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Animals - Vyoos

Who are you calling a fur-ball?

February 15th 2010 21:16

Catherine Zeta-Jones - is that wool?

The animal activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) knows how the world of news works. It used to be that such groups would cry "shame" when someone wore clothing which previously kept an animal warm, but PETA has marketing know-how several levels above this.

Just ask Catherine Zeta-Jones, that sultry siren who is famous for being beautiful and for being Welsh.

PETA has just tried to add infamy to her trophy cupboard, naming her the world's biggest fashion offender.

According to PETA, Zeta was spotted wearing an outfit that included leather pants, a fox coat and an alligator bag. Zeta, PETA said, "looked like she was working her way through Noah's Ark with a knife".

PETA's acerbic finger-pointing was also aimed at Jenifer Lopez, who was dubbed "Jenny from the butcher block" for wearing "old-school corpse coats", whatever that means, and at Kate Hudson, who according to PETA may have been dumped by boyfriend Alex Rodriguez because she loves wearing fur.

So is this a case of all's fair in love and animal rights? Or would we prefer PETA to stop behaving like a tabloid newspaper?
thesun.co.uk

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Celebrity watch

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Qantas' snakes escape

April 16th 2009 21:46

One of the pythons which did not escape during a Qantas flight

About the only thing Qantas is doing well these days is getting itself in the news for disasters, large and small.

Qantas, the once proud national carrier of Australia, has been on a rocky public relations road ever since an attractive cabin crew member exposed actor Ralph Fiennes' member in a first-class toilet. The airline's management, faced with the potential of a global marketing bonanza by treating the case with a sense of humour, instead imperiously fired her.

Plenty more staff have gone since — in March Qantas axed 90 senior executives and earlier this week announced a plummeting profit and another 1,250 full-time job cuts. In July 2008 a Qantas jumbo plunged 20,000 feet after a faulty door caused an "explosive" depressurisation, leaving a huge hole in the side of the plane.

What they didn't need in these dark days is snakes sliding around a plane full of passengers.

It happened on Tuesday when four snakes escaped from their cage during a flight from Alice Springs to Melbourne.

When the cage containing 12 15-centimetre (six-inch) baby Stimson's pythons was checked after arrival in Melbourne, it was found to contain only eight pythons.

As passengers filed onto the plane for its next flight, worried officials searched for the four missing snakes. Someone suggested they had been eaten by the other snakes, but that hope died after the eight snakes were weighed. No snake snacking there.

Passengers were transferred, the aircraft was fumigated, and still no snakes were found.

"They're not endangered so a decision was made to fumigate. If these snakes turn up they will be very much dead snakes," David Epstein of Qantas said.

The snakes can grow up to a metre in length. They were being transported in the cargo hold of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft in a bag inside a plastic foam box with air holes. How they escaped remains as much a mystery as their whereabouts.

The aircraft returned to service on Wednesday. Qantas announced the disaster on Thursday. Business as usual on Friday, with no-one in the public relations department smiling.

Associated Press, bbc.co.uk; image: ntnews.com.au

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Aircraft toilets, Animals, Australia/NZ/Pacific

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Would Christ have wept?

March 22nd 2009 20:48

The spectacled eider duck

Mary Colwell is a Catholic lay activist and environmentalist. About 15 years ago she went deep into the Arctic to film the spectacled eider duck, a rare species which lives all year round above the Arctic Circle. While other birds fly south for winter, it spends the dark months, as Colwell describes it, "sitting in the middle of the frozen Baring Sea".

It is an inspiring creature.

In filming the spectacled eider, Colwell stayed on a remote Arctic island favoured as a breeding ground. She captured images of a female brood with her clutch of eggs, and later filmed the ducklings waddling into the Arctic Ocean, the start of an isolated life free of some of the more disturbing influences of the planet, such as humans.

A few years later, Colwell telephoned the man who owned the island to ask how the ducks were doing, and was deeply shaken by his terrible response. During a check on the four females that regularly nest on his island, he had found all four had been shot sitting on the nest. The bodies had not been taken for food; neither had feathers or eggs been removed. The mothers, sitting on their eggs, had been shot for sport.

Colwell writes, "I put the phone down and wept, not just for the wickedness of the people who had carried out this callous act of violence but for the senseless loss of magnificent creatures."

Since then, Mary Colwell has been posing a question to everyone from lay Catholics to Church leaders. The question is this, "If Christ had been walking over that island and found those dead ducks, would he have wept? Not just for the people who had killed animals, but for the loss of the ducks themselves?"

Overwhelmingly, she says, the answer to that question from the lay community is “yes”, but the hierarchy is split, with many saying, “No, Christ wouldn’t weep over that which is not human.”

. o O o .

This story is a small part of an article about broader environmental issues generally and, particularly, the World Social Forum highlighting the Amazon’s diversity, held in Brazil on January 27 to February 1 this year. The full article can be read here.

Image: www.ducks.org and www.garykramer.net

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Environment, Religion

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Chimpanzee hurls himself into scientific study

March 10th 2009 17:13

A chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo who calmly collected stones at night and threw them in frenzied attacks on zoo visitors during the day has scientists excited.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Science

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Best nest

February 23rd 2009 19:37

Black-billed magpie

In what may be a first in the bird world, two magpies have constructed a nest using metal sticks.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Hong Kong, Odd Spot

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The koala that beat the heat

February 4th 2009 04:39

It was hot all over south-eastern Australia last week. It was so hot that even the natives were feeling restless.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Happy Spot

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Sexpert needed

December 2nd 2008 04:38

Much of the news in northern Japan recently has been concerned with the poor record of local officials in the area of polar bear sexing.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Odd Spot

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Shrek's hard luck story

November 26th 2008 22:42

Warning: do no read this post if you are offended by references to parrots or feather hats or sleeping women named Jackie.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Odd Spot, Sex

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Water bears conquer space

October 24th 2008 17:23

There are creatures indigenous to this planet called tardigrades and they are in the news because it has just been discovered that they can live in space. Outer space. Vacuum territory. The place where, it has previously been believed, the only things that can survive are some of the hardier forms of cosmic dust.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Odd Spot, Science

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A love story

October 19th 2008 22:42

When Fred was in hospital about two years ago he accidentally slammed into a closed door and spent the next two days in a coma. Cynthia was the duty doctor and she nursed him back to health as best she could. Fred still hasn't fully recovered - probably never will - but he's not complaining too much since the accident helped him find Cynthia, his true love.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Happy Spot

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