DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 8, 2016

Elephant Extinction Enablers

Even though Brexit will move the United Kingdom out of the European Union, Britain’s domestic ivory market provides ample incentive to poachers to continue to slaughter elephants in Africa.

The illegal wildlife trade also blights local communities. International criminal gangs are involved in the $20bn annual trade that is now the fourth largest global illegal activity after drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking. Their activities cause instability and threaten national security in many African nations, blocking much-needed development in impoverished rural communities.

The UK’s domestic ivory market provides ample cover for illegal activity. Between 2009 and 2014, 40% of all the seizures made by the UK’s Border Force were ivory items and in 2015, 110kg of ivory were seized at Heathrow airport in one of the UK’s largest hauls of illegal ivory. This is just the tip of the iceberg as ivory sold legally in the UK domestic market is exported to illegal markets in other countries, contributing to high prices and fuelling demand for elephant products. Many nations have already taken action. In July 2016, the US government passed a new law that substantially limits imports, exports and sales of African elephant ivory, providing exceptions for some antiques and musical instruments.

Don’t Leave Your Pets In The Car

Unless they have a drivers license.

Two pups were left alone in a car while their owner ran into a grocery store in Wayne, West Virginia. The woman left the car running so the dogs could stay cool, but they had other plans.

Once she was in the store, the dogs somehow switched the car into gear and went rolling straight for the store.

The joyride didn't last long. The car came to a halt when it rolled into a concrete pillar. Shoppers ran to the runaway car to make sure everyone was all right, only to find a dog in the driver's seat.

World Lion Day is Wednesday

What have we done?  And, why do we continue to do it?

A little over a century ago there were perhaps a million lions in Africa.

By the 1940s that number had dropped to about 450 000, and today there are fewer than 20 000.

It’s a sorry tale of annihilation by man.

I can find no statistic giving a reliable, or even unreliable, figure on the number of lions in the wild in South Africa today, but there are apparently about 1 000 captive bred lions lined up to be shot as trophies (known as canned lion hunting).

Apart from trophy hunting, lion bones are being sold to far eastern countries for use in traditional Asian medicine.

What Is A Wolf

DNA studies are making the case for wolf recovery much more complex.  Most wolf “species” are apparently hybrids with lots of genes that are common to coyotes.  And, when some wolf species are in competition with coyotes, they struggles.  Coyotes are brilliant in their ability to adapt.

Stop the freight train — brand-new DNA study involving North American wolves and coyotes threatens to derail the whole concept of what we consider “pure wolves,” as well as the federal reintroduction programs dealing with them.

Researchers from Princeton University studied the genomes from a variety of gray and red wolves as well as coyotes. Both the gray species (Canis lupus) and the red (Canis niger, so-named from a black phase of them) wolves were initially listed as endangered in 1973.

The federal Endangered Species Act allows for the protection of threatened or endangered species and subspecies (the Mount Graham red squirrel is one of the latter) but does not authorize safeguards for hybrids.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may well be attempting to change the policies of the Endangered Species Act after this recent DNA study. In the meantime, other stakeholders in the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction here, such as ranchers, are contemplating their own DNA studies. And the controversy is bound to continue.

Grey wolves may be 25-50% coyote.  Kind of makes it difficult to say what a wolf really is.

The article, which can be found on the web under the title "Whole-genome sequence analysis shows that two endemic species of North American wolf are admixtures of the coyote and gray wolf" says that a red wolf is about 75 percent coyote with some gray wolf thrown in. The lesser known eastern wolf, which is not listed as an endangered species but could be, is, according to the report, about 25 percent to 50 percent coyote and the rest is gray wolf.

Just because wolf conservationis hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.  These high school kids are leading the way.

The students’ petition was picked up and circulated by conservation groups, such as the Wildlands Network; other petitions were folded into it. But its more than 498,369 signees are an impressive number. In comparison, some 77,000 people signed online or paper petitions calling for an end to oil-and-natural gas leasing off the Southeast coast, said Oceana, although 1.4 million comments were made in a public review including those signatures.

“One of the critical narratives about the red wolf program is that it has lost public support. The reality is clearly different,” said Ron Sutherland of the Wildlands Network. If the program is ended, “it may be decades before another reintroduction is attempted in some other Eastern state. Eventually (captive red wolf keeper) zoos will lose interest if it is clear the wolf has no future in the wild.”

The service in February said it was on track to make a decision on the program’s future by summer. Asked Thursday, a spokesman did not update that schedule.

A 7 Cent Tax Makes A Difference

An 85% reduction in the use of single use plastic bags.  This is a much better way to keep this trash out of the ecosystem than some fantastic ocean vacuum cleaner

Britain’s shores are about to get a whole lot cleaner, and it’s all thanks to a very small change. Single-use plastic bag consumption has plummeted by more than 85% following the introduction of the 5p/bag charge last October, early figures suggest.

Single-use plastic bags are handy if you’re a customer, but they’re an environmental nightmare for the planet. In an attempt to reduce the number of such bags that shops provide their customers with, England introduced a modest 5p charge per bag last October. It was the last part of the UK to adopt the tax on plastic bags, after it was successfully implemented in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This little tax has had an enormous effect: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reported that the number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets dropped from the 7bn in the year before the tax to only 500m in the six months after it. The charge also raised enough cash for retailers to donate more than £29m towards causes including charities and community groups, Defra added.