Let’s close the year out with a bit of bird blogging.
It seems the stories I heard about magpies liking shiny objects are really true. At least the ones in Germany. A magpie was flying around carrying a cell phone it had taken. Sadly for the bird, it dropped the phone and the phone landed in front of a couple of police officers. The officers took the phone in an effort to try and return it to it’s rightful owner. But not before the magpie landed and began to search for it’s phone.
Maybe this is what we should do with our old phones? Support your local magpie!
Tonight we’re going to have a bit more positive news and we’ll open up with a couple of penguin stories. I like penguins!
US proposes protecting 7 penguin species
It seems like there’s not a whole lot of good news coming out of Washington these days, but here’s some. The Bush administration wants to add seven species of penguins to the Endangered Species listings. As none of them live particularly close to the US, it’s not all that clear how much good this will do, but I guess something’s better than nothing.
Gay Penguin Egg-Snatchers Get Their Own Brood
Go ahead and make all the Prop 8 jokes you want to here but the article is actually pretty interesting. There have been considerably more gay penguins than I had every realized. And interestingly enough, at least one of them left his partner and took up with a female penguin. Penguin mid-life crisis?
APD will start paying closer attention to animal cruelty
With all the bad press surrounding Governor Palin, you’d think any good news on the animal welfare front coming out of Alaska would be pretty thin stuff. I think the announcement the Anchorage Police will be looking at animal cruelty cases for signs of other abuses, such as domestic ones. It’s good to see the links between cruelty to animals and general disrespect for all becoming more mainstream.
2008 State Animal Protection Laws Rankings
The Animal Legal Defense Fund has issued its annual ranking of the state’s animal protection laws. I was a little surprised Indiana was in the middle tier of the ranks. I figured we’d be down at the bottom.
The Suffolk County SPCA in New York is offering a $5000 reward for information about the slime that hanged a cat earlier this week. Anyone with information is asked to call 631-382-7722. Hopefully these folks get caught and put away from the rest of us.
What is cold in Wisconsin?
You’d think that wouldn’t be a particularly difficult question to answer. But for the Wisconsin legal code it is. WGBA in Green Bay informs us the law requires an animal to have “fresh water and proper shelter”. But it seems that standard is open to interpretation. I suggest anyone unclear on a shelter’s suitability spend the night in it. Should clear things right up.
Is being poor an excuse for abuse?
The final story comes to us from the Garden State. A man in Woodbine had his conviction upheld on changes of animal cruelty. He had offered the excuse that he was too poor to take proper care of his 18 cats and two dogs. Possibly finding better homes for them would have been a more worthwhile activity than starving them? Just thinking out loud here.
It’s been a while since I’ve put anything up here but hopefully the stars are beginning to align and Real Life(tm) will settle down a bit so I can get back to sharing my ill-formed thoughts with everyone out there in InterTube land.
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