominence at home.

    Little is being left to chance, not even the city’s notoriously mischievous population of rhesus macaques.

    The small monkeys are found across the capital, running across roads, bouncing between rooftops, causing a general nuisance and occasionally attacking unexpected pedestrians.

    As the government embarks on a major beautification drive, freshly painting walls, planting trees and placing colorful flowers in key areas across town, New Delhi’s authorities have taken steps to ensure the animals don’t ruin those efforts.

    Enter the langur – or at least, cardboard cutouts of langurs – and men trained to sound like the bigger primates.

    “(The monkeys) don’t want to come near the large cutouts of the langurs as they get scared,” Satish Upadhyay, vice-chairperson of the New Delhi Municipal Council, told Indian news agency ANI. “Monkeys cannot be displaced, harmed or hit.”

    Upadhyay added they have also deployed between 30 and 40 men who can mimic the sounds of langurs to trick the rhesus monkeys into thinking they are nearby.

    The council has also left food for the monkeys in forested areas to encourage them to remain there, he added.

    Monkeys are revered in Hindu-majority India and culling programs of wild or stray animals have previously proved hugely controversial. Hence the need for more humane solutions.

    The langur monkey is much larger and more aggressive than the smaller rhesus macaque and have long been used in the past by authorities to scare off marauding gangs of the latter.

    Live langurs were rented and put on duty when the Commonwealth Games were held in New Delhi in 2010, Reuters news agency reported.

    Much of central New Delhi will come to a halt for the G20 with a huge operation to keep global leaders moving freely between the hotels and meeting venues.

    Billboards advertising the summit and featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face have been placed on corners of many streets, while the police and security presence is set to increase in the days leading up to the meeting.

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  • Logging is growing in a Nigerian forest home to endangered elephants. Rangers blame lax enforcement

    Logging is growing in a Nigerian forest home to endangered elephants. Rangers blame lax enforcement

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    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Roaring chainsaws sent trees crashing to the ground, and bare-chested men hacked away at the branches beside a muddy road. Others heaved logs onto a truck, where they were tied in place with wire.

    The work was similar on the other side of the road, with a timber-laden truck coughing dark plumes of smoke as it pulled away. This was miles into the conservation zone of Omo Forest Reserve in southern Nigeria, a protected area where logging is prohibited because it’s home to threatened species like African elephants, pangolins and white-throated monkeys. But forest rangers, seeing the impunity, were hesitant to act.

    “We see people we arrested and turned over to the government back in the forest, and they get emboldened,” ranger Sunday Abiodun told The Associated Press during a recent trip to the reserve.

    Conservationists say the outer region of Omo Forest Reserve, where logging is allowed, is already heavily deforested. As trees become scarce, loggers are heading deep into the 550-square-kilometer conservation area, which is also under threat from uncontrolled cocoa farming and poaching.

    Conservationists and rangers blame the government for not enforcing environmental regulations or adequately replanting trees, impeding Nigeria’s pledge under the Paris climate agreement to maintain places like forests that absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

    The government of Nigeria’s southwestern Ogun state, which owns the reserve, denied failing to enforce regulations. In a statement, it said it’s replanting more trees than are being cut down.

    The forest’s gatekeepers and those processing the wood both dispute that assertion, insisting trees are disappearing.

    Sawmillers get annual permits from the government to cut down trees until their designated area is completely deforested. Then they can apply for a new section. They say the permit fee of 2 million naira ($2,645) is intended to cover the government’s costs to replace trees but that this rarely occurs.

    “The government is not replanting,” said Owolabi Oguntimehin, a sawmiller in Ijebu, a nearby town that has over 50 sawmilling companies relying on the reserve. “It is not our responsibility to replant because the government collects the fee from us.”

    Besides problems with replanting, authorities don’t enforce tree removal standards, even when loggers get permits, according to forest guards, who are employed by the state government.

    Joseph Olaonipekun, a guard, said officials from Ogun state’s forestry department used to mark trees that could be cut and ensure “strict” enforcement to prevent others from being removed. But that’s no longer done, he said.

    “By implementing selective logging, the adverse effects on the biodiversity of an area can be minimized while also providing the opportunity for young trees to continue growing,” Nigerian ecologist Babajide Agboola said. “This method allows for a more sustainable approach to logging and forest management.”

    Trees such as Cordia wood, mahogany and gmelina are disappearing from the forest’s periphery, according to both sawmillers and reserve gatekeepers.

    “There has to be massive reforestation so that the conservation zone will not be dismantled,” Agboola said.

    But forest rangers hired by the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which is the government’s partner in managing the conservation zone, have found it a challenge to protect against illegal logging in off-limits areas.

    They say loggers harvesting trees in the conservation zone brag about bypassing regulations by paying off government officials.

    “We want the government to support us in preserving the forest,” ranger Johnson Adejayin said. He echoed his colleagues in calling for strict enforcement and sanctions, “so that the loggers do not come back to continue their illegal acts and boast that with money they can avoid punishment.”

    The Nigerian economy, Africa’s largest, heavily relies on agriculture, forestry and other land uses. These industries, which are responsible for 25% of Nigeria’s greenhouse gas emissions, provide jobs for the majority of people in agrarian communities around the reserve.

    As a result, there is debate about the political will to enforce environmental sustainability when livelihoods are at stake.

    That factor should be considered, said Wale Adedayo, chairman of the Ijebu East local government area where a significant part of the forest is located. He advocated for a reduction of the conservation zone to give more land to locals to farm and log.

    But he also acknowledged that “there is a lot of deforestation” that should be reversed to ensure Nigeria’s contribution to fighting climate change.

    For its part, the state government said “it is incorrect” to blame the pressure to make a living “when loggers illegally find their way into the conservation area to steal parts of the conserved trees.”

    Adedayo said logging in protected areas “is not possible without the connivance of the civil servants.”

    The government’s forest guards have seen it first hand.

    “There is too much corruption in this forest caused by greed and poverty,” Olaonipekun said. “When we say, ‘Don’t go there,’ some go through higher authorities to defy us, and we are helpless.”

    The government, meanwhile, has delayed formally declaring the conservation area a wildlife sanctuary to protect it from threats like logging, farming and poaching, said Emmanuel Olabode, who manages the Nigerian Conservation Foundation’s wildlife conservation project in the forest.

    The foundation’s rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are believed to live and has been designated a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO.

    “It is left to the government to enforce the regulations,” said Olabode, who supervises the foundation’s rangers.

    Loggers even have resorted to violence to ensure their timber supply. Olabode recounted when assailants with assault rifles attacked a rangers’ patrol base in 2021, and loggers just kept cutting trees.

    “Our rangers escaped with injuries, and we notified the authorities, but nothing was done, and we have not gone back there due to security concerns,” Olabode said, adding that the area is now unprotected.

    The government says it plans to employ the military and police to combat illegal operators. It urges loggers who follow the rules to “fight their members who are into illegalities.”

    ___

    This is the second in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve. Read the first installment here.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Honoring the legacy of game show host and activist Bob Barker | CNN

    Honoring the legacy of game show host and activist Bob Barker | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For over thirty years, Bob Barker was known and loved as the host of the hit game show “The Price is Right.” He famously ended each episode telling viewers to spay or neuter their pets. Barker spent decades giving his time and money to better the lives of creatures big and small. Here are several organizations you can donate to in honor of Bob Barker’s legacy.

    Barker often joined forces with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to fight for various animal welfare issues – from protecting captive orcas to opposing product-testing on rabbits. “We love this man,” PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk said in 2018. “But what do you give someone who has everything and gives his all to animals? The answer is a rescued horse named in his honor.” PETA also named its headquarters in Los Angeles “The Bob Barker Building” honoring the show host’s multi-million dollar donation.

    Barker helped relocate captive big animals to comfortable sanctuaries. In 2013, Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary welcomed three elephants from the Toronto Zoo after their program was shut down. Barker’s $1 million donation ensured safe transport of Iringa, Thika and Toka. “If an elephant is going to be in captivity,” Barker said, “the PAWS sanctuary is the best place in the world for them.” The 2,300-acre sanctuary also houses lions, bears, and tigers.

    Awards and Achievements

    While Barker was recognized for his on-screen work with 19 Daytime Emmys, he also earned praise for his activism. The Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals honored Barker with their 2007 President’s Award. The nonprofit animal welfare organization has been helping animals since 1877 with services including cruelty investigations and a disaster animal response team.

    Aside from simple activism, the TV veteran championed animal legal and ethics studies at law schools around the world. Barker was named an Honorary Fellow by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. “Almost single-handedly in little more than a decade, Bob’s sagacity and generosity have propelled animal ethics from a marginal issue into the academic mainstream. This is a colossal achievement,” said University of Oxford Professor Andrew Linzey.

    Bob Barker poses with his bust at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

    In his younger years, Barker attended Drury University, then known as Drury College, on a basketball scholarship. He has since given millions of dollars to his alma mater, funding a scholarship, an internship fund, and setting up the university’s animal studies program. “Drury University is able to place bright young minds into this important field thanks to his support,” said Drury President Timothy Cloyd. “Gifts such as these have a ripple effect on the lives of our graduates and the world around them.”

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  • Beloved Wild Horses Roaming North Dakota National Park May Be Removed

    Beloved Wild Horses Roaming North Dakota National Park May Be Removed

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    BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The beloved wild horses that roam freely in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park could be removed under a National Park Service proposal that worries advocates who say the horses are a cultural link to the past.

    Visitors who drive the scenic park road can often see bands of horses, a symbol of the West and sight that delights tourists. Advocates want to see the horses continue to roam the Badlands, and disagree with park officials who have branded the horses as “livestock.”

    Wild horses graze on a hillside by the boundary fence of Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota, on Saturday, May 20, 2023.

    The Park Service is revising its livestock plans and writing an environmental assessment to examine the impacts of taking no new action — or to remove the horses altogether.

    Removal would entail capturing horses and giving some of them first to tribes, and later auctioning the animals or giving them to other entities. Another approach would include techniques to prevent future reproduction and would allow those horses to live out the rest of their lives in the park.

    The horses have allies in government leaders and advocacy groups. One advocate says the horses’ popularity won’t stop park officials from removing them from the landscape of North Dakota’s top tourist attraction.

    “At the end of the day, that’s our national park paid for by our tax dollars, and those are our horses. We have a right to say what happens in our park and to the animals that live there,” Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates President Chris Kman told The Associated Press.

    Last year, Park Superintendent Angie Richman told The Bismarck Tribune that the park has no law or requirement for the horses to be in the park. Regardless of what decision is ultimately made, the park will have to reduce its roughly 200 horses to 35-60 animals under a 1978 environmental assessment’s population objective, she previously said.

    Kman said she would like the park “to use science” to “properly manage the horses,” including a minimum of 150-200 reproductive horses for genetic viability. Impacts of the park’s use of a contraceptive on mares are unclear, she added.

    A wild horse stands near Peaceful Valley Ranch in Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota, on Saturday, May 20, 2023.
    A wild horse stands near Peaceful Valley Ranch in Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota, on Saturday, May 20, 2023.

    Ousting the horse population “would have a detrimental impact on the park as an ecosystem,” Kman said. The horses are a historical fixture, while the park reintroduced bison and elk, she said.

    A couple bands of wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park after it was established in 1947, said Castle McLaughlin, who in the 1980s researched the history and origins of the horses while working as a graduate student for the Park Service in North Dakota.

    Park officials in the early years sought to eradicate the horses, shooting them on sight and hiring local cowboys to round them up and remove them, she said. The park even sold horses to a local zoo at one point to be food for large cats.

    Around 1970, a new superintendent discovered Roosevelt had written about the presence of wild horses in the Badlands during his time there. Park officials decided to retain the horses as a historic demonstration herd to interpret the open-range ranching era. “However, the Park Service still wasn’t thrilled about them,” McLaughlin told the AP.

    “Basically they’re like cultural artifacts almost because they reflect several generations of western North Dakota ranchers and Native people. They were part of those communities,” and might have ties to Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, she said.

    In the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt hunted and ranched as a young man in the Badlands of what is now western North Dakota. The Western tourist town of Medora is at the gates of the national park that bears his name.

    Roosevelt looms large in North Dakota, where a presidential library in his honor is under construction near the park — a legislative push in 2019 that was championed by Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.

    Burgum has offered for the state to collaborate with the Park Service to manage the horses. Earlier this year, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a resolution in support of preserving the horses.

    Republican U.S. Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota has included legislation in the U.S. Interior Department’s appropriations bill that he told the AP “would direct them to keep horses in the park in line with what was there at the time that Teddy Roosevelt was out in Medora.”

    “Most all of the input we’ve got is that people want to retain horses. We’ve been clear we think (the park) should retain horses,” Hoeven said. He’s pressing the park to keep more than 35-60 horses for genetics reasons.

    The senator said he expects the environmental review to be completed soon, which will provide an opportunity for public comment. Richman told the AP the park plans to release the assessment this summer. A timeline for a final decision is unclear.

    The environmental review will look at the impact of each of the three proposals in a variety of areas, Maureen McGee-Ballinger, the park’s deputy superintendent, told the AP.

    There were thousands of responses during the previous public comment period on the park’s proposals — the vast majority of which opposed “complete livestock removal.”

    Kman’s group has been active in gathering support for the horses, including drafting government resolutions and contacting congressional offices, tribal leaders, similar advocacy groups and “pretty much anyone that would listen to me,” she said.

    McLaughlin said the park’s effort carries “a stronger possibility that they’ll succeed this time than has ever been the case in the past. I mean, they have never been this determined and publicly open about their intentions, but I’ve also never seen the state fight for the horses like they are now.”

    The park’s North Unit, about 70 miles (112.65 kilometers) from Medora, has about nine longhorn cattle. The proposals would affect the longhorns, too, though the horses are the greater concern. Hoeven said his legislation doesn’t address the longhorns. The cattle are managed under a 1970 plan.

    Theodore Roosevelt National Park “is one of very few national parks that does have horses, and that sets it apart,” North Dakota Commerce Tourism and Marketing Director Sara Otte Coleman said in January at a press conference with Burgum and lawmakers.

    Wild horses also roam in Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia.

    The horses’ economic impact on tourism is impossible to delineate, but their popularity is high among media, photographers, travel writers and social media influencers who tout them, Otte Coleman said.

    “Removal of the horses really eliminates a feature that our park guests are accustomed to seeing,” she said.

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  • Surfer fights for his life after shark attack in Australia | CNN

    Surfer fights for his life after shark attack in Australia | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A surfer is fighting for his life in the hospital after he was attacked by a shark off Australia’s east coast, police said Friday.

    The 44-year-old man was surfing near Lighthouse Beach, Port Macquarie when a shark launched a “sustained and prolonged attack,” New South Wales (NSW) police said in a statement.

    The surfer tried to fight the shark for about 30 seconds before swimming back to shore where he realized the extent of his injuries, CNN regional affiliate 9News reported.

    Police said a bystander applied a tourniquet before paramedics transferred the surfer to Port Macquarie Hospital in critical condition.

    “[He is in] a serious condition with life threatening injuries, sustained from the lower leg injuries, and also significant blood loss,” NSW Police Chief Inspector Martin Burke said.

    A witness told 9News the scene was “really scary”.

    “I have never seen anything like it,” the unnamed teenager said. “His foot ripped off and basically he was bleeding everywhere.”

    Lighthouse Beach will remain closed for at least 24 hours, Port Macquarie Hastings ALS Lifeguards said on Facebook. Meanwhile, a drone will be used to conduct surveillance flights and monitor shark activity in the area, the group said.

    Experts from the Department of Primary Industries (Fisheries) have begun an investigation into the incident, according to Surf Life Saving NSW.

    Australia ranked behind only the United States in the number of unprovoked shark encounters with humans last year, according to the Florida Museum’s International Shark Attack File.

    The museum describes “unprovoked bites” as incidents in which a bite on a human takes place in the shark’s natural habitat with no human provocation of the shark. “Provoked bites” are classified as when a human initiates interaction with a shark in some way.

    According to the Australian Shark Incident Database, there were 10 shark encounters in New South Wales in 2022, resulting in seven injuries and one death.

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  • CDC Warns: Stop Puckering Up To Your Pet Turtles

    CDC Warns: Stop Puckering Up To Your Pet Turtles

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    Getting cozy with your pet turtle might not be a good idea, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Last week, public health officials advised people not to “kiss or cuddle” their shelled companions after a multistate outbreak of salmonella linked to tiny turtles.

    Twenty-six people across 11 states have fallen ill from the outbreak and nine had to be hospitalized. No fatalities have been reported, but more that 30% of the cases hit children under the age of 5, who can be seriously affected by an infection.

    While turtles of any size can carry salmonella, the CDC said creatures smaller than four inches long were banned by federal law in 1975 after causing “many illnesses, especially in young children.”

    A false map humpback turtle from Hamburg, Germany.

    picture alliance via Getty Images

    Still, smaller breeds are available “illegally online and at stores, flea markets, and roadside stands,” so the CDC advised people to only buy animals from reputable sources.

    The agency noted that even healthy-looking turtles can spread germs, so pet owners should be vigilant about hand-washing and general hygiene.

    It also warned against eating near pet turtles, and warned people to keep turtles out of areas where you eat, store or prepare food.

    Salmonella symptoms include diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps. While not usually serious, it can cause complications in children, older adults and people who are immunocompromised.

    Each year, 26,500 Americans are hospitalized and 420 people die from illnesses related to salmonella infections, according to the CDC.

    While turtles have a history of causing health concerns, they’re not the only pets that have been linked to salmonella outbreaks.

    Last year the CDC reported 32 illnesses stemming from contact with bearded dragons. Pet hedgehogs were linked to 49 cases from 2019 to 2020.

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  • Austin Pets Alive! | Progress Update of APA!’s Veterinary Services…

    Austin Pets Alive! | Progress Update of APA!’s Veterinary Services…

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    Aug 23, 2023

    The City of Laredo and Laredo Animal Care Services (LACS) partnered with Austin Pets Alive! (APA!) in February 2023 as a result of the city’s desire to meet the Laredo community’s need for shelter improvement. Due to limited resources, LACS has historically faced challenges in implementing veterinary best practices, struggling to save half of the 8,000 pets that come into its shelter. Recognizing that a change was needed, LACS contracted with APA! to provide veterinary care services and updated shelter operations. Because LACS has unnecessarily delayed implementing animal welfare industry standards at its shelter, APA! is calling on the citizens of Laredo to join our efforts in advocating for the thousands of pets who are at risk of being euthanized.

    APA! has been helping LACS with rescue transport since 2020 and partnered with LACS during Winter Storm Uri, which led to this bigger partnership. In May 2023, after working with LACS over many months, APA! built a set of customized recommendations and an implementation plan to establish Laredo as a leader in animal sheltering throughout South Texas. LACS has been presented with its first opportunity to accept resources, in the form of time and money, from a transformational organization to help save more animal lives. APA!’s objective is to help fill the gap in necessary training and support, at the request and with the cooperation of LACS, to help people and their pets in Laredo.

    APA!’s implementation plan includes shelter best practices such as support at intake,Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) program, lost pet reunification, and placement programs. A people focused intake model, which includes an appointment-based intake of animals in non-emergency situations into the animal services facility, is a modern practice that prioritizes sick or injured pets, animals in immediate danger, or dogs that pose a threat to public safety. Organized intake frees up shelter resources to ensure emergencies and critical situations are handled promptly and effectively.

    PROGRESS IN SAVING LIVES

    APA!’s vet and national shelter support teams have made significant progress at LACS:

    • Since March, APA! doubled spay and neuters with over 1,000 animals, and in 2023 since the start of the contract, we have brought the feline live outcome rate to over 65%. APA! is responsible for over 1,100 live outcomes in 2023 through rescue transport.

    • Implemented treatment protocols to ensure every sick, treatable animal receives medication and vaccines, health certificates, and more to increase the number of pets saved.

    • Performed an elevated level of medical attention for shelter animals, including leg amputations, mass removals, surgeries, and more to save the pet’s life. Previously animals requiring this care would have been automatically euthanized.

    Furthermore, APA! designed free custom staff training, over 30 standard operating procedures, and an implementation plan for LACS based on best practices that include:

    • Intake Counseling and Triage – To help provide treatment and care to the animals in need, providing consent-based resources for pets that may not need to come to the shelter, and reducing euthanasia rates.

    • Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) program – To ensure stray cats aren’t euthanized upon intake at alarming rates.

    • Lost Pet Reunification – To ensure that at least the national standard number of lost pets make it back to their families.

    • Placement Programs- Rescue/Transport, Adoption, Case Management, Foster, Volunteer – To help reduce the number of pets at the shelter by promoting adoptions, fostering, and working with rescue partners.

    The implementation of these programs and procedures is fundamental to the success of the contract between Austin Pets Alive! and Laredo Animal Care Services to increase adoptions and provide community guidance to better support the people and pets of Laredo. APA! is also providing additional resources such as:

    • 5 Full-time employees (4 directly operations focused and local to Laredo and 1 focused on marketing and communication)

    • National Field Services in-person training

    • Online course module with in-person guidance and assessment for free

    • Weekly transport van and driver dedicated to picking up Laredo animals and taking in-state partners.

    • Once a month, state transport van and driver assistance are dedicated to Laredo animals.

    • $90K pet food donation for the community via HSUS/Chewy secured by APA!.

    • Adoption incentive grant of $3,000 for gift bags for adopters.

    • Handouts, flyers, resources, and posters – printed for the front lobby, and for staff to hand out to the community to help people with their pets.

    CHALLENGES BEING FACED:

    While APA! has addressed the many issues with LACS’s current practices by providing recommendations, staff training, and standard operating procedures, LACS has unnecessarily delayed implementing animal welfare industry standards at its shelter.

    APA!’s implementation plan, introduced in May 2023, includes shelter best practices such as support at intake, Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) program, lost pet reunification, and placement programs.

    To be successful, Laredo Animal Care Services needs to implement these changes immediately and take the community’s and animals’ needs into consideration. Many of the recommendations made by APA! in May have yet to be implemented, leading to the continued killing and warehousing of shelter pets.

    HISTORY

    When APA!’s team first arrived at LACS, they encountered dire conditions, including an extremely high rate of disease in pets–predominately parvovirus; overcrowding, unsanitary kennels; inadequate water and food supplies; and unattended injured animals in urgent need of medical care.

    Upon arrival, APA! quickly identified and implemented immediate solutions to solve these harsh conditions and continued to work with the LACS team to implement additional medical and treatment protocols. These actions have already contributed to saving the lives of several hundred pets that most certainly would have died without intervention due to lack of medical care and euthanasia. The year-end goal is to increase live outcomes to 90%, almost double what they were when APA! first arrived.

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  • Watch Otters Use ‘Turtle Tunnel’ To Cross Safely Underneath Road

    Watch Otters Use ‘Turtle Tunnel’ To Cross Safely Underneath Road

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    A project to help animals cross the road has been completed in Minnesota, and it looks to be an otter success.

    Two otters were caught on camera utilizing a newly built wildlife passage in Minnesota’s Dakota County, with the footage shared to social media Friday.

    “The wildlife corridor under Cliff Road along Lebanon Hills Regional Park is busy!” Dakota County Parks wrote in a Facebook post.

    A team of natural resource staffers from the county and the Minnesota Zoo had previously determined that this particular road was a “hotspot” for small animals getting killed by vehicles, the post said.

    In a press release, the county said that it had completed “three ‘turtle tunnels’ or ‘critter crossings’ designed to provide safe passage for turtles and other wildlife that travel near the area.”

    “When we have projects like these wildlife tunnels, we are helping to facilitate wildlife movement within the landscapes they travel — a little better and a little safer,” Tom Lewanski, a natural resources manager with the parks department, said in the statement.

    The new tunnels are already popular with the local four-legged population.

    “In the short time since the tunnels have been operational, we have already documented many animals using them including otters, muskrats, squirrels, and snapping turtles!” Dakota County Parks wrote on Facebook.

    In a post last week, the department also shared images of a passage being used by a squirrel, a muskrat and, yes, a turtle.

    The United States’ most famous turtle tunnel is the Lake Jackson Ecopassage in Florida’s Leon County. That project was completed in 2010 after researchers documented thousands of turtles and other animals being killed on a particular stretch of four-lane highway over a five-year period.

    The Lake Jackson Ecopassage attracted some controversy in 2009 after then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) claimed it was an example of wasteful government spending. But after its completion, Matthew Aresco, the biologist who spearheaded the project, said it was a big success in terms of saving animal lives.

    “I monitored it over the last several months and it’s working exactly as it was intended,” he told Tallahassee Magazine in 2012. “Animals are using it back and forth (through) the culverts, and they’re staying behind the barrier wall. They’re not being killed on the highway.”

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  • A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

    A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

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    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Sunday Abiodun, carrying a sword in one hand and balancing a musket over his other shoulder, cleared weeds on a footpath leading to a cluster of new trees.

    Until recently, it had been a spot to grow cocoa, one of several plots that Abiodun and his fellow forest rangers destroyed after farmers cut down trees to make way for the crop used to make chocolate — driving away birds in the process.

    “When we see such a farm during patrol, we destroy it and plant trees instead,” Abiodun said.

    It could take more than 10 years for the trees to mature, he said, with the hope they ease biodiversity loss and restore habitat for birds.

    He was not always enthusiastic about conservation. Before becoming a ranger, Abiodun, 40, killed animals for a living, including endangered species like pangolin. He is now part of a team working to protect Nigeria’s Omo Forest Reserve, which is facing expanding deforestation from excessive logging, uncontrolled farming and poaching.

    The tropical rainforest, 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of Lagos in Nigeria’s southwest, is home to threatened species including African elephants, pangolins, white-throated monkeys, yellow-casqued hornbills, long-crested eagles and chimpanzees, according to UNESCO.

    To protect animals and their habitat, 550 square kilometers — more than 40% of the forest — is designated as a conservation zone, said Emmanuel Olabode, project manager for the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which hires the rangers and acts as the government’s conservation partner.

    The rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are thought to live and is a UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserve, where communities work toward sustainable development.

    “The rangers’ work is crucial to conservation because this is one of the last viable habitats where we have forest elephants in Nigeria, and if the entire area is degraded, we will not have elephants again,” Olabode said.

    For decades, the conservation foundation has assisted in forest management, but hiring former hunters has proven to be a game changer, particularly in the fight against poaching.

    “The strategy is to win the ring leaders from the anti-conservation side over for conservation purposes, with a better understanding and life that discourages them from their destructive acts against the forest resources and have them bring others to the conservation side,” said Memudu Adebayo, the foundation’s technical director.

    For poacher-turned-ranger Abiodun, it offered a new life. He started helping the foundation protect the forest in 2017 as a volunteer but realized he needed to fully commit to the solution.

    “Back then, I used to see students on excursions, researchers and tourists visit the forest to learn about the trees and animals I was killing as a hunter,” he said. “So, I said to myself, ‘If I continue to kill these animals for money to eat now, my own children will not see them if they also want to learn about them in the future.’”

    He said he now sees “animals that I would have killed to sell in the past, but I cannot because I know better and would rather protect them.”

    Abiodun’s team consists of 10 rangers, which they say is too few for the size of the forest. They established Elephants’ Camp, named for rangers’ top priority, deep within the protected part of the forest, where they take turns staying each week and organize patrols.

    The camp has a small solar power system and a round room where the rangers can rest amid the sounds of birds and insects chirping and wind blowing through the trees. Outside, the rangers plan their work at a large wooden table beneath a perforated zinc roof.

    The roughly hourlong journey from their administrative office to the camp is difficult, with a road that is impassable for vehicles and even motorcycles when it rains. But once there, ecologist Babajide Agboola, who mentors the rangers and helps document new species, declared, “This is peace.”

    Despite the physically taxing work, Adebayo of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation said the rangers have a better life than as poachers, where they could spend 10 days hunting with no guarantee of success.

    “Now, they have a salary and other benefits, in addition to doing something good for the environment and humanity, and they can put food on the table more comfortably,” Adebayo said.

    The rangers have installed motion-detecting cameras on trees in the most protected part of the forest to capture footage of animals and poachers. In a 24-second video recorded in May, one elephant picks up food with its trunk near a tree at night. Other images from 2021 and 2023 also show elephants.

    Poaching has not been eradicated in the forest, but rangers said they have made significant progress. They say the main challenges are now illegal settlements of cocoa farmers and loggers that are growing in the conservation areas, where it is not permitted.

    “We want the government to support our conservation effort to preserve what remains of the forest,” said another poacher-turned-ranger, Johnson Adejayin. “We see people we arrested and handed over to the government return to the forest to continue illegal logging and farming. They’d just move to another part.”

    One official from the government’s forestry department said they were not authorized to comment and another did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.

    Rangers implore communities in the forest, particularly farmers, to avoid clearing land and plant new trees. However, they called the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations critical to success.

    “We are losing Omo Forest at a very alarming rate,” said Agboola, the ecologist, who has been visiting for eight years. “When the forest is destroyed, biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. When you cut down trees, you cut down a climate change mitigation solution, which fuels carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.”

    ___

    This is the first in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

    A Nigerian forest and its animals are under threat. Poachers have become rangers to protect both

    [ad_1]

    OMO FOREST RESERVE, Nigeria — Sunday Abiodun, carrying a sword in one hand and balancing a musket over his other shoulder, cleared weeds on a footpath leading to a cluster of new trees.

    Until recently, it had been a spot to grow cocoa, one of several plots that Abiodun and his fellow forest rangers destroyed after farmers cut down trees to make way for the crop used to make chocolate — driving away birds in the process.

    “When we see such a farm during patrol, we destroy it and plant trees instead,” Abiodun said.

    It could take more than 10 years for the trees to mature, he said, with the hope they ease biodiversity loss and restore habitat for birds.

    He was not always enthusiastic about conservation. Before becoming a ranger, Abiodun, 40, killed animals for a living, including endangered species like pangolin. He is now part of a team working to protect Nigeria’s Omo Forest Reserve, which is facing expanding deforestation from excessive logging, uncontrolled farming and poaching.

    The tropical rainforest, 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of Lagos in Nigeria’s southwest, is home to threatened species including African elephants, pangolins, white-throated monkeys, yellow-casqued hornbills, long-crested eagles and chimpanzees, according to UNESCO.

    To protect animals and their habitat, 550 square kilometers — more than 40% of the forest — is designated as a conservation zone, said Emmanuel Olabode, project manager for the nonprofit Nigerian Conservation Foundation, which hires the rangers and acts as the government’s conservation partner.

    The rangers are focused on nearly 6.5 square kilometers of strictly protected land where elephants are thought to live and is a UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserve, where communities work toward sustainable development.

    “The rangers’ work is crucial to conservation because this is one of the last viable habitats where we have forest elephants in Nigeria, and if the entire area is degraded, we will not have elephants again,” Olabode said.

    For decades, the conservation foundation has assisted in forest management, but hiring former hunters has proven to be a game changer, particularly in the fight against poaching.

    “The strategy is to win the ring leaders from the anti-conservation side over for conservation purposes, with a better understanding and life that discourages them from their destructive acts against the forest resources and have them bring others to the conservation side,” said Memudu Adebayo, the foundation’s technical director.

    For poacher-turned-ranger Abiodun, it offered a new life. He started helping the foundation protect the forest in 2017 as a volunteer but realized he needed to fully commit to the solution.

    “Back then, I used to see students on excursions, researchers and tourists visit the forest to learn about the trees and animals I was killing as a hunter,” he said. “So, I said to myself, ‘If I continue to kill these animals for money to eat now, my own children will not see them if they also want to learn about them in the future.’”

    He said he now sees “animals that I would have killed to sell in the past, but I cannot because I know better and would rather protect them.”

    Abiodun’s team consists of 10 rangers, which they say is too few for the size of the forest. They established Elephants’ Camp, named for rangers’ top priority, deep within the protected part of the forest, where they take turns staying each week and organize patrols.

    The camp has a small solar power system and a round room where the rangers can rest amid the sounds of birds and insects chirping and wind blowing through the trees. Outside, the rangers plan their work at a large wooden table beneath a perforated zinc roof.

    The roughly hourlong journey from their administrative office to the camp is difficult, with a road that is impassable for vehicles and even motorcycles when it rains. But once there, ecologist Babajide Agboola, who mentors the rangers and helps document new species, declared, “This is peace.”

    Despite the physically taxing work, Adebayo of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation said the rangers have a better life than as poachers, where they could spend 10 days hunting with no guarantee of success.

    “Now, they have a salary and other benefits, in addition to doing something good for the environment and humanity, and they can put food on the table more comfortably,” Adebayo said.

    The rangers have installed motion-detecting cameras on trees in the most protected part of the forest to capture footage of animals and poachers. In a 24-second video recorded in May, one elephant picks up food with its trunk near a tree at night. Other images from 2021 and 2023 also show elephants.

    Poaching has not been eradicated in the forest, but rangers said they have made significant progress. They say the main challenges are now illegal settlements of cocoa farmers and loggers that are growing in the conservation areas, where it is not permitted.

    “We want the government to support our conservation effort to preserve what remains of the forest,” said another poacher-turned-ranger, Johnson Adejayin. “We see people we arrested and handed over to the government return to the forest to continue illegal logging and farming. They’d just move to another part.”

    One official from the government’s forestry department said they were not authorized to comment and another did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.

    Rangers implore communities in the forest, particularly farmers, to avoid clearing land and plant new trees. However, they called the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations critical to success.

    “We are losing Omo Forest at a very alarming rate,” said Agboola, the ecologist, who has been visiting for eight years. “When the forest is destroyed, biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost. When you cut down trees, you cut down a climate change mitigation solution, which fuels carbon accumulation in the atmosphere.”

    ___

    This is the first in a series of stories from the Omo Forest Reserve.

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Researchers have identified a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

    Researchers have identified a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

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    Researchers are howling with delight after discovering a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

    FILE – A male grey wolf leads his four pups to explore their habitat at the Oakland Zoo in Oakland, Calif., on July 1, 2019. A new pack of gray wolves has shown up California’s Sierra Nevada, several hundred miles away from any other known population of the endangered species, wildlife officials announced Friday, Aug. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Ben Margot, File)

    The Associated Press

    SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — A new pack of gray wolves has shown up in California’s Sierra Nevada, several hundred miles away from any other known population of the endangered species, wildlife officials announced Friday.

    It’s a discovery to make researchers howl with delight, given that the native species was hunted to extinction in California in the 1920s. Only in the past decade or so have a few gray wolves wandered back into the state from out-of-state packs.

    A report of a wolf seen last month in Sequoia National Forest in Tulare County led researchers to spot tracks, and collect DNA samples from fur and droppings, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

    Researchers concluded that there is a new pack of at least five wolves that weren’t previously known to live in California: an adult female and her four offspring.

    The pack is at least 200 miles (321.8 kilometers) from the next-nearest pack, which is in Lassen Park in northeastern California, wildlife officials said. A third pack is also based in Northern California.

    Gray wolves are protected by both state and federal law under the Endangered Species Act. It is illegal to hurt or kill them.

    DNA testing found that the adult female in the new pack is a direct descendant of a wolf known as OR7 that in 2011 crossed the state line from Oregon — the first wolf in nearly a century to make California part of its range, the Department of Fish and Wildlife said.

    That wolf later returned to Oregon and is believed to have died there, officials said.

    Researchers didn’t find any trace of an adult male in the new pack but genetic profiles of the offspring suggest they are descended from the Lassen Pack, wildlife officials said.

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  • Researchers have identified a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

    Researchers have identified a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

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    Researchers are howling with delight after discovering a new pack of endangered gray wolves in California

    FILE – A male grey wolf leads his four pups to explore their habitat at the Oakland Zoo in Oakland, Calif., on July 1, 2019. A new pack of gray wolves has shown up California’s Sierra Nevada, several hundred miles away from any other known population of the endangered species, wildlife officials announced Friday, Aug. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Ben Margot, File)

    The Associated Press

    SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — A new pack of gray wolves has shown up in California’s Sierra Nevada, several hundred miles away from any other known population of the endangered species, wildlife officials announced Friday.

    It’s a discovery to make researchers howl with delight, given that the native species was hunted to extinction in California in the 1920s. Only in the past decade or so have a few gray wolves wandered back into the state from out-of-state packs.

    A report of a wolf seen last month in Sequoia National Forest in Tulare County led researchers to spot tracks, and collect DNA samples from fur and droppings, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

    Researchers concluded that there is a new pack of at least five wolves that weren’t previously known to live in California: an adult female and her four offspring.

    The pack is at least 200 miles (321.8 kilometers) from the next-nearest pack, which is in Lassen Park in northeastern California, wildlife officials said. A third pack is also based in Northern California.

    Gray wolves are protected by both state and federal law under the Endangered Species Act. It is illegal to hurt or kill them.

    DNA testing found that the adult female in the new pack is a direct descendant of a wolf known as OR7 that in 2011 crossed the state line from Oregon — the first wolf in nearly a century to make California part of its range, the Department of Fish and Wildlife said.

    That wolf later returned to Oregon and is believed to have died there, officials said.

    Researchers didn’t find any trace of an adult male in the new pack but genetic profiles of the offspring suggest they are descended from the Lassen Pack, wildlife officials said.

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  • An Adorable Way to Study How Kids Get Each Other Sick

    An Adorable Way to Study How Kids Get Each Other Sick

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    At the start of 2022, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus blazed across the United States, Seema Lakdawala was in Pittsburgh, finalizing plans to open a brand-new day care. She had found the perfect facility and signed the stack of paperwork; she had assembled a hodgepodge of plushies, puzzles, and toys. It was the perfect setup, one that “I’ve been dreaming about for years,” Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. She couldn’t help but swell with pride, later that spring, when she ushered in her establishments’ first attendees: five young ferrets—including one deliberately infected with the flu.

    Over the next several months, Lakdawala and her colleagues watched several cohorts of ferrets ping-pong flu viruses back and forth as they romped and wrestled and frolicked inside of a shared playpen. The researchers meticulously logged the ferrets’ movements; they took note of the surfaces and other animals that each one touched. Their early findings, now being prepared for publication in a scientific journal, could help researchers figure out how flu viruses most efficiently spread in group settings—not just among ferrets, but among human kids.

    Aerosols, droplets, face-to-face contact, contaminated surfaces—there are plenty of ways for flu viruses to spread. But the nitty-gritty of flu transmission remains “pretty much a black box,” says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. Despite decades of research, “we really don’t know the relative importance of each potential route.” Now, though, ferrets in playpens could help researchers to tease out those dynamics—and even, someday, to design flu-blocking measures for bona fide day cares.

    Ferrets have long been the “gold standard for influenza infection and transmission,” says Nicole Rockey, an environmental engineer at Duke University who led the experiments with Lakdawala. The animals’ airway architecture is uncannily similar to ours, and unlike most lab mice, ferrets are vulnerable to catching and passing on flu viruses—even developing the same coughy, sniffly symptoms that so many humans do. But most flu-transmission experiments in ferrets remain limited to artificial circumstances: pairs of animals in tiny cages with dividers between them, where scientists ogle them inhaling each other’s air for days or even weeks. That’s not how animals catch one another’s infections in the wild, and it’s certainly not how human outbreaks unfold. “We don’t interact with each other for 48 hours straight through a perforated wall,” Rockey told me.

    A giant playpen outfitted with toys, air samplers, and video cameras isn’t exactly a natural habitat for a ferret. But the setup does tap into many of the animals’ impish instincts. Domesticated by humans over thousands of years, ferrets “are a very playful species, and they love to be social,” says Alice Dancer, an animal-welfare researcher at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College. That makes them great models for not just flu transmission, but flu transmission among kids, who are thought to be major drivers of outbreaks. In their day care, the ferrets squabble over toys, clamber up play structures, and canoodle plush snakes; they chase one another around, and nap in big piles when they get tuckered out; they exchange affectionate nuzzles, bonks, and little play bites. Every interaction represents a potential transmission event; so, too, do the surfaces they touch, and the shared pockets of air from which they all breathe.

    Read: The flu may never be the same

    Already, the researchers have collected some results that, Lakdawala told me, are “changing the way I think about transmission a little bit.” In one early experiment, involving an infected animal cavorting with four uninfected ones, they were surprised to find that the ferret with the least direct contact with the flu “donor” was the only “recipient” in the room who got sick. It seemed counterintuitive, Lakdawala told me, until video footage revealed that the newly sickened recipient had been copying everything that the donor did—chewing the toys it chewed, rolling the balls it rolled, swiping the surfaces it swiped. It was as if the first ferret was leaving a trail of infectious breadcrumbs for the second one to snarf. If that finding holds up in other experiments, which the researchers are analyzing now, it could suggest that contaminated surfaces, or fomites, are playing a larger-than-expected role in passing the virus around, Rockey told me.

    Another of the team’s early findings points to a similar notion. When the researchers cranked up the ventilation in their ferret day cares, hoping to clear virus particles out of the air, they found that the same proportion of uninfected ferrets ended up catching the virus. This was disappointing, but not a total shock given how paws-on ferrets—and kids, for that matter—are with one another and their surroundings. It didn’t matter if the air in the room was being exchanged more than once every three minutes. Whenever the ferrets had their run of the room, the researchers would find virus particles smeared on the toys, the snack station, and the playpen walls.

    Ventilation wasn’t totally useless: More air exchanges, the team found, did seem to reduce the concentration of flu genetic material in the air, and the ferrets who got infected under those conditions were slower to start shedding the virus—a hint, Lakdawala thinks, that they might have taken in a lower infectious dose. Among humans, that might translate into less severe cases of disease, Gordon told me, though that would need to be confirmed.

    Whatever upshots Rockey and Lakdawala’s ferret findings might have for human day cares won’t necessarily apply to other venues. In offices, hospitals, and even schools for older kids, people are generally a lot less tactile with one another, and a lot better versed on hygiene. Plus, adult bodies just aren’t built like kids’, says Cécile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. Their airways are bigger, stronger, and more developed—and some experiments suggest that, for at least some respiratory viruses, the older and larger people are, the more infectious aerosols they might expel. For adults, ventilation may matter all the more.

    Lakdawala and her colleagues are still mulling some other interventions that might work better for ferrets, and eventually kids: humidifiers, air purifiers, targeted cleaning, maybe even keeping individuals from crowding too closely into a portion of the playpen. (They don’t plan to experiment with handwashing or masking; imagine the difficulty of strapping an N95 to a ferret’s face.) Lakdawala is also mulling whether surfaces made of copper—which her team has shown can render flu viruses inactive within minutes—could play a protective role.

    But everything that happens in the ferrets’ playpens will still come with caveats. “It’s still an animal model, at the end of the day,” Viboud told me. For all the similarities between the ferret airway and ours, the way their little noses and snouts are shaped could affect how they cough and sneeze. And the researchers haven’t yet studied spread among ferrets with preexisting immunity to flu, which some day-care attendees will have. Ferrets are also more inclined to bite, wrestle, and defecate wherever they please than the average (potty-trained) kid.

    Still, for the most part, Lakdawala delights in how childlike the ferrets can be. They’re affectionate and mischievous; they seem to bubble with energy and glee. After discovering that the air-sampling robot stationed in the center of their day care was mobile, several of the ferrets began to take it for rides. In watching and sharing the footage at conferences, Lakdawala has received one piece of feedback, over and over again: Oh yeah, parents tell her. My kids do that too.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • US judge to hear legal battle over Nevada mustang roundup where 31 wild horses have died

    US judge to hear legal battle over Nevada mustang roundup where 31 wild horses have died

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    RENO, Nev. — A legal battle over the U.S. government’s ongoing capture of thousands of wild horses in Nevada where 31 mustangs have died in a weekslong roundup goes before a judge Wednesday as opponents try to prove it’s illegal and should be stopped.

    Federal land managers said in new court filings ahead of the Reno hearing that the deaths among 2,500 horses gathered since July 9 are an unfortunate — but expected — part of necessary efforts to cull the size of large herds.

    They said the free-roaming animals pose a threat to the ecological health of public rangeland.

    Horse advocates said the deaths were unnecessary, resulting from inhumane tactics being used to expedite removals from public lands where pregnant mares and young foals are being chased in summer heat across rocky, high-desert into makeshift corrals.

    U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks scheduled Wednesday’s hearing to get details from both sides as he considers the non-profit Wild Horse Education’s bid for a temporary restraining order halting the gather in northeast Nevada scheduled to run through Aug. 22.

    Government lawyers said in court filings Monday the horse advocates are trying to inflame emotions with photos and videos of injured mustangs trying to flee helicopters and wranglers on horseback. One with a broken leg was chased for 35 minutes before it was euthanized.

    “Deaths are tragic, but they are a known and anticipated part of wild horse gathers that must be weighed against the harm the same horses face under drought and overpopulation conditions if the gather cannot be completed,” Justice Department lawyers representing the bureau wrote.

    The agency says the 31 deaths are within the average mortality rate of 1% and 1.2% for wild horse gathers conducted from 2010-19.

    “Plaintiffs list the number of deaths that have occurred during the gathers but fail to mention the thousands of horses that have been gathered safely,” government lawyers wrote.

    “Despite plaintiffs’ sensational allegations, there is nothing out of the ordinary … and nothing to suggest the conditions of these gathers have been unusually dangerous to the horses,” they added.

    Horse advocates said the mustangs have been made scapegoats for damage most-often caused by taxpayer-subsidized cattle grazing the same limited forage on the high-desert range at much higher numbers.

    Among other things, they said in a lawsuit filed July 26 the roundup halfway between Reno and Salt Lake City is illegally based on an outdated environmental review that fails to reflect current conditions on the range. They said it also ignores evidence the herds are still in the midst of foaling season when the use of helicopters is largely prohibited.

    Democratic U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, of Nevada, is pushing legislation in Congress to outlaw the use of helicopters altogether.

    The lawsuit also claims the agency is failing to comply with requirements that the public be allowed to witness the roundups, frequently parking trucks and trailers to obscure distant views from the designated observation area.

    Above all, the lawsuit argues the roundup violates a 1971 U.S. law that mandates that the animals be treated humanely.

    “The physical and emotional toll of watching BLM wrap abuse in layers of bureaucracy and simply take no real action to stop inflicting unnecessary suffering on these sensitive and family-oriented beings is sickening,” said Laura Leigh, founder of the Nevada-based Wild Horse Education.

    Leigh says the bureau has erroneously concluded that peak foaling season is the same for all herds — from March 1 through June 30. During this period the agency grounds helicopters to minimize potential harm to the young foals.

    Leigh said she’s documented seasonal distinctions throughout western rangelands in 10 states. She said some begin as early as late January and others continue through September.

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  • A dog hit the pedal on a golf cart and ran over a 4-year-old, who was uninjured | CNN

    A dog hit the pedal on a golf cart and ran over a 4-year-old, who was uninjured | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A fire crew’s dog jumped on the pedal of a golf cart which then struck a 4-year-old Michigan girl, leaving her with no visible injuries, firefighters said.

    Bella, an arson dog, jumped down from the seat of a golf cart and landed on the accelerator pedal, sending the cart toward people attending a Friday night festival, the Westland Fire and Rescue Department said in news release.

    Firefighters attempted to gain control of the cart and steer it away from people attending the event. Before they were able to stop the vehicle it struck a 4-year-old girl, running over her left leg, the fire department said.

    Paramedics assessed the child and found no visible injuries. Her mother refused further treatment and an emergency room visit, according to the news release.

    Ten minutes after the accident, the 4-year-old girl resumed eating her popcorn and jumping in a bounce house, the news release said.

    Although in this case the child was uninjured, more than 6,500 children across the country are injured by golf carts each year, according to a study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Over half of these injuries happen to children 12 years and younger.

    Bella will be returning to the cart “with extra precautions in place,” according to the fire department.

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  • A market slaughtering dogs was a top tourist attraction. Then a video was leaked

    A market slaughtering dogs was a top tourist attraction. Then a video was leaked

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    The Tomohon Extreme Market was once a top tourist attraction in the Indonesian province of North Sulawesi — a live animal market filled with everything from fileted pythons to skewered bats and rats.

    But the market drew international condemnation in 2018 after animal activists shot videos of dogs and cats being brutally beaten and blowtorched alive.

    Activists urged major travel companies to stop recommending the market as a tourism site, said Lola Webber, Humane Society International’s director of campaigns.

    Companies like Tripadvisor swiftly complied, she said.

    But banning the dog and cat meat trade — part of a long-held tradition among the local Minahasa people — was significantly harder, she said.

    “We were told by many for many years, you’ll never change North Sulawesi, you’ll never change Tomohon. it is impossible,” Webber said.

    They were wrong.

    A ‘huge win’

    In July, Tomohon’s mayor, Caroll Senduk, signed a law banning dog and cat meat trading at the market, and the market’s meat traders signed an agreement to permanently stop selling, slaughtering and trafficking dogs and cats, according to Humane Society International.

    This was a “huge win” for activists, said Webber, who have been working together under the name Dog Meat Free Indonesia since 2017 to change the “immense cruelty and suffering” on display at the market.

    After the ban went into effect, 25 dogs and three cats were rescued. They were taken to a sanctuary run by Animal Friends Manado Indonesia for quarantine, after which they will hopefully be placed in their “forever homes, either within Indonesia or internationally,” said Humane Society International’s Lola Webber

    Source: Humane Society International

    “It’s an enormous victory for animal protection and literally the thousands and thousands of dogs and cats that are spared from Tomohon market every month,” she said.

    The traders were given a “small grant” to stop participating in the trade, she told CNBC Travel, while the coalition of activists lobbied the government about the disease risks of live animal markets, which ranges from viruses like Covid-19 to rabies.

    Rabies is endemic in much of Indonesia, including the island of Sulawesi, according to the World Health Organization.

    Next steps

    The ban of dog and cat meat in the Tomohon market is a step in the right direction, but problems with the trade don’t end there, said Michael Patching, chairperson of Impetus Animal Welfare.

    One issue is an influx of stray animals, he said. “Bali dealt with this issue by poisoning stray dogs, which ended up being just as bad, if not worse, than those that have been subjected to the dog meat trade.”

    A live dog can cost up to $40, and one that has already been killed is priced from $2.30 to $4 per kilogram, said Frank Delano Manus of Animal Friends Manado Indonesia.

    Source: Humane Society International

    To combat this, the Dog Meat Free Indonesia coalition is supporting programs to spay, neuter and vaccinate dogs and cats in Indonesia, said Webber.

    She said she hopes to use the Tomohon market ban as a precedent to work with government, market management, meat traders and the public in other provinces where dog meat is eaten too.

    Polling suggests only 5% of Indonesia’s population has ever tried it, said Webber. Yet there are hot spots where it’s eaten, like Java’s Surakarta (or Solo) and North Sulawesi, the latter being a predominantly Christian enclave in a Muslim-majority nation. (Like pigs, dogs are viewed as being unclean, and therefore not suitable for consumption, in the Muslim faith.)

    A timeline of Indonesia’s dog meat trade

    • 2017: Bali cracks down on dog meat vendors
    • 2019: The regency of Karanganyar in central Java bans the dog trade
    • 2022: The city of Medan and the capital city of Jakarta ban dog meat
    • Today: Bans exist in 22 cities and regencies

    In those areas, activists raise public awareness of the cruelty of the trade and the trafficking that goes along with it, which often involves the theft of family pets.

    “We’ve interviewed so many people who’ve had their dogs and cats stolen,” Webber said.

    Poor governance

    Many activists who spoke to CNBC Travel said poor governance is the biggest hurdle to ending the dog and cat meat trade.

    Frank Delano Manus, an animal rights advocate at Animal Friends Manado Indonesia, said 95% of North Sulawesi’s exotic animal meat is sent from neighboring provinces — without government checks or quarantine regulations.

    Indonesian officials did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

    When his organization tried to ban the sale of snake and bat meat when the pandemic hit in 2020, it received a “flat response” from the government, he said.

    “When people ask me what’s the number one problem in Indonesia, I always say it’s the lack of law enforcement,” Manus told CNBC.

    Indonesia has a huge pet-loving community, said Webber, which includes the dog meat traders. “Every trader has a pet, at least one pet dog.”

    Source: Humane Society International

    The sale of dog meat is illegal other parts of Asia, including Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan. But the industry lives on in places like China and South Korea — and Vietnam.

    “While all the focus has been on South Korea, Indonesia and other countries, Vietnam’s dog and cat meat trade has continued to thrive,” said Rahul Sehgal, director of international advocacy at the Soi Dog Foundation, adding that “millions of signatures” on online petitions have not made a difference.

    Rescued animals being transported by members of the Humane Society International to a care and rehabilitation center on July 21, 2023, in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

    Source: Humane Society International

    “In Vietnam, every third shop is a pet grooming salon, every fifth shop is a pet supply store, but every twentieth shop is a slaughterhouse or a restaurant that is selling dog or cat meat,” he told CNBC, adding that it’s eaten for cultural, superstitious and medicinal purposes.

    “Just like how the Chinese use rhino horns or tiger bones for traditional medicine, cat bones are said to cure a host of illnesses like asthma,” he said. “But there is no scientific basis to this.”

    An opening for more travelers

    Though Tomohon Extreme Market was once marketed as a tourist attraction — and in some places, it still is — the dog and cat meat ban may bring in more travelers to North Sulawesi.

    In a Tripadvisor post on March 5, a user discusses reading about Sulawesi’s dog meat trade.

    The post states: “Well the next trip was going to be to Sulawesi, Indonesia … I don’t care what you eat, but torture should not be a part of it. Therefore I cannot in good conscience travel there.”

    A screenshot of a post on Tripadvisor in a forum discussing Sulawesi.

    Screen shot from Tripadvisor

    Negative media attention frustrated the dog meat traders, Webber said.

    “People would see it, and feel very strongly about it,” she said. “International tourists, national tourists, and locals themselves didn’t want to see that degree of brutality.”

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  • Texans Wrangle ‘Willy’ The Rodeo Goat Following Wild Weekslong Chase

    Texans Wrangle ‘Willy’ The Rodeo Goat Following Wild Weekslong Chase

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    HOUSTON (AP) — Willy the rodeo goat, who has lassoed the hearts of residents in a rural South Texas county ever since she escaped from an arena enclosure July 15, has been found.

    The elusive goat had hidden in sugar cane and corn fields, avoiding capture for weeks in Willacy County, about 300 miles (483 km) southwest of Houston. Residents searched for her on horses, all-terrain vehicles and by drone. Local businesses aided the search by donating 90 prizes and gifts worth $5,000 in total — including brisket, bales of hay and beef jerky — to be given to whoever found her.

    Ricardo Rojas III didn’t have to go far to find Willy. He and a friend caught the slippery goat on Monday in his backyard, about 1 mile (1.6 km) away from where she escaped.

    The 16-year-old high school junior and family friend Sammy Ambriz were fixing animal stalls on the teenager’s 10-acre (4-hectare) family property located between Raymondville and Lyford in deep South Texas when there was a Willy sighting.

    Neighbors had possibly seen the goat, so Rojas’ father told him to grab some ropes. Rojas used one of his family’s goats and its cries to try and lure Willy out of the heavily wooded area behind his family’s property.

    They soon spotted Willy coming out of the woods and chased her when she ran back into the trees, Rojas said. They cornered her, and both Rojas and Ambriz unsuccessfully tried to lasso Willy.

    “And then she started to run again. But luckily, we had a fence that was there, and she tried to hop the fence, but then her head got stuck in the fence,” Rojas said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Me and Sammy jumped on top of her. At that point, she wasn’t going nowhere.”

    Alison Savage, president of the Willacy County Livestock Show and Fair, said they believed Willy was getting enough to eat and drink while she was on the lam but worried that predators, including coyotes, might get her.

    “We had her checked over just to make sure that she is getting healthy,” Savage said. “We plan to let ol’ Miss Willy lead a very sweet life going forward.”

    When Willy first escaped, she hadn’t yet been named. During the search, the livestock show had been posting updates on its Facebook page, and an online poll on the page christened her Willy. Officials had not been sure whether Willy was a boy or girl, Savage said.

    People from around the U.S. had reached out asking for updates and sending their wishes for Willy’s safe return.

    The search also brought together many of Willacy County’s 20,000 residents, many who grow crops and raise livestock, as families went out to search for Willy.

    “I think it was very awesome that everybody was working together to try to find her,” said Rojas, who is splitting the prizes with Ambriz.

    The search has also been a boon for the livestock show; residents and businesses donated hundreds of dollars to make improvements to the nonprofit’s arena and other facilities.

    “Even a little rodeo goat is important and has shown us and taught us that we need to look after each other,” Savage said, “and we need to take care of one another, and together, there’s pretty much nothing we can’t do.”

    Follow Juan A. Lozano on the X platform: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

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