Animal rights groups appealing against decision to kill bear after death of Andrea Papi
A court in the north Italian province of Trentino has suspended an order to put down a 17-year-old female bear that killed a man while he was jogging in the woods.
Andrea Papi, who died on 7 April and whose funeral was held on Wednesday, was the first person in Italy in modern times to be killed in a bear attack.
Continue reading...Number of house sparrows spotted has dropped by nearly 60% since 1979, according to RSPB annual survey
House sparrows are the most spotted bird in UK gardens for the 20th year in a row, according to new data. This comes despite the decline of the bird’s population, with nearly 22 million house sparrows lost from the country since 1966.
Roughly 1.5 million house sparrows were spotted in gardens between 27 and 29 January this year, according to people who took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch, the garden wildlife survey conducted by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Continue reading...Firefighters rescued one employee from the fire at South Fork Dairy family farm near Dimmitt
More than 18,000 cows died after an explosion and fire at a family dairy farm in west Texas, marking the deadliest such barn blaze on record in the United States.
Firefighters rescued one employee from the South Fork Dairy near Dimmitt on Monday as flames raced through a building and into holding pens, according to images and statements from the Castro county sheriff’s office.
Continue reading...Nanuq, a one-year-old Australian shepherd, disappeared from a family trip and went on an adventure across the Bering Sea
A one-year-old Australian shepherd took an epic trek across 150 miles (241km) of frozen Bering Sea ice that included being bitten by a seal or polar bear before he was safely returned to his home in Alaska.
Mandy Iworrigan, Nanuq’s owner who lives in Gambell, Alaska, and her family were visiting Savoonga, another St Lawrence Island community in the Bering strait, last month when Nanuq disappeared with their other family dog, Starlight, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Continue reading...Dead creature was one of 150 descendants of four hippos imported by drug baron Pablo Escobar in 1980s
Colombia has logged its first hippopotamus-caused road traffic accident after a car crashed into one of the animals at high speed, leaving the vehicle mangled and the two-tonne mammal lying lifeless and bloodied across a highway.
The hippo was declared dead soon after the crash on Tuesday night in the municipality of Doradal on a highway connecting the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, local environmental authorities said.
Continue reading...Pearl is shorter than the standard television remote and about as long as a dollar bill, Guinness World Records says
What do you call a chihuahua dog that’s shorter than a popsicle stick and can fit in your pocket? The planet’s shortest living dog, Guinness World Records has announced.
Pearl qualified for the title after a veterinarian at the Crystal Creek animal hospital in Orlando, Florida, where she was born, used a special dog-measuring wicket to determine she was just under 3.6in (9.14cm) tall and 5in (12.7cm) long. Those dimensions mean she is shorter than the standard television remote and about as long as a dollar bill, Guinness said in a statement.
Continue reading...Exclusive: ‘Everyone told me it would never work’, says professor of nanomedicine, but science needs alternatives to experimenting on animals
Professor of nanomedicine Wojciech Chrzanowski finds it “heartbreaking” to recall some of his early scientific work, where research involving animal testing was inevitable.
“The moment you start working in a lab, and have to start squeezing and cutting animals, you feel sorry for them,” Chrzanowski said.
Continue reading...Two dogs seized by council from a Woodridge property after the child sustained significant abdominal, chest and shoulder injuries
A six-year-old girl is in a serious condition in hospital after being mauled by a dog south of Brisbane over the Easter long weekend.
Police and paramedics were called to a house in Woodridge just after 4.30pm on Monday after reports a girl had sustained multiple bites from a large dog.
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Continue reading...Eight-week-old beige pup with one blue and one brown eye tossed out of moving vehicle in designer bag ‘miraculously’ OK
A puppy that was thrown out of a moving pickup truck in Los Angeles during a high-speed police chase “miraculously” survived, according to authorities.
In a statement released on Saturday, the Los Angeles police department announced that on 7 April, at about 12.10pm in a south-east part of the city, officers started a car chase in pursuit of a suspect who was wanted in connection to an attempted murder and carjacking which occurred on 26 March.
Continue reading...Distressed mammal was reported at lunchtime on Friday, but marine rescue service arrived too late to save it
A sperm whale is feared to have died after it washed up on the Lincolnshire coast.
British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) was called at about 12.15pm on Good Friday to help with a “large stranded whale” on the beach at Cleethorpes. The charity said the whale had been spotted “upright in the water” at about midday, but by the time it reached the beach, it was stranded on its side.
Continue reading...New rules require Britain’s rare canaries to be tested for five diseases before they can travel between UK and EU
Cute fluffy yellow plumes may be synonymous with Easter, but bird hobbyists have warned that a rare canary species bred for centuries in Britain may become a thing of the past because of Brexit.
Access to the birds, particularly in the Netherlands and Belgium where canary and budgie breeding is also popular, has been lethally impeded by new rules. Each bird now has to be tested and certified for five diseases before it can travel between the UK and the EU.
Continue reading...Pest numbers are booming and the annual cull has been called off, forcing one rural council to look at other ways to control the rabbit boom
In New Zealand, Easter is usually a time for killing rabbits. But, faced with a ban on the annual slaughter this year, one region is hoping to deploy a deadly virus instead.
Wild rabbits are considered a serious pest in New Zealand, particularly in rural areas, with major impact on agriculture and native landscapes. In parts of the South Island, the boom is reaching “plague” proportions, a spokesperson for Otago regional council (ORC) said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Two people were seen boarding the train with the animal wrapped in a towel
A platypus believed to have been taken from the wild and transported on a Brisbane train urgently needs to be returned to its natural environment, officials say.
Two people were spotted boarding the train at Morayfield on Tuesday with a platypus wrapped in a towel, Queensland police said.
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Continue reading...Rudolph Erasmus praised for ‘great airmanship’ after discovery of deadly cobra in cockpit of private plane
A South African pilot was forced to make an emergency landing after a 5ft deadly cobra slithered past his side and curled up under his seat.
Rudolph Erasmus was flying four passengers in a private plane at 11,000ft when he said he felt a “cold sensation” on his hip. Thinking that his water bottle might have been leaking, Erasmus looked down instead at the sight of a highly venomous snake disappearing underneath him.
Continue reading...The machine in the northern prefecture of Akita sells locally killed wild bear captured by hunters
Japan has added to its large and eclectic pool of vending machines with a new model that sells fresh bear meat – and which has proved an unlikely hit.
The machine, in the northern prefecture of Akita, has attracted a steady stream of customers since it was installed at the end of last year, according to media reports.
Continue reading...The bodies of four furry swimmers tested positive for a strain of toxoplasmosis first seen in mountain lions
Scientist Melissa Miller was seeing something in California sea otters that she had not seen before: an unusually severe form of toxoplasmosis, which officials have confirmed has killed at least four of the animals.
“We wanted to get the word out. We’re seeing something we haven’t seen before, we want people to know about it and we want people working on marine mammals to be aware of these weird findings,” said Miller, a wildlife veterinarian specialist with the California department of fish and wildlife (DFW). “Take extra precautions.”
Continue reading...The Pine Mountain Animal Safari lost two of its big cats after it sustained weather damage, but found them a few hours later
Two tigers briefly went missing from a Georgia zoo after a tornado struck the state on Saturday night and damaged the facility’s infrastructure.
In a Facebook post on Sunday morning, the Troup county’s sheriff’s office announced that it received a report from the Pine Mountain Animal Safari that a “tiger … is unaccounted for inside the park”.
Continue reading...Australia Museum says 20-year-old collection will help understand and conserve threatened animals, which are sensitive to climate change
As floods devastated Lismore, a group of ecologists waited anxiously for a break in the weather so they could move an important scientific collection of “spectacular” spiny crayfish to a new home at the Australian Museum.
The samples of the crayfish were collected more than 20 years ago from deep within the rainforests of north-eastern NSW and southern Queensland by Dr Jason Coughran, a freshwater ecologist.
Continue reading...Act opens door to technology being used to create cats and dogs with extreme features, says charity
Pets could be subjected to gene editing under a new government act, the RSPCA has warned.
The animal charity has said that the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act applies to all vertebrate animals, not only farmed animals, and that it could lead to cats and dogs being gene-edited to include extreme features.
Continue reading...Canarsie cow to meet fellow celebrity escapees at rescue center where animals live on vast pasture: ‘She’ll be ecstatic’
It’s been one hell of a week for the Canarsie cow, a black angus calf who started this week on her way to a slaughterhouse and will end it settling into her new home on a New Jersey farm.
After she escaped a truck hauling her from a Pennsylvania farm to certain death at Saba Live Poultry in Canarsie, Brooklyn, she went on a rampage through the streets. Slaughterhouse employees and workers at a nearby pizza shop tried to catch up with her, in a chase that lasted several minutes.
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