CANANDAIGUA — The Clifton Springs man who accidentally shot his hunting partner in a fatal 2021 incident will not be spending any time behind bars.
Ontario County District Attorney Jim Ritts said Kevin Hudson was sentenced Monday by state Supreme Court Justice Craig Doran to 300 hours of community service and five years’ probation. Hudson previously pleaded guilty to a felony count of criminally negligent homicide.
Hudson, 62, was charged after the Thanksgiving Day incident near Cross Road in Phelps. He was hunting in a wooded area near the Oaks Corners Fire Department with Zachary Barse, 28, of Gorham.
Police said Barse shot a deer and was tracking it when Hudson, who was in a tree stand, fired at movement in an area of thick brush near a creek. Hudson told…
Biologists are evacuating endangered riparian brush rabbits as floodwaters rise in California.
Lee Eastman/FWS
California’s record-setting winter is providing a much-needed boost for wildlife, includingblooming wildflowersand the fish and ducks that depend on thriving rivers and streams.
Still, for other animals, the rising waters are perilous. Just ask the bunnies.
In the Central Valley, evacuations are underway forendangered riparian brush rabbits. The small brown cottontails, only about a foot-long, are finding themselves stranded on small areas of dry land as nearby rivers overtop their banks.
The San Joaquin River has spread far beyond its banks as the snowpack melts in California’s Sierra Nevada.
Lauren Sommer/NPR
A team from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has captured and moved more than 360 rabbits to higher ground in an effort to protect a species…
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seizes tanker in Strait of Hormuz
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard seized a Panamanian-flagged oil tanker in the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, the second-such capture by Tehran . (May 3)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard seized a Panamanian-flagged oil tanker in the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, the second such capture by Tehran in under a week amid heightened tensions over its nuclear program.
The taking of the oil tanker Niovi renewed concerns about Iran threatening maritime traffic in the strait, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all crude passes. It also comes amid the disappearance of a crude oil tanker in southeast Asia believed to be carrying Iranian crude oil amid reports it may have been seized by the United States.
In extremely rare cases, bird flu can infect and kill cats and dogs when the pets eat birds with the disease.
The bird flu wave that’s left around 60 million chickens and turkeys dead nationwide can also infect and kill pets like cats and dogs, along with other mammals.
Six cats have died in Nebraska, Wyoming and Oregon and at least one dog in Canada. The U.S. Department of Agriculturereports170 mammals have picked up the disease during the latest outbreak, mostly wild foxes and skunks.
Cases are extremely rare but can be fatal.
“I think maybe we were waiting for this moment to happen,” said Nichola Hill, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston…
She grew up with pet tarantulas and cockroaches, and accompanied her stepfather, naturalist Chris Packham, on research trips. Now a conservationist and presenter, McCubbin discusses the passion and fear that inspired her new book
Megan McCubbin, 28, zoologist, conservationist and presenter of Springwatch – among other things – lives half the time in the Highlands with her boyfriend, wildlife cameraman James Stevens, who she met at a Springwatch wrap party. If you want to catch her anywhere less remote, it’ll be at her stepfather Chris Packham’s place in Southampton.
When I arrive here, everything about the scene is eccentric: the place looks like Fort Knox, surrounded by large, thick wood fencing, made necessary by the obsessive hatred, culminating in death threats and arson attacks, directed at Packham for his advocacy of the natural world. He’s tramping about with a wheelbarrow, and stops to say hello; or rather, what he actually says is: “Yoko Ono said that neurotics build fortresses, and psychotics live in them. I’m neither neurotic nor psychotic and I have to live like this!” Then he tramps off.
An illustration of a pangolin by Emily Robertson from An Atlas of Endangered Species by Megan McCubbin. Photograph: Emily Robertson
McCubbin is indoors with two crazy miniature poodles, and she looks so normal, with her calm, symmetrical face that lights up a TV screen, that you assume she’s thinking about normal things – lunch, weather, mascara. In fact, she’s thinking about glow-worms and tarantulas, the great expanse of the universe and frogs.
In her new book, An Atlas of Endangered Species, which is illustrated by Emily Robertson, McCubbin alights on 20 species (10 from each hemisphere) that are in danger of extinction, ending with humans. If this sounds stark – and, yes, it is stark – the message is more practical. If the small army of scientists, rangers and conservationists dedicating their lives to the species in her book can make the gains she describes, well, the rest of us might actually achieve something if we would just get a move on.
Part of what enables her to engage as meaningfully with a freshwater pearl mussel as with an African wild dog is that she doesn’t require animals to be cute, or emotionally responsive, to pique her interest. A lot of things about her – the teenage years volunteering in a big cat sanctuary on the Isle of Wight, her months spent in China rescuing bears, which turned into her first TV break with an investigative piece – sound pretty understandable. What teenage girl wouldn’t want to play with tigers? Which of us wouldn’t rescue a bear? But her fascination is much more dispassionate and respectful than “animal lover” really captures. “Nothing repels me,” she says, “because I understand everything’s got a place and I’ve got a real curiosity about how things are connected to one another.” We were talking about why she had a praying mantis, a tortoise and some cockroaches as a child, when she could have had, I don’t know, a cat. “I remember seeing hissing cockroaches for the first time, listening to them; it’s such a loud sound and they’re feeling so vulnerable.” She also had a “lovely tarantula, such a lovely spider. They all have individual characteristics, of course they do, just like we do. She was so calm.” Her mother was terrified and couldn’t go into the utility room, so she had to go and live with the grandparents. “Wait, your mother, or the spider?” “The lovely spider.”
‘I respect wild animals enough to not develop a very strong bond’ … Megan McCubbin. Photograph: David Crump/Daily Mail/Shutterstock
This life of snakes and rodents and a barn owl named Marmite started when McCubbin’s mother, Jo, began a relationship with Packham when Megan was two. They ran a production company together, and Jo – “a very selfless human being,” Megan says – was always happy for her daughter to go off on far-flung research trips with Packham. Before she had left school, Megan had been to really remote places – such as South Georgia, Antarctica. She remembers one trip, when she was 11, “looking over this king penguin colony as the sun was setting, streams coming down from the glacier. The king penguins were loud and smelly, as they are, but beautiful and funny and entertaining and charismatic. The meltwater was glistening, the seawater was sparkling. It was one of those moments you remember like a postcard. I went back six or seven years later and that glacier had retreated. I’ve seen the frontline of the climate crisis. I’m only 28 years old.”
Before her second glacier trip, though, there was the trip to the big cat sanctuary on the Isle of Wight. McCubbin was 12, and her mum and stepfather had split up, “but they’re really good friends, and she’s always put my relationship with Chris first”. McCubbin went along because Packham was opening one of the enclosures. “It was a pivotal moment,” she says – not because this is where Packham met Charlotte Corney, who is still his partner now, but because it was where Megan met four hand-reared tigers. “You always want an animal not to be hand-reared if you can avoid it. But because these were, it gave me an opportunity to fall in love with them – it was like an invitation.
We had a jaguar called Tequila, who was a rescue from a drug dealer. She had a real liking for Coco Chanel – she would go absolutely nuts for it
“Aysha was my baby. She was quite a small Bengal tiger. I would sit next to her all day, I would talk, tigers chuff. It’s a friendly greeting sound.” I asked her to do an impression of it, and now I wish I could play you the audio. It’s such a lovely sound and it’s also quite cute when a human does it. “I was always going between my dad, Chris and my mum, but the tigers were always there.” Big cats really love perfume, apparently. “We had a jaguar called Tequila, who was a rescue from a drug dealer; he used to walk her round London in the middle of the night. She had a real liking for Coco Chanel. She would go absolutely nuts for it.”
Living among these tame tigers was a turning point for McCubbin – but not because it informed her relationship with wild animals, as you’ll know if you’ve seen her nature programmes. She’s much more in the David Attenborough than the Terry Nutkins mould. “Humans seek relationships, from one another and from other animals,” she says, “but I respect wild animals enough to not develop a very strong bond so they become habituated to people. Because it’s a tough world for animals out there, and people will try to exploit or harm them.” Rather, the tigers made the difference because “I grew up with them, we were teenagers at the same time, though they matured a lot quicker than I did. I don’t think, without them, I would have had the confidence to go into science.” She had always struggled academically, being dyslexic. “I can remember as a kid being handed a pile of books, and the genuine anxiety and fear that I would feel having to open them. It’s like trying to climb Everest in ice skates.” But, after meeting Aysha, Zia, Zina and Diamond, “I was just dedicated to making the world a better place for them. I wanted to make the future better for tigers.”
‘My mum always put my relationship with Chris first’ … McCubbin with Chris Packham on Springwatch in 2020. Photograph: BBC
She went to Liverpool to do a foundation degree in biological science, then did a zoology degree, spending four months in China as an animal behavioural volunteer for Animals Asia, rehabilitating bears from the bear bile farming industry. “This is a hideous, awful business,” she says, shaking her head. The rescued bears had spent their lives in tiny cages up to that point. “Some of them are more tolerant of people than others. It’s amazing how forgiving they are of humans, considering the torture they’ve been through. It was just really joyful watching them be bears again.” It was the best of times – a lot of people, locals and volunteers from across the world, coming together to save bears – and it was the worst of times: bears in terrible condition after lifelong maltreatment, other people kidnapping dogs for a dog meat festival. “An amazing experience, a very eye-opening experience,” she says, more sober than enthusiastic.
When she got back, she was approached by the producer of BBC Three’s Undercover Tourist, who had just had a story fall through. This was 2017, and McCubbin got her first presenting job, a 10-minute documentary for which they went to bear bile farms in Vietnam. The concept was, “how close can a tourist get to this sketchy underworld?” But “the sad thing”, McCubbin remembers, “is we didn’t have to go that deep undercover: you can look into people’s garages and they’re full of bears, the cages so small they can’t turn around. They can be in that cage for about 30 years.” McCubbin wasn’t really thinking about it in career terms: “I just thought, great, I can get the story out there, I can get people thinking about bears.”
Our freedom of speech is being trampled on. We can’t just be squashed. We won’t have a livable environment
She then got a job on Al Jazeera, presenting Earthrise. On one episode, she went behind the scenes with Extinction Rebellion, shortly before its major actions. “Direct action is necessary,” she says. “It’s the only way that change has ever been made.” I like people who come at activism via a cause, not ambient left politics, like me; they look more respectable, and a bit less wet. She is freelance at the BBC now, so she is not bound by rigid impartiality, “which for me is important; it’s not enough to love animals and talk about beautiful science, I have to be doing something to try to help.” She makes the caveats that direct action has to be peaceful and considered, that she’d always work with the police, and she hasn’t personally glued herself to anything, yet. “Ask me that in a few years time, or next year. How bad are things going to get? How much inaction is going to happen? How angry am I going to get? I don’t know. I’m already quite frustrated. I’m already quite desperate for change. I’m already very, very angry. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. I don’t want to be gluing myself to things. I’ve never been arrested.”
‘It’s not enough to love animals and talk about beautiful science, I have to be doing something to try to help’ … Megan McCubbin participating in the For the Foxes March in October. Photograph: SST/Alamy
“It’s only a matter of time,” Packham chimes in. “We’re all going to be arrested, I think.” I didn’t hear him come in. Both McCubbin and Packham move very quietly, as I guess you have to if you want to get near a badger.
“I think our freedom of speech is being trampled on,” McCubbin says. “The public order bill is trampling on our rights. We live in 2023 and we can’t protest.” She’s dismayed by how the climate movement and its demos are increasingly portrayed as riotous and anarchic, “because my experience has been nothing but positive. They are beautiful events, filled with beautiful, kind-hearted people who want to do something. They are not troublemakers who want to get arrested. These are professors, doctors, highly intelligent people who feel like there’s nothing left to do but take to the streets. We can’t just be squashed. We won’t have a livable environment.”
An illustration of a kākāpō by Emily Robertson from An Atlas of Endangered Species. Photograph: Emily Robertson
Most UK wildlife pros live in Bristol, McCubbin says, because that’s where the BBC’s natural history unit is. But she and her boyfriend decided that “rather than be where the people are, and being sent out to the wildlife, live with the wildlife and then come back and contact the people.” They have pine martens and badgers in their garden, and spring and summer are beautiful because of the ospreys. “I need to be near wildlife and nature. Even when I lived in Southampton city centre, I’d get my nature fix from the New Forest. My flat looked over the marina and I’d see gulls flying at eye height, and oystercatchers.”
The one thing I still don’t understand is how a person loves all wildlife equally – it seems as random as loving all people equally. Surely, even within the 20 endangered species of her book, let alone the assembled life forms of the Earth, she has a preference?
“I really like sharks. I love misunderstood creatures. If I can convince one person who reads the book to love glow-worms as much as orangutans, I’ll be very happy. Because they’re not the most attractive animals in the daytime. But at night, when they light up, is there anything more magical than that? You’ve got these fairy lights twinkling at you. How amazing is that, that you can create light in your abdomen? What a beautiful thing to be able to do. Trying to imagine what it’s like to live as a glow-worm is more intriguing to me than trying to imagine what it’s like to live as an orangutan.”
So, there’s your answer: all dogs, of sorts: funny-looking dogs, strange dogs, but especially underdogs.
An Atlas of Endangered Species by Megan McCubbin is published by Two Roads (£20) on 11 May
Simon P. JamesAssociate Professor of Philosophy, Durham University
Disclosure statement
Simon P. James does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Durham Universityprovides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.
Environmentalists rightly urge us to consider the long-term effects of our actions. Plastic bags, they point out, can takehundreds of yearsto decompose, while radioactive waste can remain dangerous forhundreds of thousands of years. It could take the Earth’s biosphereseveral million yearsto recover from human-caused…
Members of the family of an Ogun State-based hunter, Olasunkanmi Olakiye, are currently grieving following his untimely death.
PUNCH Metrogathered that the 35-year-old man was accidentally shot dead by one of his co-hunters while they were on a hunting expedition in a bush in the Odeda area of the state on April 20.
The incident, it was learnt, threw the Egba Hunters Association, a group the deceased belonged to, into confusion.
The group’s leader, Alao Yusuf, confirmed the incident in an interview withPUNCH Metroon Monday, describing it as an accident.
Yusuf said the information gathered from the group members who were with the deceased showed that he was accidentally shot by a team member when they were making attempts to kill an antelope in the bush.
He regretted that efforts made by his colleagues to save Olakiye’s life proved futile…
NORTON COUNTY—Law enforcement authorities are investigating two suspects for alleged hunting violations.
Game wardens encountered two individuals hunting for turkey in Norton County, according to a social media report from Kansas Dept. of Wildlife and Parks Game Wardens.
Upon noticing the game wardens, one individual attempted to fill out a Nebraska turkey tag for a turkey they previously killed in Kansas. The wardens seized three turkeys in connection with violations in Kansas and Nebraska. Charges are pending.
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In an essay in Mosaic, Eric Mechoulan addresses the threat against European Jewish communities posed by debates over banning religious ritual slaughter for animal-welfare purposes. Noting that animal cruelty is forbidden by Jewish law, he gives a meaningful history of Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita), which has created a culture that demands the slaughterer (shochet) be learned and trustworthy.
Unfortunately, progressive “animal rights” legislation has failed to recognize the Jewish imperative of humane slaughter. The mandate of stunning an animal before slaughter (which is forbidden in Jewish law) has been creeping toward a universal requirement of stunning that does not exempt Jewish methods of slaughter. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2019 that animal products from animals that were not stunned before slaughter cannot be labeled “organic”; this implies that kosher slaughter does not completely uphold animal welfare. The court ruled in 2020 that the Flemish government’s mandate of stunning before ritual slaughter strikes a “balance” between animal welfare and religious freedoms. Mechoulan lists the many European nations moving toward effective bans on kosher slaughter.
Bans on shechita have a disturbing history, having occurred under the Nazis from 1933 through the years of World War II. The recent regulations, of course, are being pursued in a completely different context, on the basis of animal welfare and not religious persecution. But despite the supposedly modern sensibilities of animal-welfare groups and the legal bodies entertaining their arguments, current restrictions on long-standing religious rituals target important cultural traditions. Those pursuing these restrictions should think twice.
One last note: It takes only a couple of minutes to find questionable headlines on the website of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that generalize about Jewish practices and even draw connections with greed. For instance, an article called “The Hidden Cost of Cheap Kosher Beef” includes a section titled “Shekels, Lies, and Videotape.”
It’s important to remember that what may be viewed as progress by some runs the risk of being oppressive toward others.
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