Rats, a group that has been hunting rats with dogs in New York since 1995, is summoned to infested neighborhoods
This will come as no surprise to anyone but New York City has a rat problem.
Two million rats call the city home, thriving on the streets, in sewers, in both abandoned and un-abandoned buildings, in the parks, in the subways, in shoe stores and in restaurants.
Continue reading...Carcasses found in four provinces, including one pregnant female, with nine arrests made
Poachers have killed 24 rhinos in South Africa during the first two weeks of December after a lull in killings during the Covid pandemic.
On Tuesday, the South African environment ministry said carcasses had been discovered in four provinces across the country since the beginning of the month, with seven rhinos found dead in Kruger national park, six in KwaZulu-Natal and seven in Mpumalanga. Four, including a pregnant female, were shot dead by poachers at a game reserve in the Western Cape last week while a fifth is being treated for gunshot wounds.
Continue reading...A baby Java mouse-deer has been born at Warsaw Zoo, Poland. The new arrival is around 10cm tall and its sex is not yet known. The arrival comes after Warsaw Zoo welcomed its first mouse-deer, Arnold, in 2020, before he was joined by Linda in July this year. Mouse-deer are among the smallest hooved animals on the planet
Continue reading...Aerial shot shows devastating effect of drought that has left people and animals without water
Six dead giraffes lie in a spiral on the dry earth, their bodies emaciated and interwoven. The aerial shot, taken by the photojournalist Ed Ram, shows the devastation of Kenya’s drought, which has left people and animals struggling for food and water.
Already weak, the animals had died after they got stuck in the mud, according to Getty Images. They were trying to reach a nearby reservoir, although it had almost dried up, the agency reported.
Continue reading...Ryad Alsous, whose story helped inspire the bestselling book, says life is sweet caring for his hives in Huddersfield
In 2013, Syrian beekeeper Ryad Alsous drank his last cup of mint tea on the balcony of his flat in Damascus. He was about to leave the city where he had spent his whole life and move to Britain. Eight years later, he is again drinking mint tea made in the same flask but this time in Huddersfield. The flask is the only item he still has from his home in Syria. He is talking about the moment he left. “It was very difficult. And also full of hope,” he says.
His block of flats had been bombed twice, and explosions in the eastern part of the city were happening daily. On the day he left, a loud bang nearby caused the doves perched on his balcony to briefly flutter into the air. He had been feeding the birds for years and realised they would have no one to look after them once he left.
Continue reading...Scientists are racing to assess the spread of the virus in wild and domestic animals, and the threat it could pose to us
A year ago humanity embarked on a project to vaccinate every person against Covid-19. But in recent months a shadow vaccination campaign has also been taking place. From giraffes to snow leopards, gorillas to sea lions, zoos around the world have been inoculating their animals with an experimental Covid vaccine as an insurance policy against what they fear could be a similarly fatal illness for certain mammals.
Meanwhile, veterinary scientists have been scrambling to understand the scale of Covid-19 infection in our furry household companions, and what the consequences could be for their health – and our own.
Continue reading...Vicki Holland, from Newport, south Wales, pleads guilty to animal cruelty charges after videos found on phone
A woman has pleaded guilty to abusing her pet marmoset, including offering cocaine to the primate and attempting to flush it down the toilet.
A court heard how Vicki Holland was aggressive towards the primate, which is native to tropical forests in Central and South America. The monkey’s treatment was shown to the RSPCA after videos were discovered on Holland’s phone by Gwent police after a drug raid at her home.
Continue reading...Japanese researchers use bird antibodies to detect virus under ultraviolet light
Japanese researchers have developed masks that use ostrich antibodies to detect Covid-19 by glowing under ultraviolet light.
The discovery, by Yasuhiro Tsukamoto and his team at Kyoto Prefectural University in western Japan, could provide for low-cost testing of the virus at home.
Continue reading...Graham George Spencer says he was bitten 26 times in 10 seconds while out for a morning walk
A man attacked by a pack of otters in a Singapore park has said that he thought he was going to die during the ordeal.
Graham George Spencer, a British citizen living in Singapore, said he was chased, pinned down and bitten “26 times in 10 seconds” by a family of otters while out for an early morning walk in the botanic gardens.
Continue reading...Scientists working on the Search For The Lost Fishes project have spotted the freshwater Batman River loach, which has not been seen since 1974
A freshwater fish that scientists thought was extinct has been found in south-east Turkey, after an absence of nearly 50 years.
“I’ve been researching this area for 12 years and this fish was always on my wishlist,” said Dr Cüneyt Kaya, associate professor at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University. “It’s taken a long time. When I saw the distinctive bands on the fish, I felt so happy. It was a perfect moment.”
Continue reading...They make brilliant companions, but do dogs really feel empathy for humans - and what is going through their minds when they play, panic or attack?
Read more: the inner lives of cats: what our feline friends really think
It is humanity’s great frustration, to gaze into the eyes of a dog, feel so very close to the creature, and yet have no clue what it’s thinking. It’s like the first question you ask of a recently born baby, with all that aching, loving urgency: is that a first smile? Or yet more wind? Except that it’s like that for ever.
I can never know what my staffie is thinking. Does Romeo realise that what he just did was funny, and did he do it on purpose? Is he laughing on the inside? Can he smile? Can he feel anxious about the future? Can he remember life as a puppy? Does he still get the horn, even though I had his knackers off some years ago? And, greater than all these things: does he love me? I mean, really love me, the way I love him?
Continue reading...‘He had been used for logging on the Andaman Islands. When I found him, he was 60, living in retirement – and loving his swims’
I lived at sea for 10 years. I co-owned and ran a global kiteboarding expedition business. We’d sail around the world on a 60-foot catamaran, following the trade winds, kiteboarding, surfing and paragliding in remote locations. One night, I watched a Hollywood movie called The Fall, which had a section where an elephant was swimming in tropical blue water. I didn’t know if it was real or a fake Hollywood thing. But I thought: “Man, if that does exist, I’d love to photograph it.”
I searched the internet and found the elephant from the film was living in the Andaman Islands, an Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal. When we sailed into the capital, Port Blair, a few months later in 2010, I decided to hop off and try to find this elephant. I found Rajan on Havelock (now Swaraj) Island and spent two weeks with him, learning about his incredible story.
Continue reading...Dozens of animals disqualified after owners manipulate their looks with hormones, fillers and facelifts
Saudi authorities have carried out their biggest crackdown on camel beauty contestants, disqualifying more than 40 “enhanced” camels from the annual pageant, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.
The camels disqualified in the competition, at the King Abdulaziz camel festival, were judged to have received Botox injections and other artificial touch-ups.
Continue reading...They do what they want, all the time – and can teach us a lot about how to live in the present, be content and learn from our experience
I wanted to know the exact amount of time I spend ruminating on the inner lives of my cats, so I did what most people do in times of doubt, and consulted Google. According to my search history, in the two years since I became a cat owner I have Googled variations of “cat love me – how do I tell?” and “is my cat happy 17 times. I have also inadvertently subscribed to cat-related updates from the knowledge website Quora, which emails me a daily digest. (Sample: Can Cats Be Angry or Disappointed With Their Owner?)
How do I love my cats? Let me count the ways. The clean snap of three-year-old Larry’s jaw as he contemplates me with detached curiosity is my favourite sound in the world. I love the tenor and cadence of my six-month-old kitten Kedi’s miaows as he follows me around the house. (High-pitched indignant squeaks means he wants food; lower-pitched chirrups suggest he would like to play.) I love the weight of Larry on my feet at night and the scratchy caress of Kedi’s tongue on my eyelid in the morning.
Continue reading...Chris Bryant reveals Pen Farthing was sent a letter from Boris Johnson’s PPS confirming evacuation
A leaked letter suggests Boris Johnson and the Foreign Office may have covered up the prime minister’s involvement in airlifting more than 150 dogs and cats from Afghanistan, a senior MP has said.
On Tuesday it emerged that the charity worker Pen Farthing received a letter from Johnson’s parliamentary secretary saying Farthing, his staff and the animals could be rescued from Kabul amid the Taliban takeover in August, when thousands of Afghans with UK connections were also trying to flee.
Continue reading...In 1479 beetles were put on trial for ‘creeping secretly in the earth’
If you hold a Christmas beetle – small, brown, mechanical – in the palm of your hand, it moves as though under a spell. The spell commands it to keep walking, to burrow its surprisingly strong legs endlessly forwards, like the end of the year growing steadily nearer and just as steadily receding.
In Europe, Christmas beetles are called “cockchafers”. In the year 1478, they appeared in a French court to stand trial on the charge of having been sent by witches to destroy the laity’s crops (and jeopardise the church’s tithes).
Continue reading...Food and Agriculture Organization says most plastics are burned, buried or lost after use
The “disastrous” way in which plastic is used in farming across the world is threatening food safety and potentially human health, according to a report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
It says soils contain more microplastic pollution than the oceans and that there is “irrefutable” evidence of the need for better management of the millions of tonnes of plastics used in the food and farming system each year.
Continue reading...Continuing our series looking behind the headlines of 2021, the former Royal Marine on his perilous evacuation of hundreds of dogs and cats during the fall of Kabul – and how he answers the sceptics
From his home in Exeter, Paul “Pen” Farthing reruns the events of late summer through his mind. The former Royal Marine, who 15 years ago established the Nowzad charity in Kabul to care for animals suffering the fallout of war, still cannot believe that America “would just throw Afghanistan to the wolves”. When the retreat began in August, he realised “things were going south very, very quickly. We’d got young female staff who had trained as vets, who feared they would be married off to Taliban fighters. Their faces were just horrible to see…”
At the time, the Nowzad animal refuge employed 24 Afghan staff. Since Farthing first adopted his own street dog in 2006 while stationed in Helmand, Nowzad had reunited 1,600 soldiers back home with animals they cared for on active service, while establishing a pioneering veterinarian practice and neutering programme. Farthing had been living at the compound since the beginning of the pandemic. Given the charity’s symbolic and practical mission, with Kabul about to fall, it was clear that he had to get both his team and the animals out of harm’s way.
Continue reading...Animals brought illegally to Colombia by the drug kingpin have been allowed to roam free and are now disrupting the fragile ecosystem
Myths and legends continue to surround Colombia’s most notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar 26 years after his death. But his legacy has had an unexpectedly disastrous impact on some of the country’s fragile ecosystems. A herd of more than 80 hippos roam free, the descendants of animals smuggled to Colombia from Africa in the 1980s and now flourishing in the wild.
Reporter Joe Parkin Daniels tells Michael Safi that when Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in his hometown of Medellín, the authorities seized his estate and the animals on it. While most were shipped to zoos, the logistics of moving his four hippos proved insurmountable and they were left to wander the Andes.
Continue reading...Skunks, iguanas, terrapins, big cats… Britain has more invasive and exotic animals than you imagine. Meet the search and rescue enthusiasts dedicated to capturing them and keeping them safe
Sometime in 2016, Chris Mullins received a message about a missing skunk. Mullins, 70, who lives in Leicestershire, had founded a Facebook group, Beastwatch UK, in 2001 as a place to document exotic animal sightings in the British countryside, so it was natural for news of this sort to trickle his way. In that time there had been a piranha in the Thames and a chinchilla in a post box, so a skunk on the loose in a local village seemed a relatively manageable misadventure. He loaded up some traps and headed to Barrow upon Soar to see if he could help locate the wayward creature.
Mullins, who has a white beard, smiling eyes and maintains a steady, gentle rhythm when he speaks, had always nurtured a passion for wildlife – chasing it down, catching it. The interest took hold amid a challenging childhood. Aged five, Mullins was victim of a hit and run that left him with amnesia and he spent two years in hospital before his parents sent him to a special school to catch up with his education.
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