Pet Safety Tips for the Holidays
Holidays are highly stimulating to pets as well as to people: there are breaks in the routine, the introduction of shiny objects, greenery brought inside, excited people, displays of good-smelling delicacies, party guests and house guests, long absences for visiting. Pets take part in our preparations and our social experiences. It can all be a bit overwhelming for them, especially to young pets who have never experienced this uproar before. […]
IFAW Germany: A Visual Protest to Help Save Elephants
Our thanks to the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the IFAW Rescue Blog for permission to reprint this blogpost by the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s press officer in Germany, Andreas Dinkelmeyer.
Let’s save the elephants! Early on Tuesday we left Hamburg for Berlin, the capital of Germany, in the high speed train. We had prepared an action to visualize how many elephants die per day. In the days to the action we prepared 416 elephant footprints, a huge banner and our petition elephant. In the very heart of Berlin, in front of Brandenburg Gate, we wanted to make the public and politicians aware of the plight of the elephants. […]
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Animals in the News
From the As If There Weren’t Enough Things in the World to Worry About Department: Scientists report that an increasing number of male shovelnose sturgeon are being born in the Missouri River drainage with what are called “female characteristics”—that is to say, are the piscine equivalent of hermaphrodites. […]
Animals and Borders
In November 2009, Germans—and people the world over—celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had risen on an August night in 1961 and been steadily reinforced ever since. The wall was a small component of the elaborately constructed and guarded border defenses that separated the satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact from those of the West, but it was highly effective in keeping Eastern Europeans from fleeing into the hands of the supposed enemy.
The defenses of the Iron Curtain killed hundreds of would-be refugees, people some of whose names we will never know. But it also had an effect on other inhabitants of the region: populations of animals that were prevented from mingling with others of their kind by walls, towers, strands of concertina wire, lights, sirens, gun emplacements, and minefields. […]