Two new reports were recently published with information on additional sporadic avian influenza (bird flu) human cases and outbreaks in wild birds, poultry, and other animals such as cats.
On June 30, 2023, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) confirmed Poland’s Chief Veterinary Officer of Poland announced that about 20 samples from domestic cats from different cities have tested positive for A(H5N1) influenza virus.
The director of the National Veterinary Institute in Puławy, Poland, stated that “they have detected two mutations that indicate that the A(H5N1) virus is evolving to multiply more easily in mammals.”
The ECDC stated several uncertainties regarding the source of infection, the potential of feline-to-feline and feline-human transmission of the particular A(H5N1) influenza virus strain, and the severity of the disease.
Poland’s authorities advise pet cat owners to prevent contact of their cats with other animals or objects from outside the homes and enhance hygiene measures.
And the statement also mentions the need to isolate any suspected cases from other pets due to potential shedding from the gastrointestinal tract.
Furthermore, there are too many uncertainties at this stage to properly assess the risk to the general public. And no human cases have been reported related to this event in Poland.
Separately, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published an updated Technical Report on June 30, 2023.
The CDC confirmed it is actively working on the domestic situation with current clade 2.3.4.4b HPAI A(H5N1) viruses associated with infections in wild birds and poultry outbreaks, including conducting surveillance among people with relevant exposures.
And we are preparing for the possibility that these HPAI A(H5N1) viruses gain the ability for increased transmissibility to people.
The CDC continued to say despite the panzootic nature of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) viruses in wild birds and poultry, only a small number of sporadic human cases of A(H5N1) have been identified since 2022.
Nearly all reported human cases since 2022 were associated with recent poultry exposures, and no instances of mammal-to-human or human-to-human transmission of the HPAI A(H5N1) virus have been identified.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year. David Silverman via Getty Images
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U.S. egg production numbers are on the rise, signaling a rebuild after bird flu decimated commercial flocks last year and sent prices skyrocketing.
A total of 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Egg production levels were down as much as 6% earlier this year, but started to show signs of improvement in April.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza, a contagious disease often fatal to birds, has affected 325 U.S. commercial poultry flocks over the past year, but only seven cases have been reported since March. No cases were reported in the past 30 days.
Dive Insight
HPAI, often spread by migratory birds, affected more than 58 million commercial and wild birds in the past year, the country’s worst outbreak on record, according to USDA data. As cases spread, supplies tightened and prices soared, especially for eggs.
U.S. egg inventories were down 29% in December compared to the start of 2022. More than 43 million egg-laying hens died from disease or depopulation efforts last year. Wholesale egg prices surged 267% on increased holiday demand. They have since decreased as flocks are rebuilt and farmers adopt biosecurity measures as HPAI preventative.
After last year’s outbreak, Brian Earnest, lead economist, animal protein at CoBank, said he anticipated HPAI to be a year-round issue in 2023 with a lingering expectation that it would be back in full force, but “that does not seem to be the case.”
Instead, the rate of infection among domestic commercial poultry flocks has significantly weakened, according to USDA data. No U.S. cases have been reported among egg-laying birds since December.
“It appears that maybe commercial flocks are growing some immunity to it,” Earnest said.
CEDAR CITY — Utah Division of Wildlife Resources conservation officers are seeking the public’s help after a buck deer was recently illegally shot and killed in southern Utah.
DWR officers received a tip on June 16 from an individual who discovered the dead deer while fishing at the Kanab Creek area of the East Fork of the Sevier River in Kane County. Upon further investigation, officers discovered that the buck deer had been shot behind the left shoulder. Investigators believe a small caliber firearm was used.Officers believe the deer may have been shot south of where it was found, due to the high flow and fast moving water in the river at the time. Due to the lack of decomposition of the carcass, investigators estimate the deer had been shot within the previous week of it being found, sometime between June 10–16.
Attempted cat purges overlook value of predation to maintaining the health of species
WELLINGTON, New Zealand; PERTH, Australia––The cat news from Down Under on June 28, 2023 provoked a global explosion of hissing and spitting, focusing––as cat news from Down Under usually does––on ever more cruel, bizarre, and inevitably futile attempts to exterminate cats, rationalized as always by absurdly inflated claims from birders about the numbers of birds whom cats purportedly kill.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Cat-killing contest
“Animal welfare protestors at a hunting contest in rural New Zealand faced off against a group of child attendees, some clutching dead feral cats, who repeatedly chanted the word ‘meat’ at demonstrators,” reported Guardian correspondent Charlotte Graham-McLay.
“The North Canterbury event had previously scrapped the category for killing feral cats after it was criticized by animal welfare groups,” Graham-McLay summarized, “but it was reinstated following apparent support from the local community.”
The killing contest organizers claimed that “About 1,500 competitors – 400 of them children – killed hundreds of animals during the contest, including 243 feral cats,” Graham-McLay said.
Former New Zealand environment minister Maggie Barry, an architect of Predator-Free New Zealand, with endangered kiwi. (Facebook photo)
How cat predation helps birds
Overlooked by the North Canterbury cat pogrom sponsors, and by practically everyone else pushing the campaign to make New Zealand “predator free” by 2050, is that cats there, as everywhere else worldwide, are the major predators of mice and rats, whose egg predation poses a far greater threat to ground-nesting flightless birds such as the kiwi, the national symbol of New Zealand, than cats and all other non-native predators of adult birds combined.
Also overlooked, not only by New Zealand birders but by birders worldwide, is that while cats preferentially hunt rodents, by night, when cats do hunt birds the birds they kill are most often debilitated by disease or injury.
This is especially relevant to New Zealand, because as vulnerable as flightless birds such as the kiwi are to cats and other introduced predators, they are even more vulnerable to introduced infectious diseases. The bird whom a cat––or a brush possum or a weasel––kills may be the bird who otherwise spreads a malady such as the H5N1 avian influenza among a bird population having little history of exposure and of building resistance to non-native pathogens.
Mallard duck. (Beth Clifton photo)
H5N1 has reached New Zealand at least once
New Zealand––and Australia as well––are thousands of miles away from the mainland Asian, North American, and European nations which in recent years have killed multi-millions of poultry in mostly futile efforts to slow the spread of H5N1.
But the nations Down Under are scarcely immune to the threat. The New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in September 2008 reported finding low pathogenic H5N1 in two mallard ducks.
Fifteen years later, high pathogenic H5N1 is circulating globally more widely and rapidly than ever before. If and when it reaches New Zealand, as it almost inevitably will at some point, an absence of predation to intercept sick birds before they infect others could bring about an overnight catastrophe for the New Zealand bird population, irrespective of any and all conservation efforts.
Not that killing cats in the name of conservation seems to be accomplishing much.
“In one part of the South Island,” mentioned Graham-McLay, “between 150 and 200 feral cats are still caught each year, 18 years into an initiative to remove them.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Compound 1080 & the “Felixer”
Western Australia state environment minister Reece Whitby meanwhile announced that his department plans to spend $7.6 million Australian dollars over the next five years to deploy sixteen “Felixer” cat-killing machines and air drop 880,000 poison baits meant to kill cats.
“The Felixer device uses lasers and cameras to identify feral cats and foxes from other animals before spraying them with 8 milligrams of toxic gel,” explained Eli Green via the NCA NewsWire media release service.
Thylation, maker of the “Felixer,” contends that most Australian native carnivores are too small to activate Felixers and dingoes are too large.
Dingo. (www.ehp.qld.gov.au)
Dingos in danger
“However,” Green mentioned, “the device can be activated by dingo pups, which means that they will not be suitable in all areas at all times of the year.
“From the funding,” Green added, “$2 million will go toward grants for local community organizations, farmer groups and traditional owners to fight feral cats.”
Such schemes, University of Queensland emeritus professor of veterinary science Jacquie Rand and WellBeing International founder Andrew Rowan jointly pointed out earlier in 2023, have “little obvious conservation merit (and nobody has demonstrated that such a cull is achievable). Other invasive mammalian species in Australia (e.g., foxes, rabbits, and horses) have also been targeted without much noticeable progress in reducing their numbers. Data show baiting with Compound 1080 has largely been ineffective in achieving a sustained decrease in feral cat numbers over several years and that native animals are also at risk of poisoning.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Neuter/return banned in Australia
By contrast, the only experimental neuter/return program ever authorized in Australia discovered that “sterilization of around 30 cats per 1,000 residents in a year produces a 30-50% reduction in cat intake into the community animal shelter within 12-18 months,” accomplished “in one rural town, one suburb in Queensland, one suburb in New South Wales, and the city of Banyule (population 130,000) in Victoria,” Rand and Rowan mentioned.
Releasing feral cats, once trapped, is otherwise illegal throughout Australia, regardless of the cats’ sterilization status.
Australian feral cat. (Beth Clifton collage)
Data, finally, on Australian shelter cats
A study newly published in the journal Animals, by Rand and fellow Australian veterinary researchers Diana Chua and John Morton, further demonstrates the potential for neuter/return to please both Australian cat advocates and conservationists, and those in New Zealand too, other than the most inveterate cat-haters, who prefer killing cats over obtaining results by reducing cat predation.
The study, “Stray and Owner-Relinquished Cats in Australia—Estimation of Numbers Entering Municipal Pounds, Shelters and Rescue Groups and Their Outcomes,” is based on data collected from as many pounds, shelters, and rescue groups as possible in 2018–2019, with “Unavailable municipal pound data imputed based on known data and the human population.”
This is essentially the same method that ANIMALS 24-7 used to produce annual estimates of U.S. animal shelter traffic in both dogs and cats from 1993 through 2014.
“We estimated a total of 179,615 stray and surrendered cat admissions to pounds, shelters, and rescue groups in Australia in 2018–2019 (7.2/1000 human residents) and that 5% of admissions were reclaimed, 65% rehomed, and 28% euthanized,” Rand, Chua, and Morton reported.
“Municipal councils operating their own pounds rehomed 26% and euthanized 46% of cat intake compared to 65% rehomed and 25% euthanized for welfare organizations,” Rand, Chua, and Morton found.
The data is closely comparable to the numbers that ANIMAL 24-7 found in the U.S. during the 1990s, before neuter/return dramatically lowered shelter cat intakes and also before the post-2010 advent of “return-to-field” of non-feral cats hopelessly distorted shelter admission data as a data reference point indicative of feral cat population trends.
The preponderance of data, both from New Zealand and Australia and from the U.S. over the past 30 years, suggests that properly funded and well-managed neuter/return programs, as opposed to haphazard, poorly funded local volunteer efforts, would be the fastest, most inexpensive way to reduce cat predation, irrespective of the conservation value of retaining some cat predation to control rodent populations and the spread of avian disease.
Properly funded and well-managed neuter/return programs could also end the ecologically suicidal practice of littering the countryside with Compound 1080, or fluoroacetate, a poison banned in most of the world and restricted in the U.S. for 50 years.
Map of New Zealand. While Compound 1080 has been spread only in the teal blue areas, brush possums (inset) are persecuted everywhere.
New Zealand national obsession
But as BBC News correspondent Henri Astier detailed on June 29, 2023, killing cats, rats, brush possums, and other mammalian predators has become a national obsession in New Zealand, a nation which already had one of the world’s highest rates of sport hunting participation.
The national Predator-Free New Zealand campaign aims to protect birds, Astier explained, “in an area larger than the United Kingdom.
“At the heart of the project is a unique ecology,” Astier wrote. “New Zealand split from an ancient supercontinent 85 million years ago, long before the ascent of mammals. Without land predators, birds could nest on the ground or do without flying.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Celebrity physicist popularized the dream of a predator-free country”
“Further, New Zealand was the last major landmass settled by humans. In the 13th century Polynesians brought mice and Pacific rats. Six centuries later, Europeans introduced larger mammals. Almost a third of native species have been wiped out since human settlement.
“Efforts to save the others,” Astier continued, “are not new. In the 1960s, conservationists managed to clear rats from small offshore islands. But tackling predators did not become a social phenomenon until about 2010,” when the introduction of inexpensive infrared wildlife cameras produced widely distributed images of cats, rats, brush possums, and other mammals “pouncing on eggs and chicks.
“In 2011,” Astier recounted, “a celebrity physicist, Sir Paul Callaghan, popularized the dream of a predator-free country.
Australian politician Greg Hunt declared war on feral cats in 2017. New Zealand politicians followed. (Merritt Clifton collage)
“Politicians then got on board”
“Politicians then got on board,” in a nation where longtime anxiety over Asian immigration easily carried over into anxiety over “alien” animals.
A 2016 law marked rats, brush possums, and mustelids, including stoats, weasels, and ferrets, for extermination.
“Mid-century was chosen as an inspirational deadline,” Astier mentioned.
The campaign has claimed some successes. On the Miramar peninsula, Astier wrote, “Rats are now a rarity and many native birds have made a comeback. The distinctive call of the tui, whose numbers in Wellington had dwindled to just a few pairs in 1990, is ubiquitous.”
But James Lynch, the founder of Zealandia, the first of what are now dozens of large fenced bird sanctuaries in New Zealand, is among the Predator-Free New Zealand critics.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Most native birds do not need a predator-free environment”
Summarized Astier, “Most native birds, he notes, do not need a zero-predator environment to thrive. The few that do, he argues, can survive on offshore or urban sanctuaries. Rather than try to clear the whole country of pests, Lynch recommends focusing resources on woodland around fenced areas to maximize the survival of birds coming out.”
Most New Zealanders currently appear to accept the argument that if predators can just be exterminated completely, once and for all, the trouble and expense of sustained killing campaigns can be avoided forever more––as if no rats, for instance, would ever again arrive with cargo and repopulate every accessible habitat niche, just as rats have repeatedly done at every port around the world despite millennia of rat-hunting and poisoning.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“How could we be so blithe with suffering?”
“Others regard the very idea of a predator-free New Zealand as fanciful,” Astier acknowledged. “Conservation researcher Wayne Linklater,” of Victoria University, “points out that over the past 150 years, New Zealand has lost every war it has waged on rabbits, deer and other pests.
“Campaigns to exterminate intelligent, sentient beings are not just unworkable but ethically misguided, Linklater adds.”
Beth & Merritt Clifton
Concluded Linklater, speaking for himself as both a longtime critic of the effects of predators on native birds and an opponent of killing campaigns, “We marshaled enormous resources and people’s passion and we implemented great cruelty. How could we be so blithe with suffering?”
China and Russia need to “lead the correct direction of global governance reform”, according to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who hailed the two countries’ partnership at a meeting with a top Russian politician in Beijing on Monday, state media reported.
Beijing and Moscow have ramped up economic cooperation and diplomatic contacts in recent years, with exchanges only growing closer since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
On Monday, Xi met Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of theFederation Council — the Russian parliament’s upper house — at the Great Hall of the…
Acalf belonging to a species of bison that became extinct in the wild in Western Europe in the Middle Ages has been born in Switzerland.
The European bison calf was born in the Jura Mountains on July 4 as part of the Wisnet Thal project, which is based in Solothurn, northwestern Switzerland, according to a news release.
The Wisnet Thal initiative, which began in November 2022, focuses on reintroducing the European bison to the mountain range. The aim is to see whether a herd can be reintroduced to the area over a five-year period. Visitors are able to come and visit the project.
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Two men were separately caught with illegal wildlife this weekend in South Florida, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
Jorge Isael Frontela Diaz, a 37-year-old angler in Miami, was given a citation to appear in court on Friday for possessing illegal fish. He was caught by an Upper Keys deputy who found four undersized schoolmaster snappers and four undersized mangrove snappers.
Sergio Alejandro Mena Rivera, a 24-year-old Fort Lauderdale man was arrested Saturday afternoon for possessing illegal lobster. Mena Rivero had a resource check conducted by a Middle Keys deputy who found five wrung lobster tails, three of which were undersized. He was also cited for possession of lobster out of season and having no measuring device.
For information on wildlife regulations, visit www.myfwc.com.
Micrograph of avian influenza, also known as bird flu (Credit: CDC/F.A. Murphy)
A 52-year-old woman in eastern China who tested positive for H5N1 bird flu earlier this year was also suffering from COVID-19, according to a new report, making it the first known case of co-infection with both viruses.
The woman, from a rural area in Anhui province, was exposed to sick poultry and developed a fever on February 1. She was initially given antibacterial treatment but was transferred to a hospital in Jiangsu province when her symptoms got worse.
At admission, the woman had a temperature of 39°C (102.2°F), worsening shortness of breath, decreased blood pressure, air bronchogram and lung consolidation, according to a team of researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University.
Dustin D. Goldsmith, 39, of McCall Creek, was charged with possession of wild game for commercial use, a Class 4 felony.
Hunter D. Baxter, 29, of Lucedale, was charged with possession of wild game for commercial use, a Class 4 felony, and unlawful use of weapons, a Class 3 felony.
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According to court documents, on or about April 2 Goldsmith allegedly captured, killed or possessed wild turkeys for profit or commercial purposes.
According to court documents, on or about March 6 Baxter allegedly captured, killed or possessed wild turkeys for profit or commercial purposes. On April 29, Baxter allegedly had a silencing attachment for a firearm.
PUBLISHED:July 7, 2023 at 12:44 p.m.| UPDATED:July 7, 2023 at 2:48 p.m.
A coyote stares and licks its lips as it stands in the front yard of a home in Rialto on Sunday, April 12, 2020. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
One of the first things I learned when I moved to Pasadena from Virginia is that I cannot leave my little dog Sueshi outside without me because — of course — we share our neighborhood with coyotes.
Sueshi and I run into coyotes almost every day on our walks. As you might imagine, I’m an expert hazer. The coyotes run away when I yell “go away” and wave my arms to appear threatening and bigger than my height of 5′ 5.”
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