jenny cares 

Posted by Samantha, selected from Tonic Apr 16, 2010
Stork Travels 8000 Miles to Be Reunited with Injured Lover | Care2 Healthy & Green Living:

No distance is too far for Rodan...Making the trip from South Africa to Croatia every spring, the male bird travels 13,000 km to see his beloved female partner, Malena, who is unable to fly.

   The loving storks cozy up, mating and raising their new chicks (they have produced 32 offspring so far). Rodan then departs to spend the winter months in South Africa and returns on exactly the same day, the following spring.
   Locals in the small village of Slavonski Brod in Croatia thought crippled Malena would almost certainly die when she was shot by a hunter in 1993, but thanks to the Vokic family, whose roof she lives on and her ever faithful partner, Rodan, she has survived for over 17 years.
   Reunited again last week, Rodan was more eager than ever to see his love, arriving two hours earlier than usual.
   The storks have become so famous in the village that it’s not only Malena that waits anxiously for her partner to return, local residents and reporters gather round to welcome the tired bird home, every March. Lets hope the couple’s little chicks will be just as loyal and faithful as their Papa!

From the Romanian Times: 
   "When Italian hunters shot this female stork called Malena, local vets in Croatia were the stork had been nesting revealed that although they had saved her life -- she would never fly again.
   "She was placed back in her nest with her young and when her partner named Rodan flew south with their young they expected that she would eventually die and certainly never mate again.
   "But their predictions that she would not live were foiled after the Vokic family where she had a nest helped to feed her through the long winter months and now -- amazingly -- every year Rodan returns to mate with his partner and rear another clutch of chicks."
   "Because she can't fly Rodan teaches the little ones to fly and accompanies them south every season."

from ANFA (Act Now For Animals):
Kangaroo Shooting
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Introduction: Late at night while peacefully grazing, thousands of kangaroos are faced with the threat of being hunted for their meat and skins.
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These docile herbivorous creatures which are an integral part of the Australian ecosystem and have roamed Australia’s vast landscape for thousands of years are brutally killed for nothing other than profit.
The killing of kangaroos has been described as the largest massacre of wildlife in the world.
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Betrayal of a National Icon: The Kangaroo has been a part of Australian history long before European settlement; it is also featured on the Australian coat of arms, the fifty cent and one dollar coins and is the mascot of Australia’s largest Airline Qantas – Despite this, the Australian government endorses the slaughter of several million kangaroos annually.
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The butchered bodies of these iconic animals are exported all over the world – mainly to Europe and the USA.
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Kangaroo leather and fur- According to VIVA, Australia exports approximately 3 million kangaroo skins each year – mainly to Europe and the USA. Kangaroo skins are used to make handbags, wallets, sports gloves and mitts, golf bags, shoes (including athletic football boots and cycling shoes) and various other products.
In addition, many souvenir shops sell kangaroo products including “kangaroo paw” back scratchers and bottle openers, coin purses made from kangaroo scrotums, beer can holders and other ridiculous products. Kangaroo fur is also frequently used in the making of souvenirs.
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Kangaroo Meat- According to the Australian Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, the kangaroo industry exports kangaroo meat (for human consumption) to over 55 countries.
Additionaly, a large portion of Australia’s precious wildlife ends up being used as pet food.
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The World's Largest Massacre of Wildlife Kangaroos including mothers with pouch dependent joeys are targeted at night by shooters. Startled by the noise of vehicles and blinded by the bright spotlights that the shooters use, kangaroos are defenceless to the invasion and massacre that is about to take place. Although the shooters are supposed to lethally wound the kangaroo (by a single shot to the head) to avoid suffering, many kangaroos are shot in the jaw, neck or chest, which causes immense and often prolonged suffering.
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The fate of orphaned joeys is equally despicable. Once the mother has been killed, they are helpless. The code of practice for humane shooting of kangaroos states that ‘at foot’ joeys should be killed by a single shot to the head or heart, but many joeys escape and face death by starvation, cold, dehydration or predation. Pouch dependent joeys are ripped from their dead mothers pouch and either hit over the head with a metal pipe or decapitated and discarded - a practice that is considered acceptable by the Australian government.
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World Famous Icon - Yet No Legal Protection The massacre of kangaroos is not
monitored or policed by the RSPCA
or animal welfare experts. The only
&ldquorotection” which is afforded for
these gentle and unique animals is
a weak set of guidelines known as
the "Code of Practice for Humane
Shooting of Kangaroos" which is
not linked to the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals Act.
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Video footage has revealed serious violations of the Code of Practice for Humane Shooting of Kangaroos including horrific abuse of kangaroos where shooters were seen slamming fully conscious joeys into their trucks, stamping on furless joeys and simply leaving them on the ground to die.
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Unfortunately, the kangaroo means nothing to the Australian government or to the large corporations that exploit these defenceless animals for their skin and meat.
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Act Now
Write to the Australian Government and express your opposition to the killing of kangaroos.
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The Hon Peter Garrett
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts
PO Box 6022
House of Representatives
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
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Email: Peter.Garrett.MP@aph.gov.au
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Other Ways To Help Kangaroos
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Click here to sign our petition to Adidas asking them to stop using kangaroo leather.
Alternatively, please click here to download the petition PDF.
By signing this petition you will send a strong message to Adidas that supporting the abuse and destruction of Australia’s unique wildlife is unacceptable.
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Never buy kangaroo meat or products sourced from kangaroos or other wildlife. If you see products made of kangaroo for sale, please take a moment to speak to the manager about the cruelty of the kangaroo industry and urge the manager to carry synthetic alternatives.
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Encourage family and friends to boycott kangaroo products.
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Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper about massacre of kangaroo. One published letter can reach thousands of people who may not know what is happening to kangaroos.
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Read More Here

Should Wild Animals Become Pets to Ward Off Extinction?

 C2NN story submitted by Cher
_________________________________________________
In February 2009, Australia's Environmental
Minister, Peter Garrett made a depressing
announcement. The Christmas Island pipistrelle
bat— an inch-long winged creature no heavier
than five grams — was about to go extinct.
_________________________________________________
Articles about its imminent demise were accompanied by photos of the bat's miniscule body, barely big enough to embrace the full diameter of a human finger...One was seen fluttering around the island in August, but there have been no sightings since.
___________________________________________________
If the Christmas Island pipistrelle is truly gone,
it will be the 23rd Australian mammal species
to have become extinct in the past 200 years.
___________________________________________________
The last to perish was the CRESCENT NAIL-TAIL WALLABY — a miniature wallaby the size of a hare — which disappeared from western and central Australia in 1956. Twenty years earlier, in what was perhaps Australia's most infamous extinction, the TASMANIAN TIGER met its end. 
________________________________________________
The accumulation of tragedies like these has
given Australia the shameful distinction of
having the worst mammal extinction record
in the world. Half of the mammals that have
vanished from the planet in the last two
centuries have been in Australia.
________________________________________________
And though the continent is hardly the only place grappling with die-offs — many biologists have conceded that a mass wave of extinctions is now sweeping the globe — as the list of Australia's endangered species continues to grow longer, scientists here are looking for ways to put an end to the trend.
MIKE ARCHER, a professor at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has long been a proponent of domesticating Australia's unique wildlife to keep it from disappearing.
Archer has had SUGAR GLIDERS employ his shoulder as transport, shared a bed with a cucumber-loving QUOLL, and battled a SWAMP WALLABY over a roast chicken. While he concedes that not all native animals make great pets (WOMBATS and KOALAS come to mind), others do, and Archer's hoping that the government will start to legalize ownership of more native pets.
________________________________________
PICTURED BELOW: An Eastern quoll pictured in
Cradle Mountain National Park in Tasmania, Australia
 
Archer said, "No animal that has ever entered
[humans'] inner circle has become extinct.
When you value something and have an
emotional connection with it... it simply
doesn't disappear."
_____________________________________________
It's a strategy that has worked before in Australia, albeit on a smaller scale. In 1987, RAINBOW FISH were considered to be forever-gone from the lakes in northern Queensland — their sole habitat. In a move to save them, fish enthusiasts collected the species for their personal aquariums, and when the Queensland fisheries caught on, the pet fish were used to start breeding programs.
Today, most Australians' interactions with the continent's native species are limited to zoos — many wouldn't know a QUOLL from a BANDICOOT, or a NUMBAT from a BILBY.
But Archer's plan seems to be gaining some traction. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), a federal government organization, will release a study next year considering the potential to use threatened EASTERN QUOLLS — native, cat-sized marsupials with white spots and bushy tails — as household pets, on the basis that they are rare, and could be suited to an urban habitat.
ROSALIE CHAPPLE, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the UNSW a key author of the RIRDC report, cautions about the implications of utilization of wild animals as pets...
________________________________
"It should be based on a conservation
imperative and not a commercial industry
imperative. The wellbeing of the animal
must be taken into account."
____________________________________________
A native mammal pet industry would need guidelines on living and food requirements for quolls, as well as a lot of paperwork for licensing and regulation.
Chapple is also wary about contributing to an overloaded pet industry.
In the Australian state of New South Wales alone, over 63,000 cats and dogs are abandoned every year, and...
_____________________________________________
...a recent bill brought before NSW state
parliament sought, unsuccessfully, to ban
the sale of cats and dogs from pet shops.
_____________________________________
"With cats and dogs, we already see gross welfare issues,"
...says DANIEL RAMPS, a senior research fellow with the Australian Wetlands and River Center at UNSW who is vehemently opposed to keeping quolls as pets.
"Quolls have much more specific requirements… They need a lot of space. By encouraging a pet industry you are essentially opening quolls up to abuse. [The quoll] is a predator. Its instincts aren't able to be maintained in a captive environment," Ramps said.
Archer dismisses the argument.
"When I was given a Western quoll as a kitten, we had a very strong bonding experience. It was so cute, covered in little white spots with these huge eyes," he recalls. And while he feels quolls and people would get along just fine, he is blind to the charms of less exotic housemates while his cause gains more traction.
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Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1946471,00.html#ixzz0ZAhpq7Ph 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Island_Pipistrelle 
No Christmas for the Pipistrelle
Extinction Countdown 

[from Care2 article by Melissa Breyer: Adapted from 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic (New Society, 2007) by By Guy Dauncey, Liz Armstrong and Anne Wordsworth] 

CANCER IN PETS, WILDLIFE AND FISH

It’s not only humans. The beluga whales in Canada’s St. Lawrence estuary are getting cancer, while those in the less-polluted Arctic waters are not. Fish in contaminated waters have tumors, but not those in clean water. Dogs exposed to herbicides from chemically treated lawns have more cancers than those that are not. In her book detailing the global reach of environmental pollution, Devra Davis reported that polar bears in the Arctic have major body burdens of carcinogens, and that out of 100 of the Arctic’s largest land-based mammals is reported to be a hermaphrodite. It can’t get much clearer.
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The belugas have survived in the world’s northern waters for millions of years, eating octopus, crabs and fish. Now one in four of the st. Lawrence whales is dying from cancer, mostly intestinal. They are also having trouble reproducing. When scientists examined their bodies, the autopsies revealed high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which almost certainly came from an upstream aluminum smelter.
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In Washington D.C. the Registry of Tumors in Lower Animals has almost 4,000 specimens of cancer in fish, amphibians, reptiles and invertebrates collected by the Smithsonian and the National Cancer Institute. Epidemics of liver cancer have been found in 16 species of fish in 25 different polluted freshwater and saltwater locations, while in non-polluted waters, fish with cancer are almost non-existent. The same tumors have been found in bottom-feeding fish in industrialized and urbanized areas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada.

Cancer in Sea Lions
During the 1960s and 1970s, persistent organic pollutants were dumped in California’s coastal waters, where they bio-accumulated through the food chain. Twenty years later, people started noticing dead and stranded California sea lions. When examined, 20 percent of the sea lions were found to have cancer of the urinary and genital tracts and toxic chemicals in their blubber that had accumulated through the anchovies, squid, salmon and mussels they ate.”
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Cancer in Dogs
A study of more than 8,000 dogs showed that canine bladder cancer was associated with their living in industrialized counties, mimicking the distribution of bladder cancer among humans. Between 1975 and 1995 the incidence of bladder cancer in dogs examined at veterinary teaching schools in North America increased six-fold. Scottish terriers, Shetland sheepdogs, wirehaired fox terriers and West Highland white terriers had a higher risk than mixed breeds, suggesting a genetic susceptibility to cancer among the terriers, but not a reason for the increase.
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When the researchers interviewed the owners of Scottish terriers with bladder cancer, they found that dogs whose owners had used phenoxy acid herbicides on their lawns were 4 to 7 times more likely to have cancer than dogs whose owners had not. Phenoxy acid is an active ingredient in 2,4-D, a widely used herbicide that has been linked to cancers, neurological impairment and reproductive problems.
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The “cancer in dogs” studies reveal the multifactorial nature of cancer. Their cancer is linked to the use of insecticidal flea and tick dips, but more so if the dogs were obese and lived near another source of pesticides. In the terrier study, the researchers found that when the Scotties ate green leafy vegetables three times a week, there was a 90 percent reduction in their risk of cancer.
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Danger Ahead
We need to ring all the alarm bells about the accumulation of chemical wastes in the bodies of wildlife. The fire-retardant chemicals known as PDBEs have been found in every fish sampled in San Francisco Bay. They are similar to PCBs in their chemical structure, and the levels found in breast, blood and breast-milk samples of U.S. women are the highest in the world.

Is it a coincidence that women in San Francisco also have the highest levels of breast cancer anywhere?
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PDBEs have been linked to an array of adverse health effects, including the possibility of cancer. When Sweden noticed a 60-fold increase of PDBEs in human breast milk between 1972 and 1997, it led to a ban throughout the European Union. In the San Francisco Bay area, the level in breast milk is 12 to 300 times higher than it was in Sweden, but the chemical industry has blocked California’s attempts to legislate.
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We have to fight back, if we want to regain our health and the health of the world's wildlife.

From Tragic Outcome for 'Roos in Canberra // Animals Australia:

The world's largest land-based commercial wildlife slaughter is in our own backyard. Find out more...

The deaths of 400 kangaroos at the Defence Department Belconnen Naval Transmission Station in Canberra has been a tragedy in the making for the past 10 or more years. The enclosed population of Eastern Grey kangaroos at the base have been permitted to increase in number and were said to be threatening several plant species. Similar mismanagement had occurred years earlier at the Puckupunyal Army Base in Victoria.

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