BBC news recently reported that, as the headline put it, “most pheasants sold for food ‘contain lead shot’” (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56158777). In the UK, it is legal to sell Ring-necked Pheasants shot by hunters. This is the same species of pheasant found throughout much of temperate North America, where it is widely hunted. But so far as I know, it is illegal in any part of Canada for a licensed hunter to sell the meat of his victims. The birds are non-migratory and are managed at the provincial level.
Ring-necked pheasants were “introduced” to the UK around the 11thcentury and to North America late in the 19thcentury, with many re-introductions to both regions and other parts of the world since then. In Canada, the birds are captive-bred and sold in…
People shop after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visited a pharmacy administering Covid-19 vaccines in a Giant Food grocery store February 25, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
The intelligence of octopuses is well known, but did you know that they have been observed decorating their homes with pretty bits of glass, shells, and bottle tops? They’ve also been seen using tools and playing games! Octopuses have extremely sensitive skin for both touch sensation and chemical recognition. Their suckers are the equivalent of a tongue or fingertip, and the linings are regularly shed to maintain sensitivity to touch and taste. These brilliant beings are like us in so many ways that for most people, the thought of eating one alive is unimaginable.
However, Sik Gaek in Queens, New York, has for years insisted on serving octopuses and lobsters—another complex, misunderstood species also known to have the ability to experience great pain—still squirming on dinner plates, to those customers who find slowly hacking apart living, suffering animals to be appetizing. The restaurant even brags about this horrific practice on its website.
Sik Gaek needs to continue hearing from the compassionate public until it decides to join the 21st century and leave this barbarism behind. Please contact its management and tell them what you think!
After you’ve submitted the form, please also leave a comment on Sik Gaek’s Facebook page.
The coronavirus has killed over 365,000 people worldwide in just five months — but that’s nothing compared to what could be coming if humans don’t clean up their act when it comes to chickens.
In his new book, “How to Survive a Pandemic,” Dr. Michael Gregor, a scientist and physician who once testified for Oprah Winfrey in her “meat defamation” trial, warns that an apocalyptic virus emanating from overcrowded and unsanitary chicken farms has the potential to wipe out half of humanity.
Greger, a vegan, writes that “In the ‘hurricane scale’ of epidemics, COVID-19, with a death rate of around half of one percent, rates a measly Category Two, possibly a Three. … The Big One, the typhoon to end all typhoons, will be 100 times worse when it comes, a Category Five producing a fatality rate of one in two. … Civilization as we know it would cease.”
While environmentalists warned earlier this month that the world would face another stronger epidemic if we continue to have contact with wildlife, Gregor places the blame squarely on chickens.
“With pandemics explosively spreading a virus from human to human, it’s never a matter of if, but when,” Greger writes.
Citing the bird-based Spanish Flu outbreak of 1920, and the H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, Gregor writes, “the worry is that the virus never stands still but is always mutating. … This is the monster lurking in the undergrowth, the one that makes epidemiologists shudder.”
The Hong Kong outbreak, which originated in a bird market, “started with a three-year-old boy in Hong Kong, whose sore throat and tummy ache turned into a disease that curdled his blood and killed him within a week from acute respiratory and organ failure.” While only 18 people contracted that flu – a third of them died.
During that pandemic, the government killed 1.3 million chickens in an attempt to eliminate the virus – but there have since been two more outbreaks between 2003 and 2009 outside of China.
But with over 24 billion chickens on earth feeding the world, what can be done?
Gregor writes we have to change the entire system – away from large scale farms where chickens are fed antibiotics and are crammed together and pass diseases from one to another easily to smaller, free-range farms … and eventually not eating chickens or ducks at all.
“The pandemic cycle could theoretically be broken for good,” he writes. “Bird flu could be grounded.”
But until then, he warns, “as long as there is poultry, there will be pandemics. In the end, it may be us or them.”
A mutating strain of bird flu that has emerged in Russia has “a fairly high degree of probability” of human-to-human transmission, the head of the country’s health watchdog warned in a report.
Anna Popova, who heads Rospotrebnadzor, made the worrying prediction almost a month after scientists detected the first case of H5N8 transmission to humans at a southern Russia poultry farm, the Moscow Times reported.
Humans can get infected with other bird and swine flu subtypes, but the H5N8 strain — which is lethal for birds — has never previously been reported to have spread among people.
“This is likely to happen. Colleagues say that the mutation is continuing very actively,” Popova said, adding that Rospotrebnadzor and the Siberia-based Vektor state research lab have time to develop a test kit and a vaccine, and then to “monitor the situation.”
“If we won’t need it, it’ll be a lucky break. But if necessary, we’ll be ready,” Russia’s chief sanitary doctor told Russian news agency TASS.
“In other words, we’ll be able to warn the entire world community of the threat.”
Last month, Popova reported the first case of the H5N8 strain passing to humans from birds to the World Health Organization, according to Reuters.
In addition to Russia and Europe, outbreaks of H5N8 have been reported in recent months in China, the Middle East and North Africa — but so far only in poultry.
Other strains of avian flu, such as H5N1, H7N9 and H9N2, have been known to spread to humans.
Seven workers at a Russian poultry plant had been infected with the H5N8 mutation in an outbreak at the plant in December, Popova said, adding that everyone quickly recovered.
“This situation did not develop further,” she said in late February.
Montana voters could be asked to enshrine in the state constitution hunting, fishing and trapping as the traditional and preferred methods of fish and wildlife management under a bill brought by a Thompson Falls lawmaker.
During a hearing marked by a number of contentious exchanges between Republicans and an opponent of trapping, the House Judiciary Committee heardHouse Bill 367brought by Republican Rep. Paul Fielder. If the bill receives support from two-thirds of the Legislature, voters in 2022 would be asked whether to amend a section of the Montana Constitution called the “Harvest Heritage” clause.
As currently written, the clause says, “The opportunity to harvest wild fish and wild game animals is a heritage that shall forever be preserved to the individual citizens…
The CDC recently updated theirrecommendations for what is considered safeand acceptable once you are vaccinated.Once you are fully vaccinated, youcan gather indoors with other fullyvaccinated people without masks.You can gather indoors withunvaccinated people from oneother household without masks.But only if no members of thathousehold are at increased riskfor severe illness from COVID-19.If you have been exposed to someone withCOVID-19, you don’t need to get tested orquarantine unless you have symptoms.You should still wear a mask and socialdistance in public, with unvaccinatedpeople, or around people at increased risk.Keep in mind that the vaccine can taketwo weeks to reach maximum effectiveness
‘It looks like the end of the world’: China’s worst sandstorm in a decade chokes Beijing
“This is the most intense sandstorm in China in the past 10 years,” China’s National Meteorological Center said Monday.00:00/01:05TAP TO UNMUTE
March 15, 2021, 5:42 AM PDTByYuliya TalmazanandNicole Yang
China’s capital city woke up to yellow skies Monday as the biggest sandstorm the country has seen in a decade swept through it, sparking new health fears.
The thick brown dust shroudedBeijing‘s iconic landmarks, including the Forbidden City, and downtown skyscrapers at times disappeared from view, enveloped by clouds of sand.
The visibility in the capital was reduced to less than 1,000 meters (3,300 feet), China’s English-language news agency CGTN reported, forcing residents who dared venture outside to wear improvised headgear to protect their faces.
Traffic was snarled and more than 400 flights out of the capital’s two main airports…
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?
