Quarantine keeps crime in check––for now ROME, CASTEL VOLTURNO, Italy––The deadly global COVID-19 pandemic, killing nearly 32,500 Italians to date, might if anything have made Castel Volturno, the unlikely spay/neuter hub of the nation, just a little bit safer. Certainly stay-at-home orders seem to have at least temporarily reduced the mob violence for which […]
Deaths in Tahiti: pit bull mayhem hits “tropical paradise”
Victim survived nuclear bomb tests, but not four Staffordshires and a bull terrier PAPEETE, Tahiti––Maria Liu Sing ép. Layoussaint, 87, was on May 12, 2020 torn apart by four American Staffordshire pit bulls and a bull terrier pit bull variant. She had survived World War II, the 1946 annexation of Polynesia by France, and 193 […]
Pit bull or hunting hounds? Who killed Elisa Pilarski & unborn child Enzo?
DNA data may decide which dog did the killing, but maybe not who was at fault SOISSONS, France––Pack hunters and pit bull enthusiasts are pitted against each other in a melodrama gripping French media since November 16, 2019, when someone’s dog or dogs killed Elisa Pilarski, 29, six months pregnant. Anxiously awaited DNA test results […]
Iconic animal use events fall to COVID-19: “Running of the bulls” is latest
“Social distancing” also shuts down SeaWorld, seal hunt, fur auctions, Kentucky Derby, & the carriage horses in Central Park PAMPLONA, Spain ––The 700-year-old Festival of San Fermin, featuring bullfights and the “running of the bulls” through the cobbled streets of the oldest part of Pamplona, Spain, was on April 21, 2020 indefinitely postponed due […]
Add to COVID-19 toll expanded hunting on U.S. Wildlife Refuges
Trump administration appointees open more federal refuges to hunting than last three administrations combined WASHINGTON D.C.––Opponents of hunting might imagine that Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service chief Aurelia Skipwith waited until the public was distracted by soaring daily death tolls from the COVID-19 global pandemic to announce the biggest-ever […]
COVID-19: What can wildlife management teach us?
No, it is not “shoot the victims”! SEATTLE––Perhaps the most startling statistic pertaining to the global spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus is the statistic almost nobody mentions: the ratio of compensatory versus additive mortality. What’s that? It is not that as of March 10, 2020 there are still only about 140,000 COVID-19 cases of […]
Science races law to end culling seven billion male chicks a year
No more fingers up chicks’ anal vents PARIS, France; BERLIN, Germany––Racing to appear to be ahead of egg industry science, French agriculture minister Didier Guillaume on January 28, 2020 announced that his administration would ban mass culling of male chicks and castration of piglets without anesthetic. “From the end of 2021, nothing will be […]
Pit bull suspected of killing Elisa Pilarski struck twice more in five days
French fatality, still under investigation, echoes & contrasts with U.S. cases BEAUVAIS, OISE, France; CLEARCREEK TOWNSHIP, Ohio; PORTSMOUTH, Virginia; ASHEVILLE, North Carolina––Curtis, the pit bull suspected of killing Elisa Pilarski in the Retz Forest near Soissons, France, on November 16, 2019, also injured her fiancé Christopher Ellul at the police station on the evening of […]
Bird bloodbath over Britain & Scotland: regulatory failures, royal hypocrisy
“General licenses” mean open season on 22 non-game species LONDON, Edinburgh––Birds are in steep decline over Europe, as they are over the U.S. and Canada, reports the British-based organization BirdLife International, monitoring bird populations since 1922––but the chief cause of the European bird crash appears to be simply that hunters, including the British royal family, […]
Why vultures are not circling over the drought-parched world
It isn’t that vultures don’t feel the threat from global warming GABORONE, Botswana––Scarce over much of drought-parched India, Central Asia, and Africa, vultures still converge over dead livestock and wildlife in Botswana, stripping the corpses of even elephants and hippos down to the bones within hours––but for how much longer? The Botswana Department of […]