Residents in Bill Shoals, Cherokee Village, Fairfield Bay, Heber Springs, Helena-West Helena, Horseshoe Bend, Hot Springs Village, Lakeview and Russellville were the selected cities for the early hunting season.
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“We need a safe way to hunt deer, and obviously shooting deer in places like that is not safe and that’s why we turn to urban bow hunts,” Jeff Williams of the Arkansas Game and Commission said.
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — An Oregon man has been indicted by a grand jury on 38 charges related to the poaching of numerous animals.
On June 23, 2022, Oregon State Police said they executed a search warrant on the home of Norman Jones, based on information gained from an alleged co-conspirator who said Jones had poached several large deer using a rifle.
Upon searching the home, police said they discovered several guns, which were not legal since Jones had a prior felony conviction, and numerous wildlife parts, including sets of deer and elk skulls with antlers still attached.PPB: 35 arrested, stolen cars recovered, chop shop busted during stolen…
Headed to Yellowstone National Park anytime soon? The National Park Service is warning park visitors to be careful of the most current “danger.”
That danger is aggressive elk.
During May and June, it’s elk calving season in the country’s first national park. Female elk, or cows, are known to be hostile toward humans who come across as perceived threats.
A cow can weigh about 500 pounds, so you may want to heed the warning.
The park service warned that the elk may run toward people and even kick them. “Attacks can be unprovoked and unpredictable,” the announcement read.
Park guests are advised to keep at least 25 yards from any elk and check around corners or other blind spots before exiting any buildings. Female elk are known to bed calves close to buildings and under cars.
If an elk is running at you, the park service says, take shelter behind a car or other barrier as soon as possible.
Elk are the most common large mammals found in the park. An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 live there during the summer.
The park tells people to keep their distance from wildlife at all times for their own safety and the well-being of the animals.
Unfortunately, tourists tend to break the rules to get that perfect selfie or otherwise encounter wildlife. In 2021, a Yellowstone tour bus driver caught a tourist on camera getting too close to elk to film them. A bull charged the man, who panicked and stumbled onto the ground.
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On May 20, a man was seen touching a newborn bison calf that was separated from its herd at Yellowstone. Human interaction can cause wildlife to reject their offspring, and the calf ended up abandoned and died.
Philosopher Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, helped launch the animal rights movement nearly 50 years ago. He talks with Yale Environment 360 about how we now better understand how animals feel pain and how other species are not so different from humans as we thought.
Peter Singer has been called one of the most influential — and controversial — philosophers alive today. His pioneering work Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, which vividly portrayed the harsh conditions for livestock on factory farms, helped spark the animal rights movement. The book, published in 1975, has now been revised and was reissued this week.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, the 76-year-old Singer talks about how in the years since his seminal book was published, science has eroded the boundaries between humans and other creatures, demonstrating that animals can experience joy and also suffer. Knowing this, we are ethically bound to avoid causing them pain, he says. Singer, a vegan, also cites the environmental reasons to eat plants, which are less carbon intensive to produce than meat. Factory farming of livestock is on the rise worldwide, he notes, while wild animals are increasingly under threat.
Singer argues that protections increasingly afforded animals should be extended to ecosystems, rivers, and other natural features. The ethical demand to protect nature is growing, but slowly. “I do think the world will get there eventually,” he says, “but I can’t say when. I don’t expect to live to see it myself.”
Yale Environment 360: You are best known for your work on animal rights. Was there anything in your childhood or upbringing that sparked your interest in animals and your desire to lessen their suffering?
Peter Singer: No, I don’t think so, I was not an animal lover, and I still don’t consider myself an animal lover. I don’t want to have [pet] animals in my house. I appreciate their abilities more after learning about them. I empathize more with their suffering and their capacity for suffering, but I’m still not emotionally attached in the way that many people are emotionally attached usually to their companion animals, their dogs and cats.
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My concern about inflicting suffering on animals came much more from my interest in ethics, which I only developed when I followed through on the ethical implications of what I found out about factory farming and the way that animals were being treated. That’s really what brought me into this area and led me to write Animal Liberation.
e360: You published that book nearly a half century ago. Why did you feel it was important to revise it now?
Singer: Well, it has never been out of print since 1975, which is unusual in modern publishing, so there is still a demand for it. But I was starting to get a little embarrassed that the factual information was from earlier than 1990 when we last fully revised it. These conditions in labs and factory farms have changed a lot since then. I wanted this book to still be relevant. It needed a very through updating.
“We shouldn’t inflict [pain] on others without a very strong justification. And the species boundary isn’t relevant.”
e360: I imagine that your own views have changed somewhat as well.
Singer: Yes, that’s right, inevitably they have changed to some extent, and of course the situation is different now. There is a whole animal movement that didn’t exist when the book was written, and that has gone in a variety of directions, including the suffering of wild animals. I wanted to comment on that. Progress has been made, so some of the things that I described that were really bad in the first edition have improved in some jurisdictions.
e360: When you first wrote the book, the very idea that animals had rights was considered marginal. Now it is more widely accepted, at least in principle — how do you account for that change?
Singer: I hope that it’s been in response to some of the arguments that I and others have put forward. I also think that the scientific work of Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey and others really helped to narrow that gap that we previously had thinking all humans are over here and over there is this vast collection of beings we call animals ranging from chimpanzees to oysters and they are all somehow in another moral category entirely. I think that’s been demolished by a lot of the work that’s been done, and not only on great apes but also on so many other species.
e360: You are a vegan, and the rationale for your veganism is based on the capacity of animals to feel pain more than on their intelligence. Why is pain the criteria?
Singer: We recognize that pain is a bad thing in ourselves. Just as we don’t like pain inflicted on us, we shouldn’t inflict it on others without a very strong justification. And the species boundary isn’t relevant. Pain is pain as long as a creature is capable of feeling it. And that seems to me to be a more simple and straightforward argument than one based on cognitive capacities.
A recent study found evidence that octopuses feel pain in a similar way to mammals. MARTIN STRMISKA / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
e360: How far do you take this? Can fish feel pain? What about plants? Do they have rights in your view?
Singer: With fish there is now a whole body of research that shows they can feel pain. There isn’t such a body of research with plants, and plants don’t seem to have the kind of nervous system that we associate with feeling pain. I do feel there’s a gray area between fish and vertebrates and at least some invertebrates that can feel pain. Recently the U.K. passed an amendment to its animal welfare legislation that recognized that cephalopods like octopus and squid and crustaceans like lobster and crab [can feel pain]. So I do think there are some invertebrates for which we have good evidence. But getting back to the oyster, it seems very unlikely that oysters can feel pain. So in my view it’s not true that all animals can feel pain.
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e360: You write a lot in the book about meat production at a time when the conditions that livestock were being raised under were not well known. Have the practices of factory farming changed much since you wrote the book?
Singer: Europe and the U.K. have banned some of the worst forms of confinement for chickens where they can’t even spread their wings, as well as California and several other U.S. states. The confinement of calves in veal stalls so that they can’t turn around — that’s also prohibited in some places. Confining breeding sows in tiny stalls has also been banned in Europe and elsewhere. But in much of the U.S., conditions haven’t changed very much, and in some respects they have gotten worse.
Chickens are being bred to grow so fast that the birds no longer support their body weight. For the last couple of weeks, they are in pain just standing up, and they can’t sit down because they are raised on a kind of litter — wood shavings that are full of their droppings and has such a high level of ammonia in it that if they sit down, it gives them skin burns on their legs and chest. There is no legal control, and market forces demand the cheaper chickens that can be raised that way. Overall, the breeding of chickens, which is the largest number of farm animals, has intensified. It’s actually gotten worse.
“It is not OK to eat grass-fed beef because the animals have a good life. We need to think about the effect on the planet.”
e360: Why you think the U.S. lags behind Europe in terms of these kinds of reforms?
Singer: The agricultural industry is very powerful here, and money plays a bigger role in American politics than it does in European politics. In California there have been a couple of referendums to improve the lives of farmed animals. They both passed by large majorities, over 60 percent, and in Massachusetts there were even larger margins. So if you put it to Americans, they reject these practices. But there is no federal legislation at all regulating farm animal welfare. The agribusiness lobby has managed to defeat any attempt to change the rules.
e360: You also write about the abuse of lab animals. That situation has changed a lot since you wrote the book, hasn’t it?
Singer: It has changed, though not as much as I had initially believed when I set out to revise the book. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of pain and suffering inflicted on animals for not very significant or no benefit at all to humans. There is still a lot of toxicity testing of nonessential substances that goes on. But the FDA is becoming a bit more accepting of non-animal results now. Legislation went through Congress recently that said that they shouldn’t require animal research.
In Europe, you can’t test cosmetics on animals. You can’t even import cosmetic products that have been tested on animals. But there is nothing like that in the U.S. One area that has improved is experimentation on great apes like chimpanzees, which has essentially stopped.
The National Primate Research Center of Thailand, where a COVID-19 vaccine was tested on monkeys. MLADEN ANTONOV / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
e360: How important for you are the arguments based on climate change, that animal agriculture is more energy intensive and is a big contributor to global warming?
Singer: Well, people should be aware of it. Some people say. “I don’t eat factory farmed products, but I eat grass-fed beef.” It’s true that with grass-fed beef they have a reasonably natural way of life and animal welfare concern are much less than with chickens and pigs and feedlot beef, but in fact the greenhouse gas emissions are still very high, so because of climate change I would not say that it is OK to eat grass-fed beef because the animals have a good life. We need to think about the effect on the planet as well.
e360: Growing vegetables has a carbon cost as well. How much of a difference is there between eating meat and eating a vegetarian diet?
Singer: There’s a really big difference in fact. I have graphs and charts in the book that show it. Pretty much all animal products are worse than the worst of the plant products. Beef is by far is the worst. Then, the other ruminants, like lamb. Even dairy is pretty bad, although you get more protein and calories out of dairy than you do from beef. Maybe the best animal product from the greenhouse gas point of view is eggs, but even that is worse than pretty much all of the main plant products — the grains, the soybeans, and the like.
e360: You’ve written mostly about the cruelty to farm animals. What about destroying wildlife habitat, driving them to extinction — isn’t that an equal or greater violation?
Singer: The arguments for biodiversity and against extinction are another category of argument because they are not focused on individual animals [but rather on species]. You need a different argument for preserving biodiversity and preventing extinction. Of course there are such arguments. And as you say, environmentalists are making them.
“It is a different ethical argument if you are talking about things that are not sentient, like rivers and mountains.”
e360: Some environmentalists have argued that legal rights should be extended to geographical features like rivers, mountains, and ecosystems. Is there an ethical basis for extending rights to these natural systems?
Singer: To me, the ethical basis is the responsibility of this generation to pass on things that have existed for millions of years to future generations. To destroy these things is a kind of vandalism. Just as what the Taliban did to the Bamiyan Buddhas is clearly wrong, so too it is wrong to dam a wild river. It is a very different ethical argument if you are talking about things that are not conscious and sentient, like rivers and mountains. But I do support countries that have such legislation that recognizes those rights.
e360: You’ve written that global poverty, climate change, and the way we treat animals are the top three ethical issues facing us today. Are these three connected in your mind?
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Singer: Yes, they are connected. In all of them, there is a lack of concern for distant others. The distance can be geographic — they’re somewhere like Africa, so I don’t have to be concerned about them — or it can be economic — they are poor [so I can ignore them]. With climate change, the distance is temporal. The people who will be worst affected by climate change will be living at the end of this century and maybe the next century. And there is a biological distance between us and other species. They are distant relations. We’re less concerned for animals for that reason.
e360: Is the move toward fully recognizing animal rights inevitable?
Singer: I do think the world will get there eventually, but I can’t say when. I don’t expect to live to see it myself.
Police and fire department personnel at the warehouse in Section 32, Shah Alam last night.
PETALING JAYA: A suspected case of ammonia pollution at a warehouse in Section 32, Shah Alam, last night caused residents of a nearby housing area to be evacuated.
Shah Alam district police chief Iqbal Ibrahim said authorities were alerted by a resident of the housing area, who complained of a foul smell from a drain nearby at about 9.30pm.
Iqbal said police and the Selangor fire department’s Hazmat unit found that the odour, suspected to be ammonia pollution, originated from a drain near a warehouse.
“The warehouse management said regular maintenance works were being carried out as scheduled…
A whooping crane flies over the Aransas Wildlife Refuge in Fulton, Texas. Despite only 500 birds in the natural flock, in 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had plans to downlist whooping cranes from endangered to threatened.Pat Sullivan/AP Photo
UW-Madison’s Tyler Lark recommends better farming practices, alternative biofuels
While renewable fuel standards at American gas stations aim to reduce the nation’s reliance on imported and polluting fossil fuels, conservationists worry the standards are also amplifying pressure on vulnerable animals.
One Wisconsin scientisthoping to draw more attention to thatis Tyler Lark, who works at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lark said renewable fuel standards, enacted in 2007, spurred millions of acres to be converted into cropland for the cultivation of corn and ethanol production. And that…
The man was attacked behind Banditos Bar, which is located near a pond in Port Charlotte, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Charlotte County Fire and EMS received a call about the attack around 1:40 a.m., spokesman Todd Dunn told USA TODAY.
Responders treated the man with “an above-the-elbow amputation of his upper right extremity,” and airlifted him to Gulf Coast Hospital in Fort Myers by helicopter, Dunn said.
Witness saw man swimming towards shore after attack
Manny Hidalgo, a patron at another bar, told The Daily Sun that he heard the man screaming and went outside looking for him near the pond area.
“He was yelling and swimming toward the shoreline,” Hidalgo told the outlet. “I ran and dragged him up onto the sand. I was scared to get close to the water because it was dark out.”
A cow moose browses on foliage at Kincaid Park on Sunday, August 9, 2020. (Bill Roth / ADN)
An Anchorage attorney has filed a lawsuit against the Alaska Board of Game in an attempt to halta moose huntproposed for mobility-impaired people in Anchorage’s Kincaid Park.
And Tuesday, three Anchorage Assembly members plan to introduce an ordinance spurred by the hunt that would require Assembly sign-off to allow hunting on city parklands.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Anchorage Superior Court, says the moose hunt would violate the Alaska Constitution because it would grant “exclusive or special privileges to hunt and fish for Alaska wildlife to a specific group.”
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The lawsuit asks a the Superior Court to declare the proposed hunt unconstitutional, and for an injunction that would prevent the state from taking steps to implement it.
Recycling has been promoted by the plastics industry as a key solution to the growing problem of plastic waste. But a study has found recycling itself could be releasing huge quantities of microplastics.
An international team of scientists sampled wastewater from a state-of-the-art recycling plant at an undisclosed location in the UK. They found that the microplastics released in the water amounted to 13% of the plastic processed.
The facility could be releasing up to 75bn plastic particles in each cubic metre of wastewater, they estimated.
“I was incredibly shocked,” said Erina Brown, the lead researcher of the study, conducted at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. “It’s scary because recycling has been designed in order to reduce the problem and to protect the environment. This is a huge problem we’re creating.”
The researchers tested the water before and after the plant installed a water filtration system and found the filter reduced the concentration of microplastics from 13% of the plastic processed to 6%.
The estimate of 75bn particles a cubic metre is for a plant with a filter installed. A majority of the particles were smaller than 10 microns, about the diameter of a human red blood cell, with more than 80% smaller than five microns, Brown said.
Microplastics, usually considered to be any particle of plastic measuring less than 5mm, have been found everywhere from freshly fallen snow in Antarctica to the depths of the ocean, and can be toxic for animals and plants.
The results also revealed high levels of microplastics in the air around the recycling facility, with 61% of the particles less than 10 microns in size. Particulate matter less than 10 microns has been linked to human illness.
The facility was a “best case scenario”, Brown said, given that it had made efforts to install water filtration while many other recycling plants may not.
“An important consideration is what other plants globally are emitting,” she said. “This is something we really need to find out.”
The study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Material Advances, suggests the recycling plant discharged up to 2,933 metric tonnes of microplastics a year before the filtration system was introduced, and up to 1,366 metric tonnes afterwards.
“More than 90% of the particles we found were under 10 microns and 80% were under 5 microns,” said Brown. “These are digestible by so many different organisms and found to be ingested by humans.”
“For me, it highlights how drastically we need to reduce our plastic consumption and production.”
Judith Enck, a former senior official at the US Environmental Protection Agency, who now leads Beyond Plastics, a lobby group, said: “The findings are disturbing but not surprising. This one recycling facility, a state-of-the-art facility, demonstrates the serious problem of using plastics. It causes serious problems, even in terms of the infrastructure to recycle plastics. It is a clarion call to use less.”
Avengeful killer whale called Gladis is teaching gangs of orcas to attack yachts around Gibraltar, and has already sunk three boats.
It may read like something out of Moby Dick, but in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.
Researchers believe that a female orca called White Gladis is seeking revenge after being traumatised by a collision with a boat, or being trapped in illegal fishing nets.
Her attacks are now being copied by the rest of the nearby killer whale population, which has learnt how to ram vessels from their ringleader.
The matriarch is tutoring younger whales in the art of sinking boats; raising the prospect of future generations continuing the war on humans for years.
On May 2, six of the apex predators slammed into the hull of a Bavaria 46 yacht, which was sailing in the Strait of Gibraltar, near Tangier in Morocco.
The hour-long attack left Cambridge couple Janet Morris, 58, a business consultant, and Stephen Bidwell, 58, a photographer, who were on board for a sailing course, in awe.
The couple were below deck, when the cry of “orcas!” went up.
“It’s an experience I will never forget,” Mr Bidwell told the Telegraph.
“I kept reminding myself we had a 22-ton boat made of steel, but seeing three of them coming at once, quickly and at pace with their fins out of the water was daunting.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw them,” said Ms Morris, 58, “We were sitting ducks.”
“A clearly larger matriarch was definitely around and was almost supervising,” Mr Bidwell told the Telegraph before conceding he could have come face to face with White Gladis herself.
“The experience left us in awe of nature and her power”.
Skipper Greg Blackburn, from Leeds, was already dealing with “heavy weather” of 25-30 knot winds and a rolling swell of six to 10 feet when the whales hit his rudder with two large blows.
He said. “I thought ‘oh dear’ when I saw them. After reading reports and knowing what has been going on, I just thought we were in for a ride now.”
The skipper dropped the main sail and tried to make the boat “as boring as possible”.
The whales eventually lost interest, but not before causing extensive damage worth thousands of pounds, leaving the boat to limp back to port.
Mr Bidwell and Ms Morris are going back to the Straits of Gibraltar again in just two weeks to recoup the missed sailing hours, rather than an Ahab-style quest to face Gladis again.
The attack in the Straits, a vital travel route to reach the Mediterranean from Gibraltar, followed a similar incident in November last year off the coast of Portugal.
The French-crewed vessel sank off the port of Viana do Castelo after orcas “cracked” its hull and it took on water.
A pod of three orcas attacked and sank a third sailboat, piercing its rudder, off the coast of Spain, just two days after Mr Bidwell’s brush with the bully whales.
Werner Schaufelberger, the captain, said he saw the two smaller whales imitating the ramming tactic of the largest orca.
“The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side,” he told Yacht, a German publication.
“The two little orcas observed the bigger one’s technique and – with a slight run-up – they, too, slammed into the boat.”
Spanish coast guards rescued the crew of the stricken vessel but the boat sank at the port entrance of Barbate after it was towed to shore.
“That traumatised orca is the one that started this behaviour of physical contact with the boat,” said Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the Atlantic Orca working group.
This “critical moment of agony” made Gladis aggressive towards boats, and that aggressive behaviour is now being copied by other orcas, he told LiveScience.
Orcas are social animals and can learn from each other. David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet II captured footage of orcas working together to cause waves to knock seals off icebergs and into the water,
Other theories are that the whales are exhibiting territorial, defensive, or play behaviour.
The first reports of aggressive orcas off the Iberian coast began in May 2020. In September of that year, Spanish authorities banned boats from setting sail from the country’s northwestern tip after 29 orca attacks were registered.
The assaults have become increasingly frequent. The orcas approach from the stern and hit the rudder before losing interest once they have stopped the boat.
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Exposing the Big Game 