Link Banana

I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t posted about this before, and then I realized that my original exposure to the topic came from the constantly solid audio program, Radiolab. If you prefer text, Keith O’Brien’s story (title link)  is what reminded me of the idea. From him I take this summary of the issue:

What he’d like to see more of, however, is in-depth discussion about animal welfare, how to best gauge it, and what to do about it if zoos are falling short of meeting animals’ needs. It’s a discussion that may lead to the conclusion that the zoos’ ultimate mission means giving up more of its animals, but Kagan’s all right with that.

I had no idea.

(via ToMu)

Some Australian scientists think they’re a natural replacement for beef. Patrick Fitzgerald explains:

Unlike sheep and cattle, kangaroos emit little methane, which accounts for 11 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The study suggests that increasing the kangaroo population to 175 million while simultaneously decreasing the the number of other livestock would lower emissions by 3 percent over the next 12 years. The plan would have added benefits for soil conservation, drought response, and water quality as a result of reducing the number of hard-hoofed livestock.

I must have seen this at least three times today before I registered how amazing it is. It wasn’t until I saw John Redmond’s BuzzFeed post that this sunk in:

The Barbados threadsnake is the smallest snake in the world. The recently discovered species is as thin as a spaghetti noodle and measures just 3.9 inches long. Because of its small size, it is susceptible to attacks from anything ranging from centipedes to spiders…not to mention it’s blind. I think I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an animal that’s more defenseless than this one.

UPDATE (08/08/08): Highlighting the danger of “discovering” anything in this globalized world: an AP story on the Barbidian backlash.

Because I didn’t know slugs could be so colorful.

(via kottke.org)

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

Your disturbing statistic of the day comes care of Passport, who points out that the amount Americans spend on health care for their pets is roughly the same as the GDPs of Botswana or Bahrain.

National Geographic’s got some interesting pictures of fascinating animals found in the Antarctic. Just go look at them.

(via Boing Boing)

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

Virginia Morrell’s article about how animals can learn and create was much more interesting than I expected. But then the last time I read National Geographic was when I was forced to in the sixth grade.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

(via brijit)