There Were Millions, Once Upon a Time

Cleaning an elephant skin for display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, June 1933. Source.

Museum staff mounting an elephant skin, March 1935. 

The Wonder of Canine Ears

Beagles and bassets have huge ears, but it's the terriers that actually use their ears for hunting.

Underground, a dog can see nothing -- zero, zilch, nada. Past the first turn of a sette, all is black. All the dog knows for sure is that somewhere in the blackness are white teeth waiting to bite and slash if the dog gets too close.

It is the ears that tell the dog where "too close" is -- the breathing of the animal, the sound of claw and paw against dirt, even the heartbeat of the animal at the opposite end of the pipe.

Though some people will tell you terrier's ears flop over to keep out dirt, that is pure nonsense -- every wild animal that burrows has an ear that stands upright, from rats to fox, from badger to wart hog. Terrier ears flop over, not out of necessity, but out of convention. In all of the wild animal kingdom, only the elephant has ears that flop over, and these are hinged for an entirely different reason -- ventilation.

Deafness in terriers is a very serious problem, especially in Bull Terriers and Jack Russell Terriers. For reasons that are not well understood, deafness in dogs is strongly correlated with the gene for merle coats, and shows up in a higher-than-random incidence in dogs that are mostly white and have blue or "glass" eyes.

Dog that have solid-colored coats or which have large amounts of color in them (such as Border terriers, Fell terriers, Patterdale terriers, and the beagle-colored Jack Russells) are less likely to have heriditary deafness.

All Jack Russell terriers should be BAER tested before breeding. BAER stands for "brainstem auditory evoked response" and involves placing two very small wires into the skin on the dog's scalp just above the eyes. These small wire electrodes register a response if the neural pathways work in response to sound (i.e. they dog is hearing).

Dogs that are unliateral or bilateral deaf should not be bred, nor should dogs that produce deaf offspring.

BAER testing needs to be done only once in the life of a dog, can be done on very young puppies (any time after 5 weeks of age), and costs only $40 a dog or so.

Remember that a dog is a long-term invesment of time as well as money, and a deaf dog is useless in the field, more trouble at home, and a drag on the gene pool.

If you are in the market for a puppy, especially a Jack Russell Terrier or any other breed at high-risk for deafness, demand that the puppy be BAER tested.

For more information, and a list of BAER testing sites, see >> deafness in dogs and cats.

This is what a dog can see underground when it is working, and it is why hearing is so vital to a working terrier.
.

The World As It Was and Should Be

I downloaded a dozen FREE books to my Kindle Fire last night, one of which was In Africa - Hunting Adventures In Big Game Country (1910) by John T. McCutcheon.

A quick glance through the table of contents found this summary of Chapter Eight:

Meeting Colonel Roosevelt in the Uttermost Outpost of Semi-Civilization. He Talks of Many Things, Hears that he has Been Reported Dead, and Promptly Plans an Elephant Hunt

Nice!

Now to be clear, I am not saluting elephant hunting, but neither would Teddy if he were alive today. This is, after all, the man who almost single-handedly created the National Forest system, the national Wildlife Refuge system, and the National Park system, and who did more to protect wildlife in this country than anyone who came before or who has come along since.

But Roosevelt believed in an active life, well-lived. He did not shrink into his hole, cuddle up next to the fire, and play board games all day. Life was to be lived, and he was out in the world living it. That is the world as it was, and the way it should be today.
.

Failing the Flip Test

An elephant dies in  Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe.  From The Daily Mail.

Bigotry come in many forms. 

Most of it is not very subtle, but some is less obvious than others.  For those cases, syndicated columnist and cultural critic Stanley Crouch invented "the Flip Test."

The first time I heard Crouch explain the Flip Test, was during the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Flip it around, said Stanley. 

"What if Woody Allen were accused of murdering Mia Farrow and a friend, and the cop who searched Allen's apartment turned out to be a rabid anti-Semitic who had said he'd plant evidence on a New York Jew if he had half a chance.  At trial, the prosecution portrays the cop -- its star witness -- as Captain Whitebread, but Allen's lawyer learns of his attitude towards Jews and uses it. Would he be accused of waving the bloody shirt of Anti-Semitism? I'm sorry, but the case would go down! And when the nine Jews on the jury voted to acquit, it wouldn't be because they were crazy, it would be because the prosecution embraced a scumbag and got caught!"

Okay... an interesting exercise.  But Crouch is black, so maybe this was simply a convenient reach to get to a pre-ordained pro-O.J. conclusion? 

But no, Crouch says the "Flip Test" works in both directions:

"Black kids who dress like gangsters complain that they get bad service at restaurants and stores. They say, 'Hey, we aren't thugs, we just dress that way.' Well, let's flip it over. Let's say a white guy comes into a store wearing a K.K.K. outfit, and everybody is horrified. And he says, 'I'm not really a Klansman, I just like the look.' Now, with ninety-nine percent of those black kids it is only style, but we just don't have time to go around interviewing them. 'Excuse me, young man, are you actually carrying a 9-mm pistol or is your outfit just a cultural signifier.'"

Flip it around says Crouch.  Once you do that, you can see if you are running on principles -- or something else.

I bring up Stanley Crouch's Flip Test because I gave the flip test to Roger Harris, a self-described "species saver" who was upset about a video of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons culling a crop-eating elephant in Zimbabwe.   I directed Harris to a little information about elephant demographics and habitat destruction, and then I asked:

Suppose Bob Parsons was a rich white guy with an elephant preserve that was waaaaay over-subscribed with elephants, and the elephants were going outside his preserve, and the poor black folks outside the refuge wanted to shoot the overage of elephants for food. Is that a problem? Or is that what you allow when you want the local folks to benefit from having elephants around?

Of course, what I’ve described is exactly the case here — the only difference is who is pulling the trigger, which does not matter a whit to the elephants or all the rest of the wildlife that depend on habitat that is quickly degraded when there are too many elephants on the ground.

And what was the answer?  Harris responded:

If Bob had handed a local one of his guns and had the villager shoot the elephant, that would have been easier to swallow. You see, it’s not the killing of an elephant that’s the real wrong here (read my lips). It’s not about elephant management. (I did not claim to be an expert.) It’s the demeaning and disgusting way Parsons used the killing and the butchering to promote his company. That’s the problem.

That's the problem?  What?  What's the problem?  Genuinely confused,  I wrote:

Really? This is your concern — whether this video was a good promotional tool for GoDaddy? Wow. OK. But why do you care?  Do you own stock in GoDaddy? I don’t. I could care less how GoDaddy wants to promote itself. The fact that you have retreated to this position suggests how little thought and information went into your initial reaction to Bob Parsons’ shooting of an elephant in Zimbabwe.

The response back:

Yes, my concern is the way in which a person used his wealth and privilege to demean and humiliate the very people who he claims to help. As you know, conservation requires people to work together. By shooting an elephant and glamorizing it, Parsons sends a message that it’s okay to kill wildlife. I’m not interested in parsing out the minutiae of the situation. It’s the whole package. The killing, the humiliation of locals, the promotion of his company that are painful. You focus on the elephant and their plight, that’s fine. Hey, I love elephants too. Here, though, my concern is of man’s relationship to wildlife. That’s the bigger (and to my mind more important) issue.

Never mind the elephants?  Never mind the biology and demographics of elephants?  What's import is "man's relationship to wildlife," and telling people that it's never okay to kill wildlife?  What's wrong is not the killing of an elephant but showing the local people butchering the elephant while wearing free hats and T-shirts?

I wrote back:

... you have lost me.  You means it’s not okay to kill wildlife, EVER?

Please tell the wildlife, which kills each other every day.

Please tell the duck hunters at Ducks Unlimited who work tirelessly to protect wetlands, and whose numbers dwarf that of the Sierra Club.

Please tell the folks at the Wild Turkey Federation, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and Trout Unlimited whose members do more to support public lands conservation than all the other green groups combined.

And, above all, please tell the people of Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa who have hunted wildlife for millennia.

Tell them that you — a rich white man from America — disapprove of their hunting history, and their hunting and agricultural lifestyle and values.

You say your objection to Bob Parsons’ elephant hunt is that he somehow “demeaned and humiliated” the people of Zimbabwe.

How?

Are you (perhaps) confusing ethics and aesthetics? These are very different things!

Most people have never butchered an animal, but I have, and I assure you there is nothing demeaning or humiliating about it. It is certainly less demeaning than hunger, even if it is less aesthetic than getting your cow delivered to you in small quarter-pound bits wrapped in wax paper!

Have you have never worn a “gimme” hat or a T-shirt from a sport team, rock band, or company? I have, and I assure it does not demean or humiliate the wearer — it is an entirely voluntary experience, even if it is less aesthetic than a polo shirt or an L.L. Bean button-down!

What I found most interesting, however, was that this "species saver" had suddenly abandoned the elephants and appointed himself a "dignity savior" for the rural people of Zimbabwe.  I would never have guessed this conversation would have headed down that road!  I challenged his thinking here -- did he not see that he was being a bit presumptuous to speak for the local people of Zimbabwe?

You mean to say you represent the people of Zimbabwe and their dignity, values and honor?

I think not.

Everyone represents themselves, every day, and no one needs anyone else to speak for them — and certainly not a rich, white man they have never met in a country far away, and who no one in Zimbabwe ever elected!

Of course that was the end of that conversation!   By holding up a mirror, I had suddenly gotten "too personal."   Of course, it was not personal when this fellow trashed Bob Parsons without doing a lick of research into elephant populations in Zimbabwe! 

Ah well, another case of someone failing to do their homework when it comes to wildlife, only this time it's someone on the political Left rather than the political Right. 

Rather than fight on soft ground with weak knees, this "species savior" decided to cry foul when presented with the facts, and stormed off the field.  A good thing too, as the next round of facts were not going to go his way either.

You see, hunting licenses are a major funder of the CAMPFIRE program in Zimbabwe, which is considered one of the most important and successful wildlife management initiatives in Africa. 

As this editorial on the web site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation notes:

"...there is a place for hunting in Africa. In a continent where people struggle to survive, the wildlife has to earn its living.

In the 1990s the population of elephants in Zimbabwe was growing at a rate that was unable to be supported by their habitat. In many areas where the CAMPFIRE program operated controlled hunting took place. Together with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, the communities set sustainable quotas for the various species that hunters were allowed to hunt....The communal landowners were paid excellent money by the hunters who wanted to bag good trophies for their clients....

Once the people adopted CAMPFIRE they began to see the wildlife as their cattle....CAMPFIRE has proven to be a unique, thoughtful and successful program of sustainable wildlife management: a way to secure biodiversity and sustainability of resources for future generations."

And, of course, the same is true in the United States, where hunting licenses help pay the salaries of the best game managers in the world, and dedicated taxes on bullets, guns, bows, arrows, and camping gear, help pay for millions of acres of land that are set aside for wildlife management purposes under the Pittman-Robertson Act.

Now, to be clear, I am not for indiscriminate elephant hunting anywhere, and I do want any culling that does occur to be science-based and well-regulated.

Having said that, am I all for the "exploitation" of rich white men who are willing to pay huge sums to hunt wildlife so that these sums can be reinvested into wildlife conservation programs?

You bet!

Am I also for making sure that the money, elephant meat, and elephant hide are used locally by the native people in Zimbabwe so they have a reason to like the local elephants which occasionally kill people, destroy houses, wreck vehicles, take down electrical wires, destroy crops, and pull down garden trees?

You bet!

Do I care about the race, gender, politics, education, dress code, religion, or accent of the person who is doing the elephant shooting?  Nope.  Not a bit.  All I care about is their cash and their shooting accuracy.  Do I care a whit about their corporate marketing programs (including their marketing blunders)?  Nope.  And why would I?

All I care about is what the people of Zimbabwe care about:  that the hunter stays within the law, kills cleanly, and spends as much money as possible locally so that the wildlife is seen as an economic asset to be kept and preserved for generations to come.

______________ ||| ______________ 

A village butchers an elephant that died of unknown causes in Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe.   Gonarezhou National Park is part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, created in 2000, which joins with the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.  Animals can move freely between the three sanctuaries.

• Related Posts:
  ** The Elephants in the Living Room
  ** Shooting Elephants and Carrying Capacity

.

The Elephants in the Living Room

If you are interested in elephant problems, take a look at Elephant Care International, an organization "Dedicated to the Healthcare & Conservation of Elephants." 

As the site notes, in Asia, where elephant populations are very low as compared to Africa:

... elephants and humans are increasingly in conflict as elephants continue their search for food. 

You may be surprised to read of the levels of destruction caused by elephants. 

In India alone, Bist reports that elephants kill some 170 people per year and damage 10,000-15,000 houses and 8 million to 10 million hectares (one hectare = 2.5 acres) of crops.

What I particularly like about this web site is that it keeps coming back to the core problem for elephants:  too many people on the land.  

Elephant Care International notes that in Africa, where there are still about 500,000 elephants in the wild, the countries with the largest percentage of elephants are those that have a relatively small percentage of Africa's total population.

Note that over 70 percent of the elephants in Africa are found in just 5 countries that contain less than 10% of the human population of the continent.

Clearly, reducing the speed of human population growth is vital to the long-term health and welfare of elephants. 

But, of course, increased funding and support for family planning programs does nothing to solve elephant problems that are happening in the real world today.

What are we to do in a country like Vietnam where the population of wild elephants declined from over 1,000 twenty years ago, to less than 100 today? 

What are we to do a country like Zimbabwe where the wild elephant population has doubled from 50,000 to 100,000 in that same twenty-year period of time? 

Yes, human family planning programs are desperately needed in both countries, but what about the elephants today? 

Can we afford to demonize captive elephant populations in Vietnam?

Can we afford to demonize culling in Zimbabwe?

And what role are elephants in zoos and circuses to play?  Is an elephant laboring in a logging camp in Assam, Northern India, always a "good thing," while an old circus elephant in a zoo in Toledo always a "bad" thing? 

Why?

And really, should we be listening to anyone in the world of elephants today who is not banging on the drum for increased support for international family planning?  

Yes, there are TWO elephants in the living room now, not just one.  

If we fail to address both issues, then the fate of elephants is sealed.

• Related Link:
  ** Shooting Elephants and Carrying Capacity
  
   .

Shooting Elephants and Carrying Capacity



Peter Beard, Kenya, about 1963.

Over on Facebook a friend posted a video which shows GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons engaged in shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe.  

The elephant was a local crop-raider, and all of the meat from this elephant went to feed local villagers (as can be seen on the video). 

Parsons' elephant shoot was done under the auspices of Zimbabwe's Problem Animal Control (PAC) program, and this was not a trophy animal. 

The shooting license for an elephant in Zimbabwe is a tidy sum of money by African standards, but it's not much more than the cost to shoot an Elk here in the U.S. if you are an out-of-state hunter.

My smart, generally well-informed, and caring friend saw the video of Parsons' elephant hunt and thought it so shocking she promptly called for everyone to boycott GoDaddy.

Shocking?  I merely thought the video was very bad public relations.  But was it a horror?  Not to me. 

Now, to be clear, I know that different people are shocked by different things.  Not everyone has actually killed something, or thought long and hard about where beef, chicken, and lamb come from.  Not everyone has watched a hawk put a talon through a rabbit's eye, or heard the scream of a fox as it smacks a fender and crawls off to die in a water ditch.  Not everyone has walked through a nursing home and looked, listened, and smelled the last few weeks of a human life.

I understand that people get emotional when they see death, especially the death of such a magnificent and exotic animal as an elephant.  And I am more than sympathetic. 

The death of an elephant should be a big deal, and I am damn glad it is.

But the question to ask about Bob Parson's elephant hunt is this:  Is this hunt bad for elephants? 

Notice the plural. 

I am not asking about this elephant in particular (yes, it was a very bad day for this individual) but about elephants in Zimbabwe in general.

And the answer is no. 

To understand why, you have to be willing to park your heart for a minute and "listen with your head."

For starts, let's admit that Africa used to have a hell of a lot of elephants.  These elephants were hunted even in pre-European days, but the kills were fairly modest as the tools for killing -- spears, poisoned melons, and poisoned darts -- were not very efficient, and the human population density was relatively low. 

Around 1930, however, things started to change in Africa. 

With the arrival of vaccines and antibiotics, human mortality rates rapidly declined even as birth rates continued to remain breath-takingly high. 

At the same time low-cost, accurate, and rapid-firing guns, efficient chainsaws, high-production logging mills, and tractor-pulled plows came to the continent wholesale.

As a result, Africa's lands and wildlife took a hammering even as things got marginally better for most humans (as measured by longevity and lower infant mortality).

By 1960, it was clear things were going to have to change in Africa, and for the very same reason they had changed here in America 100 years earlier. 

In the U.S., our own population had grown by leaps and bounds during the 19th Century. 

We had gone west, broken the plains to the plow, shot out all the buffalo, trapped out all the beaver, and stretched barbed wire from coast to coast even as we poisoned our rivers and creeks with mine tailings and sewage.  

Around 1900 we began protecting some of the wild land that remained. 

Now to be honest, most of this land was swamp or worthless mountain already ravaged by over-logging (in the East) or land that was too rocky, mountainous or dry to farm or raise cattle on (in the West).  

Nonetheless, in rapid succession we set aside State Parks, National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, National Forests, and vast stretches of empty scrub for our children and grandchildren to come. 

On all of this land, except for the National Parks, we allowed hunting in season. 

In Africa, the push to create vast national parks and protect both wild lands and wildlife arrived in the 1920s -- much earlier in the arc of economic development than it had in Europe or North America.

Kenya was one of the first countries to protect its wild lands and wildlife, opening one of Africa's first great parks, the Tsavo, in 1948. 

It was to the Tsavo that the young photographer and author Peter Beard first traveled in 1955. 

Of his perspective back then, Beard writes:

“ When I first went to Kenya in August 1955, I could never have guessed what was going to happen.... it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. 

Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed."

But, of course, nothing is too big to be destroyed, is it? 

What amazed Beard, however, was that a good chunk of his part of East Africa was being destroyed by elephants.  

Elephants?  Elephants.

Beard chronicled it all in in amazing, heart-shattering photography. 

Elephant herd, Tsavo, early 1960s, Peter Beard photo.

What happened in the Tsavo -- a massive die-off of elephants that started in the early 1960s and continued off and on for more than a decade -- was due to a combination of human population growth outside of the park, combined with elephant over-population inside the park, and drought to push it all over the edge.  

In the end, what had been a forested landscape was reduced to a near-desert.

Beard's pictures of the destruction became The End of the Game, a book which still stands as one of the great visual witnesses to what can happen when "heart first" wildlife conservation goes wrong.

What Beard photographed (often by air) was shocking then, and it is still shocking now.


Dead elephant, starvation, Tsavo.  Peter Beard photo.  Notice tusks.

So what does this have to do with Bob Parsons shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe? 

Maybe quite a lot. 

You see, while elephant herds are not uniformly robust across Africa, they appear to be a little too healthy in Zimbabwe, where their numbers have more than doubled to about 100,000 in the last 30 years

Why does Zimbabwe have so many elephants? 

One factor is that very few hunters have wanted to go to Zimbabwe in recent years. 

Robert Mugabe, the brutal dictator of that country for the last three decades, has collapsed the economy to the point that many people are, quite literally, starving.  Not exactly a good place for a vacation!

Another factor is that while wildlife may be in abundance in some parts of the country, most of the local people do not have access to guns, as Mugabe is terrified that an armed populace might rise up to overthrow him.

And so the elephants have done what elephants do -- they breed and they feed. 

All good up to a point, but that point can be crossed, and there is little doubt that that has occurred in some parts of Zimbabwe.

Today, the elephant population of Zimbabwe is running far beyond the carrying capacity of protected lands, resulting in elephants frequently entering farmer's fields to destroy life-sustaining crops.

In order to manage its elephant herds, Zimbabwe has implemented a Problem Animal Control (PAC) program in which elephants that threaten local village crops are culled out. 

To be clear, when you get a license to shoot an elephant in Zimbabwe you are not guaranteed a trophy animal, nor do you get to decide what animal is culled, nor do you get to keep any part of the elephant. 

All you get to take with you is the experience and your pictures.

Bob Parsons is unapologetic about his Zimbabwean elephant hunt.  He says:

All these people that are complaining that this shouldn't happen, that these people [in Zimbabwe] who are starving to death otherwise shouldn't eat these elephants, you probably see them driving through at McDonald's or cutting a steak. These people [Zimbabwe villagers] don't have that option."

And, as noted, Parsons is not inventing the hungry people of Zimbabwe.  If you have any doubt about that, take a look at these pictures which show what happens when an elephant dies of natural causes in that God-and-UN-forsaken country.

But surely there is an alternative to culling these elephants, right? 

What about moving the elephants to an area where there are too few of these animals? 

That's been done in the past, but after moving over 1,000 elephants it seems that all of the nearby wild lands that can take elephants have them, and the costs are not cheap to move these massive creatures -- about $2,000 per animal in a country that does not have the money it needs to feed its own children.

What about elephant contraception?  That sounds easy enough in theory, but it's not in practice, as elephants are very slow breeders which means you have to put 75% of all breeding females on contraception for more than 10 years in order to get the numbers down, and that too will not be cheap or easy.

Are other options being tried?  Of course.  Some success has been had with elephant drives using fireworks and drums.  Some minor success has been achieved with heavy gates, grates and moats around fields, crop substitution, and the use of chili-pepper fires and oil spray deterrents.  African bee hives on trip-wires are even being experimented with.  That said, Zimbabwe's problems with elephants are not small and localized -- they are widespread and endemic. If you think it's hard to get deer out of a suburban garden, and impossible to get them off a large farm, consider what it must be like to get elephants out of the fields of some parts of southern Africa!

Put it all together and you can see why regulated, science-based elephant culling in Zimbabwe makes sense, not only for the local people, but also for the long-term health of elephant populations in that part of the world. 

So, to bring it all back around, whatever happened to Kenya and the elephants of the Tsavo?  Peter Beard is not shy about answering the question:

The game now involves accommodating statistics like every mature female in Kenya having 8.2 children. The game now involves the Bono–Bardot– Jolie–Holywood–Madonna–World Bank people. The politics of sentimentality, AIDS retardation drugs guaranteeing thousands (or millions) more AIDS babies, now already numbering around four-million in South Africa alone. BandAid, UNICEF, World Bank (high nitrogen fertilizers ruining the soil), Oxfam plus all the others. (They’ve never heard of sustainable yield!) Their seemingly heroic businesses are just unloading guilt for profit. More specifically “Buy an elephant a drink” comes to mind: suckering contributions for the overloaded national park system and all the absurdly sentimental park trustees, who could see swelling numbers of 40,000 elephants eating all the trees in the park – starving to death with stress related heart disease and of course constipation from consuming the wood. Violence, vandalism, and density-related negatives… "Buy ‘em a drink! Hug the babies.”

It amounts to selfish and presumptuous often spoiled interference from the disastrous, locust-like, human population exploding all around and replacing (if not eradicating) most of nature. And then on our end: U.N. bureaucrats, G.W. Bush at the G8, and at Kyoto; and even more awkward, his pathetic African tour, just handing out money – more silly interference, less understanding…No sense of biology, population dynamics or Charles Darwin, and most amazing of all, hiding behind clichés like “climate change”, global warming, etc… when all it is, is emissions from our own horrible exponentially expanding human population explosion (except in France, Scandinavia, and a few other places).

Wow!

Read the entire interview (I am not saying I agree with all of it!) and go order a copy of The End of the Game for the pictures alone.  You will not be disappointed (though you may be a little disturbed).
 

.

• Related Link:
  ** Shooting an Elephant (George Orwell)
  ...

Water for Elephants -- A Terrific Book

I'm not a huge book-pusher, but for those looking for a terrific bit of fiction, I give five stars to Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. 

There's not a bad paragraph in this book -- terrific characters, great plot, vibrant settings, and yes there is even operant conditioning for the dog- and animal-trainers among you! 

Get a copy -- I guarantee you will like this book!

Feed Me Like a Hyena

Back in 2005 I wrote a piece on this blog entitle Feed Me Like a Wolf in which I noted that:

"The preferred diet of the wolf is not cooked backstrap from the pride of the herd, but raw flesh ripped from the diseased rectum of a downer cow."

Now, the BBC has provided a nice video showing a Hyena sticking its head up the ass of an elephant carcass and heartily chowing down (see below).




So how fast does it take for scavengers to reduce an elephant to nothing?

About a week as the time-lapse video, below, makes clear.

A Cry of Hounds and an Exaltation of Larks

For Noah, it was a simple pair of this and a pair of that.

The Animal Collective

a herd of antelope

an army of ants

a shrewdness of apes

a congress of baboons

a culture of bacteria

a cete of badgers

a sleuth of bears

a lodge of beavers

a flight of bees

a flock of birds

a sedge of bitterns

a sounder of boar

a chain of bobolinks

a clash of bucks

a herd of buffalo

a rabble of butterflies

a wake of buzzards

a flock of camels

an army of caterpillars

a clutter of cats

a herd of cattle

a flock of chickens

a cartload of chimpanzees

a herd of chinchillas

a bed of clams

a quiver of cobras

a rag of colts

a bury of conies

a cover of coots

a flight of cormorants

a band of coyotes

a siege of cranes

a float of crocodiles

a murder of crows

a herd of deer

a pack of dogs

a pod of dolphins

a drove of donkeys

a bevy of doves

a paddling of ducks

an aerie of eagles

a swarm of eels

a herd of elephants

a gang of elk

a mob of emus

a business of ferrets

a charm of finches

a school of fish

a swarm of flies

a skulk of foxes

a colony of frogs

a gaggle of geese

a horde of gerbils

a corps of giraffes

a cloud of gnats

a herd of gnus

a drove of goats

a charm of goldfinches

a band of gorillas

a skein of goslings

a leash of greyhounds

a covey of grouse

a colony of gulls

a group of guinea pigs

a husk of hares

a kettle of hawks

a prickle of hedgehogs

a brood of hens

a shoal of herrings

a crash of hippopotami

a drift of hogs

a nest of hornets

a herd of horses

a cry of hounds

a charm of hummingbirds

a clan of hyenas

a band of jays

a smack of jellyfish

a mob of kangaroos

a deceit of lapwings

an exaltation of larks

a leap of leopards

a pride of lions

a lounge of lizards

a herd of llamas

a plague of locusts

a tiding of magpies

a sord of mallards

a richness of martens

a nest of mice

a labor of moles

a troop of monkeys

a herd of moose

a pack of mules

a watch of nightingales

a family of otter

a parliament of owls

a drove of oxen

a bed of oysters

a company of parrots

a covey of partridges

a muster of peacocks

a colony of penguins

a bouquet of pheasants

a flock of pigeons

a farrow of piglets

a wing of plovers

a chine of polecats

a pod of porpoises

a passel of possum

a coterie of prairie dogs

a covey of quail

a bury of rabbits

a gaze of raccoons

a colony of rats

a rhumba of rattlesnakes

an unkindness of ravens

a crash of rhinocerouses

a clamor of rooks

a run of salmon

a pod of seals

a school of shark

a flock of sheep

a den of snakes

a walk of snipes

a host of sparrows

a dray of squirrels

a murmuration of starlings

a muster of storks

a flight of swallows

a bevy of swans

a flock of swifts

a drift of swine

a spring of teals

an ambush of tigers

a knot of toads

a hover of trout

a flock of turkeys

a nest of vipers

a colony of vultures

a mob of wallabees

a herd of walruses

a pack of weasels

a pod of whales

a pack of wolves

a warren of wombats

a fall of woodcocks

a descent of woodpeckers

a herd of yaks, and

a zeal of zebras

.

Cooking at The National Zoo

Feeding dogs is easy; feeding lizards, marmosets and hippos is a bit tougher! I used to live very near the National Zoo and I could occassionally hear the elephants below while I was shaving early in the morning.
.
.

Amazing Elephant Birth Video

Riski Business comes to a Bali, Indonesia Elephant Safari Park.
.

Elephant & Dog: A Nice Story

.

Coffee and Provocation

Disrespecting Tintin:
Snowy (Milou), Tintin's dog, did not make the first list of inductees into the "Dog Walk of Fame." Dogs that did make the cut, include such lesser canines as Greyfriars Bobby, Gromit of the Wallace and Gromit films, Toto from The Wizard of Oz, Lassie, and Fang from the Harry Potter films. The fact that "Fang" was allowed to beat out Snowy/Milou suggests the whole thing is rigged and certainly a travesty. Adding insult to injury we find Bullseye from the movie Oliver made the cut, as well as two two ne'er-do-well dogs best relegated to a "where are they now?" special: Chance and Shadow from the saccharine-sweet Homeward Bound movies. Upon investigation, it was no surprise to find that the whole thing is a put up job by the U.K. Kennel Club working in conjunction with Sky Movies. You will note that all the dogs are big box-office movie dogs, while Tintin's Milou/Snowy was more of a literary dog (if a comic book can be described as literature, and I think it can). Balto? Gelert? Argos? Hachikō? Cerberus? These barbarians have never heard of them. In any case, the light-weight celluloid dogs that made the cut this year will be honored with a bench and plaque in London's Battersea Park, with more benches and plaques added in subsequent years. Hopefully Tintin, our favorite terrierman, will be added next year. Blistering barnacles!

Indiana Cougar: Real or Fake?
I rarely give a nod to incredible assertions, but sometimes an unlikely story is too easily written off. It seems a cougar has been spotted (repeatedly) in Indiana and a photograph has even been taken (a very grainy one). Some folks are quick to dismiss the claim, but not so fast: there are special circumstances here. It seems that a 70-pound female cougar named Donner escaped the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Center Point just 80 miles away in January. The director of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center says she thinks her escaped cougar is dead, but she has no proof to support this claim, as the escaped cat was never found. It would not be hard for a young cougar to find deer and other food in Indiana, even if it were just roadkill. One wonders if the Center is simply trying to avoid liability and responsibility if something bad occurs. In any case, a naturally occuring wild cougar in Indiana is not out of the range of possibility either; roadkill lions have confirmed their presence in Iowa, and camera traps have confirmed their presence in Minnsesota. Rangers in Michigan and Illinois have seen lions in their states as well.

He's Dead Either Way:
There's a Lyle Lovett lyric that goes: "Was that the yacht club/Or just a fishing boat ; Was that the leg of lamb/Or was it a billy goat ; Was that a snail baby/ Or escargot?" Its the kind of lyric Kenton Carnegie might appreciate if he were alive today. Sadly, Carnegie is dead, either the first semi-confirmed person in North American to have been killed by a wolf, or else just one more name in a small sea of people killed by a black bear. No one will ever be sure, as no one witnessed the attack, and wolf and bear experts disagree. An autopsy (if that's what it can be called after someone has been ripped apart by a wild animal) shows Carnegie's stomach, kidneys and intestines had been eaten. Bear experts claim these are the "organs of choice" preferred by black bears, while wolves are supposed to prefer the liver, heart and lungs which have more fat in them. I am pretty certain neither bears nor wolves read such reports. Wolf-kill advocates will note that a coroner's inquest ruled that the killing was by a wolf, but in fact this may have been weighed to some degree by the natural desire of all parties at the inquest to make news and history. This is not to say that a wolf cannot kill a human; they most certainly can, and they have certainly done so in Europe. It's just that in 200 years, there has yet to be a confirmed case of a fatal wolf attack on a human in North America. And, like it or not, there still isn't a confirmed fatal attack by a wolf on a human in this hemisphere. I have no doubt it will happen one day, but it has not yet.

The Cut and Run Irish:
In other news, while Ulster boxer John "The Derry Destroyer" Duddy was in America training for a fight, he encountered a black bear on the side of the road. Did he lay down and play dead as he was told to do if he saw a bear? He did not! Did he go "bear knuckle" and punch it out with the bruin? He did not! Instead, he ran like a girl. And probably for no reason. Bears are all over the Poconos, where this occured, and they rarely do anything more violent that rip down a bird feeder and turn over a few garbage cans. More people are killed by golf balls in America every year than are killed by black bears, and it's not like we don't have a huge population of the animals to work with; over 500,000 wild black bears roaming all across the U.S. That works out to be one black bear for every 600 people in America.

"Crocodile Hunter" on Oz Stamp:
Australia has put Steve Irwin and family on one of the ugliest stamps ever made which also seems to feature a magazine cover in some sort of strange cross-promotion. Proceeds from the sale of the 50 cent stamp will go to Irwin's conservation charity, Wildlife Warriors, but it seems to me that they have denigrated the Australia's postal system and the memory of Steve Irwin more than they the charity (or the animals) will ever benefit. Enough is enough!

Good News from the Sudan:
Good news from the Sudan? Can it be? Well yes. Apparently after an end to 20 years of fighting, the wildlife of Sudan is beginning to return. Sudan's wildlife service estimates that 7,000 elephants have returned, along with an estimated 1,500 giraffes and 500 oryx antelopes. Lions, leopards and a wide variety of gazelles have also returned, and hippo numbers are again starting to rise. Elephants live a long time, and they remember, which means that older elephants have been able to lead younger members of their herds back to their historical haunts from neighboring Uganda. Another bit of good news is that Africa’s elephant population seems to be rebounding a bit thanks to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, which outlawed ivory sales worldwide beginning in 1989. Elephant populations across Africa (which is nine time bigger than the U.S.) may now number 400,000..

.