Tag Archives: animals

Zebra-Scented Collars On Cattle Prevent Sleeping Sickness – Impacts On Land Use Are Good & Bad

Tanzanian Zebra . Image credit: National Geographic, excerpted. Researchers at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology have developed a cattle collar which will be tested on Masai herds subject to the biting tsetse fly, and hence prone to catching sleeping sickness — “up to three million cattle die each year from the disease.” SciDevNet reports that there could be conservation benefits if the c… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Zebra-Scented Collars On Cattle Prevent Sleeping Sickness – Impacts On Land Use Are Good & Bad

Whaling & Dolphin Hunting Not About What’s Being Killed But Who

Humpback whale breaching, photo: Christopher DiNottia . Continuing on a theme that keeps coming up on TreeHugger, the fact that an increasing number of scientists believe that cetaceans have levels of self-awareness and societal development that they should be granted rights similar to human rights : There… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Whaling & Dolphin Hunting Not About What’s Being Killed But Who

Superhero Animals Saving Other Animals (Slideshow with Videos)

Photo via Mabels When it comes to daring rescues, most news focuses on those acts of bravery committed by humans — but the animal world has heroes too. The amazing feats on these pages — from a lion saving a baby rhino, to a dog saving a cat, to a dolphin saving a whale — show just how far the animal kingdom will go to help one of their own.

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Superhero Animals Saving Other Animals (Slideshow with Videos)

Giant Crocodile Devours a Shark as Tourists Look On

Photo via The Daily Telegraph On what otherwise might have been an average excursion through Australia’s Kakadu National Park , tourists were treated to an epic battle between two of nature’s most ferocious predators , a crocodile and a shark. There’s no saying just how long the pair were at it for, but by the time the tour boats arrived on … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Giant Crocodile Devours a Shark as Tourists Look On

Bird Protection Clashes with Bride Prospects in India

A Great Indian bustard. Photo via Madras Ramblings . When the animal a national park was designated to protect hasn’t been seen in the area for 16 years, is it worth maintaining the land as a sanctuary? Residents of the villages around the Karera bird sanctuary in India say no — and argue that their economic, and marital, prospects are being hindered by their inability to use the land devoted to the Great Indian bustard …. Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Bird Protection Clashes with Bride Prospects in India

Urgent Priorities and Common Sense in the Gulf

The ramifications of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have not even begun to surface. We will be dealing with the ecological damage for years as the prime nesting grounds for shrimp, oysters and countless other varieties of sea life are destroyed by the leak at the bottom of the ocean that nobody seems to be able to deal with. The economic damage is another entirely different animal that is going to rock the Gulf Coast and head inland with reverberations that will be seriously felt around the whole country. The Obama administration is completely lost on how to deal with the spill and the president seems helpless except to appoint commissions and place blame anywhere except 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I know that an oil leak at this depth has never had to be dealt with before and is a seriously difficult thing to fix, but somewhere on this earth, somebody knows how to fix it and it’s high time to find him or her. The other part of the equation, the cleanup, is a horse of a different color and there are literally hundreds of ways to go about that, practical and simple methods that seem to either go over or under Obama’s head. I’ve seen demonstrations on television using things as mundane as the hay I feed my animals to clean up the oil. There are fabrics that have been developed that soak up the oil and reject the water and there is any number of machines people have come forward with, but none of them are appearing on the horrible scene on the Gulf Coast beaches. Why is Obama afraid to let common citizens test the methods they’ve come up with, what could it possibly hurt. Let’s just use a little cowboy logic in this situation. Bring all these people with ideas to the Gulf Coast, give them all a stretch of water to work with and see which ones work the best. That’s so simple and what can it hurt? Let the people try out their ideas. If they don’t work they can simply be disregarded without any harm to anybody. If they work the can be deployed en mass. I know the walls of the White House are covered with ivy league diplomas and Nobel Prizes, but there isn’t enough common sense in that bunch to change a spark plug. It’s time for the politicians to stop using this crisis for an excuse to raise our taxes and advance their confounded socialist agenda. It’s time for them to get out of the way and let the people with the practical ideas have a go at cleaning up this mess. And by the way President Obama, the moratorium on drilling in the Gulf is nothing less than pure dumb. You’re taking the last vestige of economic hope away from people who have no way left to make a living because no matter how much money British Petroleum ponies up, it’s going to run out way before those shrimp and oyster beds come back and long before the tourists start streaming back to the Gulf Coast. Stopping the drilling is nothing less than cheap political pandering and another sign of the total lack of experience in your administration. Just more proof of your lack of understanding and just how baffled you are by your job. You’re lost, Mr. President. Why don’t you admit it and look for some help among the great, unwashed masses. I think you’d find that we’re pretty dern good people who have been solving problems for generations. Maybe you can’t ‘plug the damn hole” but you can get out of the way and let some people with the common sense your administration lacks come in and do something right for a change. And believe me, it would really be a change.

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Urgent Priorities and Common Sense in the Gulf

Sharks Carry Drug-Resistant Bacteria That Could Infect Humans

Photo via Serge Melki Scientists have found that sharks swimming off the Florida Keys and Belize carry a significant amount of drug-resistant bacteria strains that they worry could one day impact humans. In all, bacteria resistant to 13 types of anti-bodies — including penicillin — were found among the sharks sampled, and because the sample populations were somewhat small, the researchers think this could be an underestimate for the number of resistant strains. But it might be humans’ fault the sharks are carrying the strains in the first place. … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Sharks Carry Drug-Resistant Bacteria That Could Infect Humans

Restaurant Offers Lion Burgers. They’re Grrrrross!

Photo via Tristan In an odd attempt to somehow celebrate the World Cup , a restaurant in Arizona has added one of Africa’s most noble creatures to the menu by offering a hamburger made from real lion meat. As you might expect, serving the king of the jungle as a burger has elicited strong reactions from the public, but the restaurant owner insists … Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Restaurant Offers Lion Burgers. They’re Grrrrross!

Michael Jackson Left Behind A Legacy Of Unfinished Projects

A year after his death, we’ve seen ‘This Is It’ and heard the leaked songs, but where’s that robot hotel? By Gil Kaufman Michael Jackson Photo: Getty Images In the twilight of his career, Michael Jackson was almost as well known for the projects he never completed as he was for the ones that came to fruition. From the mid-1990s on, fans were frequently tantalized with the promise of movies, theme parks, tours and song collaborations with the day’s hottest music stars that came and went without ever being realized. As the one-year anniversary of Jackson’s death approaches, MTV News is taking a look at the many plans the King of Pop dreamed up before his premature end, some of which are finally becoming reality. Despite more than a decade out of the pop-culture spotlight, Jackson also clearly never stopped having his finger on the pulse of what was going on in music. Lady Gaga recently revealed that Jackson had tapped her to open for his 50-show This Is It stand at the O2 arena in London. “I was actually asked to open for Michael on his tour,” she said. “We were going to open for him at the O2. … And we were working on making it happen. And I suppose there was some talk about the openers doing some duets with Michael onstage.” In fact, one of the choreographers of This Is It said in an interview that not only did Jackson want to have Gaga open for him, he was very interested in recording a song with her before his death. Travis Payne said that after giving Jackson a short list of possible collaborators for his next musical project (including Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Usher and Justin Timberlake), the pop icon suggested Payne check out the then budding superstar Gaga. “He goes, ‘Lady Gaga.’ I go, ‘Really?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ He’s the one who really got me to get into her,” Payne recalled. “He literally told me, ‘You gotta get into her. She’s good.’ So, I started listening to her music more and going on YouTube and looking at her performances, and I was like, ‘He’s right.’ ” Jackson was also clearly looking to take his place among the musical icons he most admired and whose sales records he was determined to break during the course of his career. Just like the Beatles and Elvis Presley, Jackson will be immortalized by Cirque du Soleil with a permanent show in Las Vegas and a touring version in 2011, thanks to an agreement with Jackson’s estate. This brings to fruition a long-held dream for Jackson, who was a big fan of the Canadian troupe’s productions and had discussed mounting a show based on his music several years before his death. Jackson always dreamed big , and toward the end of his life, he spent quite a bit of time in Vegas cooking up another abandoned pie-in-the-sky project. In October 2005, just a few months removed from his acquittal on child molestation charges , Jackson began work with fashion designer Andr

Book Review: Anthony Barnosky’s Heatstroke

Image credit: Anthony Barnosky/ Island Press In 2006, a hunter discovered a “pizzly” in the Canadian Arctic. Half polar bear, half grizzly bear, the hybrid animal had never been documented by scientists. Some called it a fluke—a chance occurrence signaling the unpredictability of nature. Dr. Anthony Barnosky, however, believes the bear is a product of a changing world, and a sign of things to come. His new book Heatstroke draws on his extensive research to paint a picture of a natural world that has been fundamentally altered by climate c… Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Book Review: Anthony Barnosky’s Heatstroke