The National Zoo’s giant panda Mei Xiang, who was showing signs of being pregnant, is actually carrying a developing fetus and could give birth in coming weeks, the Washington zoo said on Wednesday.
Expectant mother giant panda Mei Xiang sleeps indoors at Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington on Tuesday.
Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Veterinarians detected a 1.6in (4cm) fetus during an ultrasound on Wednesday of Mei Xiang, who is a star tourist draw in the US capital, the zoo said in a statement.
“Today, we are cautiously optimistic,” said Dennis Kelly, the zoo’s director.
Veterinarians estimate that Mei Xiang could give birth early next week or possibly in early September, the statement said.
The zoo warned, however, that there is a substantial possibility that the fetus could be miscarried or resorbed, a process in which a fetus is broken down into components and dispersed in the panda’s circulation.
Mei Xiang started showing a secondary rise in her urinary progesterone on 20 July, a sign of pregnancy or a false pregnancy.
Mei Xiang was artificially inseminated on 26 and 27 April. The procedures used frozen sperm from Hui Hui, a panda living in China, and fresh sperm from the National Zoo’s Tian Tian, it said.
Mei Xiang is showing behaviors at the David M Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat in line with pregnancy, such as spending more time in her den, body licking and cradling objects. The inside of the habitat has been closed to the public.
Giant pandas are one of the world’s most endangered species and have a very low reproductive rate, particularly in captivity. Their natural home is in a few mountain ranges in central China. There are about 1,600 giant pandas known to be living in the wild and some 300 in captivity, mostly in China.
The cartoon rabbits pictured on Easter cards may look cute and cuddly, but real rabbits have no place in the “pet” industry. These complex animals are often purchased on a whim, especially in the spring, and potential caretakers rarely understand the specific needs of their new companion. Once the novelty has worn off, many bunnies are neglected, relegated to outdoor cages, dumped at shelters, or simply turned loose in the wild, where they have little chance of surviving. Hundreds of organizations and shelters are trying to deal with this growing problem.
Dealers and “pet” stores usually request 4-week-old bunnies because they require less space and are “cuter,” but bunnies of this age are ill-prepared to be weaned from their parents. Many people who purchase these young, small bunnies do not realize that depending on breed, the average weight for an adult rabbit is anywhere from 2 to 20 pounds.
Rabbits are social creatures with gentle natures and individual personalities, and they need just as much attention as a dog or cat. They are not suitable companions for young children. Rabbits require specific foods, stimulating environments, and veterinarians who have specialized knowledge of their species.
How to Spot Neglect
Federal regulations apply only to those breeders or “bunny mills” that do at least $500 of business with a particular pet store, and enforcement is lax, so the rabbits that you see in the store may not have been properly transported or cared for.
A runny nose, sneezing, head-tilt, listlessness, and diarrhea are all signs of a sick bunny. Rabbits have extremely delicate respiratory and digestive systems, and any change in the balance of these systems can result in death if they are not treated properly and quickly. Bare spots or scabs anywhere on the body suggest that the rabbit has parasites or has been fighting with other rabbits.
Adoption
If—after careful consideration—you have decided to welcome a rabbit into your home, please adopt from your local humane society or rabbit rescue group. Rabbits can live up to 10 years and require annual checkups by a veterinarian who is familiar with rabbits. Bunnies need lots of company and can become withdrawn and depressed if not provided with plenty of love and companionship. Rabbits do get along with dogs and cats if they are all safely socialized.
If you plan to adopt two rabbits, consider a neutered male and a spayed female, as they are usually more compatible than two fixed same-sex bunnies. It is crucial to have your new companion spayed or neutered immediately. Otherwise, males mark their territory, females run a high risk of uterine cancer, and the already serious overpopulation crisis becomes worse.
Rabbit-Proofing
Rabbits cannot tolerate extreme heat and must be provided with shelter from the cold. They prefer to live indoors, where they can participate in their caretaker’s everyday life, but before you let your new friend into your home, there are a few things you need to do to ensure his or her safety and happiness. Bunnies are natural chewers and they love to play, so be sure to provide plenty of toys. Untreated wood; straw; wire cat-balls; keys; paper towel rolls; and hard, plastic baby toys work well, but even with all these fun toys to play with, bunnies are drawn to electrical and phone wires, books, baseboard molding, door jams, and plants.
You’ll need to cover or redirect wires and move the rest of these items up and out of the way before bringing your bunny home. You’ll also want to set up a large box or basket filled with shredded paper for your new companion to dig in. Not all rabbits are chronic diggers, but those who are will take their natural digging instincts out on your rugs and other furnishings unless you’ve supplied an alternate digging spot. And while you’re setting up, don’t forget that rabbits also need a safe, quiet haven such as a cardboard box or plastic carrier with a towel inside. Wire cages are not suitable for bunnies.
Litter Training
Litter training is possible at any age—since rabbits like to relieve themselves in one place—and older rabbits tend to be quicker students than youngsters. Even if you plan on giving the bunny the run of the house, you’ll need to conduct litter training in a relatively confined space. Fill a litterbox with paper pulp litter. Do not use clay, as it is deadly for rabbits’ delicate digestive systems! Place the litter box in the corner of the cage or room. Try encouraging your rabbit by putting some of his or her droppings into the box or try using timothy hay or treats. Rabbits learn easily, and before long, you will be able to leave litterboxes in different locations around the house.
“We’re Vegetarians, Thank You!”
The bulk of a rabbit’s diet should be grass, timothy or oat hay, and fresh vegetables. You may also try giving a limited amount of pellets and a small amount of fruit to him or her. Dark leafy greens, broccoli, carrots, parsley, watercress, bananas, apples, pears, and pineapples are all good choices. Stay away from iceberg lettuce (too much water) or large amounts of cabbage (can give a bunny gas). Like dogs or cats, rabbits may be prone to begging at the table. As tempting as it may be to give your rabbit a taste of whatever it is that you’re eating, rabbits have digestive systems that are easily disrupted, so you should stick to his or her normal diet. Check with your vet before you add other treats.
Grooming and Handling
Although rabbits clean themselves much as cats do, rabbits do not have the ability to cough up hairballs, so it is imperative that you groom your rabbit a least once a week. Most rabbits love the attention and grooming prevents digestive problems later in life
Rabbits are instinctively nervous when lifted off the ground. Because of the delicate structure of their spines and the power of their leg muscles, struggling rabbits can actually break their own backbones. Never lift a rabbit by the ears or with just one hand under the stomach. Rabbits do not like to be carried around as cats or dogs might. It is best to get down on their level to interact with them, but if you must pick your rabbit up, make sure that you are supporting his or her hind legs and rump at all times and using your other hand to support his or her chest. Once acclimated to your home, bunnies will come to you, jump into your lap, and even sleep with you.
Siegfried and Roy pose with Pride, another white lion, in an undated photo.
Photograph: Getty Images
A white lion on loan from the Siegfried and Roy animal and magic act has died
after undergoing a medical procedure at the Toledo Zoo.
Zoo officials announced Friday that 14-year-old Legend died after being
immobilized for an hour to allow veterinarians to treat problems with one of its
paws. Legend went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after being removed from
anesthesia.
A zoo veterinarian says in a statement that while there are risks whenever
anesthesia is administered, the procedure was necessary for Legend’s quality of
life. A necropsy will be performed to determine a cause of death.
The zoo has one other white lion, Legend’s 14-year-old brother Courage. The
pair came to the zoo in 2003. A white lion named Wisdom died during surgery at
the zoo in 2013.
The relationship
between shepherds and their dogs is one of the longest-running stories in human
history. But in the US, that story paused for a while and almost looked like it
might come to an end. Since the second world war, by and large, Americans have
stopped eating sheep.
In 1945, there were 55
million head of sheep in the US. By 2013, there was around a tenth of that
number. The decline in the demand for wool led to some of the liquidation of the
sheep flock, but so did changing food tastes. Americans used to eat upwards of
4lbs of lamb in any given year, but now two out of three don’t eat any at
all.
The consumers who
still eat lamb are a now a small niche market, incorporating immigrants from
countries where lamb is a staple and foodies in search of pasture-raised
authenticity. Demand is slowly regaining strength, along with a growing
consciousness about the provenance of animals and the conditions they’re raised
under.
Michelle Canfield, sheep farmer, with Bronte (right) and
Moses . Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
For farmers like
Michelle Canfield, who since 2008 has run a small herd of sheep near Snohomish,
Washington, it brings both opportunities and constraints.
First, she runs
“shedding sheep”, which drop their hair, meaning she doesn’t have to pay to
shear them. Hers are Katahdin Hair Sheep, first developed in Maine and prized
for their prolific lambing and easy-care characteristics.
Second, the absence of
a USDA-approved slaughterhouse close by means that if you want to eat her sheep,
you have to take them away and get them butchered yourself. She doesn’t have a
problem selling them – Seattle is close by, she says, where “the Muslim market
is huge” (she says it is thanks to the number of migrants who have moved to work
in the tech industry).
As much as any other
foodies, this highly educated clientele “want their grass-fed, natural, local
meat, but they want to do their own slaughter, and make sure it’s Halal”.
This “exploding
demand” for strictly grass-fed animals means that she has to leave the flocks
out in the fields full time, including overnight. In turn, the animals are
vulnerable to predators, particularly in lambing season. The most dangerous,
persistent and clever predator of lambs is the coyote.
Canfield tried llamas
as guardian animals, and they worked for a while, but the coytoes worked out how
to get around them at the same time her border collies did. She started to take
losses.
Lockjaw traps are
illegal, and poison is fraught with risks, so she needed another solution.
This is where Moses
and Bronte came in. Both dogs are around eight years old, weigh in well over 100
pounds and are off-white in colour (so they can be distinguished from
predators). Each is descended from two different ancient lines of livestock
guardian dogs.
Moses (left) and
Bronte resting in the grass. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
Bronte, the Maremma,
was the first dog Canfield adopted . Maremmas are an ancient central Italian
breed, created to protect the flocks of Abruzzo, Tuscany and Lazio, a job they
still do in a country where wolves are present and protected.
Bronte had been raised
in the traditional manner of guardian sheepdogs, in a barn with sheep to whom
she was bonded. She loved Canfield’s flock, but she had to learn to cool her
exuberance. “She tried to play with them, she’d want to wrestle with them, even
the lambs.” She was challenging and wilful. “She went feral for a while and I
had to retame her with food.”
It worked, and now
Bronte attends to the flocks dutifully and gently. She looks and acts a little
like an oversized Golden Retriever, one who “perceives the sheep as her primary
peer group”.
To keep her company,
and to help at the times when they needed to split up the flocks, they got
Moses, a Kuvasz. They are a Hungarian breed whose precise origins are lost in
time, but who are said to have arrived with the Magyars in the Carpathian Valley
some 4,000 years ago.
Kuvasz almost
disappeared in the second world war, when many were killed by German or Russian
soldiers for protecting their families. There were revived, and now they are
another part of the array of working dogs available to livestock ranchers.
Moses was a failed
show dog; he was too reactive and grumpy for the ring. When Canfield acquired
him, she quickly realised what the problem was: “He’s terribly far-sighted. He
was growly at dog shows because everything up close was just a jumble of stuff.
He’s worked out well here.” The fact that he has learned to be a guardian
despite not being raised as one is a tribute to Canfield’s training.
While other breeds of
guardian dogs might be more assertive and aggressive, these two mostly get the
job done with their booming barks. A bark is enough to warn Canfield (“I’ve
learned to tell which kind of bark means trouble”) and is also enough to scare
off a coyote. They haven’t yet had to physically tangle with a predator.
Looking to the future,
Canfield worries about wolves. “We’ll see how quickly they make it out here”,
she says. Reintroduced in Idaho and the still-protected apex predator, wolves
are slowly making their way west of the ranges. They’re already in western
Oregon, and one day, perhaps, they will show up in her corner of Washington.
Perhaps the same
conflicts that have played out in eastern Oregon and Washington between
conservationists and ranchers will play out closer to the big cities of the
Pacific Northwest, or maybe by then new techniques and new dogs will provide a
solution.
For now, these two
dogs are happy sleeping, living and eating with their flocks. Soon, Canfield
will introduce a new puppy who will learn from them – which is how a tradition
as old as domestication itself will be renewed.
After one of the longest aquatic pursuits in history, a vessel wanted for
illegal fishing lies wrecked nearly 4km beneath the water off west Africa.
The vessel, Thunder, had been stalked by the Bob Barker, operated by the
conservationist group Sea Shepherd, since 17 December. The two ships played a
game of cat and mouse for 110 days, across 10,260 nautical miles through the
Southern, Indian and Atlantic oceans, before the pursuit came to an end in the
waters off São Tomé on Monday evening.
“The Thunder suddenly came to a complete stop, the crew came out with their
life jackets on and threw a ladder over the side,” said Peter Hammarstedt,
captain of the Bob Barker. “I radioed the captain to ask if they were in
distress and he said ‘yes, we’re sinking’.”
The Sam Simon, Bob Barker’s sister ship, took Thunder’s 40 crew on board as
the boat gradually slipped below the waves over a six-hour period. The crew of
the Thunder comprised about 30 Indonesians, with Spanish officers. The captain
was Chilean.
Hammarstedt said the Thunder’s captain was cheering and applauding as the
boat went down and was recalcitrant when offered shelter on the Sam Simon. Sea
Shepherd spent four months preventing Thunder illegally hauling large quantities
of toothfish, a protected Antarctic species, from the waters.
Three Bob Barker crew members boarded the Thunder and reported that the boat
was deliberately scuttled.
“It was suspicious that all the hatches and doors were left open, some tied
open,” Hammarstedt said. “That’s counterintuitive to keeping a vessel afloat.
They opened it up so it would sink, the engine room was completely filled with
water.”
The Chilean captain said the Thunder was struck by a cargo ship, causing the
sinking, but Hammarstedt said the vessel simply ran out of options.
“They have spent the last month going around aimlessly, simply burning fuel
and hoping that we would run out of fuel first,” he said. “It’s been a siege
situation – who would run out of fuel, food and patience first. They obviously
ran out of patience first.
“It’s a strange situation to be in. Bittersweet, really. I had thought this
would end with us escorting them to a port and handing them over to law
enforcement. The evidence is now in the bottom of the ocean, although we did
take some plans from the Thunder and I do have a toothfish in my freezer that
I’ll send to Interpol. I hope the captain is prosecuted and I’m glad the Thunder
won’t be poaching again.”
The lengthy chase began in the Banzare Bank, a remote part of the Southern
Ocean, about 15 days’ sailing from Perth or Cape Town.
The Thunder made a number of attempts to lose its pursuer, attempting to
dodge between pack ice or using huge waves to create a barrier between it and
the Bob Barker. Finally, the Thunder’s captain tried to simply outrun the Bob
Barker, skirting around the Cape of Good Hope before the final scenes played out
in the Gulf of Guinea.
There were flashpoints – about two months in, the Thunder deployed gillnets
to scoop up some toothfish, only for the Bob Barker to use grappling hooks to
cut buoys from the nets, rendering them useless. More than 1,400 fish, weighing
more than 45,000kg, were returned to the ocean.
Patagonian toothfish, known by some fishers as “white gold” due to their
value, are large predators found in some of the coldest waters on Earth, in the
Southern Ocean. Dwelling in depths of up to 2,500m, toothfish can weigh up to
150kg and produce a solid piece of white flesh, high in omega 3, when
filleted.
The capture of toothfish is tightly regulated but at least six vessels,
including the Thunder, are suspected of targeting the species in the largely
lawless international waters.
In 2013, Interpol issued a “wanted” notice for the Thunder, which has
operated under at least three different names and several different flags,
including Mongolia and, most recently, Nigeria.
Interpol estimates that the owners of the Thunder, probably an organised
criminal gang, have earned more than US$60m from illegal fishing since 2006. The
governments of New Zealand and Norway have condemned the activities of the
Thunder, accusing it of “violating international laws and conventions”.
Sea Shepherd will be pressing São Tomé and Nigerian officials, who are
leading the search and rescue operation, to work with Interpol to prosecute the
Thunder’s captain. But most illegal activity in international waters goes
unpunished and even unnoticed.
“We hope this makes government think a bit more about co-ordinated action
against illegal fishing,” Hammarstedt said. “These criminal syndicates take fish
from some of the poorest countries in the world and they need to be
stopped.”
