(Bloomberg) — Asia remains in the grip of a blistering heat wave, chiming with predictions from climate scientists that 2023 could be the world’s hottest year.
In an ominous sign ahead of the northern hemisphere summer, an emerging El Nino weather pattern is pushing the mercury to unprecedented levels in southern parts of the continent.
Vietnam reported its highest ever temperature of 44.2C over the weekend, triggering power shortage…
A number of the carcasses of the fin whales shot by explosive harpoons during hunts in Iceland last year were examined by the organisation, which found that almost 40% struggled for approximately 11 and a half minutes before they died, while two took more than an hour. A quarter of the fin whales, the second-largest mammal on Earth after the blue whale, considered “vulnerable” globally by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, had to be harpooned a second time. Only 59% died instantly.
The report, described as alarming by Iceland’s minister of food agriculture and fisheries, found the killing of some whales had taken too long. The provisions of the animal welfare act on hunting had not been violated, it found, due to the “best known” methods used by the hunt. But it questioned whether hunting large whales could meet animal welfare objectives and referred its finding to an expert animal welfare council to decide.
Animal welfare campaigners described the findings as intolerable and unacceptable and called on the Icelandic government to halt all whale hunts.
Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Iceland’s minister of food, agriculture and fisheries, said: “This alarming report underscores the need for a discussion in Iceland about the values we want to be known for. I believe that industries incapable of guaranteeing animal welfare should be considered part of our past rather than our future. This report, along with the expert council on animal welfare’s findings, will serve as essential background material for making decisions about the future of whaling post 2023.”
Iceland is one of the few countries that hunts whales commercially, along with Norway and Japan, despite a ban on commercial whaling that has been in place since 1986 under the international whaling commission.
However, Svavarsdóttir said last year that the country planned to end whaling from 2024 as demand dwindled. Last August, the ministry issued a regulation requiring the food and veterinary authority (MAST) to carry out regular inspections of whaling hunts, in order to promote animal welfare.
Patrick Ramage, senior director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said: “Whatever their views on whaling, both Icelanders and the international community will be horrified by these findings. No animal – however it is killed – should suffer for such a long time. Whales are sentient, intelligent and complex creatures that suffer both physically and psychologically during this traumatic massacre.”
“There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea. This new evidence underscores how outdated this practice is. It has to end immediately – no one in Iceland is dependent on this meat.”
In Iceland, 148 whales were killed in 2022. The hunting of 58 whales was filmed and analysed by experts on behalf of the food and veterinary authority. It showed, of the 36 whales shot more than once, five whales were shot three times and four whales were shot four times. One whale with a harpoon in its back was chased for five hours without success.
Árni Finnsson, the chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, said: “This killing is inhumane; it has to stop. There is no economic benefit for Iceland and it undermines the country’s record as a pro-conservation nation.”
Danny Groves, a spokesperson for Whale and Dolphin Conservation, said: “We’ve known for a long time that time to death in these hunts can take 20-25 minutes. It will be an agonising death because these are sentient beings. They will experience great pain.
“You’re using a grenade-tipped harpoon from a moving ship to a moving target. This wouldn’t be allowed in a slaughterhouse in the UK.”
There will be no jail time for the Ontario County man who accidentally shot and killed his hunting partner on Thanksgiving Day 2021.
TheFinger Lakes Times reports62-year-old Kevin Hudson was sentenced this week to 300 hours of community service and five years probation for the shooting that occurred near Cross Road in Phelps that killed 28-year-old Zachary Barse, of Gorham.
Barse was tracking a deer he had shot when Hudson, who was in a tree stand, fired at movement in an area of thick brush near a creek thinking it was the wounded game. Barse was struck in the upper body by a single round and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Hudson pleaded guilty to a felony charge of criminally negligent homicide.
Jockey John Velazquez riding Authentic, right, crosses the finish line to win the 146th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Sept. 5, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
“This is part of racing and it’s the cruel part,” Mike Repole, co-owner of Forte, said in an interview with FanDuel TV.
It was the fifth scratch from the Derby in the days leading up to the $3 million race for 3-year-olds. Six horses have died at Churchill Downs in recent days.
The string of horse deaths cast a pall for some Derby goers on a mostly cloudy and warm day.
“It’s concerning, and I hope they’re quickly trying to the best they can to correct whatever’s going on,” said Michael Freeze, who along with his friend dressed up as jockeys. “They need to do whatever is best for the horses, and the sport in general.”
A horse in Saturday’s second race, 3-year-old Chloe’s Dream, took a bad step leaving the first turn and was taken off in an equine ambulance. The gelding suffered a right front knee injury and was euthanized, trainer Jeff Hiles confirmed to The Associated Press.
“He just took a bad step out there,” Hiles said. “They could do the same thing running in the field as they could on the track. So it’s very unfortunate. That’s what we deal with.”
“There’s something going on,” said Pat Murtha, who was attending his first Derby. “They need to find out, and set some rules and regulations to protect these animals.”
Forte had been the early 3-1 favorite; his absence reduces the field to 18 horses for the 1 1/4-mile race.
Repole said veterinarians from the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission diagnosed Forte with a bruised foot. He said the colt had developed the bruise a few days ago. The colt stumbled during a workout Thursday, although trainer Todd Pletcher had downplayed it publicly.
Behind the scenes was a different story.
“We did X-rays, we brought in vets, the state vets came in and they watched him every single day,” Repole said in the interview. “He’s fine. He probably needs a couple more days (to recover).”
Pletcher still has two horses in the Derby: Tapit Trice and Kingsbarns.
A crowd of about 150,000 is expected to jam Churchill Downs to wager and watch the Derby. Post time is 6:57 p.m. EDT.
The horse deaths included Derby contender Wild On Ice. Two of the horses were trained by Saffie Joseph Jr. He was indefinitely suspended by the track, although investigators have yet to determine a cause for the deaths of his horses.
“It doesn’t make me happy to see a horse get euthanized,” said racegoer Joe Conforto, wearing jockey goggles and a stuffed horse on his head. “But I think a lot of it is bad luck. Most race horses are taken better care of than human beings.”
Four horses were scratched — Practical Move, Lord Miles, Continuar and Skinner — in recent days. Practical Move and Skinner had fevers, while Continuar wasn’t in peak condition, according to his Japanese trainer. Lord Miles was Joseph’s Derby horse.
Forte was last year’s 2-year-old champion and has a five-race winning streak.
“You can only be a 3-year-old colt on the first Saturday in May one time in your life,” Repole said. “I feel bad for the horse.”
More details are emerging about anunsafe hunting incidentthat took place near Wapiti on the 3600 block of the North Fork Highway in the early morning hours of November 30th, 2022.
ThePark County Sheriff’s Officeand Wyoming Game and Fish responded to the scene after receiving reports of bullets crossing the highway and traveling through Trout Creek Ranch.
Nina Webber, a Wyoming Republican Party national committeewoman and Wyoming House of Representatives candidate, has been cited with misdemeanor charges for reckless endangering while hunting.
Nina Webber and Scott Weber
KODI Radio spoke with the General Manager of Trout Creek Ranch, Cory Williams, and several residents in the area who wish to remain anonymous, about Webber’s elk hunt that day.
Williams says he was preparing for work that wintery Wednesday morning, “I went out a little…
With last year’s increase in turkey reproduction and a strong start to the 2023 spring turkey season, biologists and staff at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission are cautiously optimistic about recent trends in Arkansas’s turkey woods. One trend that still has AGFC game wardens concerned is the continued use of bait by some poachers to illegally shoot their turkeys.
According to the AGFC’s Code of Regulations, hunters, whether on public or private land, may not hunt turkeys with the aid of bait. An area is considered baited if any food (including shelled, shucked or unshucked corn, chops, wheat or other feed that could serve as a…
Trumpeter swans swim around a wetland in 2017. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources is recommending an end to hunting trumpeter swans as the swan hunting season has ended prematurely the last four years. (Utah Division of Wildlife Resources)
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah doesn’t let hunters harvest that many trumpeter swans every fall; in fact, its quota is actually based on what the federal government allows each year.
However, hunters began to hit that quota well before the season ends, after state wildlife officials expanded the hunting boundaries in 2019. The 2022 swan season ended more than three weeks early when hunters reached the 20th trumpeter swan on Nov. 17. It marked the fourth consecutive year that the hunt ended early, according to…
In this photo taken Wednesday, July 17, 2019, Sarah Bates hauls in a chinook salmon on the fishing boat Bounty near Bolinas, Calif. California fishermen are reporting one of the best salmon fishing seasons in more than a decade, thanks to heavy rain and snow that ended the state’s historic drought. It’s a sharp reversal for chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, an iconic fish that helps sustain many Pacific Coast fishing communities. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
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SEATTLE — A ruling from a U.S. judge in Seattle could effectively shut down commercial king salmon trolling in Southeast Alaska — a valuable industry that supports some 1,500 fishermen — after a conservation group challenged the harvest as a threat to endangered killer whales that eat the fish.
Wild Fish Conservancy, the organization that brought the lawsuit, heralded the decision as the most significant government action in decades to provide more food for starving orcas. The group said it would also help recover struggling king salmon populations along the West Coast, as nearly all the salmon caught in Southeast Alaska spawn in rivers to the south.
But fishing organizations condemned the ruling, saying it threatens the region with economic disaster and would do little or nothing to benefit orcas. The state of Alaska quickly announced an appeal.
“If they can’t fish 10 months of the year — the two most productive seasons of the year — it’s going to be devastating,” Amy Daugherty, executive director of the Alaska Trollers Association, said Wednesday. “Southeast Alaska has always been very fish dependent.”
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On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones in Seattle ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to redo a biological opinion that’s required for the fishery to take place. The decision threatens to prevent the important summer and winter king salmon seasons; the summer season begins July 1.
Officials have known for months the ruling was a possibility, and the agency has been working to draft a new biological opinion, said Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association. The industry is hoping it will be released in time to allow fishing this year or that the judge’s decision is put on hold pending appeal.
It remained unclear how likely either scenario was.
“All we can say at this point is that we are reviewing the ruling and considering next steps,” NOAA Fisheries spokesman Michael Milstein said in an email.
Officials in April canceled commercial and most recreational king salmon fishing off California and much of Oregon for the second time in 15 years after the fish returned in near record-low numbers to California’s rivers.
Meanwhile, people who work on the boats, as fish processors or even in support businesses such as fuel stations and grocery stores in Southeast Alaska are waiting to see if the season will occur or whether they must find work elsewhere for the summer.
“There is so much stress in the lives of every family that relies on this industry,” Behnken said. “We’re in a real quandary until we know whether we can have a fishery.”
Emma Helverson, executive director of Wild Fish Conservancy, said she was sympathetic to the communities’ plight and hopes the government will make emergency funding available to support them. But she also said the industry had long overharvested the fish, also known as Chinook.
“Chinook populations are crashing coast-wide, and we need a coastal recovery effort,” she said.
King salmon are the largest and priciest of the Pacific salmon species, and the Southeast Alaska troll fishery provides them to restaurants and grocery stores around the world.
They also make up the bulk of the diet for endangered orcas in the waters of the Salish Sea between Washington state and Canada. Due to overfishing, dams, development and pollution, chinook runs in the Northwest are at a small fraction of their historical abundance, and the local orca population has suffered in turn. Just 73 whales remain, inbreeding is a severe problem, and scientists are warning of extinction.
While the endangered whales don’t typically venture as far north as Alaska, a huge amount of the Chinook salmon caught in the Southeast Alaska troll fishery — about 97 percent — originate from rivers in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. If those fish weren’t caught, many would be available for the orcas to eat as the salmon migrate to their natal rivers to spawn, the Wild Fish Conservancy argued.
In 2019, NOAA Fisheries approved the most recent decade-long plan for the commercial troll fishery for Chinook in Southeast Alaska, with harvest limits set during negotiations between the U.S. and Canada.
The agency acknowledged the harvest was likely to hurt the orcas and protected Puget Sound and Columbia River king salmon stocks, but it said it would offset the harm by spending about $100 million on habitat restoration and increasing hatchery production of Chinook by 20 million smolts per year, thus providing more food for the whales.
Last year, a magistrate judge who reviewed the case, Michelle Petersen, took issue with that, finding that under federal law, NOAA Fisheries could not rely on hypothetical mitigation measures to offset actual harm to protected species. Because the funding for the restoration efforts was uncertain, because there were no binding deadlines for the mitigation measures and because the agency did not actually study what effect an increase of hatchery production would mean for wild salmon stocks or orcas, that mitigation was legally insufficient.
The question then became whether fishing could continue while the agency addressed the legal errors. Under Jones’ ruling Tuesday, the answer was no.
Tad Fujioka, a commercial troll fisherman from Sitka, said it won’t be economical to fish only for other salmon species because Chinook make up well over half of the fleet’s profits.
Paul Olson, a Southeast Alaska troller who lives in Plain, Washington, noted that the fishery has existed for well over a century — evidence that it is sustainable, he said.
And, he said, even as the industry has seen catch limits dramatically reduced over the years, the endangered orcas have not recovered — suggesting that the problems plaguing orcas have little to do with a fishery in Southeast Alaska made up of small operators who catch and handle each fish individually, far removed from massive factory trawlers scraping the ocean clean.
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“We should be the poster child of the kind of fishing that everybody wants to have,” Olson said.
Officers met with two men on Thursday, March 9, and found evidence that showed illegal possession of an alligator on one of their cell phones, leaders with the FWC explain in a news release. The other reportedly confessed to the illegal take of an alligator using…
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ByMike Anderson
Published:May. 6, 2023 at 8:30 PM PDT|Updated:17 hours ago
BISMARCK, N.D. – North Dakota’s 2023 deer season is set. 53,400 deer gun licenses were made available to hunters in this year’s deer lottery, 10,800 fewer than last year.
“We have a pretty good reduction in deer licenses, probably mainly because the winter, and also a little bit to do with the condition of deer as they came into winter. Obviously, the better reserves they have, the better they’ll last through a winter, but this winter was six months, essentially of winter, and that doesn’t happen to us very often,” said Casey Anderson, North Dakota Game and Fish wildlife division chief.
Whitetail deer populations were slowly heading in the right direction after the winters of 2009, ‘10, ‘11, but the…
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Exposing the Big Game 
