The League of Humane Voters/NY would like to thank you for all of your work to achieve the many compromises that resulted in Part ZZ of Bill S2505C. It was a far cry from the original budget bill S2508 Part X, in which a lower hunting age to kill deer and bears with crossbows and other weapons would have beenimposed on all countiesof the state. Part X would have allowed 12 and 13 year-olds to hunt deerand bearswith crossbows throughout the state permanently. Crossbows add to the already deadly assortment of weapons that youngsters can legally possess, which includes modified AR-15 and AK-47 semi-automatics.
Had there been no intervention or negotiation among the legislators, the outcome would have been very different:
Part ZZ turned an imposed statewide lower hunting age into an opt-in pilot program that expires in 2 years and 7 months.
An 18-year-old driver in Old Forge was ticketed late last month by state conservation officers for intentionally speeding up his pickup truck, hitting and critically injuring a white-tailed deer.
That incident and other recent incidents below involving state Department of Environmental Conservation officers (ECOs) was reported this week by the DEC.
Intentional Deer Strike – Herkimer County
“On March 31, Town of Webb Police contacted a state Conservation Officer about a deer struck and killed by a vehicle in the village of Old Forge. Multiple eyewitnesses claimed the driver intentionally accelerated his truck toward two deer standing in the road, striking one and dragging it approximately 70 to 100 yards down the road. Due to the extent of its injuries, the deer had to be euthanized, according to wktv.com. An officer accessed video footage from a local business’ security camera that corroborated eyewitness statements. With help from Old Forge Police, ECOs located the truck and driver in the town of Forestport, Oneida County, and found deer hair in the front bumper of the suspect’s truck. After interviewing him and presenting him with the evidence, the driver, Grady Boulier, 18, admitted to accelerating toward the two deer, striking one, and dragging it down the road before stopping. The subject was issued appearance tickets to the Town of Webb Court for Environmental Conservation Law violations of taking deer from a public highway, taking deer while in a motor vehicle and taking deer during the closed season.”
Earlier this month, the Navy notified Turkey, which manages traffic through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits leading to the Black Sea under the 1936 Montreux Convention, that they were tentatively planning a routine transit by the two destroyers, according to a U.S. defense official.https://products.gobankingrates.com/r/e48f149e71a19f66115d5f5c8edaefd8?subid=
Humans are great (well, that’s debatable) but we’re also super noisy. Think about all of the noise we make with our vehicles, machines, various types of entertainment devices, and even our voices and you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that humans as a species are one of the noisiest around. We’re so noisy, in fact, that other animals tend to avoid us. Cities often push many species away just by gobbling up their habitat but beyond that our incredible noise can make other types of animals like birds search for homes elsewhere.
Scientists have been telling us about the effects of our noise on animal life for some time, but new research is beginning to point to another side effect that many people might not even consider. Since animal groups like birds are some of nature’s most prolific seed-spreaders, it’s looking increasingly likely that humans are actually preventing the regrowth and spread of various plant species simply because we’re making the animals that plant those seeds head for the hills.More from BGR
In the study, which was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers observed a large area of New Mexico known as Rattlesnake Canyon, which is currently under natural resource management. The region has a lot of natural gas wells, and as Guardian reports, these facilities are extremely loud. The round-the-clock ruckus is up to 100 decibels, which would be enough to cause hearing damage in humans with extended exposure. But if the noise is painful for us, it’s perhaps even worse for wildlife that often sees loud sounds as a threat.
The study covered a whopping 115 acres and multiple wells with noisy compressors. Observations of the number of trees of various ages as well as animal activity, specifically birds, began in 2007. At the time it was thought that the noise around the wells with compressors was pushing some animal life away, including birds that spread seeds, while other species were doing just fine. Hummingbirds, for instance, didn’t mind the noise, and that led to an increase in flowering plants due to their pollinating efforts.
Over a decade later, scientists once again revisited these areas to compare how things changed over time. What they found was that some wells had removed their compressors while others that were previously quiet had installed them, turning each individual area on its head. In regions that had been noisy but had since quieted down, some trees had made a comeback with fresh seedlings, but some specific species of plants didn’t bounce back as well as others.
It’s believed that the bird species that feed on the various seeds — in the case of the pinyon pine, the California scrub jay is a big seed-spreader — had not returned to the areas for one reason or another. It’s likely, the researchers say, that the jays had associated these areas with loud or even painful noise and even though the areas were now quiet, the birds refused to return.
It’s disheartening to imagine that, because humans are so noisy, we might change entire ecosystems without even realizing it, but that appears to be not just plausible, but likely.
Using fluorescent antibody-based stains and advanced microscopy, researchers are able to visualize cells of different species origins in an early stage chimeric embryo. The red color indicates the cells of human origin.Weizhi Ji/Kunming University of Science and Technology
For the first time, scientists have created embryos that are a mix of human and monkey cells.
The embryos, described Thursday in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, says the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns.
“My first question is: Why?” says Kirstin Matthews, a fellow for science and technology at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we’re just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.”
Still, the scientists who conducted the research, and some other bioethicists defended the experiment.
“This is one of the major problems in medicine — organ transplantation,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the Cell study. “The demand for that is much higher than the supply.”Article continues after sponsor messagehttps://a49f5ba1bbc245a016df1c785ce60c6f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
“I don’t see this type of research being ethically problematic,” says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University and Harvard University. “It’s aimed at lofty humanitarian goals.”
But so far, that approach hasn’t worked. So Belmonte teamed up with scientists in China and elsewhere to try something different. The researchers injected 25 cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells from humans — commonly called iPS cells — into embryos from macaque monkeys, which are much more closely genetically related to humans than are sheep and pigs.
After one day, the researchers report, they were able to detect human cells growing in 132 of the embryos, and were able study the embryos for up to 19 days. That enabled the scientists to learn more about how animal cells and human cells communicate, an important step toward eventually helping researchers find new ways to grow organs for transplantation in other animals, Belmonte says.
“This knowledge will allow us to go back now and try to re-engineer these pathways that are successful for allowing appropriate development of human cells in these other animals,” Belmonte tells NPR. “We are very, very excited.”
Such mixed-species embryos are known as chimeras, named for the fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology that is part-lion, part-goat, part-snake.
“Our goal is not to generate any new organism, any monster,” Belmonte says. “And we are not doing anything like that. We are trying to understand how cells from different organisms communicate with one another.”
In addition, Belmonte hopes this kind of work could lead to new insights into early human development, aging and the underlying causes of cancer and other disease.
Some other scientists NPR spoke with agree the research could be very useful.
“This work is an important step that provides very compelling evidence that someday when we understand fully what the process is we could make them develop into a heart or a kidney or lungs,” says Dr. Jeffrey Platt, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, who is doing related experiments but was not involved in the new research.
But this type of scientific work and the possibilities it opens up raises serious questions for some ethicists. The biggest concern, they say, is that someone could try to take this work further and attempt to make a baby out of an embryo made this way. Specifically, the critics worry that human cells could become part of the developing brain of such an embryo — and of the brain of the resulting animal.
“Should it be regulated as human because it has a significant proportion of human cells in it? Or should it be regulated just as an animal? Or something else?” says Matthews. “At what point are you taking something and using it for organs when it actually is starting to think, and have logic?”
Another concern is that using human cells in this way could produce animals that have human sperm or eggs.
“Nobody really wants monkeys walking around with human eggs and human sperm inside them,” says Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist, who co-wrote an article in the same issue of the journal that critiques the line of research, while noting that this particular study was ethically done. “Because if a monkey with human sperm meets a monkey with human eggs, nobody wants a human embryo inside a monkey’s uterus.”
Belmonte acknowledges the ethical concerns. But he stresses that his team has no intention of trying to create animals with the part-human, part-monkey embryos, or to even try to grow human organs in such a closely related species. He says his team consulted closely with bioethicists, including Greely.
Greely says he hopes the work will spur a more general debate about how far scientists should be allowed to go with this kind of research.
“I don’t think we’re on the edge of beyond the Planet of the Apes. I think rogue scientists are few and far between. But they’re not zero,” Greely says. “So I do think it’s an appropriate time for us to start thinking about, ‘Should we ever let these go beyond a petri dish?’ “
The notion of using organs from animals for transplants has also long raised concerns about spreading viruses from animals to humans. So, if the current research comes to fruition, steps would have to be taken to reduce that infection risk, scientists say, such as carefully sequestering animals used for that purpose and screening any organs used for transplantation.
Officials with Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) told CNN that a manual count of the greater one-horned rhinos across Nepal’s four national parks counted 752 of the animals, the first time more than 650 have been seen in one survey since 2000.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
The rise in population was attributed by the officials to a drop in tourism, which allowed the national park habitats to remain largely undisturbed. Other factors including government-run conservation projects were also credited with the rhino boom.
COVID-19 saw airline travel and tourism plunge to historically low levels as many countries instituted bans on nonessential travel.
“Chitwan [National Park] is a major habitat for rhinos in Nepal but we have translocated them to [other parks] to make an alternate population and [as a result] the population has increased in those parks, and in Chitwan as well,” said Haribhadra Acharya, an information officer with DNPWC, in a statement to CNN.
“Because the tourists were almost zero, the habits were not disturbed,” he continued.
While the good news was celebrated by conservationists in the country, Acharaya added that the size of the national parks would likely not increase meaning that officials would have to take steps to support the now higher population of rhinos.
“It is a challenge but we are managing the habitat intensively to support the higher density,” he told CNN.
BREAKING: In response to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) partial call to action—suspending the sale of live mammals at food markets—PETA is nominating PETA Asia Director Jason Baker for the agency’s executive board.
WITH EXPERT BAKER ON BOARD, PERHAPS WE’D GET SENSIBLE AND TIMELY DECISIONS ABOUT SAFETY.
PETA, PETA Asia, and our other affiliates have done the research, and we know that preventing future zoonotic diseases cannot be achieved by feebly halting the sale of only live mammals at food markets. Did avian flu teach the world nothing? It’s not just mammals, and it’s not just food markets—sales of birds, reptiles, and fish; fur and exotic-skins farms; and roadside zoos all risk the possibility—no, make that the probability—of spawning the next pandemic.
SO LONG AS LIVE-ANIMAL MARKETS ARE OPEN AND OPERATING, ANIMALS SUFFER AND NO ONE IS SAFE.
On March 25, 2020, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk sent an urgent letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus:
We’re writing to you urgently because, while the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic remains unpredictable, one thing is certain: Live-animal meat markets will continue to put the planet’s human population at enormous risk. On behalf of PETA and more than our 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide, we respectfully ask that you call for the immediate and permanent closure of these markets, in which dangerous viruses and other pathogens flourish.
Prior to WHO’s lackluster call to action, PETA had also launched an action alert, which more than 162,000 people signed, urging the agency to shut down live-animal markets worldwide; set up a “‘blood’-soaked ‘live market’” outside WHO’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., urging the agency in person to close all live-animal markets permanently; and, with help from Slaughter Free NYC, exposed the disgusting conditions at poorly regulated stateside live-animal markets, like those in New York City. Across the pond, PETA U.K. held its own protest outside WHO’s Copenhagen office, echoing our call for a total live-animal market ban. And PETA Asia conducted investigations into live-animal markets in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam as well as follow-up investigations in Thailand and Indonesia months after the pandemic began, which verified that the bloody, filthy markets were still operating as usual, despite a mounting COVID-19 death toll. Throughout the investigations, PETA Asia observed that non-wild and non-mammalian animals were being trafficked, and they still posed a threat for the spread of disease—plus, these animals themselves are threatened by disease (consider, for example, the 1.3 million chickens Sweden announced it would “cull,” or slaughter, after it reportedly became the epicenter of a bird flu outbreak in Europe just a few short months ago).
Don’t wait for WHO or anyone else to protect you or the animals we should be living in harmony with. You can take action right now to help prevent the next global pandemic: Ditch meat, eggs, and dairy—go vegan. And help others you know do the same. Feed them vegan food and they’ll never go back to those truly dirty dietary habits.
A man has been sentenced to three months in federal prison after shooting an elephant seal in the head with a handgun while it rested peacefully on a California beach.On Location: April 13, 2021
© U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kelly M. Agee/ReleasedThe Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt arrives in Souda Bay, Greece, for a logistics and maintenance period.
© Provided by BGR noise pollution
© Getty Images A rhino in Nepal
© NOAA Fisheries/Tony Orr
