‘It ain’t over till’ . . . black bears are permanently protected

                                                                                              HSUS image

“No bear hunt in 2021.”  Those few words brought joy to the countless people who have fought for years to hear them.  New Jersey’s record for black bear hunts is inconsistent at best, from annual-or-more hunts to no hunt. 

This year marks the end of Gov. Murphy’s first term, before which, he made a campaign promise to end the bear hunt . . . and then proceeded to weasel out of that vow with no change at all or easily-circumvented half measures designed to please everyone.  No one was satisfied.  And hundreds of bears died.

Now, with Murphy’s re-election campaign underway, came the recent news of no hunt.  Does that mean our governor has come to like bears?  Does he feel belated regret at the earlier bear slaughter on his watch?  Has he “seen the (humane) light”?

No.

“It’s directly related to our relentless work,” says Angi Metler, executive director of the Animal Protection League of NJ, an organization that has long fought for NJ’s black bears and against bear hunts.   

This time around, among other things, APLNJ

·         formed an active bear coalition with other groups also against the hunt;   

·         assured there were animal advocates everywhere Murphy went, talking about bears and   challenging him on bear hunts;     

·         reached out to higher-up members of Murphy’s staff;

·         argued for bears on billboards and airplane banners.   

“We didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” Metler says, adding, “This is the work we’ve done for almost 30 years.  We never gave up and we never will – not till the bears are permanently protected and we’re not bouncing from governor to governor.”

                                                                    Bill Lea image

For her and APLNJ, the next crucial step is implementing a non-lethal bear management plan for New Jersey.  Other states have led in this effort, and NJ can learn from them.

So there’s much more vital work to be done for our bears.  Metler hopes only that a particular after-effect of success -- that some activists celebrate, but then go away – won’t happen this time.  This bear-hunt fight isn’t over yet!  

As for this fall’s gubernatorial election, nothing could be easier: simply compare what Murphy and his rival say about the bear hunt.  That should settle it for all of us who abhor it.    

Babies in the burbs

It’s baby animal season and a recent story about baby-rescuers includes new and surprising details about how deer mamas keep their babies safe before and after they leave temporarily to forage for food. But: what if a doe goes missing instead of returning to her baby?

                                      APLNJ image

In that case, for some lucky fawns in an area north of New York City, members of Animal Nation, a rescue group based in Rye, NY, step in . . . in unbelievable doe-imitating ways.  And they must do so swiftly and silently so the saved baby deer doesn’t imprint and think s/he’s a human. That would make it very hard to release the animal back into the wild.

There are also baby groundhogs, hawks, great horned owls, squirrels, waterfowl, and more, all recipients of help from Animal Nation and its affiliates.  The organization president, Patrick Moore, is an unpaid volunteer who “can’t help helping the animals” – if necessary, treating overflow babies-in-need in his bathroom! 

And there, for instance, he may keep orphaned fawns together, assuring that they bond with their own kind.  

Moore’s also a full-time firefighter who, because of his work for animals and people, may get just 4 hours of sleep a night during baby-animal season.    https://tinyurl.com/3mdfnjah

                                                                                               NYTimes image

 

 

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Creatures great & small -- & a black bear news flash!

                                  

African elephants

Sorry to say, I still don’t know why those elephants in the news earlier this summer were traveling in China, or where they wound up (hopefully, each in one piece, with tusks intact).  China, remember, is the place that’s so fixated on elephant ivory and probably still leads the world in consuming it, thereby driving the poachers who are only too happy to slaughter elephants for their tusks.  That mysterious wandering herd better watch its back!

Elephants.  Both supremely wonderful and supremely threatened creatures.  Sometimes described as more human than humans as far as good qualities go – family oriented, social, complex, smart . . . . Most of the poems about elephants that I know of don’t at all suffice to suggest their majesty, their nobility.  Neither do the quotes about them that I’ve seen.  (I welcome your suggestions on both!)

Asian elephants 

The very best thing I’ve ever heard about elephants is the gorgeous yet heart-rending poem, “The Sacred Elephant,” by Heathcote Williams (read by him and two others).  And the worst thing I’ve heard about elephants is the real possibility of their going extinct in the wild.  That’s painful even to imagine.

Way before today

Today, elephants are found only in Africa and Asia, but at one time, they inhabited the whole planet. Today, elephants are the largest land mammal, while long ago in some places, they had evolved into being horse-size.

Off Italy’s boot, Sicily is just one island where remains of “dwarf elephants” (now extinct) have been found, and scientists are trying to figure out the evolutionary rate of “elephant shrinkage” in such “geographic isolation” sites as islands.   

There’s proof that downsizing evolution happened to elephants and other animals in such places; the question is, how long did it take those full-size elephants to become dwarf elephants.  https://tinyurl.com/27cvh53s

And even before that . . .

Steppe mammoth  (artist: Beth Zaiken)

Before “our” elephants, there were Columbian mammoths (distant relatives of African elephants) -- taller, heavier and with longer tusks – who roamed North America during the last ice age.  They were assumed to have come from the one known Siberian mammoth lineage.

But then, using DNA more than a million years old -- the oldest ever recovered from a fossil (in this case, three mammoth molars, each about the size of a milk carton) – researchers painstakingly discovered a new mammoth lineage after long years of assuming there was only one, which had produced the Columbian mammoth. 

That changed everything.  Continued genomic research ultimately indicated that this newly found mammoth line had bred with the wooly mammoth to produce the Columbian – therefore, a hybrid species, appearing later than had been thought.   https://tinyurl.com/2exmj6rt

 Sound & light

Sing it!  Now that Brood X cicadas have come and gone, high summer has arrived and insect songs have started, here’s a reminder of who we’re hearing, and when.  Daytime: (most) cicadas; night: crickets can start at dusk and make a night of it, while katydids pick up later and can go till dawn.

Katydid

            Enjoy the concerts, which will eventually end as temperatures fall.  

It takes a swarm: In some species, only when enough fireflies gather together in a dense swarm, do they blink together, in near perfect synchronization.  This seems to happen spontaneously, without a firefly leader.  Apparently, one firefly, flashing while moving, can incite other insects to flash too.

Nor are fireflies the only animals who can glow or flash.  Certain sharks, mammals and reptiles also have the gift of glow.  https://tinyurl.com/tf73y3vr

                                           The best possible news for bears

“Good” only begins to describe this news: The black bear season is closed. New Jersey’s Comprehensive Black Bear Management Policy (CBBMP) expired on June 21.  There will be no black bear hunt in 2021!  

 

Details to follow in the next post.  Meanwhile, rejoice!  

 

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Of monarchs, people feeding animals & a unique farm

Will 30,000 milkweed plants make enough of a difference for the sinking numbers of monarch butterflies who overwinter in California?  Will that targeted number of vital milkweeds all be planted by people who care about butterflies?  (Nearly 500 types of insects also count on the milkweed’s sap, leaves and flowers for nourishment.)

The monarch population has dropped 99% since the 1980s: fewer than 2,000 of them were counted this year, down from 1.2 million in 1997.  Although threatened with extinction, monarchs aren’t federally protected because other species have been seen as higher priorities.  https://tinyurl.com/3hjsujwc

Meanwhile, “East Coast monarchs” are also in big trouble: their winter refuge in high-altitude forests on Mexico’s mountain sides is being destroyed by  “deforestation” – with the trees they rest in being cut down.  That thins out their protection from winter storms, orioles and other predators.    

Together with a reduced supply of milkweed along their travel route and drought caused by climate change, monarchs are in trouble.  Plus, they can’t indefinitely keep moving up Mexico’s mountains!   https://tinyurl.com/yrwr2szy

Human intervention – to plant milkweeds and halt deforestation – could make a difference for them.  If it happens.  

(The tall “swamp milkweed” in my yard has been good for monarchs before, so I’m eager to witness this year’s cycle underway.)

Why do we feed animals?

“We fed and feed cats both tame and feral, sharks, alligators, deer, hedgehogs, bears, pigeons of all sorts, ducks, swans, zoo animals, lab animals, pets, farm animals and more.”

For centuries, humans have fed birds, beasts and other fauna.  Why?

Did they do it to encourage animal domestication?  Or, although domestication usually comes first, to eat them?  (And BTW, the article mentions an ominous connection between domestication and extinction – think: aurochs disappearing, then cattle appearing.)

Is the reason for feeding animals largely practical (you can’t ride a starving horse) or is it “unrelated to any return or investment”? 

Five British researchers have embarked on a four-year study designed to answer some of the questions about humans feeding animals.  For instance, why do cats eat fish?  (Did religion have anything to do with it?)

The study will focus mainly on the “roles played by birds and cats in human life, as pets, pests, wild animals and zoo animals.”  Analysis of isotopes in ancient and modern animal bones will play a big part.      https://tinyurl.com/23fjfrdx

A farm like no other

This NYTimes headline alone should get your attention, as it got mine: “On this farm, cows don’t have to make milk.  Pigs sleep in.”  

Double WOW!  It sounds like hard-earned heaven on earth for animals, which is exactly the case at one former dairy farm in Germany.  There, cattle, pigs, a few horses, chickens, geese and rescue dogs all “co-exist as equals with Hof Butenland’s human residents and workers.” 

The dairy farmer quit that business because he could no longer stand the “brutality” behind dairy cows’ milk production.  Over time, with a like-minded partner, he adopted total egalitarianism for all species living at the farm.

Now, “no animal is there to serve a human need.”  They do what they want, when they want at Hof Butenland, described as an animal retirement home and animal sanctuary.

“If we want to save this planet, then we have to stop using and consuming animals,” co-owner Jan Gerdes says, well aware of how industrial farms contribute greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.  

His partner, Karin Muck, recalls her time in solitary confinement for trying to free lab animals years ago and describes both settings this way: “You don’t see the sun, you are separated from your friends, you have no idea what is going on around you and you have no control over your own life.”   https://tinyurl.com/3bp5eecw

 

Dairy cow & calf -- unusual and idyllic life together 

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Help enact law against animal testing for cosmetics

                                                                               HSUS infographic

Would you like your creamy smooth lipstick quite as much if you knew the chemicals in it were tested on live animals?  How about your special shampoo: Does a live animal’s suffering to test its chemical ingredients make it or you feel extra special?  And your deodorant may make you feel safer – but not the animals involved in testing its efficacy. . . .  

“For decades, animals have been used in painful, harmful testing that has determined the safety of chemicals used in cosmetics.  New techniques by which to test cosmetics, however, like conducting tests on synthetic material that mimics human skin and using advanced computer modeling are available to us today.”  --from the testimony of Anthony Verrelli (D-15), a primary sponsor of New Jersey’s “Humane Cosmetics Act.” 

And according to the Humane Society of the US, “There are thousands of existing ingredients with a history of safe use, which allow cosmetics companies to create innovative products without the need for new animal testing.  For new ingredients, non-animal test methods exist.”

What are we waiting for?  Just one thing: Governor Murphy signing the bill into law.  It’s been on his desk since easily moving through the legislature.  Maybe he’s waiting to hear from . . . YOU, urging him to sign it.  Just think: if enacted, the law would prevent the sale of cosmetics that have been newly tested on animals!  

Your course is clear: Please contact Governor Murphy – now!  Ask him to sign S1726/A795, the New Jersey Humane Cosmetics Act, into law.  Tweet: @GovMurphy or e-mail: constituent. relations@NJ.Gov.  

Early-summer sightings

They may be a bane to gardeners, but I’m always happy to see groundhogs, especially the chubby babies, at the edge of a nearby park.  Lots of them right now.

Fawns too, unfortunately.  The other day, three sweet, spotted and so-vulnerable babies under a highway bridge looked to be moving tentatively toward the grassy hill nearby and away from the traffic.  I could only hope. 

As of June 29, fireflies, aka “lightning bugs,” reappeared after dusk.  And a ladybug who had made it inside was transported to an outdoor garden (“fly away home!”). 

What are you seeing?     

 ‘What the world needs now. . .’

In How to Love Animals: In a Human-shaped World, author Harry Mance explores what people living in our destructive Anthropocene Era can do to help -- and hopefully save -- the animals of the Earth.  Early on, he observes that loving animals is "one of western society's core values," yet the thoughtless, often inhumane ways that people treat animals go against this principle and "rational thinking."

Drawing on research and interviews, Mance (chief features writer for the Financial Times) brings to light the many contradictions in the human-animal relationship and offers insights into how people can protect an animal kingdom in crisis.  A former meat-eater turned vegan, he has witnessed, and questioned, the taking of animal lives for human consumption, and investigated alternatives to meat.  

With high awareness of climate change and the ecological disaster it foretells for all terrestrial life, Mance’s book aims to foster greater sensitivity toward the animal world as a whole and to recognize the Earth as more than just a "human-shaped" space.   

Enough

by Robin Chapman

There is always enough.
       My old cat of long years, who
              stayed all the months of his dying,

though, made sick by food,
       he refused to eat, till, long-stroked,
              he turned again to accept

another piece of dry catfood
       or spoonful of meat, a little water,
              another day through which

he purred, small engine
       losing heat—I made him nests
              of pillow and blanket, a curve of body

where he curled against my legs,
       and when the time came, he slipped out
              a loose door into the cold world

whose abundance included
              the death of his choosing.

("Enough" by Robin Chapman, from Abundance. © Cider Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission in The Writer’s Almanac for July 20, 2014.)

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