Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a House hearing on Capitol Hill on July 20, 2023 in Washington, D.C.Anna Moneymaker–Getty Images
The video, which was shared with the caption, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker,” came ahead of a critical profile of the independent presidential candidate published on Monday.
While recounting the story to actress Roseanne Barr, RFK Jr. said that he had been driving in upstate New York on his way to a hunting trip when a woman driving in front of him hit a bear with her car, accidentally killing it. “I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was gonna skin the bear and … put the meat in my refrigerator,” he said.
RFK Jr. said that the hunting trip ran late and he had dinner plans and needed to be at the airport that evening. “The bear was in my car and I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad,” he added.
At that time, fatal bicycle accidents in New York City that were getting major media attention. RFK Jr.’s friends, who were drinking, decided to leave the bear carcass with an old bicycle he had. “We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” RFK Jr. said.
Two women walking their dogs discovered the bear the next day and alerted police. “To think people would do something like this to an animal—very disturbing,” one resident told CBS news.
The carcass was sent to Albany for a necropsy, which said that the animal was likely hit by a motor vehicle and was not a case of animal cruelty.
This is not the first unusual incident involving RFK Jr. during his longshot presidential campaign. Earlier this year, he denied eating a dog after a friend showed Vanity Fair a photo of him about to take a bite of a charred animal. RFK Jr. also revealed in May that he suffered memory loss more than a decade ago, potentially related to a parasite doctors found in his brain.
Paintings, poems, sculptures and statues – including a 150lb (68kg) mixture of driftwood, sea shells and dried kelp – have memorialized a wolf whose legacy reflects the complex relationship between humans and wildlife.
But photographer Cheryl Alexander, a relentless advocate against government-sanctioned wolf culls, was shocked to see her most famous image used to advertise a big game hunting company.
“I was shocked and a bit horrified. And it really pissed me off that company was using Takaya as an advertisement to come up to Canada and kill a wolf,” she told the Guardian. “It hurt too because Takaya has become, in many ways, an international image for positive coexistence with humans.”
The unlikely story of the wolf’s years of self-imposed isolation captivated residents of Vancouver Island, some of whom would paddle by the rocky outcrops and windswept trees hoping to glimpse the animal. But one day in late March, a hunter’s rifle brought an untimely end to the wolf.
Alexander recently found British Columbia-based Terminus Mountain Outfitters was using her photo to advertise its wolf hunting package. She soon posted to her Instagram page, appealing to her 33,000 followers to share news of the company’s decision to use the photo.
The owner of Terminus said in a statement he didn’t mean to “offend” anyone with the image.
“[A web design company] chose some live wildlife photos to use on the [website]. July 27th I was contacted by a disgruntled person upset about a wolf picture that they recognized as a wolf named Takaya. I had no idea of the story behind this wolf or even which of the three pictures on my website was of Takaya. I asked my web developer … to simply remove all three of the photos. July 29th they were removed. Neither I nor my web developer meant to offend anyone,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of the media attention we are now getting emails that are threatening and quite angry when we had nothing to do with the live pictures chosen. We are a legal family-run business.”
Both the image, and the page on wolf hunting, have since been taken down.
In British Columbia, hundreds of wolves – which are seen as vermin that must be eradicated – are killed for sport each year. Hunters usually only take the pelts, discarding the remains. Channelling growing outrage – and changing perceptions – Alexander and local conservation groups have started a petition calling for a moratorium on wolf hunting in British Columbia that has so far received more than 65,000 signatures. Alexander has also founded the non-profit Takaya’s Legacy which works to support wolf protection initiatives.
While Takaya’s legacy has aligned with the aims of conservation groups, his curiosity – or lack of fear – also raised difficult questions about the relationship locals had fostered with the wolf that led to his demise.
“I was angry about the photo, but there’s a silver lining, because it actually allows word to get out there about what’s happening in Canada regarding trophy hunting – the whole range of wild animals that are hunted in Canada is quite disgusting,” said Alexander. “We’re grappling with loss of biodiversity. That trophy hunters are continuing to hunt them just for fun and for recreation is not acceptable.”
Six people who work at a poultry farm in northeastern Colorado have tested positive for the bird flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported July 19. This brings the known number of U.S. cases this year to 10.
The workers were likely infected by chickens, which they had been tasked with killing in response to a bird flu outbreak at the farm. The endeavor occurred amid a heat wave, as outside temperatures soared to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The barns in which culling occurs were no doubt even hotter,” said CDC principal deputy director Nirav Shah at a July 16 press briefing. Wearing N95 respirators, goggles, and other protective gear was a challenge. Industrial fans whipped feathers around the facility that could have carried the virus, Shah added.
In this environment, the farmworkers collected hundreds of chickens by hand and placed them into carts where they could be killed by carbon dioxide gas within two minutes.
“If a farm worker gets severely ill or dies from an H5N1 infection, it will be a stain on US public health that we didn’t do more with the tools we have,” Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, posted on X. “You don’t send farm workers in to cull H5N1 infected birds without goggles and masks. Period. If it’s too hot to wear those protections, it’s too hot to cull. We need vaccines to be made available to farm workers. We have to stop gambling with peoples’ lives.”
More than 99 million chickens and turkeys have been infected with a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu that emerged at U.S. poultry farms in early 2022. Since then, the federal government has compensated poultry farmers more than $1 billion for destroying infected flocks and eggs to keep outbreaks from spreading.Play Video
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As summer temperatures rise across the country, Shah said, the agency is contending with how to offer farmworkers “safety from the virus, as well as safety from extreme heat.”
The H5N1 bird flu virus has spread among poultry farms around the world for nearly 30 years. An estimated 900 people have been infected by birds, and roughly half have died from the disease.
The virus made an unprecedented shift this year to dairy cattle in the U.S. This poses a higher threat because it means the virus has adapted to replicate within cows’ cells, which are more like human cells. The four other people diagnosed with bird flu this year in the U.S. worked on dairy farms with outbreaks.
Scientists have warned that the virus could mutate to spread from person to person, like the seasonal flu, and spark a pandemic. There’s no sign of that, yet.
So far, all 10 cases reported this year have been mild, consisting of eye irritation, a runny nose, and other respiratory symptoms. However, numbers remain too low to say anything certain about the disease because, in general, flu symptoms can vary among people with only a minority needing hospitalization.
The number of people who have gotten the virus from poultry or cattle may be higher than 10. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tested only about 60 people over the past four months, and powerful diagnostic laboratories that typically detect diseases remain barred from testing for bird flu. Testing of farmworkers and animals is needed to detect the H5N1 bird flu virus, study it, and stop it before it becomes a fixture on farms.
Researchers have urged a more aggressive response from the CDC and other federal agencies to prevent future infections. Many people exposed regularly to livestock and poultry on farms still lack protective gear and education about the disease. And they don’t yet have permission to get a bird flu vaccine.
Nearly a dozen virology and outbreak experts recently interviewed by KFF Health News disagree with the CDC’s decision against vaccination, which may help prevent bird flu infection and hospitalization.
“We should be doing everything we can to eliminate the chances of dairy and poultry workers contracting this virus,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “If this virus is given enough opportunities to jump from cows or poultry into people, it will eventually get better at infecting them.”
To understand whether cases are going undetected, researchers in Michigan have sent the CDC blood samples from workers on dairy farms. If they detect bird flu antibodies, it’s likely that people are more easily infected by cattle than previously believed.
“It’s possible that folks may have had symptoms that they didn’t feel comfortable reporting, or that their symptoms were so mild that they didn’t think they were worth mentioning,” said Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive for the state of Michigan.
In hopes of thwarting a potential pandemic, the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and about a dozen other countries are stockpiling millions of doses of a bird flu vaccine made by the vaccine company CSL Seqirus.
Seqirus’ most recent formulation was greenlighted last year by the European equivalent of the FDA, and an earlier version has the FDA’s approval. In June, Finland decided to offer vaccines to people who work on fur farms as a precaution because its mink and fox farms were hit by bird flu last year.
The CDC has controversially decided not to offer at-risk groups bird flu vaccines. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told KFF Health News that the agency is not recommending a vaccine campaign at this point for several reasons, even though millions of doses are available. One is that cases still appear to be limited, and the virus isn’t spreading rapidly between people as they sneeze and breathe.
The agency continues to rate the public’s risk as low. In a statement posted in response to the new Colorado cases, the CDC said its bird flu recommendations remain the same: “An assessment of these cases will help inform whether this situation warrants a change to the human health risk assessment.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Researchers at Kyushu University discovered that blowflies in southern Japan carry the bird flu virus, potentially introducing a new route of transmission. Their findings, which highlight the significant implications for poultry farming and public health, suggest that controlling these insects could be crucial in preventing further outbreaks.
A recent study conducted in a wild bird colony in southern Japan indicates that blowflies could be a possible vector for the transmission of bird flu.
Researchers at Kyushu University have found that blowflies, which are highly attracted to decaying flesh and feces, are carriers of the bird flu virus in southern Japan. Their study, published in Scientific Reports, suggests a potential new transmission route for bird flu and underscores the importance of developing new strategies to prevent and control the disease in poultry farms.
Since 2020, bird flu has been spreading rapidly around the globe, leading to the death of millions of wild birds and the culling of more than half a billion farmed birds worldwide. In Japan, where a single case of infection on a poultry farm mandates the culling of the entire stock, the 2022-2023 winter season saw a record-high of 326 outbreaks of bird flu, resulting in the sacrifice of 17.7 million birds. Some strains of bird flu have also jumped to mammals, including cows, goats, dogs, and cats, and since March, an uptick of cases in poultry and dairy workers, with a high fatality rate, has raised significant concern.
In winter, thousands of cranes migrate to Izumi city in Southern Japan. During winter 2022-2023, 1600 cranes out of colony of 10000 cranes died from bird flu. Credit: Ryosuke Fujita, Kyushu University
“Bird flu has been causing substantial damage to wildlife and the poultry industry, and also holds great risk for humans who work closely with livestock. It’s therefore vital to understand how the virus spreads and its potential routes of transmission to control and prevent outbreaks,” explains first author Associate Professor Ryosuke Fujita of Kyushu University’s Faculty of Agriculture.
In this research, the scientists studied a wild crane colony in Izumi city, Kagoshima Prefecture, in southern Japan. In winter, the prime season for bird flu, thousands of cranes migrate to this area, with their dense numbers making them vulnerable to infection. During winter 2022-2023, 1600 cranes out of a colony of 10000 cranes died from bird flu.
“We were notified about the cranes being infected and we had to act quickly,” says Fujita.
Blowfly Role in Virus Transmission
Along with his colleagues, he set traps at different locations around Izumi city to collect blowflies. “We were particularly interested in one species of blowfly, Calliphora nigribarbis, as unlike other fly species, they are active in winter, coinciding with the peak season of bird flu. This, along with their attraction to the flesh and feces of animals, makes them a prime suspect for spreading the virus,” adds Fujita.
The researchers collected 648 blowflies and discovered that 14 blowflies were carrying the bird flu virus. The majority of virus-positive blowflies were collected from the sample site closest to the crane colony. “While 14 blowflies may seem like a low number, this represents a prevalence in blowflies of 2.2%, which is a huge percentage compared to other diseases spread by insects,” explains Fujita. The research team also used genetic testing to confirm that the blowflies were carrying the same virus strain that has been infecting the crane colony.
Blowflies, a family of flies strongly attracted to decaying flesh and feces, are carrying the bird flu virus in southern Japan, highlighting a potential new route of bird flu transmission. Image captured from Kyushu University’s Biodiversity Conservation Zone. Credit: Ryosuke Fujita, Kyushu University
Unlike birds and mammals which the virus infects and replicates inside, blowflies instead ingest the virus from infected dead birds or their waste, with the virus maintaining infectivity for up to two days. Blowflies are capable of flying at least 2 km per day, so the researchers estimate that is it feasible for them to reach nearby poultry farms or other wild bird populations within a 4 km range. The researchers believe that as the blowfly moves from place to place, it could contaminate surfaces, food sources, and water sources, with healthy birds becoming infected through direct contact with these contaminated sources, or by ingesting adult or larval blowflies.
In Japan, where farmers often use closed farming systems instead of open spaces to control infections and maximize production, countermeasures aimed at eliminating blowflies could be implemented fairly easily, helping to protect farmers from severe financial damage.
“By keeping areas clean and using fly control methods, such as fine nets or insecticides, we can reduce the risk of virus spread to indoor poultry farms. However, in outdoor farms in other countries, and in wild bird populations, controlling blowflies may be logistically impossible,” says Fujita.
Having identified that blowflies carry the virus, Fujita and his colleagues are now collaborating with the government to capture blowflies in quarantined sites around infected poultry farms, hoping to find definitive evidence that blowflies are causing these outbreaks. Fujita and his colleagues are also developing new tools that use artificial intelligence to assess and predict the potential risks of vector insects. “By using advanced technologies alongside on-the-ground research, we can better understand and control the spread of bird flu and other insect-borne diseases, ultimately safeguarding both animal and human health,” concludes Fujita.
Reference: “Blowflies are potential vector for avian influenza virus at enzootic area in Japan” by Ryosuke Fujita, Takuji Tachi, Masato Hino, Kosuke Nagata, Masahiro Saiki, Mizue Inumaru, Yukiko Higa, Kentaro Itokawa, Nozomi Uemura, Ryo Matsumura, Izumi Kai, Kyoko Sawabe, Mutsuo Kobayashi, Haruhiko Isawa, Takahiro Kusakabe, Kazunori Matsuo and Shinji Kasai, 4 May 2024, Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-61026-1
The study was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
This week, the Colorado Secretary of State gave us official word that our ballot measure campaign in Colorado – flying under the banner of Cats Aren’t Trophies (CATs) – won official approval for placement on the November ballot.
That means that there will be a straight up-or-down vote on whether the state of Colorado should enact a statute to forbid the unsporting, inhumane targeting of these animals for their body parts and for bragging rights.
To be specific, this week we learned that the submission of nearly 188,000 signatures – accumulated over six months of one-on-one talks with more than one million Coloradans – met the threshold for qualifying for a place on the November ballot.
To be sure, this marks a milestone in our campaign to stop the needless trophy hunting and commercial fur trapping of the native big cats of Colorado for their heads and beautiful coats.
This issue will be in the national spotlight for the next 100 days and the effort will culminate with a vote of the people in the state.
It’s our greatest hope that the people of Colorado will vote to stop high-tech hounding and the bloody fights that result when a pack of dogs overtakes a solitary and badly outnumbered cat.
To stop “guaranteed kills” of “trophy lions” offered up to out-of-state trophy hunters by hunting guides.
To stop trapping, then strangling or stomping bobcats to kill them and then to take their fur to sell the pelts to China.
Even though volunteers talked to a million Coloradans over the past six months, many people in the state still have no idea that trophy hunters slay up to 600 lions a year in inhumane and unsporting kills. And they have no idea that trophy hunters and commercial trappers can kill an unlimited number of bobcats during a single season, resulting in thousands of cats killed for their beautiful fur coats.
Colorado has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stop animal cruelty by passing a statewide ballot initiative. It will set the tone for how all animal protection policy initiatives will be viewed in Colorado and throughout the West in the years to come.
We ask you to dig deeper than for any other cause or campaign because an outcome looms. In less than three months, with your help, Colorado can usher in a new policy to protect native cats in the state from cruelty.
Our New Report Released on Mountain Lions and Their Ecological Role
Just two weeks ago, we released a new report, “A Scientific Review of Mountain Lion Hunting and Its Effects,” by Jim Keen, D.V.M. and Ph.D., that gives us insight into the beneficial role of lions in ecosystems and the utter falsehood from the trophy hunting crowd that head-hunting for inedible lions does anything but deliver detrimental effects to Colorado. (You can read the report here.)
Dr. Keen is a former USDA researcher and former faculty member at the University of Nebraska College of Veterinary Medicine and Biological Sciences.
His report shatters the false claim by trophy hunters that they are doing something good for lions by shooting them for their heads. The truth is, trophy hunters often target large, dominant males. This disrupts the social structure of mountain lion populations. Younger, less experienced males take over the vacated territories. These younger males are more prone to come into conflict with people because they have less knowledge of their territory and prey availability.
California banned trophy hunting of mountain lions in 1972. And when there are cases of individual lions coming into conflict with people, the state has primarily managed those conflicts with non-lethal methods like hazing and relocation, with just 10 problem lions killed in the entire state last year. California’s approach is working, sustaining a healthy mountain lion population and maintaining human-lion conflict rates that are similar or even lower than states that permit trophy hunting.
Mountain lions play a crucial role in the ecosystem by removing sick and weak animals. This can help slow the spread of diseases like the brain-wasting illness of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer, elk, and moose herds.
So let’s be clear: trophy hunting of essentially inedible animals delivers no benefits for Colorado. It enriches a handful of hunting guides who use high-tech hounding strategies for fee-paying trophy hunters. It creates chaos and disrupts the balance of nature, causing downstream adverse effects with deer and elk populations and creating a population of lions more likely to come into conflict with.
Fasten your reading glasses, or pour yourself a cup of coffee or glass of wine, because this blog will take a good while, and a few good turns.
I’ve been involved in wolf recovery efforts, since the late 1980s, and there’s not much I haven’t heard or seen: good and bad; inspiring and disappointing; and lots and lots of bewildering. But what we’re witnessing today is particularly disturbing—an epidemic of pure, unbridled cruelty, and a rekindling of the prejudice and persecution that essentially extirpated wolves from mainland America back in the early 1900s. It presents a significant risk to one of our nation’s greatest conservation successes. I wrote about it in this piece, recently published in the Washington Post.
Wolves have centuries of mythology and misrepresentation working against them, which shape beliefs about wolves that science can’t easily shake. I’ve spoken to ranchers who believe that wolves, if given the chance, will attack their children, and frankly, I’m confident if a pack of wolves was running around suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, semi-rabid packs of PhD parents would be having a collective fit. If you don’t believe it, I can show you posts from NextDoor where seemingly highly educated folks are demanding action from “animal control” because someone posted a picture of a fox walking down the street in front of their home. But I digress.
Years ago, I spent some time with a rancher, in Montana. He was a great partner in grizzly bear conservation, so I asked about wolves and got a cold, steely look back. Then, with a slow, deliberate tone, he said, “Dan, it’d just be better if we don’t talk about wolves. My grandfather helped drive them out of this county and I just can’t tolerate the thought of them being back.” End of conversation.
When I began my U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service career, in 1995, the agency Director was the first-ever woman to hold the job, the late Mollie Beattie. Mollie was passionate about all wild life, but especially wolves. That’s her in this iconic photo with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. In the crate is the first wolf to set paw into Yellowstone National Park since 1926.
About a year later, Mollie and I were in the offices of Montana’s Democratic Senator Max Baucus. Some Montana ranchers were upset about a wolf pack that had taken up residence in the midst of several U.S. Forest Service grazing allotments. The ranchers wanted the Service to authorize USDA Wildlife Services to “remove” the wolves. Since they hadn’t killed any cattle, and were actively denning, Mollie declined.
A week later, we found out that USDA had “made the ranchers happy” by killing several dozen coyotes in the area. I remember Mollie fuming about the “abject cruelty,” and she said she felt like going up there and planting a monument to those coyotes “who had given their lives in support of wolf recovery.”
We’ve come a long, long way in the 25 years since then. Or so I’d thought, until recently. Last year Wisconsin held a poorly organized and managed hunt, just weeks after wolves were removed from Endangered Species Act protections. The state issued nearly 2,400 permits with a quota of 119 animals. It was a literal bloodbath, with at least 218 wolves killed in less than 72 hours. Recently published research indicates that related poaching likely killed another 100 animals, so in total, a third of Wisconsin’s wolves have been killed less than a year after losing ESA protection.
And then the Idaho legislature took matters into their own hands, presumably because they were unsatisfied with Fish and Game Commission harvest regulations that had only resulted in 570 wolves being killed from July 2019 to July 2020. They passed legislating regulations to give every conceivable advantage to “hunters” with the goal of reducing the population by as much as 90 percent.
Montana has followed suit. Almost certainly, Wyoming and Utah will join. Unless the federal government puts a halt to this mayhem. Decades of progress will vanish.
A hallmark of our Association of Zoos and Aquariums community is our abiding and overriding concern for the welfare of animals—animals in our care, for sure, but animals everywhere. If we’re going to live this, and make it an enduring part of our community culture, I believe we must stand strongly against animal cruelty, and especially the rebirth of brutal and relentless persecution of wolves that we’re witnessing today. The Rev. Martin Luther King said,
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Our concern for animals, and intolerance for cruelty, can’t stop at a perimeter fence.
That’s why I’d like to enlist you to do a few things:
Every AZA member who holds an advanced degree in science, please consider adding your name to this petition.
I’ve added my name, but don’t let that discourage you. You’ll be in good company with the likes of Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson, and Tom Lovejoy.
Members and member-employees who are not scientists, please consider signing this petition.
Consider sending a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland asking her to exercise her discretionary authority under the Endangered Species Act and put in place an emergency listing of wolves in Idaho and Montana in order to counteract the deliberate efforts of these states to undermine wolf recovery. Make sure to note that the actions of these states constitute a “a significant risk to the well-being” of wolves. That’s the ESA’s standard for emergency listing.
Consider asking your conservation partners, board members, and members to take these actions. And consider using your social media accounts to amplify concerns about this threat to wolf recovery.
Animals in AZA-accredited facilities receive the best care of animals anywhere. This is a moment when we can add our voices to howls of condemnation about actions of abject cruelty towards wolves and show our concern for animals everywhere.
Exposing the Big Game 
