Clipmarks | jklugman's 'animals' clips

Video shows factory farm animal abuse

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:30:36 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: "[H]e saw the supervisor shove a cane into a sow's vagina. 'I was just shocked. What do you say to that?'"

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An undercover video taken at an Iowa pig farm shows workers hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods up into sows' hindquarters.

On the video, obtained by The Associated Press, a supervisor tells an undercover investigator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that when he gets angry or a sow won't move, "I grab one of these rods and jam it in her [anus]."

"Abuse on factory farms is the absolute norm, not the exception, and anyone eating factory-farmed meat is paying to support it," Friedrich said.

he also saw the supervisor shove a cane into a sow's vagina. "I was just shocked. What do you say to that?"

workers are shown slamming piglets on the ground, a practice designed to instantly kill those baby pigs that aren't healthy enough. But on the video, the piglets are not killed instantly, and in a bloodied pile, some piglets can be seen wiggling vainly

"Hurt 'em! There's nobody works for PETA out here

Tags: peta, animals, hogs, farming

Mother & Killer

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:31:06 GMT

clipped by: jklugman

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

A HUNTING TROPHY: In this undated photo, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and one of her daughters pose with a caribou she shot. A woman in an exceedingly macho state, Palin has not always been taken seriously. But opponents cross her at their peril.

Tags: sarah palin, animals, hunting, caribou

US Can Block Mad Cow Testing

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:43:16 GMT

clipped by: Imnclady

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Court: US can block mad cow testing

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease, a federal appeals court said Friday.

The dispute pits the Agriculture Department, which tests about 1 percent of cows for the potentially deadly disease, against a Kansas meat packer that wants to test all its animals.

Larger meat packers opposed such testing. If Creekstone Farms Premium Beef began advertising that its cows have all been tested, other companies fear they too will have to conduct the expensive tests.

The Bush administration says the low level of testing reflects the rareness of the disease. Mad cow disease has been linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Great Britain. Only three cases have been reported in the U.S., all involving cows, not humans.

the Agriculture Department can only regulate disease "treatment.

no cure for mad cow disease

test is performed on dead animals,

ruled, the test is not a treatment.

Tags: disease, animals, court, us, death, farming

The Case Against Meat

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:57:08 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

Ezra Klein said:

Animals also need land. Even if they're penned up in industrial agriculture settings. And it turns out they need a lot more of it than do most crops. The following graph (which comes from this pdf) tracks usable protein yield per acre for a host of foods. Meat doesn't fare well:

Clip Source: www.prospect.org

I've been getting a lot of links along the lines of, "if meat becomes more expensive, everyone will starve! Is that what liberals want!?" The point of talking about meat in an energy context, however, is not simply that it's extraordinarily resource intensive; it's that it's extraordinarily resource intensive compared to other foods. People are starving because so many of us eat meat. If meat were to become more expensive, and folks began trending towards plant-based diets, world hunger would be substantially alleviated.

Annoyingly, animals live for awhile before they become steaks, and that period turns out to require a lot of energy. This means it takes about 16 pounds of grain to "produce" one pound of animal flesh. That's grain, of course, that the poor can't eat, because it's bought by richer countries in order to feed livestock. And what grain remains is pricier, because the market for grain is tightened by the 756 million tons going to animal feed.

Tags: food, meat, animals, energy, environment

The case for granting apes rights

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:19:19 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks: Via Andrew Sullivan

Clip Source: www.slate.com

GAP is scientifically honest. And science doesn't show mental parity between great apes and human adults. What it shows, as the group's president acknowledges, is that great apes "experience an emotional and intellectual conscience similar to that of human children." Accordingly, the Spanish proposal doesn't treat apes like you or me. It treats them like "humans of limited capacity, such as children or those who are mentally incompetent and are afforded guardians or caretakers to represent their interests."

GAP's mission statement says great apes are entitled to rights based on their "morally significant characteristics."

they

enjoy a rich emotional and cultural existence in which they experience emotions such as fear, anxiety and happiness. They share the intellectual capacity to create and use tools, learn and teach other languages. They remember their past and plan for their future.

Tags: animals, apes, human-rights

How many words do dogs understand?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:44:26 GMT

clipped by: fewstingscorpio
clipper's remarks: For other dog owners, we all know soon we have to say W for walk or C for cookie and so on. This must be done only because they learn words fast. As with the examples above, I would obviously say the 'fast part' is associated with positive things...they're not dumb! For the complete article: http://animals.howstuffworks.com/pets/dogs-understand-words.htm

Clip Source: animals.howstuffworks.com

Dog owners love to gush about canine intelligence. So it would come as no surprise to them that research supports their beliefs that dogs have a profound mental capacity. But how much of our language do dogs really understand? It turns out that the langu

Dog Image Gallery

Sure, most dogs understand the basics --"fetch," "sit" and "stay." But if you have the motivation and patience, you will probably be able to teach your dog even more than 100 words. Stanley Coren, a psychologist who has performed a significant amount of research on the subject of dog intelligence, suggests that average trained dogs know about 160 words [source: Coren]. Some dogs even show a vocabulary as vast as a human toddler's.

Animals have the brain power to understand human language and use their own languages in surprisingly profound ways. We all know parrots can be trained to speak human words. And dogs will react to the word "walk" with a knowing, tail-wagging enthusiasm.

Tags: dogs, pets, training, language, animals, "dog lanuage""animal intelligence""dog intelligenc

Tracking the Origin of the Cat

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:27:47 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators' help protecting their stocks."There was a mutual benefit," Lyons said.

From there, domesticated cats started to radiate out to different parts of the world, often following humans on their migrations. Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia.

But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds.

The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere.

Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.

Clip Source: www.wtnrradio.com

Scientists have begun to pull back the feline veil, using the latest molecular tools to get a peek at the origin of the cat.

In one of the most comprehensive explorations of cats' origins to date, Leslie Lyons from the University of California at Davis, and her colleagues spent about five years collecting feline DNA, poking behind the whiskers of more than 1,100 Persians, Siamese, street cats and household tabbies around the world to swab inside their mouths.

The first thing the group did was confirm a report published last June in the journal Science that the domestication of cats about 10,000 years ago appeared to have occurred in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from Turkey to northern Africa and to modern-day Iraq and Iran.

"Our data support the Fertile Crescent, specifically Turkey, as one of the origin sites for cats," said Lyons

"Turkey was part of the Fertile Crescent and hence was one of the earliest areas for agricultural development."

Tags: animals

Kill the cat that kills the bird?

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:30:12 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks: Interesting article about the conflict between cat lovers and bird watchers. There is good evidence that America's large population of feral cats has decimate bird populations, including endangered species. Bird watchers advocate culling feral cats, which cat lovers do not want to do.

The story focuses on Jim Stevenson, who was tried for shooting and killing a feral cat in defense of some piping plovers, an endangered species.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In the past decade, at least a dozen studies published in top scientific journals like Biological Conservation, Journal of Zoology and Mammal Review have chronicled the problem of cat predation of small mammals and birds. The takeaway is clear: cats are a growing environmental concern because they are driving down some native bird populations — on islands, to be sure, but also in ecologically sensitive continental areas. At hot spots along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast, cat predation is a growing threat to shorebirds and long-distance migrants. And as wild habitat becomes more fragmented by human development, even some inland species are under increasing pressure from both house cats and their feral cousins.

Tags: animals, cats, birds

Alex the parrot, zeros, and death

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:07:24 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

Dr. Pepperberg reported the result with appropriate understatement: “That zero was represented in some way by a parrot, with a walnut-sized brain whose ancestral evolutionary history with humans likely dates from the dinosaurs, is striking.”

In a well-known essay, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about the elusiveness of subjectivity. What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Next to infinity, one of the hardest concepts to grasp is zero. Toward the end of his life Alex may have been coming close.

In a carnival shell game, an experimenter would put a nut under one of three cups and then shuffle them around. Alex would pick up the cup where the prize was supposed to be. If it wasn’t there he’d go a little berserk — a small step, maybe, toward understanding nothingness.

A bigger leap came in an experiment about numbers, in which the parrot was shown groups of two, three and six objects.

the experimenter finally asked, “O.K., Alex, tell me, ‘What color five?’ ”

“None,” the parrot said.

Bingo. There was no group of five on the tray.

Alex had learned the word “none” years before in a different context. Now he seemed to be using it more abstractly.

Tags: alex, parrot, animals, death

PETA exposes animal abuse at AgriProcessors slaughterhouse

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:20:39 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks:

The investigator's notes went on to say, "The first time I saw a cow stagger to his feet and walk around with his trachea dangling outside of his body, I thought to myself, this can't be happening--but after several days I knew better."

Clip Source: www.goveg.com

When PETA conducted a second investigation into AgriProcessors in May 2007 at the company's Gordon, Nebraska, slaughterhouse, the investigator discovered that animal abuse still takes place inside their facilities.

Experts in animal welfare, veterinary medicine, and slaughter systems reviewed the disturbing footage recorded inside the slaughterhouse and noted the following about the abuses documented by PETA:

Cows remained conscious for as long as two minutes after their throats were cut open.
A worker ripped into a conscious cow's throat with a metal hook in order to make the bleeding process go faster.
Cows were handled improperly, resulting in fear and stress just prior to slaughter.
Workers removed identification tags by mutilating live cows' ears.

Tags: animals, peta

World's evilest cat

Fri, 25 May 2007 01:17:40 GMT

clipped by: jklugman

Clip Source: mfrost.typepad.com

[Video]

Tags: animals, cute, cats

Strange but True: Cats Cannot Taste Sweets

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:41:02 GMT

clipped by: dorine
clipper's remarks: My cat goes crazy whenever I'm eating blackberry yogurt. I gave her a taste one time. (She got a kidney infection a week later...don't know if related). I think she CAN taste sweets.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Sugar and spice and everything nice hold no interest for a cat. Our feline friends are only interested in one thing: meat (except for saving up the energy to catch it by napping, or a round of restorative petting…) This is not just because inside every domestic tabby lurks a killer just waiting to catch a bird or torture a mouse, it is also because cats lack the ability to taste sweetness, unlike every other mammal examined to date.

he tongues of most mammals hold taste receptors—proteins on the cellular surface that bind to an incoming substance, activating the cell's internal workings that lead to a signal being sent to the brain. Humans enjoy five kinds of taste buds (possibly six): sour, bitter, salty, umami (or meatiness) and sweet (as well as possibly fat). The sweet receptor is actually made up of two coupled proteins generated by two separate genes: known as Tas1r2 and Tas1r3.

So far, cats are alone among mammals in lacking the sweet gene;

Tags: animals, cats, food

Couch Cat

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 18:16:48 GMT

clipped by: jklugman
clipper's remarks: Via Meg Frost at Cute Overload

Clip Source: s58.photobucket.com

Tags: cats, animals, cute

Flamingo's two loving daddies

Tue, 22 May 2007 03:54:32 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

flamingo's two loving daddies

When a newly-hatched flamingo chick was abandoned by its mother and father, the search for surrogate parents did not take long.

Carlos and Fernando, the only gays in the bird sanctuary, were the automatic choice.

The pair have already brought up three chicks after snatching eggs from other (mixed) couples at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.

This time they were to have one of their own.

For flamingoes, as for humans, bonding with baby is vital. The parent birds need to hear cheeping from within the egg then see the chick hatch.

So staff at the trust placed the abandoned youngster in a broken egg, taped it up and placed it in Carlos and Fernando's nest. Soon afterwards it emerged good as new.

Flamingos, although monogamous during breeding periods, usually find a different partner each year, making the enduring love of Carlos and Fernando all the more remarkable.

"They only have eyes for each other," said Nigel Jarrett,

Tags: animals, nature, birds, science

Baby Hedgehogs

Fri, 04 May 2007 16:10:47 GMT

clipped by: dorine
clipper's remarks: So ugly, they're cute.

Clip Source: thrillingwonder.blogspot.com

Tags: animals, photos, cute