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“It was just the greatest day ever,”
Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”
Mother of Georgia shooting suspect called school to warn of emergency, aunt says
September 8, 20246:09 AM ET
By
The Associated Press
A memorial is seen at Apalachee High School after the Wednesday school shooting, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024, in Winder, Ga.
Mike Stewart/AP
The mother of the 14-year-old who has been charged with murder over the fatal shooting of four people at his Georgia high school called the school before the killings, warning staff of an “extreme emergency” involving her son, a relative said.
Annie Brown told the Washington Post that her sister, Colt Gray’s mother, texted her saying she spoke with a school counselor and urged them to “immediately” find her son to check on him.
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Brown provided screen shots of the text exchange to the newspaper, which also reported that a call log from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call was made to the school about 30 minutes before gunfire is believed to have erupted.
Brown confirmed the reporting to The Associated Press on Saturday in text messages but declined to provide further comment.
Colt Gray, 14, has been charged with murder over the killing of two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside Atlanta, on Wednesday. His father, Colin Gray, is accused of second-degree murder for providing his son with a semiautomatic AR 15-style rifle.
Their attorneys declined to immediately seek bail during their first court appearance on Friday.
Investigators previously interviewed the suspects
The Georgia teenager had struggled with his parents’ separation and taunting by classmates, his father told a sheriff’s investigator last year when asked whether his son posted an online threat.
“I don’t know anything about him saying (expletive) like that,” Gray told Jackson County sheriff’s investigator Daniel Miller, according to a transcript of their interview obtained by the AP. “I’m going to be mad as hell if he did, and then all the guns will go away.”
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Jackson County authorities ended their inquiry into Colt Gray a year ago, concluding that there wasn’t clear evidence to link him to a threat posted on Discord, a social media site popular with video gamers. The records from that investigation provide at least a narrow glimpse into a boy who struggled with his parents’ breakup and at the middle school he attended at the time, where his father said others frequently taunted him.
Father says his son was bullied at school
“He gets flustered and under pressure. He doesn’t really think straight,” Colin Gray told the investigator on May 21, 2023, recalling a discussion he’d had with the boy’s principal.
Middle school had also been rough for Colt Gray. He had just finished the seventh grade when Miller interviewed the father and son. Colin Gray said the boy had just a few friends and frequently got picked on. Some students “just ridiculed him day after day after day.”
“I don’t want him to fight anybody, but they just keep like pinching him and touching him,” Gray said. “Words are one thing, but you start touching him and that’s a whole different deal. And it’s just escalated to the point where like his finals were last week and that was the last thing on his mind.”
Shooting guns and hunting, he said, were frequent pastimes for father and son. Gray said he was encouraging the boy to be more active outdoors and spend less time playing video games on his Xbox. When Colt Gray killed a deer months earlier, his father swelled with pride. He showed the investigator a photo on his cellphone, saying: “You see him with blood on his cheeks from shooting his first deer.”
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“It was just the greatest day ever,” Colin Gray said.
There’s no mention in the investigator’s report and interview transcript of either Gray owning an assault-style rifle. Asked if his son had access to firearms, the father said yes. But he said the guns weren’t kept loaded and insisted he had emphasized safety when teaching the boy to shoot.
“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do,” Gray said, “and how to use them and not use them.”
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Family evicted in 2022
An eviction upended the Grays’ family in summer 2022. On July 25 of that year, a sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to the rental home on a suburban cul-de-sac where Colin Gray, his wife, Colt and the boy’s two younger siblings lived. A moving crew was piling their belongings in the yard.
The Jackson County deputy said in a report that the movers found guns and hunting bows in a closet in the master bedroom. They turned the weapons and ammunition over to the deputy for safekeeping, rather than leave them outside with the family’s other possessions outside.
The deputy wrote that he left copies of receipt forms for the weapons on the front door so that Gray could pick them up later at the sheriff’s office. The reason for eviction is not mentioned in the report. Colin Gray told the investigator in 2023 that he had paid his rent.
It was following the eviction, he said, that his wife left him, taking the two younger siblings with her. Colt Gray “struggled at first with the separation and all,” said the father, who worked a construction job.
“I’m the sole provider, doing high rises downtown,” he told the investigator. Two days later, there was a follow-up interview with Colin Gray while he was at work. He said by phone: “I’m hanging off the top of a building. … I’ve got a big crane lift going, so it’s kind of noisy up here.”
Boy described as quiet
The investigator also interviewed the boy, then 13, who was described in a report as quiet, calm and reserved.
He denied making any threats and said that months earlier he’d stopped using the Discord platform, where the school threat was posted. He later told his father his account had been hacked.
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“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teen said.
A year before they would both end up charged in the high school shooting, Colin Gray insisted to the sheriff’s investigator that his son wasn’t the type to threaten violence.
“He’s not a loner, Officer Miller. Don’t get that,” the father said, adding: “He just wants to go to school, do his own thing and he doesn’t want any trouble.”
Mink farms are viral timebombs
By Wayne Pacelle and Jim Keen
Killing beautiful animals for fur was, since dawn of Homo sapiens, a matter of animal sacrifice for human warmth. Fur-wearing, you could say, was coldly utilitarian.
Over the last few centuries, the fur industry procured its commodity by killing free-roaming wild animals with deadly and indiscriminate body-gripping traps. Within the last century, it added to its supply chain by keeping wild animals as captives and then killing them.
To be sure, throughout the long arc of the Anthropocene, fur always came at the complete expense of the animal, even if there was great practical value in wearing fur. For all of time, there’s no way to get the fur without hurting and killing the animal.
In more contemporary times, furriers traded on the beauty and elegance of the fur while also touting that practical value.
But fur lost its special usefulness within the last century. Human innovation brought us other fabrics to keep us warm, and human creativity allowed designers to weave coats, gloves, and hats that could also please the eye.
Stripped of the key rationale for their enterprise, the furriers, trappers, and fur farmers were reduced to peddling a product for ostentatious display. And when hurting animals isn’t leavened by some noble purpose – such as self-defense, sustenance, or protection from biting wind – it simply becomes cruelty. A dictionary definition of cruelty is “callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering.”
A ready alternative ratchets up the quotient of moral responsibility for the end user.
But now, there’s more to the matter of fur farming than cruelty and moral choice. The farming of mink – the primary species used in fur production – is now a biohazard. To put it in stark terms, mink farming, with its proven ability to incubate and spread deadly viruses, threatens human survival.
New Report Underscores Pandemic Threat from Fur Farms
A new report underlines the well-known zoonotic disease risks from farms not only raising mink but also several other animals killed on these production facilities. It underscores that, purely as a matter of self interest, it is time to shut down the mink farms, in every part of the world.
A September 4 paper in the prestigious journal Nature found 125 different viruses in the tissues of 461 fur-farmed mink, raccoon dogs, muskrats, and guinea pigs that were found dead on fur farms in China. This included 36 never-before-seen viruses and 39 viruses at high risk of zoonotic spillover to people or infection cross-over to our domestic animals.
There are an estimated 11,000 fur farms across Europe, North America, and China. At least 15 species, totaling 85 to 100 million animals per year, are farmed for their pelts across at least 19 countries. However, the North American mink [Neogale vison], East Asian raccoon dog [Nyctereutes procyonoides], and foxes [Vulpes vulpe & Alopex lagopus]), all carnivores, are the most commonly fur-farmed species.
Three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases among humans are zoonotic, with viruses that originate in wild mammals of particular concern (e.g., HIV, Ebola, and SARS). Fur farming of mink, foxes, raccoon dogs, and muskrats essentially places these wild animals under high stress, crowded, and low-welfare and low-sanitation conditions. Workers must then be in close contact with these animals, conducting feeding and other animal husbandry duties. That human-animal intersection is a prescription for zoonotic disease transmission.
The Nature report had these dangerous revelations:
- Three influenza viruses in guinea pig, mink, and muskrat lungs
- A bat coronavirus in mink lungs related to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus
- Six additional coronaviruses including an emergent canine coronavirus in a raccoon dog
- Known human zoonotic hepatitis E and (often fatal) Japanese encephalitis viruses in guinea pigs
As the authors stated, “These data also reveal potential virus transmission between farmed animals and wild animals, and from humans to farmed animals, indicating that fur farming represents an important transmission hub for viral zoonoses.”
Mink Farming: Low-Value Commerce, High-Interest Viral Loads
While we don’t know all the details of the scale of China’s fur farm production, we have a general picture of the operations in the United States.
The most recently produced USDA annual review of mink production, released in July, shows that we are taking this risk in the United States for a negligible amount of human commerce. At the U.S. mink industry’s peak in 1966 when America dominated the global market, 6,000 U.S. mink farmers produced 6.2 million pelts worth about $120 million ($19.35 per pelt average) for American and foreign consumers. In inflation-adjusted dollars, a 1966 U.S. mink pelt was worth $183 and the U.S. mink industry annually generated $1.13 billion in commerce.
The average price per pelt for the 2023 crop year was $34, up from $27.20 in 2022 and the farm-gate value of all U.S. pelts was just $33.1 million – a 10 percent drop from the prior year ($36.6 million) and 83 percent drop in the value of this U.S. enterprise since 2013. Last year was the first year since that mink production dipped below one million animals.
The collapse of supply and demand for mink was accelerated by the massive worldwide SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in farmed mink that paralleled the human COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020, with outbreaks on at least 450 mink farms in 13 countries in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Only humans and mink contract the virus in large numbers and can spill it back to other species — with more than 21 million captive mink (including culling) and more than 7 million people perishing directly as a result of the pandemic.
But as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic receded, we recognized within the last year an even more ominous threat than COVID-19 mutations. Among the viruses mink can contract and spill over to other species is a deadly form of bird flu. An H5N1 mink mutant strain killed more than 200,000 farmed mink on six farms in Spain and Finland in 2022-23. This bird flu strain has killed 458 of 873 of the people it’s infected — a case fatality rate of 53%, much higher than any known influenza virus, including the infamous 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 50 million people. In short, if it mutates at a mink farm in the U.S. and becomes more transmissible, this new H5N1 strain would become a public health catastrophe of nightmarish proportions.
With the release this month of the Nature study, focused on China’s fur farms, we can now see that mink farms are hosts for a much larger assortment of emerging viruses. The nation that launched the SARS-CoV-2 crisis may be poised to deliver yet one more pandemic. But to be fair, the virus could also easily be launched from a fur farm in Wisconsin or Utah – the two states with the majority of U.S. production.
With their low output of commerce and high output of viral loads, it’s long past due that we take action.
With our active support, Congresswomen Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., urged the nation to ban mink farms first in 2021 and they quickly built strong support for their legislation. Thanks to them, the House of Representatives passed their amendment in 2022 to ban mink farming.
Unfortunately that effort stalled in the U.S. Senate. But with the findings of the Nature study as a reminder, it’s no time to relent in the political efforts to address the cruelty, negligible commerce, and viral threats built into the marrow of this industry. In this 118th Congress, Mace and DeLauro have renewed their efforts. Their bill, the MINKS Are Superspreaders Act, would end mink farming in the United States.
We know that mink are the only non-human animals who are bilateral transmitters of COVID-19. We also know they are now infected by H5N1 and could spill that far more deadly virus into the human population. And now we know about a variety of other emerging viral threats on mink farms. Yet we continue to house them on factory farms to generate a luxury product that few people want or need.
The MINKS Are Superspreaders Act should be an urgent priority for a nation concerned about the intertwined problems of wildlife exploitation and emerging pandemics.
Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, is director of veterinary sciences for AWA and CHE. Dr. Keen is a former infectious disease researcher with USDA.
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Gray wolves making historic comeback in California
KTVU Staff
Tue, September 3, 2024 at 6:58 AM PDT
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gray-wolves-making-historic-comeback-135821553.html
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. – After being on the verge of extinction in California, the gray wolf is making an historic comeback to the state.
The last gray wolf in California was killed in 1924.
But wolves started coming from Oregon in 2011, and now the gray wolf population in California has grown. to a current count of 44.
The animals have now spread as far south as Tulare County in the Central Valley.
Exposing the Big Game 