According to a new study, hunting the most impressive animals weakens a species’ ability to survive in the face of environmental changes.
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Big tusks on an elephants indicate well-being, which in turn signifies that they have high-quality genes that help them adjust to a changing environment. Elephants with big tusks are also the target of trophy hunters, but removing those genes from their populations could lead more quickly to extinction.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID CHANCELLOR, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
By Stephen Leahy
PUBLISHED
Trophy hunters, as well as poachers who “harvest” the big males—antelopes and deer with the largest horns and antlers, elephants with the longest tusks, or lions with the most impressive manes—are putting those species at greater risk of extinction with climate change.
That’s the finding of a new study published today by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, England, in Proceedings of the Royal Society…
“On June 5, 1968, 42 year-old presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded shortly after midnight PDT at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California presidential primaries in the 1968 election. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 AM on June 6 …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Robert_F._Kennedy
“JUNE 05, 2018 KENNEDY STATEMENT ON ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Newton, MA – Congressman Joe Kennedy III today released the following statement in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the death of his grandfather, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
“Fifty years ago this country lost a good man – a husband, a father, a brother and a son. For Robert F. Kennedy, strength lay in compassion, power came from empathy, and integrity was defined by how we treat the least among us. At a moment in time when division, distrust, and discrimination plagued our communities, Senator Kennedy believed that…
by: Care2 Team
target: Lancaster County, Pennsylvania District Attorney’s Office
53,008 SUPPORTERS – 55,000 GOAL
Fifteen dogs— 10 puppies and five adults — are lucky to have been rescued from an abusive breeder.
After a concerned citizen alerted authorities of a possible unlicensed puppy mill, authorities investigated and found that the breeder — who has yet to be named — had cruelly debarked at least three of his dogs. According to rescuers, they believe the breeder shoved a pipe-like object down their throats in order to damage their vocal chords.
There is no medical reason for this abuse whatsoever. The breeder, simply thought his dogs barking was a nuisance.
The inhumane manner in which this person debarked his dog could be a felony but the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office still hasn’t decided what charges the breeder will actually face.
We must encourage the DA to punish this unlicensed breeder…
In the past few decades, many have spoken out in support of the wrongfully maligned grizzly, yet the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has judged the token few that remain plenty enough to warrant their removal from the ESA list of threatened (and therefore federally protected) species, reducing them back to the status of “big game.”
Now hunters in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are gearing up for the day when they can once again decorate private lodges with their very own stuffed grizzly cadaver or bear skin rug. And why shouldn’t they be allowed to have their fun? After all, their counterparts in Alaska and Canada have legally been killing grizzlies without a hitch right up to the present.
In Alaska, bears—in addition to wolves—are routinely shot from planes under the deathly ill-advised notion that eliminating those animals leaves more moose for more hunters to slay. What the Sarah…
69,924 SUPPORTERS – 70,000 GOAL
A missing foot, a broken and infected jaw, starving nearly to death, abandoned under a pile of trash.
That was how Frig and Freya, two German Shepherd puppy sisters, were found over Memorial Day weekend. Two days later, another puppy was found in the same location, also with a broken jaw.
The monsters who did this must be found before they can torture again. Sign now to urge the Oakland Police Department to do everything they can to find those responsible now!
Frig, whose paw was cut off, and Freya, whose jaw was broken, were treated at an animal hospital for their injuries. They have now been reunited, and all three puppies are under veterinary care.
Police in Oakland are already investigating the case, but they have not identified or located the perpetrators. We need to make sure…
Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.
Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.
The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.
This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.
The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change.
Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”
While opinion surveys find that roughly half of Americans regard climate change as a problem, the issue has never achieved high salience among the public, despite the drumbeat of alarm from the climate campaign. Americans have consistently ranked climate change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind air and water pollution.
“In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make.
A case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy, whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry.”
Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.
Mr. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
The family whose Pomeranian died while traveling with Delta accused the airline of trying to cover up the dog’s bloody death.
Michael Dellegrazie said his pup named Alejandro was found dead last Wednesday in his carrier, along with a bloody blanket during a layover at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, news station WDIV reported.
An attorney for the owner suggested someone tried to wash the dog blanket and carrier to get rid of evidence.
“It was wet,” lawyer Evan Oshan told the Associated Press. “They couldn’t get the blood stains out. There was an attempt to clean it.”
Oshan said that the dog traveled in cargo on the flight headed to Newark, New Jersey, from Phoenix. The dog was alive when the plane landed in Detroit for a layover, according to WDIV.
Nearly two hours later, the dog was discovered dead in his carrier at an airport cargo facility.
64,701 SUPPORTERS – 65,000 GOAL
Eight teenagers in India dragged three puppies into a graveyard by their hind legs, dressed them in brush and sticks and then viciously burned them alive, and it’s all caught on video. As it stands now, the harshest punishment this kind of animal cruelty gets in India is 50 ruppees, the equivalent of hiring a rickshaw to get around town.
Sign the petition to demand harsher punishments for animal cruelty in India!
One poor puppy tries desperately to get away from the burning fire and a boy uses a pole to put it back in where it cries for minutes as it slowly dies. The boys laugh while the three puppies suffer their last few minutes alive.
The young boys committing this crime are all believed to be under 18 and therefore there is still time to get them…
Sharks are a apexs predator that are essential to the health of the oceans and indeed are also exceptionally valuable to tourism in Florida. You can learn more about the practice of shark finning and why it is so horrible with a simple google search.
This is unacceptable and must stop.
We the undersigned are divers and tourists who visit Florida to dive and experience the beautiful and exceptional outdoor and underwater experience that Florida offers.
Knowing that Florida is allowing this internationally condemned practice to be conducted legally is forcing us to reconsider visiting Florida as our playground.
We ask you to take a strong stand and pass legislation to stop the trade…
Exposing the Big Game 