Melting permafrost offers opportunities but poses calamitous risks
An LNG tanker successfully sailed to Asia via the Arctic Ocean early this year, the first time the journey has been managed in winter. (Kyodo photo/courtesy of Sovcomflot)KO SAKAI, Nikkei senior staff writerMarch 14, 2021 09:56 JST
TOKYO — On Feb. 19, a Russian icebreaker that transports liquefied natural gas arrived at Sabetta, an LNG loading port in the far north of Siberia. The ship had sailed through the ice-covered Arctic Ocean on its way to and back from China’s Jiangsu Province.
The journey is noteworthy because the Arctic Sea route that the ship took is usually only navigable from July to November, when the sea ice is thin.
It was the first time for a ship to successfully navigate the Arctic Sea route to Asia in the dead of winter.
Japanese companies took note. JGC Holdings has built an LNG…
The world-renowned scientist and conservationist has spent the pandemic living at her childhood home in England, watching “mindless television” with her sister at suppertime and working around the clock
PHOTO: MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN
By Lane FlorsheimMarch 15, 2021 8:32 am ET
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In our series My Monday Morning, self-motivated people tell WSJ. how they start off the week.
For Dr. Jane Goodall, the pandemic has meant the end of almost all of her normal routines. “There are no weekends anymore,” she says. “Every single day is Zooms and Skypes and interviews and video messages all over the world. And writing, I have writing to do.” Goodall, 86, one of the most famous scientists and conservationists in the world, has been living away from her usual home in Tanzania at her childhood house in Bournemouth, England, with members of her family. The only part of her schedule that’s the same every day comes at 12:30 p.m., when she takes her dog out for a short walk and then eats lunch in the garden, sitting under the beech tree she used to climb when she was young. She often has company. “I’m usually joined by a robin redbreast and a blackbird,” she says. “I’m always out there, even if it’s pouring rain, because I don’t want to disappoint the birds.”
Goodall first began to fulfill her dream of living among African wildlife when, at 22, she voyaged to Nairobi by boat from London. There, she met paleontologist Louis Leakey, who hired her to work as his assistant and eventually sent her to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where she began her work with chimpanzees. Goodall’s observations disproved major beliefs about human uniqueness, including that we’re the only species capable of using and making tools and that we’re the only ones who have personalities and emotions. Though she stopped doing fieldwork in 1986, she is at work every day for the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977 to promote wildlife and environmental conservation. She’s been married twice, first to Dutch wildlife filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, with whom she has a son, named Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, 54, and then to Derek Bryceson, who was a national parks director and assemblyman in Tanzania. Recently, Goodall launched an essential-oils collection sourced throughout Africa in partnership with Forest Remedies and started a podcast called the Jane Goodall Hopecast, which has featured guests like musician Dave Matthews and the teenage animal rights activist Genesis Butler.
Here, she tells WSJ. about her dream podcast guest and how she sees her legacy.
What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do?
After the U.S. egg industry missed its own deadline to eliminate the practice, some wonder when change will ever come.
Visual: Edwin Remsburg / VW Pics via Getty ImagesBY JONATHAN MOENS03.15.20210 COMMENTS
EVERY YEAR,up to 7 billion day-old male chicks are tossed into shredding machines, gassed, or suffocated in plastic bags — a process known as chick culling. This grim ritual is underpinned by both biology and economics: Male chicks don’t lay eggs, and they fatten up too slowly to be sold as meat. Across the globe, culling has become the default strategy for the egg industry to eliminate the unwanted hatchlings.
“It is horrible. You see these puffy, newly hatched chicks on a conveyor belt,” headed toward a large blade that slices them “into a gazillion pieces,” said Leah Garcés, president of Mercy for Animals, an animal rights advocacy group in the United States. In recent years, local and international animal rights groups, particularly in France, Germany, and the U.S., have been ramping up pressure on governments and the egg industry to commit to ending the practice — particularly given technological innovations that allow producers to identify the sex of a developing chick before it hatches. The process is called in-ovo sexing, and such technologies, versions of which are already deployed in some countries, can obviate the need for live chick culling.
Nearly five years ago, United Egg Producers, an agricultural co-operative whose members are responsible for producing more than 90 percent of all commercial eggs in the U.S., released a statement pledging to eliminate chick culling by 2020, or as soon as a “commercially available” and “economically feasible” technology became accessible. That pledge was negotiated with the Humane League, an animal rights nonprofit organization. But 2020 has come and gone, and while UEP’s pledge wasn’t legally binding, some egg industry leaders and scientists say there is little sign that the industry is anywhere near phasing in cull-free technologies that could still meet the colossal supply of more than 100 billion eggs produced every year in the U.S.
Part of the reason for the sluggish pace of change, critics say, is that the U.S. has been investing in and nurturing the development of sophisticated cull-free technologies that, while promising, remain expensive and could take several more years to develop, scale, and deploy across the nation — particularly given that the Covid-19 pandemic has shuttered labs and otherwise slowed the pace of innovation. Meanwhile, a method of in-ovo sexing of eggs is already being used in Europe — though some American stakeholders say that method, which involves creating a tiny hole in the eggshell with a laser, is sub-par, because it increases the risk of contamination. European developers dispute this, however, and as of this year, cull-free eggs are available in thousands of supermarkets in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France with only modest additional costs to consumers and hatcheries.
What’s clear is that as the hunt for a solution drags on, the U.S.-based culling continues apace. “I don’t like false promises,” said Michael Sencer, executive vice president for Hidden Villa Ranch, a California-based food company that owns egg and dairy subsidiaries. Sencer expressed support for UEP’s pledge, but he acknowledged, “They’ve supported a number of groups that said they could come up with the technology and nothing has happened.”
UEP declined to be interviewed by Undark and instead provided a press statement highlighting its continued commitment to end culling. “We remain hopeful a breakthrough is on the horizon,” Chad Gregory, president and CEO of UEP, said in the statement.
Whether U.S.-based producers could be nudged by critics to explore existing technologies rather than pursue new ones remains unclear, but both animal rights groups and industry leaders agree that chick culling is not only cruel — it is wasteful. “I mean, name another industry where 50 percent of the finished product immediately goes to the garbage can,” said Jonathan Hoopes, president of Ovabrite, a Texas-based startup developing an in-ovo sexing technique. Incubating male eggs also takes up unnecessary space, energy, and money, making a solution to culling in the interest of both animal rights activists and egg producers.
“Forgetting the ethics of not killing all those birds, look at the money saving,” said Sencer, who estimated that the industry could save billions of dollars with the right technology. “It’s mind-boggling.”
SINCE THE 2016 statement, the largest funding initiative to eliminate chick culling has come from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR), which launched the “Egg-Tech Prize” — a public-private research initiative that provides funding for scientists and startups seeking to develop in-ovo sexing technologies — with Open Philanthropy in 2019. Deploying such a technology would not only make chick culling obsolete, it would also allow the industry to repurpose unwanted male eggs for food, animal feed, or vaccine development.
In November of 2019, FFAR announced six finalists who received more than $2 million in total seed funding to develop sex identification technologies. Phase II of the competition will award up to $3.7 million for a single working prototype.
Animal rights groups and industry leaders agree that chick culling is not only cruel — it is wasteful.
According to Tim Kurt, FFAR’s scientific program director, the deadline for submissions has been pushed back due to Covid-19 delays and is now scheduled for spring 2022. However, the foundation could also decide not to fund any of the teams if they are not satisfied with the timeline. That’s a prospect Tom Turpen, a contender for the prize, says is a real possibility, especially given that at least some of the teams — his included — have experienced setbacks since the start of the pandemic. With travel restrictions and university laboratories shut down, access to data, equipment, and supplies has made it harder for teams to make progress on particular aspects of their projects, says Kurt.
Finalists, who were awarded between $396,000 and $1.1 million dollars each include startups and research laboratories with big, out-of-the-box ideas. This includes Orbem, a German startup that sexes chicks by combining high-speed scanning of eggs with AI technology, and SensIT Ventures, Inc., a California-based company, which Turpen heads, that uses a microchip to sex chicks by identifying gases emitted by eggs early in development. The selection team specifically funded projects that could potentially upend the egg industry, says Kurt.
The technologies that were selected have “the potential to really transform the industry,” said Kurt, who was involved in the selection. “They might be a bit higher risk, but if they were successful, and our funding could help them become successful, they would really be the most ideal solution.”
For all of Undark’s coverage of the global Covid-19 pandemic, please visit our extensive coronavirus archive.
Kurt and other industry leaders are optimistic that some of these technologies will help eliminate chick culling in the near future, but others are less hopeful. Changing current practices, Sencer said, would require “billions of dollars of investment in new equipment. And it’s just not going to happen [quickly], it’s happening slowly.” Sencer added that he predicts the technology may be scalable towards the end of the decade.
Even researchers competing in the Egg-Tech Prize themselves admit that, while a sexing technology may be on the horizon, cull-free eggs won’t be scalable for at least two more years. Turpen says the biggest obstacle lies in developing a technology that is not only capable of rapidly and accurately sexing chicks, but is also readily affordable to consumers and hatcheries across the nation.
“You could do a lot of things to identify the sex of the egg. That’s not the point. The point is: Can you do it and still have eggs people can afford to eat?”
To avoid a surge in costs that would inevitably arise from suddenly adopting a new mode of production, Turpen says a more likely and more reasonable path to scaling this nationally would be a slow and incremental process. “The adoption and replacement of existing equipment — that’s going to look more like making the coal industry go away.” That industry “is going away,” Turpen said, “but it’s going to be a long time.”
Other researchers in the Egg-Tech Prize have also made it clear that an all-encompassing solution to culling is not around the corner. Benjamin Schusser, whose research with colleagues at the Technical University of Munich turned into the spin-off company, Orbem, declined an interview, saying “we don’t want to awake[n] hope that there is a solution almost ready for market.” Pedro Gómez, the CEO and co-founder of Orbem said in a 2019 interview with Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, that they hope to “classify one billion eggs per year by 2025.”
While a sexing technology may be on the horizon, cull-free eggs won’t be scalable for at least two more years.
Given the mismatch in expectations, some are baffled by UEP’s ambitious commitments to stamping out culling. Hoopes says the industry has made similar pledges in the past and they failed to yield tangible results.
But David Coman-Hidy, president of the Humane League, considers the progress in research and development since 2016 a “major win,” and credits the UEP pledge with heightening awareness about a cruel and largely unheard-of practice while bolstering innovation in in-ovo sexing technologies. In fact, the Humane League saw the 2020 goal as somewhat flexible, says Coman-Hidy. “Back then, it was such early days, we didn’t know how quickly or how many companies would get involved or what the research would look like.”
MEANWHILE, COMMERCIALLY VIABLE, in-ovo sexing technologies already exist in Germany and France. And Germany is poised to become the first country to ban industrial culling of male chicks, after the government approved a draft law to end the practice from 2022 onwards.
Currently, a company based in Germany and the Netherlands called respeggt GmbH uses in-ovo sexing by creating a tiny hole into the egg using a laser, extracting fluids, and sexing the chick by testing for specific hormones, explains Kristin Hoeller, head of business development and public affairs for respeggt. The technique, known as Seleggt, is based on research by scientists at the University of Leipzig and further developed in collaboration with REWE, a German supermarket chain, and HatchTech, a Dutch technology company specializing in incubation and hatchery equipment.
The method can sort chicks on the ninth day of development, when it is “exceptionally unlikely” that chick embryos experience any sensations whatsoever, David Mellor, professor emeritus of animal welfare science and bioethics at Massey University in New Zealand, wrote in an email. This is a crucial detail given that chick embryos have the capacity to experience pain at later stages of development. A procedure that might cause harm, such as using the male egg for food or vaccine development, may simply be shifting the cruel practice to an earlier stage, says Peter Singer, an animal rights advocate and professor of bioethics at Princeton University.
“The adoption and replacement of existing equipment — that’s going to look more like making the coal industry go away,” said Turpen.
Using this method, respeggt now has cull-free eggs in more than 6,000 supermarkets across France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, with hopes to expand further. They have also devised a ready-to-implement business strategy for producing commercial cull-free eggs. Hatcheries won’t have to invest anything, Hoeller said. Instead, costs will be passed onto centers where eggs are packed into cartons for commercial distribution. These packing stations will have to pay a license fee of around 2 Euro cents, about the same in U.S. currency, per egg. While respeggt plays no role in how supermarkets price eggs, the cost to consumers ranges between 2 and 5 Euro cents more per respeggt egg than regular ones.
Many U.S. experts, however, are concerned that creating a hole in the eggs could pose a serious food safety risk, given that it increases the chances of contamination from external sources. “It’s a risk that I think the industry would rather not take,” said Turpen. Kurt echoes this, saying that all finalists explicitly use non-invasive techniques to avoid this possibility. Focusing on non-invasive techniques also means they can be more easily repurposed for other scientific endeavors, such as vaccine development, he adds.
Hoeller disputes the suggestion that their technology poses an infection risk. “The perforation of the eggshell with the laser has no negative results at all,” she said, adding that the hole is so small it actually closes itself naturally within 30 minutes.
To be sure, some animal rights groups suggest that quibbling over a technological solution distracts from what they see as the real problem at hand: the egg industry itself. “Instead of putting a Band-Aid on a Band-Aid on a Band-Aid and trying to fix all these problems with more technology and more technology, here’s another idea: Why don’t we do plant-based eggs?” said Garcés. She and other animal rights activists point to food waste, animal suffering, and health-associated costs as reasons to divest money away from the egg industry to support companies that produce plant-based alternatives.
Short of that, though, other non-invasive egg sexing technologies have also been developed in Europe. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, and amid pressure by the French government to ban culling by the end of 2021, Carrefoursupermarkets planned to launch their first round of cull-free eggs on May 1, 2020. However, experts note that this technology sexes chicks on the 13th day of development, a period where the chick fetus may experience pain. Anticipating these criticisms, the German company behind this technology, Agri Advanced Technologies GmbH, a subsidiary of EW Group, is currently developing another technology aimed at determining the sex of chicks on the fourth day of development.
While imperfect, Hoopes suggested that the existence of viable, up-and-running technologies in Europe raises questions about why the U.S. is taking a slower, more ambitious approach. But other experts speculate that the technologies being pursued in the U.S. may ultimately prove cheaper and more flexible in the long run. “You would think the simplest method of doing this would be the best,” said Singer. “But maybe for very large producers, the investment is worth it. Maybe it pays off in saving labor costs or other costs.”
At this point it’s not clear what the best strategy to eliminate culling is yet, says Singer, but he believes there is a moral imperative to at least try and stamp out the practice from hatcheries around the globe. It’s also important to continue to pressure the industry to change, he said, but change will require not only perseverance, but patience. “These things,” he said, “will take some time.”
The Earth-sized exoplanet may have lost its original atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanism.
Orbiting a red dwarf star 41 light-years away is an Earth-sized, rockyexoplanetcalled GJ 1132 b. In some ways, GJ 1132 b has intriguing parallels to Earth, but in other ways it is very different. One of the differences is that its smoggy, hazy atmosphere contains a toxic mix of hydrogen, methane and hydrogen cyanide. Scientists usingNASA’sHubble Space Telescopehave found evidence this is not the planet’s original atmosphere, and that the first one was blasted away by blistering radiation from GJ 1132 b’s nearby parent star. The so-called “secondary atmosphere” is thought to be formed as molten lava beneath the planet’s surface continually oozes up through…
A decade-old idea — a four-nation group to curb China’s aggression — is about to have a big moment.By Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com Mar 12, 2021, 8:30am EST
President Joe Biden at the White House on March 10. He’s set to meet with other leaders of the Quad — Japan, Australia, and India — on Friday.
When President Joe Biden meets virtually with the leaders of Japan, India, and Australia on Friday, he’ll be doing much more than joining a routine gathering of nations. He’ll be showcasing the growing importance of an informal alliance of those four countries to counter China, known as “the Quad.”
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an idea formed in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, has never had its heads of government meet before. And despite 14 years of trying to making it an effective forum to coordinate policy in the Indo-Pacific, it rarely did much of substance.
But Friday’s session is set to change that.
Senior administration officials said the Quad will announce an “historic” and “unprecedented” financing agreement to help India, the world’s second-most-populous country, produce 1 billion vaccines by 2022. Nikkei Asia on Wednesday noted the group plans to build a supply chain of rare-earth minerals that could erode China’s dominance in the making of products such as smartphones and batteries for electric vehicles. And multiple sources say the four nations will, for the first time, release a joint statement about their shared vision for regional cooperation.
The presidential-level meeting and these moves, then, “is a declaration that the Quad is here to stay,” said Tanvi Madan, an expert on the group at the Brookings Institution.
But the group’s newfound prominence isn’t without controversy. Beijing views it (understandably) as expressly designed to thwart China’s economic and military aims.
While most experts see it that way, too, no member state — including the US — will outwardly say concerns about China animate the Quad. Instead, they claim it exists for like-minded democratic nations to improve the lives of millions in the region and maintain the geopolitical status quo.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price, for example, told reporters this week that the group deals with “urgent challenges” but wasn’t “about any single competitor.”
What happens on Friday will thus impact the future of both America’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific and US-China relations. The expectation is Biden and his counterparts will solidify the Quad’s place in those futures.
“For the United States, this is a big buy-in,” said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. “This is a pretty significant statement of American intent to build with these countries a framework for the region going forward.”
In December 2004, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia, unleashing the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. Around 230,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami in a matter of hours. Its effects were felt mostly in Indonesia but also as far away as eastern Africa. The event caused an estimated $10 billion in damages worldwide, making it one of the worst-ever humanitarian catastrophes.
“Basic infrastructure like shelter, medical capacity, transportation routes, emergency services, power, communication, and sanitation were lost,” the Center for International Maritime Security noted in 2016.
Armed forces from the United States, India, Japan, and Australia all pitched in to help with the response and even worked together in what was known as the Tsunami Core Group. That coordination cell was effective and proved the concept of quadrilateral cooperation. But after all the ships and helicopters returned to their bases, there was no real follow-up to turn the four-way partnership into something longer lasting.
US Navy sailors fill jugs with purified water on January 4, 2005, to support the humanitarian response after the 2004 tsunami and earthquake.
Then, in 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was talking with aides about how to turn his more hawkish foreign policy views into actual policy. One way to do that, CFR’s Smith told me, was “to put values diplomacy at the center of [Japan’s] thinking about working with partners in the region.” Plus, it’d be good if strong democracies banded together to keep the Indo-Pacific free and open for trade, among other things.
The Japanese government recalled the success of the four-nation tsunami team and considered that a potential model for such a group.
A flurry of discussion led to some progress in 2007 as the nascent Quad held one military drill and round of dialogue. But after China sharply criticized the group’s formation, Australia (and also India, some say) got cold feet and withdrew from the four-nation team in order to maintain good relations with China.
Abe’s Quad dreams were thus crushed and remained so for 10 years.
“You have to remember that this was a different period in how these countries thought about relations with China,” Smith told me, noting they hoped to engage Beijing and thereby encourage it to become a more responsible player on the world stage. “Flash forward a decade, now we have very different thinking about Chinese power.”
Confrontation, not cooperation, with China became the preferred approach in Washington, ushered in partly over the last four years by former President Donald Trump.
In November 2017, the Trump administration revived the Quad idea with their foreign counterparts. The four nations said they’d work together to patrol regional waterways where China was acting aggressively, such as in the South China Sea. That led some commentators and Chinese officials to speculate they were witnessing the embryonic stages of an “Asian NATO,” a reference to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which began as a military alliance to counter the Soviet Union in Europe.
The Quad’s members shut down any talk of that nature, releasing public statements that never cited China’s rise for the Quad’s return. “The discussions focused on cooperation based on their converging vision and values for promotion of peace, stability and prosperity in an increasingly inter-connected region that they share with each other and with other partners,” a statement from India’s Ministry of External Affairs read at the time.
But experts are nearly unanimous that the Quad rides again because President Xi Jinping has turned China into an openly antagonistic power. Among other things, he’s solidified control over the supply chains of key industries, and harassed neighbors at sea for territorial and energy gains.
The animating idea behind the Quad, then, is that all four nations have a better chance of curbing China’s aggression together than apart. How exactly to confront Beijing, though, was the group’s long-unanswered question. “Quadrilateral cooperation was always a beautiful opportunity in search of a genuine agenda,” said Eric Sayers, an expert on US-China relations at the American Enterprise Institute.
Officials from the group have met at least seven times since 2017, but always below the presidential or prime ministerial level, to discuss concerns ranging from China’s trade practices to its growing military power. And last November, warships and warplanes from the four nations met for the Malabar military training exercise in the Indian Ocean, the greatest show of strength by the Quad members to date.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a meeting of the Quad in October 2020.
But despite various meetings and statements supporting the Quad, it wasn’t really doing more than maritime training and expressing the need for broad cooperation, experts said. The best some could say was that the group brought the nations closer together and made the idea of a four-way framework in the Indo-Pacific more palatable.
The Quad, then, was a fine venue for the nations to interact, but mostly toothless.
Toothless, that is, until now.
The Quad’s Friday meeting is a major rollout for the group
A common thread in Biden’s foreign policy is the belief that solving big problems requires the US to work with allies and partners. Confronting China is one such challenge, and the Quad serves as a ready-made way to do just that.
The new administration isn’t “looking to Quad allies just for appearances,” said Sameer Lalwani, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center. “It’s about real burden sharing” among “the biggest countries, largest economies, maritime powers with real naval capabilities, and democracies.”
The two expected outcomes of Friday’s meeting are cases in point. India’s billion-plus population needs help to manufacture and distribute coronavirus vaccines. Instead of turning to China for that, the Quad’s three other nations are prepared to offer financial assistance.
“Something like the vaccine initiative will be the Quad’s most prominent, tangible outcome in some ways,” said Brookings’s Madan. It also has the “added benefit of saying to the region that this isn’t just about China.”
“It’s proof of concept for the Quad,” she added.
China also produces around 60 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals, which has both Republicans and Democrats calling for the US to challenge Beijing on that front. If China continues to mine and refine most of the world’s rare earths, it will have a greater say in the future of telecommunications, green technology, and other important industries of the future that rely on these elements.
Part of Biden’s platform is to modernize America’s economy to compete with China in those sectors, which requires loosening Beijing’s grip on the rare-earths supply chain. That’s a massive challenge, but one made easier with big countries like India, Japan, and Australia willing to help, experts say.
In addition to potential movement on climate-related matters, there’s also an expectation that the four nations will release a joint statement, the first such statement of its kind for the Quad. Stimson’s Lalwani said such a united effort, while pro forma, would show the Quad is seen now as an important multilateral group, not just some side project.
“The Quad’s trajectory is clearly upward,” he said.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a press conference on March 7. He’s been critical of the Quad.
That portends potential trouble with China, and Beijing has already made its displeasure with the group’s rise known.
Last October, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, “What [the Quad] pursues is to trumpet the Cold War mentality and to stir up confrontation among different groups and blocs and to stoke geopolitical competition.” That’s more heated rhetoric than he used back in 2018, when he called the concept of the Quad “sea foam” because it would soon dissipate.
But the Biden administration isn’t cowed and has stated emphatically that the Quad is a central part of its plans. The group is “fundamental, a foundation upon which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific region,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said during a January event at the US Institute of Peace.
That’s the right outlook, most experts told me. “If China was behaving fine, you wouldn’t see these countries engage on these things,” said Madan.
After Friday’s meeting, then, it’s likely the Quad will have officially moved from a fringe idea into a centerpiece of four nations’ designs for the region, one that could bring China to heel.
“The goal here is basically to introduce the Quad as a new feature of regular diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific,” a senior administration official told Reuters this week.
KALISPELL, Mont. (KECI/WKRC/CBS) – Activists say populations of endangered wildlife in Montana may be at risk as the state considers a series of legislative bills that set out to expand trapping and hunting regulations.
Wildlife officials say there are approximately 900 to 1,100 wolves roaming in Montana. The state Senate recently passed two bills that would change how wolves are managed.
Senate Bill 314, introduced by State Sen. Bob Brown (R-Thompson Falls), aims to change laws related to hunting wolves.
“The opposition keeps going to I’m authorizing hunting at night and unlimited tags and everything else. If you look in the bill it says the commission may do that,” Brown said.
The bill aims to reduce the wolf population to a sustainable level, which translates to eliminating…
By 9News Staff8:44am Mar 12, 2021https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.446.1_en.html#goog_392972310Play VideoPolice seize hundreds of roosters in illegal cockfighting investigation
NSW Police and RSPCA inspectors seized hundreds of roosters during the raid. (NSW Police)
A crime scene was set up and will be maintained at the property today while RSPCA inspectors safely remove the animals.A man was detained by police and spoken to at the property before being released.The operation was part of an extensive police investigation into animal cruelty offences in Sydney’s south-west.
Illegal cockfighting equipment was found during the raid in western Sydney. (NSW Police)
Illegal cockfighting equipment was found during the raid in western Sydney. (NSW Police)
A 56-year-old man was taken into the custody of the Department of Home Affairs over his visa status, while 34 men were detained at the scene.The 34 men are next due to appear in court on April 1 over animal cruelty charges.Anyone with information should contact CrimeStoppers on 1800 333 000 or at CrimeStoppers.com.au
Ian Haydon was one of the first people to try out Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as part of the company’s phase-one trial, with first and second doses administered in April and May.
COVID-19 vaccines may come with some temporary and uncomfortable side effects.
Some of the most common include arm pain, flu-like symptoms, and a red rash.
Most of these symptoms fade away after a day or so, but the rash can linger for about a week.
After receiving her second shot of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, Susan Ladov hardly slept a wink.
“I spent the night waking up about every hour, hour and a half,” the 74-year-old from New Jersey said. “When I got up out of bed, I just felt very shaky and chilled.”
No matter how much pro-wildlife people plead with politicians to ban the tortuous, barbaric steel trap, nothing will change until we get serious about stopping Public Lands Ranching.
Since the 1800’s , the livestock industry has opposed wildlife preservation & ecosystem protection– it also contributes to Climate Change and water depletion.
This environmentally-destructive industry is responsible for the slaughter of millions of coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions , prairie dogs, wolves, hawks, native wild horses & other animals . They have an arsenal of weaponry at their disposal: steel traps, snares, M-44’s, Compound 1080, on National Forests, wilderness, state lands. Grazing could not survive without these weapons against Nature. They receive millions of federal subsidy dollars to do it!
Wildlife groups: it is time to take this industry on—wildlife, ecosystems don’t have much time.
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