National Post

The hunters become the hunted: Indian state sanctions shooting animal poachers
A western Indian state has declared war on animal poaching by sanctioning its forest guards to shoot hunters on sight in an effort to curb rampant attacks against tigers, elephants and other wildlife.

The government in Maharashtra says injuring or killing suspected poachers will no longer be considered a crime.

According to the Wildlife Protection Society of India, 14 tigers have been killed by poachers in India so far this year — one more than for all of 2011. The tiger is considered endangered, with its habitat range shrinking more than 50 per cent in the last quarter-century and its numbers declining rapidly from the 5,000-7,000 estimated in the 1990s, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (AP Photo/Corbett Tiger Reserve)

Gay penguin separation means survival of the species: zoo keepers
Splitting up a pair of potentially homosexual African penguins and pairing them with females might sound anti-gay, but keepers at the Toronto Zoo insist they are simply trying to preserve the species.

Pedro, 10, and Buddy, 20, were brought to the Toronto Zoo this year from Pittsburgh’s National Aviary to “pair-bond” with a couple of eligible females. Instead, the pair bonded with each other. Zookeepers now report seeing the pair snuggling, calling to each other and displaying courtship behaviour.

This week, the Toronto Zoo says it will be forced isolate the pair.

“The two girls have been following them; we just have to get the boys interested in looking at them,” said Tom Mason, curator of birds and invertebrates at the Toronto Zoo.

With Pedro and Buddy’s species on the cusp of extinction, Mr. Mason insists that the Toronto Zoo cannot afford to let a season go by without passing on the pair’s genes. “If [Pedro and Buddy] weren’t genetically important, then we’d let them do their thing,” Mr. Mason said. (Photo: Ken Ardill/Toronto Zoo)

Graphic: Beavers vs. bears. A scrappy new contender — the polar bear — has entered the fight to represent our nation

An unlucky porcupine leads the charge to colonize Newfoundland. The creature with the quills, naturally, was a porcupine, and yet not just any porcupine, but the first and only porcupine to be spotted — dead or alive — in Newfoundland.
“It is not uncommon to drive down the road in Labrador and see a porcupine, living or dead,” says Shelley Moores, a senior wildlife manager with Newfoundland and Labrador’s Department of Environment and Conservation.
“But this is the first time we have ever had a report of a living or dead porcupine on the island. In fact, we have never had a report of a living porcupine on the island — only [the] report of one dead porcupine.”

Jeanie, Whistler’s most famous bear, shot dead by conservation officer. Jeanie the black bear, known for a triangle-shaped patch of white fur on her chest, a camera-friendly personality and an astonishing number of cubs in her 20-some years at the ski resort community, was killed on Friday after weeks of escalating conflicts. “We’ve managed this bear for quite a long time, but the type conflict she and her cub were engaging in most recently was definitely a threat to public safety and beyond reasonable limits,” Insp. Chris Doyle of the BC Conservation Officer Service said.

Gary Clement’s Summer Stories: Happy Campers
It’s still summer for a few more days, so here’s so helpful, cartoonish camping advice.

Photos: Mammals caught in camera traps
The first Global Camera Trap Mammal study done by The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM) has documented 105 species in nearly 52,000 images from seven protected areas across the Americas, Africa and Asia. Time is running out to craft a global plan that will save the world’s rich biodiversity of mammals, a quarter of whose species could be wiped out by habitat loss, hunting, climate change and other threats, biologists warn on August 16, 2011.                                                                          

A snake with two heads, each able to think and eat separately and even steal food from each other, has become a popular attraction at a Ukrainian zoo.
The small albino California Kingsnake, now on show in the Black Sea resort of Yalta is quite a handful, zoo workers told AFP.
The snake’s two heads are fiercely independent, are not always in agreement and like to snatch food from each other, said keepers of the private zoo, called Skazka, or Fairy Tale.
“Sometimes one head wants to crawl in one direction and the other head in another direction,” zoo director Oleg Zubkov told AFP.

Man arrested for allegedly attempting to kill raccoons with a shovel
A 53-year-old man has been arrested after allegedly attempting to kill a family of raccoons in the backyard of his west-end Toronto home Wednesday. Police received a call before 6 a.m. Wednesday morning from a neighbour who said a man was beating several baby raccoons with a shovel.

“You can’t refute that there is a raccoon issue in the city, but there are more humane ways to deal with it,” Const. Drummond said. “There are a number of professional services on the city website. Putting moth balls in the garden, for example, is one way of dealing with raccoons.”

Animal ethicists call for ‘impartial’ terminology
Animal ethicists are calling for a new vocabulary about animals, shunning words such as “pets,” “wildlife,” and “vermin” as derogatory and even suggesting “animal” is a “term of abuse.”

Common language on fauna betrays an “anthropocentric bias” and impedes an understanding of our interaction with the non-human species sharing the planet, argue the editors of the first academic journal dedicated to animal ethics in their debut issue.

Instead of “pet,” the Journal of Animal Ethics suggests “companion animal.” Rather than “wildlife,” they are to be called “free-living.” “Differentiated beings” or “non-human animals” is preferred to simply “animals.”

Words such as “vermin,” “beasts” and “critters” are stricken completely, along with similes such as “sly as a fox,” “drunk as a skunk,” “eat like a pig,” “slippery as an eel,” “breeding like rabbits” and “stubborn as a mule.”

“We will not be able to think clearly unless we discipline ourselves to use more impartial nouns and adjectives in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them,” the editors write. (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)