March 2024
Elephant attack
At Amer Fort near Jaipur in India, a tourist is attacked by one of the elephants used to ferry visitors up and down. Chained, beaten and abused, it is hardly surprising that they can become aggressive. The tourist’s injuries were quite serious, but this particular elephant had attacked before. One can only hope that the upshot will be that this cruel and degrading exploitation of such magnificent creatures is finally brought to an end.
These free elephants were photographed in Kenya.
The Cheltenham Festival
PETA reports that already two horses have died at this ghastly event, citing Animal Aid’s figure of 76 deaths there since 2000. See Animal Wild for more on the cruelties of horse racing and death statistics.
Cyanide bombs in America
This was entirely new to me. Known as M-44s, they are poison-filled, baited landmines which coat any animal which triggers one with sodium cyanide, which when it makes contact with saliva turns to hydrogen cyanide causing a quick but painful death. Another chemical used is sodium fluroacetate, aka compound 1080. As reported in a Beyond Pesticides blog, they are of course completely indiscriminate. According to Wildlife Services, which spent more than $120m in 2016 destroying wildlife, in one year alone, 2017, over 13,000 animals were killed in this way – mostly coyotes and foxes, the target species, but also many others, including pet dogs.
At one point these devices were outlawed. No prizes for guessing which President’s Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency re-approved the use of M-44s in 2019.
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