DAILY QUICK READ - JUNE 28, 2016

Endangered Apparently Doesn’t Mean Anything
 

Make a little contribution and get anything you want.  On the other hand, moving breeding age species to different facilities is often critical to insure species diversity.  However, the role of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a protector of endangered species is highly questionable in many cases.

Last year, after a Minnesota dentist sparked an uproar by killing a popular lion named Cecil while on safari in Zimbabwe, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service placed similar African lions on the endangered species list, making it illegal to import them as trophies to the United States.

But for African lions and other threatened and endangered species, there’s an exception to this rule: Hunters, circuses, zoos, breeders and theme parks can get permits to import, export or sell endangered animals if they can demonstrate that the transactions will “enhance the survival” of the species.

Often, records show, this requirement is met in part by making a cash contribution to charity - usually a few thousand dollars. The practice has angered both animal-rights activists who say it exploits wildlife and exhibitors who describe the process as unfair and arbitrary.

In the last five years, the vast majority of the estimated 1,375 endangered species permits granted by the Fish & Wildlife Service involved financial pledges to charity, according to agency documents reviewed by Reuters.

For a $2,000 pledge, the Fish & Wildlife Service permitted two threatened leopard cubs to be sent from a roadside zoo to a small animal park. After a $5,000 pledge, the agency approved the transfer of 10 endangered South African penguins to a Florida theme park.

An application now under final consideration would permit a South Carolina safari park operator to send 18 endangered tigers to Mexico to participate in a multimillion-dollar movie – for a $10,000 donation to charity.

Climate Change – More Hoaxification

Climate change is real and it’s destroying the lives of people who have worked for generations at a trade.

One of America's oldest commercial industries, fishing along the coast of the Northeast still employs hundreds. But every month that goes by, those numbers fall. After centuries of weathering overfishing, pollution, foreign competition and increasing government regulation, the latest challenge is the one that's doing them in: climate change.

Though no waters are immune to the ravages of climate change, the Gulf of Maine, a dent in the coastline from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, best illustrates the problem. The gulf, where fishermen have for centuries sought lobster, cod and other species that thrived in its cold waters, is now warming faster than 99 percent of the world's oceans, scientists have said.

The warming waters, in the gulf and elsewhere, have caused other valuable species, such as clams, to migrate to deeper or more northern waters. Others, such as lobsters, have largely abandoned the once-lucrative waters off the southern New England states of Connecticut and Rhode Island, having become more susceptible to disease or predator.

I’m So Tired Of These People

Maybe they should be hunted from helicopters.

Five conservation groups filed a lawsuit in federal court recently challenging the U.S. Department

of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services’ killing of gray wolves in Idaho.

The agency killed at least 72 wolves in Idaho last year, using methods including foothold traps, wire snares that strangle wolves, and aerial gunning from helicopters. The agency has used aerial gunning in central Idaho’s “Lolo zone” for several years in a row — using planes or helicopters to run wolves to exhaustion before shooting them from the air, often leaving them wounded to die slow, painful deaths.

The agency’s environmental analysis from 2011 is woefully outdated due to changing circumstances,

including new recreational hunting and trapping that kills hundreds of wolves in Idaho each year, and significant changes in scientific understanding of wolves and ecosystem functions.

Toxic Chemicals – Thanks 3M

As if anyone in the political leadership of the State of Alabama cares about a little poison in their rivers.

  

With a major American river poisoned by toxic chemicals dumped into it by one of the nation’s largest corporations, Tennessee Riverkeeper has filed a federal lawsuit against 3M Company and other defendants under the U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).

The suit alleges the defendants’ contamination of the Tennessee River in and near Decatur, Alabama with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and related chemicals has created an “imminent and substantial endangerment to health and the environment.”

The toxins—components or byproducts of 3M’s manufacture of its profitable lines of “non-stick” products like Scotchgard and Stainmaster—have polluted the Tennessee River’s Wheeler Reservoir, a popular recreation destination and home to various important wildlife species and ecosystems. The Tennessee Riverkeeper’s RCRA suit seeks to compel the immediate and thorough clean-up of the contaminants.

As even minimal exposure to PFOS and PFOA is linked to a variety of lethal health hazards, there exist virtually no safe levels of the chemicals in the environment. 

We Owe Dogs Everything

Dogs detecting diabetes.  The wild that lives with us can save us.

Dogs may be able to help prevent type 1 diabetes patients' blood sugar levels from dropping dangerously low by detecting the start of a hypoglycemic episode with their sense of smell.

Teaching dogs to detect higher levels of a chemical exhaled in human breath during a hypoglycemic episode could prevent potentially dangerous health conditions in diabetic patients, report researchers in England.

"Humans aren't sensitive to the presence of isoprene, but dogs with their incredible sense of smell, find it easy to identify and can be trained to alert their owners about dangerously low blood sugar levels," said Dr. Mark Evans, a consultant physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital at the University of Cambridge. "It provides a 'scent' that could help us develop new tests for detecting hypoglycemia and reducing the risk of potentially life-threatening complications for patients living with diabetes."