Poachers in Africa Have a New Enemy

How can a team of just 70 rangers more effectively protect the wildlife in an African national park the size of Rhode Island?  One word: statistics.  That’s the theory, anyway, behind a new paper published this week in the journal Conservation Biology. The study used a new statistical model to look at 12 years of illegal activity within Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park as a way to predict the possibility of future crimes.  It’s not quite Minority Report, but it may help foretell behavior and therefore protect the park’s elephants, hippos, buffalo, and other heavily poached wildlife.

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Chimpanzee Representatives Argue for Animals' Rights in Court

Representatives for two chimpanzees argued before a New York judge on Wednesday, in the first hearing of its kind over their “personhood” rights and freedom from a research institution.  Steven Wise, the lead attorney for the Nonhuman Rights Project, the group arguing on behalf of the chimps, said that the apes are unlawfully imprisoned and that the court should relieve them. They are “autonomous and self-determining beings”, he argued, and therefore deserve the right to bodily liberty.

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Video: Buff Kangaroo Moves Into Suburb and Flaunts Muscles

An unusually buff kangaroo has made a suburb of Brisbane, Australia, his new home, and he's reportedly been intimidating and astounding his human neighbors with his massive muscles.  Seven News Brisbane says the muscly marsupial has been spotted hanging out at the golf course in North Lakes, Queensland, among other areas. A resident named Linda Hellyer said she recently bumped into the brawny animal while walking her dogs.

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Rhino Survives Horrific Attack By Poachers

The rhino's rescuers gave her a name: Hope.  Poachers in South Africa had darted the rhino with a tranquilizer and hacked off her horns while she was sedated, leaving the animal with a horrific wound covering much of her face. A couple of days later, staff on a wildlife reserve found the grievously injured rhino — alive.

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Celebrities Help Save the World's Last Male Northern White Rhino

One of the world’s most critically endangered animals is about to get a little star-studded support.  Over the next few months, as many as 18 celebrities from around the world will travel to Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where they will have the opportunity to meet one of the planet’s rarest animals: Sudan, the last male northern white rhino.  Only five northern white rhinos remain alive, and Sudan is 42. Three of them live at Ol Pejeta. Two other elderly females live at zoos in San Diego and the Czech Republic. None of the animals is capable of breeding naturally. Ol Pejeta is exploring artificial means of reproduction to preserve the species.

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Lucky The Elephant's Paintings Raise Money For Her Treatment

Lucky the elephant is an artist unlike any other, using her talents to not only raise awareness for an important cause, but to also raise money to help herself fight a rare disease.  Fifteen-year-old Lucky was raised at the Cambodian rescue center after she was abandoned at only 6 months old. Her mother, rescuers said, was likely killed by poachers.Nick Marx, wildlife rescue director at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center in Cambodia, said that she has become a symbol of the conservation movement at the center.  
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More Say Animals Should Have Same Rights as People

Almost a third of Americans, 32%, believe animals should be given the same rights as people, while 62% say they deserve some protection but can still be used for the benefit of humans. The strong animal rights view is up from 2008 when 25% thought animals' rights should be on par with humans'.

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21 Animal Pictures To Make You Crease Yourself

THERE ARE OF course thousand, nay, MILLIONS of gas animal pictures on the internet.  This is just a selection of our favorites…

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He Didn’t Know How Long His Puppy Had To Live So He Filmed Her Every Day

Dave Meinert made a beautiful film of his dog Pegasus as she grew up.   This video has gone hugely viral in the last week.  It was made by Dave Meinert, 34, a film-maker from South Africa, and it stars Pegasus.Meinert rescued her from backyard breeders when she was a puppy.  He told BuzzFeed: “Most of her siblings died or were deformed. I’ll never know what was wrong.”  He said: “She saw seven vets in the beginning. She’s just a dog that’s always sick and always, always happy.”

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Seeing Humanity In Farm Animals

You can tell a lot about a person from their expressions. Perplexed eyebrows, pursed lips.  Animals are no different.  From raised noses to lowered heads, outward displays of emotion are not exclusive to humans. But perhaps that isn't the message inked in these portraits taken by Ronan Yver.  Farm animals have their own stories. Their lives consist of more than rolling in the mud and grazing the fields. The perception of farm life cannot be taken at face value. You have to dig deeper for the truth under the skin.

http://tinyurl.com/qyrxh25

For the Love of Animals

Linda and Gary Childs go almost everywhere with their “little girl.”  The retirees, from West Boylston, Mass., love to parade 3-year-old Chino down busy streets in her stroller. They take her to restaurants dressed in her fur-lined vest or polo hoodie where “she sits in her own chair, very polite.”  But their favorite place may be the seashore, where Chino wears sunglasses and one of her four beach dresses while lounging in a chair embroidered with her name.

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Can Emoji Help Save Endangered Animals?

Saving wildlife is now just a tweet away.  On Tuesday, WWF International launched its worldwide “Endangered Emoji” campaign, which lets users contribute to the organization’s conservation efforts by tweeting any one of 17 endangered emoji animals.The campaign reflects recent efforts by charities and advocacy groups to marry philanthropy and social media. In the last few years, donating to a cause has become increasingly simple, as websites, text messaging, and finally Facebook and Twitter provided anyone with a smartphone or an Internet connection with a way to participate or give with a click.

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Ancient Egyptian Mummies Often Not Actually Mummified Animals

According to a new study, many animal mummies from ancient Egypt contain zero mummified animal. Cats are maybe not 100% pure unadulterated cat; ibises might be mud and some feathers. I’m sorry but the window for refunds has quite definitely closed.  That’s according to the BBC, reporting on findings by the Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester. In a pretty neato application of modern technology, they’ve been scanning a bunch of animal mummies they’ve got lying around. Around a third contain precisely zilch in the way of skeletons. 

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Cutest Animal Parenting Moments Ever

Humans aren’t the only species that can be incredibly affectionate towards their children. As these adorable pictures show, the intimate child-parent relationship can be witnessed across the animal kingdom.

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The Whale Too Big for Its Own Good

For decades, scientists have tried to solve a deadly puzzle: Why can’t highly intelligent blue whales avoid the collisions with ships that are a leading cause of mortality for the endangered marine mammals?  The short answer, according to a first-of-its-kind study, is that they have never learned to steer clear of big objects like ships. The largest animal that’s ever lived, at more than 100 feet long and 320,000 pounds, the blue whale for 30 million years never had to move out of anything’s way.

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Strange and Surprising Facts About How Animals Sleep

We humans may need our eight hours of sleep a night to keep our brains functioning, but that's not the only duration, or reason, why animals sleep. Bats sleep for 20 hours out of the day while giraffes snooze for less than two hours a day. And while humans completely conk out, oblivious to the world, other animals like some whales and seals, shut off only portions of their brain at a time, keeping half their mind at work at all times.   Why is there such variety in the animal kingdom? It's something scientists have been pondering for a long time.

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Remarkable Patients at a NYC Exotic Animal Hospital

The Center For Avian and Exotic Medicine in New York City isn’t your average pet clinic. Cats and dogs are not allowed, but you can find bearded dragons, sugar gliders, ferrets and more. Linda Kuo spent over a year documenting the extraordinary patients of the center for her series Displaced.  Kuo made portraits of pets as they underwent everything from routine checkups to complicated surgeries. Treatments include endoscopy, radiosurgery, mass removals, and even shell repair. The photographer captures her subjects in a way that’s clinical but compassionate, showing the special skills and curious technology required to treat exotic animals.

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Acknowledging Animals As Beings

We see ourselves as a unique species. And we are. Every species is unique and, like us, its members view themselves as such. To a fox, for example, every animal is either a fox or a non-fox and is dealt with accordingly.  But we take our uniqueness to extremes. Nothing that was said about an animal (except a pet) could hint that she was anything like us. She could not be “who,” she had to be “which” or “that,” and had to be “it” even if her gender was known. Even now, the spell- and grammar-check on one’s computer insists upon the way we speak of animals in an entirely inappropriate and inaccurate way, having been programmed by someone who has swallowed what political correctness decrees.

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Nepal Turns to Help Quake-Injured Animals

Three dogs with broken legs have been waiting days for surgery at the Vet For Your Pet clinic in this city just east of Kathmandu. But with his family camped out in his ground-floor storefront and his support staff off tending to their households after last week’s earthquake, veterinarian Pranav Raj Joshi has had to hold off operating.  “I hope by Monday we can do the amputations,” Joshi said Saturday. “The fractures are too severe (to repair), but they’ll do fine on three legs once we can complete the surgery.”

http://tinyurl.com/ndbl3at

The 50 States of Cats

Let the stereotyping begin.  We all know that the each of the 50 states are unique in their own right. Every state has its own individual quirk that makes it special and gives it identity. But did you know cats reflect their state's personality as well?  In fact, cats might even be more of an embodiment for a state's cultural being.

http://tinyurl.com/n2y7qtm