Animals 24-7

Dogs, cats, horses, wildlife, zoonoses, & nature

Rare Aussie animals save themselves, no thanks to Compound 1080

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Brush-tailed rock wallabies & long-nosed potoroos need habitat,  poison drops CANBERRA,  ADELAIDE,  MELBOURNE,  Australia––Investigators are finding,  in the wake of bushfires that ravaged protected habitat right around the forested coastal perimeter of Australia,  that many rare Australian animals apparently know how to save themselves,  with or without human help. More than a billion animals are […]

“Dog breeder from Dallas” directing Trump COVID-19 response?

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Labradoodle breeding qualifications as questionable as COVID-19 accomplishments             WASHINGTON D.C.––“No,  the Trump administration did not put a professional dog breeder from Dallas in charge of COVID-19 response,”  huffed Todd J. Gillman,  Washington Bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News,  on April 23,  2020, sounding just a bit defensive of Brian Harrison,  37,  a fellow Texan. Contradicting […]

COVID-19: seldom has animal testing offered so little to so many

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Still no animal models, three months into global crisis             BEIJING,  WASHINGTON D.C.––A hint of the desperation of practitioners of traditional animal-based biomedical research to contribute something of relevance to the global fight against COVID-19 was posted late on March 18,  2019 by the online periodical Live Science. “When exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 […]

Baboons on the run expose Down Under biomedical research

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Male baboon briefly evades vasectomy             SYDNEY,  Australia––A week ago most Aussies might not have known the Australian National Baboon Colony from Parliament.  A week from now similar confusion may reign. On February 24,  2020,  however,  three Australian National Baboon Colony inmates touched off a national debate over the ethics […]

Poisoning Australia in the name of wildlife recovery after bushfire losses

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And kangaroos shot,  koala trees bulldozed             MELBOURNE,  CANBERRA, SYDNEY,  BRISBANE––Six months of bushfires ravaging Australian coastal forests and grasslands stretching into parts of the Outback are reportedly almost at an end. The last two dozen fires in New South Wales and a comparable number left in Victoria state are smoldering on at the lowest […]

Helping animals through the Australian firestorm

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Reports from 25 of the hundreds of animal aid charities working in the hot zones CANBERRA,  Australian Capital Territories––More than 100 wildfires raging in Australian coastal forests and wooded parts of the Australian interior in September 2019 exploded beyond immediate hope of control and burst into global consciousness during the first days of 2020,  splitting […]

Fire & ice puts Australian koalas and Icelandic horses at urgent risk

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Songwriter Joni Mitchell in 1982 recommended “50/50 fire and ice” as the best response to a crisis.  That isn’t working for either Icelandic horses or koalas.              REYKJAVIK, Iceland;  SYDNEY, Australia––Eco-disasters afflicting Icelandic horses and Australian koalas starkly illustrate extreme and contrasting effects of global warming as 2019 comes to an end. Hundreds of Icelandic […]

Is Down Under biological warfare killing bunnies across the Pacific?

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Spreading disease by air is much easier than containing it by any method             LANGLEY, Washington––About sixty feral Belgian hares, long beloved village pets in Langley,  Washington,  may be the latest casualties of deliberate releases of the rabbit hemorrhagic disease RHD-1 in Australia and New Zealand,  8,000 and 7,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean,  respectively. […]

Livestock shipment to Middle East goes sideways; to Hawaii, goes backward

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Drowned sheep & asphixiated cattle result from opposite approaches to maximizing profit MILILANI, Hawaii––Compared to the drowning deaths of more than 14,350 sheep on November 24,  2019 aboard the capsized Queen Hind in the port of Midia,  Romania,  the deaths of 21 Angus heifers aboard a Young Brothers barge en route from Honolulu to Kauai,  […]

Cruelty charges filed against Aussie live sheep shippers––a first!

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Shipping company already lost live export license             PERTH,  Australia––Cruelty charges were on July 31,  2019 filed against two former directors of the live animal shipping company Emanuel Exports over the August 2017 deaths of more than 2,400 sheep from heat stress aboard the Awassi Express.             The sheep were in transit to slaughter in […]