Animals

There are a lot of animal-friendly apps out there ... this is not one of them.

Talking Tom Cat is among the latest in iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps. Apple says "Tom is your pet cat that responds to your touch." By "touch," they mean petting the kitty, and poking him, pulling his tail and beating him unconscious.

You can find your very own cartoon cat to abuse filed under Entertainment Apps because, according to Apple, "he is especially fun for children of all ages." The Animal Welfare Institute points out that even though Tom is just a cartoon, this is where cruelty can start. Perhaps more importantly, who in the world would want to encourage this behavior?

They're raiding vineyards, terrorizing neighborhoods and passing out drunk in public. This isn't a group of reckless teenagers, but a troop of baboons in Cape Town, South Africa.

Every day, the marauding monkeys come down from the mountains into Cape Town's wine country to binge on the grapes. (The connoisseurs seem to particularly like the sauvignon blanc.) Some of them like to get drunk off the fallen fermented grapes and sleep it off in the sun. Others eat their fill and then go looking for a snack. Jean Naude at the Groot Constantia vineyard says the baboons are becoming increasingly bold — they rip the thatch off roofs and raid the kitchens.

They're not just making trouble in wine country; the nearby wealthy suburbs, including Nelson Mandela's neighborhood, have also been raided by the drunk baboons.

On Monday, August 30th, a teenage girl was filmed throwing six live puppies into a fast moving river.

Let me say that again. A teenage girl was filmed throwing six live puppies into a fast moving river.

No, repeating myself didn’t help. Nor did watching the video. I have a feeling that no amount of information is going to help me process the inhumanity of this teenage girl’s actions, no matter what.

Working in animal rescue, you routinely deal with dogs and cats who have been neglected to the point of death by starvation, who have been beaten bloody or shot or lit on fire or raped. Working in animal rescue, you get used to seeing cruelty.

But there’s just something about this video.

Two weeks ago, Thai airport authorities caught a woman trying to smuggle a drugged tiger cub in her suitcase when they ran the overweight bag through the x-ray machine. This past week, a bag with 95 endangered boa constrictors, plus a few other snakes and a turtle, broke open on a luggage conveyor belt at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, barely dodging a sequel to Snakes on a Plane.

There was little question as to who this bag belonged to or what his intentions were. The man attempting to smuggle the load of reptiles from Malaysia to Indonesia was Keng Liang "Anson" Wong, also known as the "Lizard King" for being one of the most-wanted wildlife traffickers in the world.

Things are looking up for baby sea turtles in the Gulf area. In perhaps one of the first positive signs for area wildlife since the oil disaster, wildlife officials have declared the gulf safe for the young turtles, since the hatchlings spend their early years on the surface of the water.

And there’s more good news. The thousands of turtle eggs painstakingly transported over the summer to the safer sands and water of Cape Canaveral, Florida are reportedly doing better than expected: More than 13,000 of the 25,000 relocated turtles have successfully hatched so far.

In an unprecedented effort, which I wrote about in July, hundreds of nests were dug up from Alabama and Florida beaches — by human hands, very gingerly, since any sudden movement could kill the embryos — and transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida. Once hatched, the turtles were set free in the oil-free Atlantic Ocean. The hope is that since the eggs were packed in sand from their native beaches, in 30 years or so the mature turtles will return to those same Gulf beaches and perpetuate the circle of life.

The Better Business Bureau says they haven't been able to resolve more than half the complaints they received against Texas dog breeders over the past three years. It's not for lack of trying; it's the lack of regulation and enforcement that gets in their way.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted an internal audit and found that they were doing a wretched job of inspecting puppy mills and enforcing the Animal Welfare Act. But it's not just puppy mills — the USDA has nothing to do with breeders who aren't selling their pups at the wholesale level. So all those people advertising their puppies in classified ads, online, with signs in their yards or at flea markets fall into a big black hole of regulation.

Animal Liberation Front has, unsurprisingly, claimed responsibility for the break-ins at two northern Greece fur farms last weekend that set loose 50,000 minks.

As activism goes, this stunt was about as effective as taking hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters to save wildlife. Sure, it scored headlines, but is anyone taking this opportunity to report on the cruelty of the fur industry or the conditions where these minks were kept, or comment on the fact that these 50,000 animals that were slated to be killed for fashion? Not one.

This action failed the minks, it failed the anti-fur campaign, it failed the local wildlife, and it even failed the Animal Liberation Front's credo.