Hunt saboteurs joined forces with huntsmen as they came together to rescue a horse which had become trapped in a deep bog.
Members of Surrey Hunt Monitors and Guildford Hunt Saboteurs were following a group of hunters from the Surrey Hunt Union near Hankley Common on Saturday.
They planned to track the hunt and document their activities, and intervene if any animals got hurt.
But after just 30 minutes one of the lead huntsman’s horses got stuck in a deep bog – and the saboteurs stepped in to help their adversaries rescue the distressed animal.
A member of Guildford Hunt Saboteurs, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “When I arrived, they [the hunt] had started to take the saddle off the horse to reduce weight.
“I waited until they had done that to ask if they needed help but they said ‘no’ so I observed at the side and carried on taking footage.”
Traditional enemies came together when a group of hunt saboteurs came to the aid of huntsman whose horse got tapped in a bog at the weekend
He said more saboteurs arrived on the scene and the hunters continued to refuse assistance, but eventually relented and let them help.
“I jumped in after about five minutes and said to them ‘look, the only thing that’s important at this point in time is the horse, I don’t care about anything else’.
“At that point, I think they were quite happy for me to assist.
“At the end, the joint hunt master thanked us for our help and said we had been a great help.”
The Surrey Hunt Monitors said they decided to intervene because the horse was “well stuck, freezing cold and clearly stressed”.
A spokesman for the group added: “The horse was very lucky to have survived its ordeal and we were happy we were there with the saboteurs to offer assistance.
“It was heartening to hear the appreciation of the hunt master to all of us who helped when we all made it out of the area safely.”
Surrey Police officers were also called to the scene to help with the rescue.
A police spokesman said the hunters were “grateful to the help offered” and that the horse “appeared to have no obvious injuries”.
The Surrey Hunt Union says members hunt around the county throughout the hunting season within the restrictions set out in the Hunting Act 2004.
Speaking on behalf of the group, Jeremy Gumbley said the horse is fine and thanked the saboteurs for their help.
“In the ideal scenario, you never want this to happen,” he said.
“The horses are part of the team and we care for them just as much as anyone else. To have that happen is a potential disaster.
“All credit to our Surrey Hunt Monitors and the saboteurs. In the past, we have come to blows over different opinions on various things, but we all love animals.”
He added: “It was quite refreshing to see solidarity, with the human species coming together to help one of our friends.”
Using dogs to hunt foxes was banned by the Government in 2004 under the Hunting Act.
But there are dozens of hunt saboteur groups nationwide who claim hunters regularly flout the law and kill foxes.
NEW DELHI Methane produced by India’s livestock population, considered the world’s largest, can significantly raise global temperatures, says a new study designed to help predict climate change linked to greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions from farm animals.
Results of the study carried out by the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the Deenbandhu Chhotu Ram University of Science and Technology, Murthal and published this month (January) in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety show that the Indian livestock emitted 15.3 million tonnes of methane in 2012. Globally, the livestock sector is a major source of anthropogenic (human-induced causes) methane emission with annual global contribution of 14.5 per cent.
“The impact on climate change is global in result, so the negative impact due to livestock emission is not restricted to India,”
A burial ground for dead saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan, in 2015. Photo: courtesy of the Joint saiga health monitoring team in Kazakhstan (Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity, Kazakhstan, Biosafety Institute, Gvardeskiy RK, Royal Veterinary College, London, UK)
In May 2015, researchers in central Kazakhstan witnessed something really strange: thousands of saiga antelopes began acting a bit weird, becoming unbalanced, and then just plopping on the ground within a few hours — dead. Over the course of just three weeks, more than 200,000 saigas died, or about 60 percent of the global population.
“I had never seen anything like it,” says Richard Kock, a wildlife veterinarian and professor at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK. “It was very concerning because it was so unnatural, outside of the realm of my experience.”
Dead saiga antelopes in the steppes of Kazakhstan, in 2015. Photo: courtesy of the Joint saiga health monitoring team in Kazakhstan (Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity, Kazakhstan, Biosafety Institute, Gvardeskiy RK, Royal Veterinary College, London, UK)
The saiga antelopes were later found to be infected with a bacterium that causes blood poisoning and internal bleeding, or hemorrhagic septicemia. Now, a new study shows that unusually wet and hot weather played a key role in causing the outbreak. How exactly that happened, though, remains a bit of a mystery.
Researchers analyzed historical data related to other mass die-offs of saigas from the 1980s, and found that when the outbreaks occurred, it was warmer and more humid than normal, according to a new study published today in Science Advances. That doesn’t bode well for the future of this critically endangered species. A warmer world could make such outbreaks more likely, and if that happens, the saiga antelopes could go extinct.
Saiga antelopes, whose bulbous noses recall the tauntaun creatures in Star Wars, live in the grasslands of central Asia, from Hungary all the way across Mongolia. They’ve been around for thousands of years, since the time of the mammoths, but they’re now at risk of disappearing because of hunting and habitat loss. “Extinctions took out other animals, but the saiga persisted through modern time,” says Kock, one of the authors of the study. With thick furs and unusual noses that warm up cold air before it gets to the lungs, the animals are highly adapted to extreme environments, and being able to survive harsh winters.
A saiga calf. Photo: courtesy of the Joint saiga health monitoring team in Kazakhstan (Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity, Kazakhstan, Biosafety Institute, Gvardeskiy RK, Royal Veterinary College, London, UK)
In 2015, as the antelopes got together in the spring to give birth, a sudden disease outbreak wiped out an enormous number of saigas in central Kazakhstan, almost 90 percent of the local population. Such die-offs aren’t unheard of when it comes to mammals called ungulates: the Mongolian gazelle, wildebeest, and white-tailed deer have all experienced mass deaths. But what happened in 2015 was unprecedented, says Kock. In affected herds, 100 percent of animals deceased — an insanely high percentage. “If everything dies, the bacteria doesn’t benefit, the host doesn’t benefit. It doesn’t make biological sense,” Kock tells The Verge.
Conservation scientist Eleanor Jane Milner-Gulland, who’s worked with saiga antelopes for 25 years, says the die-off was traumatic for field biologists. She remembers seeing photos of the lifeless animals spread over the steppes of Kazakhstan: “It was horrible,” Milner-Gulland says. The antelopes had succumbed to a bacterium called Pasteurella multocida, which lives in their tonsils. But somehow, the bacteria seemed to have proliferated to a point where the animals got sick and died.
To understand whether environmental factors were to blame, Kock, Milner-Gulland, and their colleagues analyzed troves of historical data on saiga antelopes, including satellite images and weather records. The animals had died en masse before, with symptoms similar to the 2015 event. In 1981, 70,000 saigas went heels up, or about 15 percent of the population in the Kazakh region of Betpak-Dala. In 1988, 270,000 died, or 73 percent of the regional population. The data showed that in the days leading up to all outbreaks, the humidity was higher than usual, over 80 percent, and the average minimum daily temperatures were also higher than normal, particularly in 2015.
Dead saigas. Photo: courtesy of the Joint saiga health monitoring team in Kazakhstan (Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity, Kazakhstan, Biosafety Institute, Gvardeskiy RK, Royal Veterinary College, London, UK)
How exactly those conditions sparked the outbreak isn’t clear, Kock says. It could be that bacteria spread when it’s hot and wet, but to be sure, more research is needed. It’s also not clear whether climate change can be blamed for the 2015 outbreak, according to Kock. Climate models aren’t precise enough to determine whether changes in climate are affecting weather in a very specific region, but the trend is obviously pointing toward the world becoming a hotter place — and that’s concerning.
Global temperatures have already increased by roughly 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit (0.85 degrees Celsius) since 1880, and saiga antelopes are already being affected, Milner-Gulland tells The Verge. In the last 40 years, the areas where the animals go to give birth have already shifted north. And since there seems to be a connection between weather and the outbreaks, more die-offs are expected in the future, Kock says. “The question is, will it cause extinction?” he says. “I think that’s a risk.”
One way to protect saigas is to make sure their populations are strong and healthy, so that if there is an outbreak, more animals can survive. That means limiting poaching, and giving the antelopes enough space to migrate across the grasslands. But saigas are also “really good at recovering,” Milner-Gulland says, and their populations can bounce back quickly: females can have babies when they’re only one year old, and newborns are large enough that they can run and migrate quickly.
So, for these mythological-looking creatures, there’s hope for survival.
On December 18th, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would seek to withdrawal the Organic livestock and Poultry Practice rule, known as the “Organics Rule.” 40 millionanimalsintheorganicfoodindustrywillnowbeleftvulnerable
January 15, 2018 by Michael Von Massow And John Cranfield,
Cows produce a lot of methane. But there’s not much evidence a tax on beef would be effective in fighting greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Shutterstock
Will taxing meat products based on their carbon footprint reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve public health? The answer is maybe, but not notably —and it will come with significant costs.
The idea is that if meat is more expensive, consumers will buy less of it. In turn, when faced with reduced consumption, farmers will produce less cattle.
Not all meat production produces the same volume of emissions. Since cows produce a lot of methane (a greenhouse gas), fewer cows should mean less methane, which in turn should help lower GHG emissions. Pigs and chickens don’t spew methane the way cows do, but there are also the emissions associated with feeding them, as well as with the decomposition of manure.
While it’s clear we need to proactively reduce GHG emissions globally, we believe the emissions tax approach is unlikely to achieve success.
It will likely increase food prices for consumers and decrease the prices farmers charge for their products, but it’s unlikely to lower meat consumption significantly and therefore unlikely to lower GHG emissions from the livestock sector. There may be other detrimental impacts to taxation too.
We would need to implement huge taxes to achieve a small decrease in consumption. As an example, the study in the Nature Climate Change journal suggests a 40 per cent tax on beef would only reduce beef consumption by 15 per cent.
Because taxes on food at the retail level tend to raise the prices paid by consumers, it’s also worth noting that any increase in the price of meat would tend to affect low-income consumers more than more affluent consumers. Low-income consumers would pay relatively more than the rich.
We also need to consider substitution effects. While a high tax on beef and other meats will lower beef consumption somewhat, it may also lead to economizing by consumers through increased consumption of lower quality or more highly processed cuts of meat.
This could actually increase the relative prices of these cuts, making the negative impact of the tax on lower-income consumers even stronger, and would undermine some of the suggested health benefits.
It’s worth noting that beef consumption is generally falling in Canada and the U.S., independent of price. Other factors are likely to be more effective at reducing beef consumption than taxation.
There is a suggestion that any tax on meat should reflect the production system. Those that raise cattle on grasslands or in pastures, for example, would have lower taxes than cattle raised using intensive production systems, like those used throughout North America, which create higher emissions.
While cattle in North America spend their early life on pasture, most beef cattle are finished in feedlots where they are grouped and fed high-energy grain rations to efficiently produce the preferred texture and taste of beef.
A tax based on how cattle are raised, however, would be both politically and logistically difficult.
If grassland and pasture rearing of cattle is favoured because of lower GHG emissions, we could see significant deforestation in those countries that produce beef extensively, but not a substantial reduction in consumption as desired.
We could end up in a situation where many differences in production practices, even within countries, create different emissions estimates and therefore cattle producers would seek different tax levels.
Unintended consequences
There’s also a risk that a meat tax would reduce the incentive to initiate research and development that could help cut emissions within the sector.
Examples of such R&D include efforts to improve the feed efficiency in cattle production. At the farm level, feeding more cattle on a forage-heavy pasture diet could increase the costs of producing cattle and change the characteristics of the beefwhile eroding the incentive to adopt climate-friendlier production practices.
It’s worth noting that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has said that emissions could be reduced by 30 per cent today if current best practices were broadly implemented. This is beyond the impact of a 40 per cent tax. The incentive to adopt these best practices would be removed by the implementation of a tax.
Even if it were possible to get broad-based agreement for a global (or even just a Canadian) tax on meat, however, it is important to look not only at whether these efforts would reduce GHGs, but also at the unintended consequences of these efforts.
In the case of the proposed meat tax, it is not only unlikely to achieve the intended outcome, it is equally likely to create a spate of unintended consequences that would negatively affect not just cattle producers, but also consumers.
Hunting season is an annual tradition for many New Yorkers. While hunting is meant to be an enjoyable recreational activity, accidents happen and even the most seasoned hunters can make mistakes and/or be at risk from fellow hunters.
Planning, accident-prevention measures and common sense are key. It goes without saying that alcohol and hunting do not mix; perhaps a close second is fatigue and hunting do not mix.
Safety courses are mandatory for new hunters but also should be utilized by infrequent hunters who want to “dust off” the old rifle or shotgun.
Should someone become injured, giving aid should be a hunter’s first priority. However, they should also bear in mind the legal ramifications of an accident. A hunter can be held liable in civil and criminal court for injuring someone while hunting so they must understand their options.
Importance of intent
The bulk of hunting accidents generally fall into three categories: accidental firing that injures a person; missing a target and accidentally hitting a person; and mistaking a person for an animal.
A hunting accident can result in criminal charges and/or a civil lawsuit. The issue of intent is central to liability. In a civil lawsuit, if the person using the gun intended to shoot an animal, that person cannot later argue that there was no intent to hit the unintended victim. In those cases, because the intent was to hit something, that intention supersedes whether or not the intended target was hit.
Under criminal law, intent is treated differently. If the accident is fatal, the prosecution often argues that intent is not relevant because the defendant was criminally negligent. In New York, a person is criminally negligent when they fail to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk. That risk must constitute a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the same situation. N.Y. Penal Law § 15.05.
Non-fatal accidents
In criminal cases, if the accident does not result in the victim’s death, the hunter may be penalized with fines of $5,000 to $10,000, up to one year in jail or both. See Pen. L. §§ 70.00(4); 80.00(1); 120.20; 120.25. In those instances, the chances of being found criminally liable decrease. Such liability requires the criminal action and a supporting mental state. This is where the intent becomes more relevant; punishment is more likely if the defendant fails to provide the necessary aid to the injured party because it shows disregard for that person’s life.
In civil cases, a hunting accident must be intentional or a result of negligence in order for the defendant to be held liable. One defense against an intentional claim is that the defendant did not intend to shoot anything. This is difficult to prove in a hunting accident because hunting inherently involves shooting at a target. The most important factor is the defendant’s intent to use a weapon to hit a target; which target the defendant hits is less important.
Fatal accidents
If the accident is fatal, the state has several options for bringing charges. It can charge the defendant with involuntary manslaughter, which requires criminal negligence on the part of the defendant. A person may be found guilty of manslaughter in the second degree if that person recklessly causes another person’s death. The difference between criminal negligence and civil negligence is that criminal negligence requires the defendant to engage in blameworthy conduct so serious that it creates or contributes to a substantial and unjustifiable risk that another person’s death will occur, and fails to perceive that risk.
According to New York Penal Code § 265.35, a person may be charged with a Class A misdemeanor if that person intentionally discharges a firearm in a public place or with persons nearby, intentionally points a firearm at another person, intentionally aims and discharges a firearm at another person but does not injure them or intentionally aims and discharges and does injure them.
In the event of fatality, a wrongful death claim may be brought in civil court. Wrongful death claims can be either intentional or negligent. One defense against a negligence claim is assumption of the risk. This defense is most useful when the area in which the accident occurred is a popular spot for hunting, and the victim knew of the potential dangers. It can also be argued that the victim contributed to their own injury through carelessness.
Standard of care
In criminal and civil cases, the “standard of care” is used to address the question of negligence. The standard of care asks whether a reasonable person in the same situation as the defendant would have acted the way the defendant did. The defendant’s carelessness is measured against this standard. In order for the defendant to be found liable for negligence, the injury must be a foreseeable result of the defendant’s actions.
Should the tragedy of a hunting accident occur, helping the injured party is of the utmost importance. It is also vital that hunters understand how their intentions and the injury’s severity could affect how they are penalized, as well as what the ramifications may be for negligent or careless behavior.
A school and community are mourning the death of a 13-year-old Shelby, Nebraska, girl who was killed in a weekend hunting accident.
Kimberlee Paddock, a seventh-grader at Shelby-Rising City Public School, was a kind, friendly, honor roll student who was involved in numerous activities, said Bill Curry, principal of the middle and high school grades at the K-12 school.
“She was the type of kid that others aspire to be,” Curry said.
Kimberlee had been hunting with her father and two family friends Sunday when the black powder gun she was using accidentally discharged, Sheriff Ben Bakewell said.
The accident, reported about 5:30 p.m., occurred south of Genoa, Nebraska, about 20 miles west of Columbus.
Kimberlee was taken to Genoa Community Hospital and was pronounced dead there.
Investigators from the Sheriff’s Office and Nebraska State Patrol determined that her death “was a tragic accident,” Bakewell said.
Counselors will be available throughout the week, Curry said.
A community gathering will be held at 7 tonight at Sacred Heart parish in Shelby.
“Sometimes, when there’s a tragedy, people just want to be together and be there for each other,” Curry said.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Paddock family,” he said. “The whole community is hurting. Everyone wants to come together and help.”
Funeral services are pending.
Kimberlee, whom everybody knew as “Kimmee,” was a trumpet player in the school band, played “whatever sport was in season,” and loved art, the principal said. “You name it, she did it.”
She is survived by parents Mary and Scott Paddock, an identical twin sister, Jaimee, as well as adult siblings
Rats may be exonerated as black plague culprit01:32
Story highlights
Plague is caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis
More than 1,800 people were infected with the plague last year
(CNN)One of the worst pandemics in human history, the Black Death, along with a string of plague outbreaks that occurred during the 14th to 19th centuries, was spread by human fleas and body lice, a new study suggests.
It was previously suggested that rodents, whose fleas can also transmit the bacteria behind the plague, were the main culprits behind Europe’s second pandemic of the disease that saw a string of outbreaks occur in succession.
A baby mountain gorilla in the Sabyinyo Mountains of Rwanda. (Ivan Lieman/AFP/Getty Images)
As if we needed another argument against war, here goes: It’s bad for wild animals.
This is true even with low-level conflict, and it’s especially true if the conflict repeats or drags on, according to a new study published in Nature. In a wide-ranging examination of the net effect of such disruptions on African wildlife populations over more than six decades, researchers found the frequency of war — rather than the intensity — to be a key factor in declines of wildlife.
“It takes a relatively little amount of conflict, and a relatively low frequency of conflict, before the average population is declining,” said lead author Joshua Daskin, a conservation ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. “All the socioeconomic things that come along with a war are probably making conservation quite difficult.”
The researchers’ conclusion might sound obvious, but there has been little previous examination of the overall impact of armed conflict on animals. The case-study work to date focused on specific conflicts’ consequences and actually found both positive and negative effects.
Those downsides are numerous. Land mines and bombs can kill fauna as well as human targets. Armies sometimes intentionally destroy critical habitat — by dumping herbicides on forests, for example, as the United States did during the Vietnam War — or finance their fight by selling ivory. Collapsed institutions mean less enforcement of laws protecting animals, and economic fallout can force desperate civilians to hunt wild animals for food.
On the other hand, wars can also cause human displacement, and “anything that causes people to vacate can be a beneficial thing for nonhuman wildlife,” said co-author Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. Poaching and habitat destruction might slow, and mining might stop. This is sometimes called the “refuge effect,” and it can be seen in the demilitarized zone dividing North Korea and South Korea.
Pringle and Daskin, who finished his PhD at Princeton last year, both do research in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where a 15-year civil war nearly decimated wildlife. They wanted to know more about the big picture — is war generally positive, negative or neutral for wildlife? Among other reasons, they note, the question is important because the vast majority of wars since 1950 have taken place in the world’s most biodiverse regions.
An elephant in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. (Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images)
The pair decided to focus on protected areas in Africa between 1946 and 2010. They mapped events there using a standard definition — fights that killed at least one person in a broader battle that caused 25 human deaths in a year — and found conflicts in a depressing 71 percent of the areas during that time period. Then came the hardest part: finding reliable wildlife population data.
Daskin said he used published research as well as “gray literature” such as park management figures, government wildlife agency documents and reports from nongovernmental organizations. He looked only at populations of large herbivores, in part because they “have really outsize roles in maintaining these ecosystems,” but also because they’re counted more easily and therefore more frequently. In the end, Daskin had data for 253 wildlife populations and 36 species, including giraffes, warthogs and wildebeests.
Next, the authors looked at correlations between wildlife populations and variables that can influence them, like drought, human population density and the presence of mining, as well as two factors related to war: conflict frequency and conflict intensity.
When they crunched it all together, the biggest and only statistically significant predictor of wildlife declines was conflict frequency. While wildlife population trajectories stayed stable in peaceful times, they dropped with even a slight increase in conflict and were “almost invariably negative” in high-conflict zones, the authors found.
Pringle said they were somewhat surprised that conflict intensity wasn’t correlated with dips in wild animals. The numbers don’t suggest why, and Pringle said understanding these dynamics will take more research with larger data sets. But he and Daskin have some theories.
“Our interpretation is that conflict destabilizes everything. When people don’t feel secure, institutions start to break down, livelihoods start to be disrupted,” Pringle said. Yet intense conflict may provide a buffer for wildlife because “people evacuate. People don’t hang around and go set snares in the forest.”
Cinereous vultures on a rice paddy in South Korea near the demilitarized zone with North Korea. The area has become a nearly untouched nature refuge. (Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency)
The researchers emphasized that their findings were not limited to gloom. The only cases of extinction in the areas they studied took place in the Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve in Uganda, where giraffes and two species of antelope vanished between 1983 and 1995.
“War is awful for people. It’s bad for wildlife. But it’s not so cataclysmically bad that we should be giving up on anything,” Pringle said. “In fact, there are great opportunities for restoration.”
He and Daskin hope their findings can help governments and wildlife organizations better predict and mitigate the influence of conflict on wildlife. Both point to the place where they do work — Gorongosa National Park — as an example. It lost about 90 percent of its wildlife during the war that ended in 1992, but it’s now back to “about 80 percent of the prewar populations,” Daskin said.
“That’s been achieved not just by trucking in large numbers of animals from other protected areas, as has often been highlighted, but by creating the conditions in the local region for conservation to be possible,” Daskin said. “It’s an excellent case study in what can happen after the conflict.”
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Exposing the Big Game 