LAMAR, Colo. — The May family said a wildfire took some of their animals and thousands of acres of their land on Friday in Lamar, Colorado — and they said they’re lucky it wasn’t worse.
Drought conditions are getting worse in the state, and so is the potential for more wildfires.
Coloradoused to prepare for wildfiresin the middle of summer, but now, they are becoming more common year-round — even during one of the state’s snowiest months.
“We don’t have the benefits of moisture in the soil,” Dallas May said. “Friday’s fire was the example of that.”
Protests over the mass destruction of chickens on an Iowa farm have repeatedly disrupted Minnesota Timberwolves post-season games.
The latest interruption of play came during Saturday’s Game 4 NBA playoff with the Memphis Grizzles at Minnesota’s Target Center. With 10:44 left in the third quarter, a spectator seated in the second row behind the Timberwolves’ bench abruptly ran onto the court in the middle of a play. Security tackled her and dragged her off.
Direct Action Everywhere, an animal rights activist organization responsible for two previous fan protests at Timberwolves games, identified the protestor as Sasha Zemmel. She was wearing a “fake ref uniform (that) had 5.3 displayed on the back,” according to USA TODAY Sports Network’s Damichael Cole, who said the number was a reference to the 5.3 million chickens killed after a bird flu outbreak at a farm owned by Rembrandt Enterprises.
Why are animal rights protesters at a Minnesota Timberwolves game?
Glen Taylor, longtime majority owner of the Timberwolves, is listed in Iowa secretary of state filings as a director of Rembrandt, based in Buena Vista County. The destruction of the millions of laying hens at the egg-producing facility came on March 17.
More: Bird flu reappears in Iowa after two-week-plus hiatus
What happens to the birds when a bird flu outbreak happens?
When outbreaks occur, state agriculture departments work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the producer to ensure the quick destruction of the entire flock and quarantine the surrounding area to prevent the spread of the virus.
The methods used to destroy the flocks, developed by the American Veterinary Medical Association, include smothering the birds with firefighting foam and piping carbon dioxide into barns to suffocate the birds. When there are too many to destroy with those methods, producers use a third veterinary association-approved method, ventilation shutdown.
In that scenario, farmers stop airflow into barns, which raises temperatures to levels at which the animals die. The USDA and the veterinary association recommend that farmers further elevate heat and carbon dioxide levels in barns to speed up the process and limit the animals’ suffering.
The association acknowledges its techniques “may not guarantee that the deaths the animals face are painless and distress free.”
California-based Direct Action Everywhere maintains the method are cruel, in particular ventilation shutdown, which it says Rembrandt used. It has distributed videos it said showed some stunned, traumatized chicken still alive in barns and at a compost site after the procedure.
What happened at the Minnesota vs. Memphis game Saturday?
The organization has said the stunts at the Timberwolves games are part of “ongoing efforts to get Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor to step down and return factory farm bailout money.” On Saturday, the organization confirmed that Zemmel was “dressed as #NBA Ref… while attempting to ‘eject’ #Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor.”
“She attempted to whistle to stop play as she approached Taylor at his courtside seat, to issue a ‘technical foul and ejection,’ along with a ‘fine’ against Forbes’ richest billionaire in Minnesota,” the group said in a news release.
Another protestor seated next to Zemmel also was removed from the game.
What happened during the other two Timberwolves protests?
It was the third protest by the organization at a Timberwolves game this postseason. During the Timberwolves’ play-in game against the Los Angeles Clippers on April 12, an animal rights protester glued her hand to the hardwood along the baseline and sprawled out before security was able to pry her away.
During the Grizzles and Timberwolves series opener on April 16 at Memphis’ FedExForum, a woman chained herself to the back of the basket and threw fliers onto the court. There was a brief delay as security cut the protestor’s chain and carried her out the arena. According to Cole, “She was pumping her firsts while being carried out by security.”
Iowa, the nation’s leading producer of eggs and seventh-largest turkey producer, has lost the most birds from commercial and backyard flocks in this year’s wave of bird flu. at 13.3 million.
An animal cruelty activist is taken away in handcuffs after she attempted to protest during the Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies Game 4 of an NBA basketball first-round playoff series Saturday, April 23, 2022, in Minneapolis.
AP Photo/Craig Lassig
Animal rights activist Sasha Zemmel was tackled to the floor by a security guard during a playoff game on Saturday at Minneapolis’s Target Center between the Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies.
Video footage of the incident, shared by the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, shows some of the scene unfolding after Zemmel stormed onto the court dressed in a referee jersey as fans watched in apparent confusion.
After her detention, the St. Louis resident was released from custody on Sunday morning, according to Direct Action Everywhere, which described her in a release to the press as participating in their protests.
In a tweet Sunday, Direct Action Everywhere said Zemmel was detained after protesting Timberwolves billionaire owner Glen Taylor over claims of animal cruelty.
The group said Zemmel briefly attempted to whistle to stop play during Saturday’s game as she approached Taylor at his courtside seat in order to issue a so-called “technical foul and ejection,” along with a “fine” against him.
Zemmel was wearing a jersey with the number 5.3 on the back, in reference to the 5.3 million chickens killed at Rembrandt Enterprises, an Ohio egg farm that Taylor owns, Direct Action Everywhere Said.
Neither the group nor the Minnesota Target Center or the Timberwolves immediately responded to PEOPLE’s request for comment. It was unclear if Zemmel has obtained an attorney.
In addition to Zemmel, another animal rights activist that was sitting next to her and dressed in all black with a blue jacket was reportedly removed after also attempting to protest at the game.
An animal cruelty activist is taken away in handcuffs after she attempted to protest during the Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies Game 4 of an NBA basketball first-round playoff series Saturday, April 23, 2022, in Minneapolis.
AP Photo/Craig Lassig
Direct Action Everywhere also claims a similar protest attempted Thursday night by another animal rights activist named Matt Johnson was prevented. The group said Johnson was “aggressively shoved to the ground” by security and police officers at the center and faced a disorderly conduct charge.
“Johnson says he was treated with excessive force as a peaceful demonstrator, and is considering his legal options,” the group said.
Thank you, Animals 24-7, for your coverage. First off, mass-production of living creatures can NEVER be made “humane.” It’s an insult to the animals to use the word humane to describe their human-imposed suffering and sicknesses in mass-production operations of any size. Back when Whole Foods developed its Compassionate Standards program, appallingly all of the farmed animal advocacy groups, as far as I can recall, signed on to it with the exception of Farm Animal Reform [now Rights] Movement and United Poultry Concerns. How could anyone, I wondered, think that “compassion” had ANYTHING to do with purely profit-seeking enterprises? How could animal protection organizations add insult to the injuries inflicted on chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs, aquatic animals and others born strictly to be killed and otherwise used for mass-consumption of their bodies and “products”?
The Global Animal Partnership (GAP) program, referenced in your article as a public relations marketer for Whole Foods, is yet another insult to the chickens and other animals whose body parts are displayed, ignominiously, in meat counters.
Urban/suburban Whole Foods shoppers have no idea what the GAP rating scale of 1 to 5 actually means or looks like in actuality. Most shoppers will choose the cheapest level of “welfare,” which at all five levels does not mean that the animals are Faring Well. Quite the contrary.
Mountaire Farms, mentioned in your article, has a big presence on the Delmarva Peninsula comprising Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, as well as in other U.S. states. Mountaire Farms raises chickens on a massive industrial scale, poisons local well water, and has no concern for anyone’s welfare: human, animal, the planet, or otherwise – except for themselves, their profits.
As for the American Humane Association, this organization has NOTHING to do with advancing farmed animal welfare. AHA should never be viewed as a “humane” organization with respect to farmed animals, laboratory animals, or even for animals in entertainment – their signature “welfare” project. American Humane is an arm of agribusiness, as is the American Veterinary Medical Association, which at the top tier is an arm of industrialized animal agriculture and animal experimentation. The AVMA serves and identifies with its wealthy, animal-abusing corporate clients and interests.
Once again, thank you for your coverage of the investigative revelations of the fraudulence of the lying organizations that cater to animal consumers’ fairy-tale wishes and willful blindness to the miserable reality of farmed-animals’ pitiful, tormented lives.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns. www.upc-online.org
Saturday marks the beginning of the annual youth turkey hunting weekend.
Saturday and Sunday will see turkey hunting in Upstate New York open to hunters aged 12-15. Hunters must have a turkey hunting permit in addition to their hunting license. Shooting hours are from one-half hour before sunrise to noon each day.
The DEC offers these tips for a safe and successful hunt:
Don’t stalk. More than half of turkey hunting injuries happen when one hunter stalks another.
Always assume any call or footsteps you hear are from another hunter. Don’t shoot until you clearly see the whole turkey and know its sex.
If you see another hunter, talk to him or her clearly, and don’t move. Never wave or use a turkey call to alert another hunter.
I’m convinced, Hooded Mergansers are simply Wood Ducks that have been corrupted by the Dark Side.
Similar in size and sharing a proclivity for nesting in tree cavities, the bill of the hoodie shrivels into thin, serrated forceps ideal for catching minnows, forsaking the broad palette of reds and yellows suited for snacking on acorns and seeds that a wood duck possesses. The hoody’s eyes turn yellow, and the resplendent, confident crest of the woody transforms into a periscoping coiffure that desperately flashes a patch of white feathers at female suitors and male rivals.
Without a doubt, they’re tougher to splash than a wood duck. As for their kitchen quality —well, while the wood duck is prized table fare, the fishy…
There are reports that Russia may be planning to usechemical weapons as part of its offensive in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration has already set up a Tiger Team of national security officials to consider options in the event this happens; now is the time for these discussions to become more public.
We’ve traveled this road before, badly. In August 2012, Barack Obama publicly warned the Bashar Assad regime in Syria against employing chemical weapons. “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” he said. “That would change my calculus.”
It didn’t. The following year, reports emerged that Assad had begun using chemical weapons, culminating in…
Individuals who accept human evolution tend to exhibit reduced levels of prejudice compared to those who reject the scientific theory, according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study indicates that disbelief in evolution predicts racism and prejudice around the world and in various cultural contexts.
“I have been interested in human-animal relations for a while now,” said study author Stylianos Syropoulos, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“I did my first study on the subject back as an undergraduate student, examining how and why people expand their moral circles to include/exclude animals or humans. Then in graduate school I joined the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program, where I became invested in research on understanding and preventing intergroup conflict and violence.”
“Further, I recently also came across a wonderful review article by Vezzali and colleagues which suggests that some interventions to reduce conflict can be non-conflict-specific,” Syropoulos said. “Namely, that means that they can focus on an unrelated psychological phenomenon outside the scope of the conflict, which in this case was belief in evolution.”
To examine the relationship between the acceptance of evolution and prejudicial attitudes, the researchers first analyzed very large sets of data collected by the General Social Survey and Pew Research Center.
For 10 years, the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. citizens, included measures of the belief that humans developed from earlier species of animals. An analysis of responses from 8,963 participants found that the belief that humans evolved from animals was associated with reduced prejudice, less racist attitudes and reduced support for discriminatory behaviors. This was true even after controlling for education level, religiosity, political beliefs, family income, and gender.
The researchers also analyzed Pew Research Center data from 21,827 Christian individuals in 19 Eastern European countries. Pew asked the participants whether “Humans and other living things have evolved over time” or “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” After controlling for education, importance of religion, age, and gender, the researchers found that those who denied that humans had evolved tended to exhibit reduced acceptance of outgroups, such as Roma and Catholics.
Next, Syropoulos and his colleagues analyzed Pew Research Center data from 28,004 Muslim individuals in 25 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They found that disbelief in evolution was associated with decreased acceptance of Christians and with the tendency to only have Muslim friends. Similarly, an analysis of responses from 3,562 participants in Israel found that disbelief in evolution was associated with support for preferential treatment for Jews, less support for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and greater support for the expulsion of Arabs.
Syropoulos and his colleagues also conducted their own studies.
An online study of 499 U.S. residents recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform found that disbelief in evolution was associated with hostility towards Iran, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and Panemistan (a fictitious country). In two additional studies, which included 509 U.S. residents recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk and 1,072 students recruited from introductory psychology courses, the researchers found that belief in human evolution and perceived similarity of self to animals were only moderately correlated, suggesting that they are “psychometrically distinguishable constructs.”
“Our findings were consistent across cultural, religious, and national contexts, for majority and minority groups, and even towards groups that were fictional (i.e., created by the research team),” Syropoulos told PsyPost. “These findings are correlational, meaning we cannot make a causal argument about this relationship, but importantly, this relationship was consistent, and remained significant after adjusting for key psychological variables such as ideology or religiosity.”
“We believe this link makes sense because of theoretical work on Social Identity Theory (i.e., when people believe in evolution, they are more likely to believe that they are similar to other people, as we all have a common ancestor); Terror Management Theory (i.e., in short, people are less defensive of their cultural worldviews and more accepting of others) and Moral Expansiveness Theory (i.e., people who believe in evolution potentially expand their moral circle to include animals, as they perceive them and animals to originate from a common ancestor, which in turn leads to them valuing people from other groups a lot too).”
The researchers noted that Darwin’s theory of evolution has been cited to perpetrate racism and other forms of prejudice, in part through the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” used to describe the process of natural selection.
“There have been theoretical accounts that predict the opposite of what we found, so it was exciting for us to show that this actually is not the case, that the opposite is true and that belief in evolution seems to have pretty positive effects,” co-author Bernhard Leidner said in a news release.
Despite using nationally representative data from across the world, the correlational nature of the data prevented the researchers from making causal claims about the relationship between disbelief in evolution and prejudicial attitudes. To overcome this limitation, Syropoulos and his colleagues conducted a final study of 1,279 U.S. residents in which they attempted to experimentally manipulate belief in human evolution.
Participants were randomly assigned to read about how humans have evolved from animals, read about evolution of currency from coins to paper bills, or read nothing before completing assessments of prejudicial attitudes.
Reading about evolution did not directly reduce prejudice. But the manipulation did reduce prejudice indirectly through changes in participants’ self-reported beliefs in human evolution. “Thus, although the manipulation itself did not prove to be effective, there is evidence to suggest that for those people who were convinced by it, prejudice was reduced,” the researchers explained.
“It’s not easy to make everyone believe in evolution, as depending on one’s education and religious background, they might reject this theory altogether,” Syropoulos told PsyPost. “More research is required in that direction.”
“This project was the result of a cross-national collaboration including researchers from the United States (Dr. Bernhard Leidner from UMass Amherst; Dr. Jeff Greenberg and PhD Candidate Dylan Horner from University of Arizona) and Dr. Uri Lifshin from Reichman University in Israel (who is a joint first-author on the paper). Additional work on perceived similarity to animals is coming out soon from this collaboration which will further validate this claim,” Syropoulos added.
The study, “Bigotry and the human-animal divide: (Dis)belief in human evolution and bigoted attitudes across different cultures“, was authored by Stylianos Syropoulos, Uri Lifshin, Jeff Greenberg, Dylan E. Horner, and Bernhard Leidner.
A rendering shows how the bridge will let animals cross over traffic.From Wallis Anneberg FoundationLos AngelesCNN—
Wild animals in Southern California soon will have more turf to roam thanks to the world’s biggest wildlife crossing, which will span 10 lanes of Highway 101 in northwest Los Angeles toclose a crucial gapfor habitats.
Mountain lions, which typically wander a territory spanning 150 to 200 miles, will be among the chief beneficiaries of the new overpass, providing a safe passage from the Santa Monica Mountains, across the freeway, and into the Simi Hills of the Santa Susana mountain range. This week, an 18-month-old mountain lion recently separated from its mother and seeking its own terrain was hit and killed on the 405 freeway, Ana Cholo, spokesperson for the National Park Service (NPS) tells CNN.
