On Loving Animals...

Greetings. I am crossposting a message from the group, Keep Life in the Park (KLIP) headed by a very dedicated animal rights proponent, Merrilee Cichy. KLIP has been very active and vigilant against all forms of animal cruelty including the gassing of park geese, and deer/bear hunting. They are the good guys. Lead core components found in traditional ammunition are destructive to the environment. Please let the Environmental Protection Agency know that you are opposed to this sort of harmful products. It's about a healthy Earth, the only place in the universe that will accept us. It's our only lifeboat in a hostile cosmic world. Always do what is good for the Earth. The elimination of ammunition with lead core components will have a positive effect on animal welfare as sport hunting with such ammunition will effectively cease. =========================================================== Dear Friends of NJ Wildlife, EPA Considering Ban on Traditional Ammunition — Take Action Now

A friend alerted me to a recently published Time Magazine issue on animal intelligence. I have lately been focused on the N.Y. Times and the Economist and so my radar didn't pick this one up. I couldn't get to the full article and so an aperitif is offered below. So, what else is new? We know that research into animal intelligence, their communication skills when there is no common spoken language between them and us, has been ongoing for a long time and I truly wonder when it would be time for us to finally accept that they are not as dumb as we think they are. Sometimes, I feel that this sort of news articles are just fillers, old and dependable stories that will always ring a bell with readers. They are like cowboy / western movies. They're cheap to produce and people will always watch them. The Wow factor is already stale. It's time to move on from our insistence that animals are nothing but blobs of protoplasm firing off involuntary reactions to outside stimuli. Th

Life has become quite hectic lately, with my son having two surgeries in Boston and I am planning a week's trip to the Dominican Republic very soon. But what has taken up most of my attention is the drafting of a petition against the legitimized gassing of dogs in the Philippines. This isn't your usual gassing via carbon monoxide cylinders, but something worse than that. This sort of gassing uses the exhaust fumes from a motor vehicle. It's called Tambucho Gassing . Yup, that's pretty hideous stuff and two government bodies in the Philippines ( The Committee on Animal Welfare and the Department of Agriculture ) approved the method as an acceptable form of euthanasia. Incredible, isn't it? But human ignorance and depravity is bottomless, and I am surprised that I still get surprised by unfathomable acts of cruelty. You can view the petition at Tambucho Gassing , and I invite you to read and understand it completely. It's not an April Fool's joke. I have incl