The Tiger Next Door: Our Problem with Backyard Big Cats

November 19, 2019

“Since 1990, there have been more than 600 attacks by big cats on the public in the United States. There are an estimated 20,000 big cats being kept in captivity in backyards and in basements across the United States. It’s a huge public safety issue, and an issue that really touches a lot of people .”

— Josephine Martell, animal welfare policy expert, Cornell University

Captive tigers in the US now outnumber those in the wild. It’s a problem.

A two-year investigation by veteran conservation journalist Sharon Guynup and wildlife photographer Steve Winter anchors the December edition of National Geographic — the story is already online on NatGeo’s main website — and it makes for sobering reading.

The investigation found rampant criminal behaviour, wildlife trafficking and — no surprise here — a casual and almost purposeful lack of animal-welfare standards by the USDA under the present US administration.

A bill, the self-explanatory Big Cat Safety Act, has been introduced into both houses of the US Congress where, if recent form holds, the Democrat majority in Congress will pass it, after which it will die a quick death in the Republican dominated Senate or, and this seems more likely, be left unattended, ignored and unsigned, where it will die a slow and deliberate death from neglect.

Death from neglect is common in the captive tiger trade. Some are in roadside zoos. Some are pets. Many are abused. The lack of regulation surrounding big cats is putting both the animals and humans at risk.

Guynup’s story features any number of harrowing first-person tales, along with the occasional success story — “Donner,” for example, one of the lucky few, rescued from a breeding and cub petting facility in Colorado who’s now thriving at a big cat sanctuary in Eureka Springs, Ark. Guynup’s exposé reveals the ugly truth behind so-called “roadside attractions,” where tiger cubs are proferred for bottle feeding, petting and photo ops — and then discarded or put down when they get too big to handle. More than a few of these roadside attractions are nonprofts that masquerade as rescue sanctuaries. (Genuine sanctuaries are easy enough to find; they’re listed by the Big Cat Sanctuary Alliance at https://bigcatalliance.org.)

Roadside attractions have nothing to do with conservation, no matter how slickly they present themselves: Not one captive-bred tiger has been successfully released back into the wild, Winter and Guynup note. Ever. Anywhere.

The reason is obvious, though easy enough to ignore for anyone with profits on their mind: Predators in the wild learn the life skills needed to survive from their mothers; it’s not something that can be taught later in life, or picked up “by instinct.”

“The Endangered Species Act does prohibit import of a number of species, obviously,”

Cornell animal policy expert and advisor to the US cable channel Animal Planet told reporters at a recent conference in Los Angeles. “Unfortunately, in the States, we have weak regulation. There's no federal law. It's governed by the states. And across the states, there are nine states that have no regulations at all. There are 12 states where it only requires a nominal permit or license, which is very easy to get. And in those 21 states, it's literally easier to get a tiger than it is to get a driver's licence.”

Many private owners of exotic pets mean well, Martel added, but it’s not enough.

“I'd like to say, from my own experience and research, I've seen that people love these animals. Whether it's healthy or not, they do love them. But they make the mistake of thinking that the animals love them the same way in return when in fact this is a need that people have of animals and obviously not that the animals have.”

Gainsville, Florida herpetologist Winston Card, an advisor to the Animal Planet program Fatal Attractions, about people who keep exotic animals as pets, says the subculture, as he calls it, is growing.

“It’s growing exponentially, here in the United States and in other countries around the world, because the world is such a small place now,” Card told the conference. “So while this used to be, 20 years ago, a very small group of people, there are now an enormous number of people who are keeping venomous snakes in their home, chimpanzees, big cats, and the public is not really aware of how big a problem, at least in my opinion, this has become.

“There’s a certain psychological profile of those people who continue to keep these animals. Some people base-jump off of bridges, some people surf extreme waves and some people keep dangerous, exotic animals. It's first about your ego. You need to satisfy that component of your ego.

“The problem is, when you jump off a bridge with a parachute on your back, and the parachute doesn't open, you're the only one that suffers the consequences. If something happens with one of these animals, the effects reverberate and touch a lot of people.”

Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night — where they should be, not in somebody’s back yard.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/11/tigers-in-the-united-states-outnumber-those-in-the-wild-feature/

When Octopuses Dream, Do They Dream of Electric Eels?

November 17, 2019

“There is a connection here that crosses a divide not just from air into water, but also across half a billion years of separation. And it’s been a privilege to have a relationship with such a strange and wonderful creature.”

— Dr. David Scheel, Alaska Pacific University

During PBS Nature’s press session this past summer in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Octopus: Making Contact, the season-opening program in the venerable wildlife filmmaking showcase, marine biologist David Scheel regaled the semi-annual gathering of the Television Critics Association about a critter that, for all its familiarity in popular culture, science doesn’t know that much about.

Their remarkable intelligence, for starters. When the program aired last month, viewers learned about innumberable escape stories of octopus in their dealings with humankind over the years, everything from an octopus that hid in a teapot while onboard a trawler in the English Channel to the octopus at a New Zealand aquarium that escaped its tank, crawled across the floor, disappeared down a drain and swam out to sea, and freedom.

“Some of my favourite stories are about pet octopus popping out of their tank to snack on their neighbours,” Scheel recalled. “My investigations into this suggest an octopus leaving its tank to grab a snack does happen. But finding its way back? That’s probably urban legend.”

Scheel, a oprofessor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific Univeristy and his teenage daughter Laurel set up a glass aquarium in their living room in Anchorage and studied an octopus over time, watching everything from its hunting habits to its growing fascination with TV.

“You look at them,” Scheel said, “and you feel like they’re looking back.”

That’s not an illusion, he insists. They are looking back.

After years of studying octopuses in the wild, Scheel wanted answers to some of the questions that have confounded scientists for years.

“We take our way of existence for granted, but there are other ways of being. Octopuses followed a different evolutionary path, making them different from all the other intelligent animals on this planet.

“But me? I’m less intrigued by the differences and more interested in our similarities . . . What would I find out if I invited an octopus into my home? What kind of connection is possible with an animal that has three hearts and blue blood running through its veins?”

An octopus that watches TV was a first, even for Scheel.

“We'd come in,” Scheel’s daughter Laurel said, “we'd turn on the TV, we'd sit down, and a couple of minutes later, she'd move over to the front of the tank, closer to the TV.

“She started doing that pretty much every time we would come into the living room to watch TV.

“And so, we'd have TV time with the octopus.”

So far, so weird.

The most intriguing part came at the end, though, in a video that has since gone viral.

It turns out our eight-legged sea creature companions can dream. Who knew? The show-stopping footage, showing the mysterious creature asleep and changing colour from grey to yellow and then translucent to the point of seeming to be invisible, went viral on Twitter, and has been viewed, shared and talked about more than 3 million times — 3,023,978 to be exact, on YouTube alone, since the end of September.

There’s a bigger issue in play, though, not so much science-based as moral. If it’s true that octopuses are sentient, and much more intelligent than we give them credit for, is it right to pen them up in a glass box for the sake of observation?

As one commenter posted on YouTube, “Se’s dreaming about the day she was just minding her business snacking on crab legs and then captured by some nerd.”

“Nerds like him help extend the horizons of human knowledge through years of research and study,” another commentor responded angrily. “What have you recenty done for civilization, salty boy?”

Even so, the original comment hit a nerve. “Stuck in a tank and put on YouTube,” someone else commented, hoping to have the final word. “This is sad. Free the octopus.”

They are highly intelligent, another scientist noted. It’s entirely possible she is dreaming.

“Imagine the things we would not have experienced had the Internet not been invented.”

Food for thought.

Or, put another way:

Guy: “Dreaming about food.”

Octopus: “Dreaming about transdimensional multiverse travels.”

Invasion of the Climate Deniers

November 14, 2019

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

— Carl Sagan

Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand to escape danger, though it can seem that way sometimes to those humans who think they see something, and then get it wrong.

Earlier this year the Intergovernmental Science-Policy (Panel) on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (ISPBES) warned that the world faces one million extinctions — give or take a rare species of ostrich — in the coming decades, due to human activity.

ISPBES — even the acronym is unnecessarily convoluted — is actually a relatively straightforward NGO, with a simple, easy-to-understand mission. It’s an independent body of scientists, established in 2012 by more than 100 national governments around the world, tasked with monitoring the state of our planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, and the essential value they provide to people, whether that value be social, economic or philosophical.

It’s a tall order, but no sooner was the report issued — this past summer — than a US Congressional committee hearing on natural resources admitted testimony from a pair of expert witnesses, invited by Republican members of the committee, arguing that extinction is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Don’t listen to those alarmist limp-wristed liberals and Commie pinko scaremongers, Patrick Moore, a director of the curiously named pro-oil lobby group CO2 Coalition — who almost always identifies himself as the cofounder of Greenpeace, the green website The Revelator pointed out — told committee members.

Moore, who’s funded in part by the Koch brothers — or, more accurately at this moment in time, Koch brother, singular — is a frequent guest of Fox News, where he rails away against the injustices perpetuated by the climate action movement, which he characterizes as being strictly in it for the money.

“Fewer than 900 extinctions have been documented in the 500 years since 1500 AD,” Moore testified — but who’s counting? Today’s advances in technology and monitoring by satellite have nothing on 17th century bioscience. Today, we’re all at the mercy of a giant Chinese hoax, the argument goes, cynically and craftily designed to wreck Western economies. Climate scientists had it better in the 17th century, when they didn’t have to deal with bad agents from the Far East, and science was relatively straightforward in the eyes of the Church, who had yet to deal with annoying irritants like Charles Darwin.

So the dodo bird went extinct in 1681 — so what? That’s just one bird.

“As with the manufactured ‘climate crisis’” — feel free to interject your own sneer here — “they are using the spectre of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance,” Moore insisted. “The ISBPES itself is an existential threat to sensible policy on biodiversity conservation.”

Ah, yes, of course. The real threat to biodiversity and conservation are those very same people who say there’s a threat to biodiversity and conservation.

Consider this, from the CO2 Coalition’s website (“Clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science”), under the heading ‘CO2 Fundamentals,’ “The debate about global warming and climate change has shifted from genuine scientific exploration to a campaign demonizing CO2. The use of energy, the primary source of C)2 emission, have [sic] played an existential role in the economic progress and improved standard of living that has been experience in many nations since the Industrial Revolution.”

The CO2 Coalition’s stated aim is to “demonstrate with science based facts” the idea that CO2 is a nutrient that is essential to life. “CO2 at current levels and higher enables plants, trees and crops to grow faster and more efficiently. It is essential for life.

“Just as we require oxygen for life, our economy requires energy, often described as the oxygen or lifeblood of the economy. Energy must be abundant, reliable, and reasonably priced for an economy to achieve robust and sustained growth.”

Not to be outdone, the — erm, how to put this politely — right-leaning website Breitbart weighed in with its own contribution: “The two biggest human threats to wildlife in the last century have been a) Communists and b) Environmentalists.”

Wind farms kill birds!

Not ostriches, though, as they don’t fly.

“Obviously, just as with climate denial,” Revelator editor John R. Platt posted at the time, “the more you deny that extinctions happen or that they’re a problem, the more you can drill, blast, pave, extract or eliminate — all so you can remove any barriers to your ‘freedom’ and make as much money as you want.”

Never mind the real extinction crisis that’s already affecting species around the globe, everything from polar bears to Sumatran tigers, that type of mindset is what really needs to go extinct.

Meanwhile, on the subject of climate change and Chinese hoaxes, Italy is about to declare a state of emergency in Venice after the city was engulfed by 1.87m (6ft) high water levels, flooding its historic basilica and cutting power to homes, in just the past 36 hours. More than 80% of the city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was under water when the tides were at their highest.

That’s some hoax.

This latest acqua alta (high water) tide is the second highest since official records began in 1923. The highest, 1.94m, happened in 1966, more than 40 years ago. Climate scientists tend to look at patterns over a period of time, though, rather than one-off events. Of the 10 highest tides recorded since 1923, five have occurred in the past 20 years, and the most recent before this week was just last year. The increasing frequency of unusually high tides is of obvious concern, whether you assume the ostrich position or not.

Sea levels are rising — that fact is undeniable — and coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to their effects. Even in China. Hoax or no hoax.

‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rhino Horn’ — Telling Fake from Real

November 11, 2019

“It appears from our investigation that it is rather easy, as well as cheap, to make a bio-inspired horn-like material that mimics the rhino’s extravagantly expensive tuft of nose hair.”

— Prof. Fritz Vollrath, University of Oxford

If it’s true that stupid is as stupid does, then perhaps one of the more effective ways to combat rhino poaching might be by conning the con.

If someone is stupid enough to believe rhino horn — made of keratin, the same protein substance found in human hair and fingernails — cures cancer and gives one a bigger horn, then how would that person know the difference between genuine rhino horn and some cheap Asian knock-off?

That’s the idea behind a novel idea devised by zoologists at the University of Oxford, working together with molecular biologists from Fudan University in Shanghai, China — institutions-of-higher-learning that do not, as a rule, cater to the stupids out there.

Scientists at the two universities have found a way to create artificial rhino horn from horse hair, in such a way that — and I quote — “is confusingly similar to real rhino horn.”

The idea is to flood the black market with fake horn and drive the price down on a product that is, for all intents and purposes, worthless, no matter how exorbitantly priced it may be.

“We bundled together tail hairs of the rhino’s ubiquitous near relative, the horse,,” the researchers wrote in a paper published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, “to be glued together with a bespoke matrix of regenerated silk mimicking the collagenous component of the real horn.”

If you’re wondering — and who isn’t — how the idea caught on in the first place that rhino horn is a powerful aphrodisiac, Oxford researchers have proved that much of the ground rhino horn in Asia is mixed with ground-up Viagra. It’s remarkable what one can learn by using a simple electron microscope.

Rhino poachers have decimated populations of wild rhinos around the world to supply demand on the black market.

Horse hair is an ideal material from which to make fakes, it turns out: The fake horn can be shaped and polished to pass for the real thing, especially as horse keratin is virtually indistinguishable from that found in horses.

The researchers aren’t just smart: They’re realistic. Scientific Reports is about the science; the researchers leave the interpretation to others. They suggest the fake horn can be used to flood the underground market, driving down prices and discouraging poaching, but they don’t take a stance on whether the idea is good or bad.

“Whether flooding the market with confusing horn copies will ultimately lead to saving rhinos . . . in the wild remains to be seen,” they wrote.

That will ultimately be left to conservation economists to decide.

Some conservation groups — Save the Rhino International and the International Rhino Foundation, to name just two, have argued in the past that the manufacture, marketing and sale of fake rhino horn could have the unintended effect of boosting demand for the real thing, which in turn could have a reverse effect on poaching.

The science is in, however: The new horn substitute is inexpensive to make and virtually indistinguishable from the genuine item, even for a stupid who learns how to use an electron microscope. Simple PSYOPs.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/08/scientists-plan-to-flood-black-market-with-fake-rhino-horn-to-reduce-poaching

Follow the Money

November 06, 2019

“This is how wealthy individuals or corporations translate their economic power into political and cultural power. They have their profits, so they hire people to write books that say climate change is not real. They hear people to go on TV and say climate change is not real. People without economic power don’t have the same size voice as people who do have economic power, and so it ends up distorting democracy.”

— Robert Brulle, Drexel University

I came across the group Climate Realists by accident. Twitter has a way of doing that to one: You follow a long list of environmental awareness groups, scientific organizations, climate activists, field biologists, palaeontologists and ecologists of all stripes, and it’s only a matter of time before social media algorithms point you in the direction of any group that has “climate” and “reality” in the same name field.

Only, in this case, I quickly learned that Climate Realists are in fact climate deniers.

Or, rather, they agree that something is wrong with the climate; they just don’t agree that it’s man-made, or even influenced by human activity. The Earth’s climate is cyclical they say, and is forever going through tectonic shifts. Humankind’s presence on Earth can be measured in the blink of an eye, time-wise. The climate has been misbehaving — or behaving erratically — for millions if not billions of years.

Here, though, some of their arguments get harder to follow. Science is on their side, they say. Furthermore, most scientists agree with them. When a news story makes headlines, as one did just 24 hours ago, that says 11,000 scientists from across the world have united to declare a global climate emergency that is already causing “untold human suffering,” climate deniers dismiss that as exaggerated alarmism at best and fake news at worst.

There is a scientific consensus on climate change, they insist, but that consensus is that all this talk of a climate emergency is bogus.

But wait, there’s more. One of Climate Realist’s most startling argument — to me, anyway — is that there’s big money to be made in climate activism. Those Tesla-driving millionaires who swan around the high seas in their solar-powered racing yachts are gulling gullible donors into giving more and more money to climate studies that show the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and that polar bears won’t be with us for much longer. Pity Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry: If only they had the money to match those granola-crunching hippies with their ponytails and 4Ocean bracelets.

This idea that climate activists have deep pockets, deeper than anyone else’s, won’t go away, though.

That’s what prompted Smithsonian magazine to do a exposé a number of year back headed, helpfully, “Meet the Money Behind the Climate Denial Movement.”

Just in case one didn’t get the message at first glance, it was accompanied by an equally

helpful subhead: “Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement.”

Shocker! It turns out money is not with the granola hippie crowd after all, but rather with those very same climate deniers — backed by Big Oil — who accuse granola-crunching hippies of having cash to burn. When they aren’t chaining themselves to old-growth trees, that is.

“The overwhelming majority of climate scientists, international governmental bodies, relevant research institutes and scientific societies are in unison in saying that climate change is real, that it's a problem, and that we should probably do something about it now, not later,” Colin Schultz wrote in Smithsonian. “And yet, for some reason, the idea persists in some peoples' minds that climate change is up for debate, or that climate change is no big deal.

“Actually, it's not ‘for some reason’ that people are confused. There's a very obvious reason. There is a very well-funded, well-orchestrated climate change-denial movement, one funded by powerful people with very deep pockets.”

In a detailed and thorough study, Drexel University (Philadelphia) sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who’s controlling the purse strings.

According to Brulle's research, the nearly 100 think-tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that make up the North American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars a year to lobby and sway public opinion on climate change and other environmental issues.

“The tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first,” Brulle explained, “and now theyʼre being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.”

Imagine that.

Mind you, when you think about it, it’s only natural that the climate denial movement would have roots in the tobacco industry. Plausibility is deniability. Tobacco is a plant, after all. A tree by any other name.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/11/google-contributions-climate-change-deniers