MaxRedline

Long Overdue!

SEATTLE (KOMO) — Alaska Airlines announced Tuesday it will no longer accept emotional support animals in the passenger cabin on its flights.

It's about time that sanity finally bites these babies in their collective behinds!

Beginning Jan. 11, 2021, Alaska will only allow service dogs, which are specially trained to perform tasks for the benefit of a qualified individual with a disability. Airlines argued that passengers abused the situation to bring a menagerie of animals on board including cats, turtles, pot-bellied pigs and, in one case, a peacock.

Those animals were never trained to do anything useful; they were simply pets - and often problematic ones at that.

 

As Suspected...

As mentioned yesterday, domestic cats are susceptible to COVID-19, and I suggested that large cats in zoos therefore may well contract it, so it's something that zoo vets should consider. This evening, it's reported that a tiger at Bronx Zoo has indeed come down with the virus; allegedly passed to the animal by an asymptomatic feline keeper.

I believe they have four tigers at that facility, so it seems reasonable to suspect that the other three are also infected. I'd also bet cash money that the keeper involved is female, and for two primary reasons: 1) today, zoos tend to prefer to hire young, relatively inexperienced women as opposed to men, and 2) the women tend to get more touchy-feely with the animals than do the men.

In my view, these attitudes contribute to unnecessary risks to both the keeper and the animals.

 

As Concerts Go, This Was A Real Killer

A 62 year-old was found dead following a recent concert at Portland's Oregon Zoo.

Autopsy is pending.

62-year-old Carl Stanley Ross Sr. went to the Zoo Saturday night to see the performer George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, The Oregonian first reported. Around 10 am on Aug. 12, Ross was found dead in the construction site of the new rhinoceros habitat by a worker.

The zoo's not very big, yet it was two days before they found the corpse?

After they got rid of the hippos, they got to work on an expanded facility for Eastern Black Rhinos, which is where the body was eventually noticed.

Personally, I've never cared for the zoo's concerts. If you want to be a zoo, get rid of the loud concerts. If you want to be a concert venue, get rid of the animals. Trying to do both is really stupid.

 

Zoo Keeper Feeds Tiger Successfully

City officials say a tiger mauled a zookeeper at the Topeka Zoo in northeastern Kansas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports the incident happened around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, when a Sumatran tiger named Sanjiv tackled the worker in an enclosed outdoor space.

Rule #1: ensure that all animals are securely locked away before entering the exhibit.

Rule #2: See rule #1.

 

Tool Use

It may come as a surprise to some, but your basic chimp will use a tree branch as a ladder.

Desperate For Money And Attention

Looking to get yourself a present this Valentine's Day? The El Paso Zoo has you covered. It will name a cockroach after your ex and then feed it to a meerkat live on camera.

They'll livestream it on Facebook and their website. I've never understood quite why zoos have to have websites, but they all seem to need one. Publicity, apparently.

 

Really Stupid

By now, you've doubtless heard about this:

MELBOURNE, Fla. — A child was transported to the hospital on New Year's Day after falling into the rhinoceros exhibit at the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida, officials say.

According to officials with Brevard Zoo, on Tuesday afternoon, the child was injured during Rhino Encounter, a hands-on, educational experience with Brevard Zoo’s white rhinoceroses. During the encounter, participants and the rhinoceroses are separated by a series of steel poles. According to witnesses, the child stumbled and fell in between two of the poles and, at this point, the snout of at least one of rhinoceroses made contact with the child.

Zoo officials say that Brevard Zoo has offered this experience daily without incident since 2009.

All the zoo wants is extra cash. While staff and volunteers are routinely tested for TB and other health issues, quite obviously, the guests aren't. So the only reason zoos "offer this experience" is for the money. Animal health is not only not high on their list of important things, it's irrelevant when there's extra cash to be made by providing a "hands-on, educational experience". If an animal contracts a fatal illness from an unmonitored guest, they can always get a replacement animal down the road.

Education isn't really part of the equation.

 

Chester Zoo

I visited the place after doing a talk on the subject of animal management at an international conference in Kent, England some years ago. It was interesting, as the U.K. had over a century of experience in the keeping of wild animals, as opposed to the USA. I'd assumed that they'd be way ahead of us. That was a bad assumption.

At Chester Zoo, I watched as an elephant keeper interacted with an Asian elephant cow, and noticed that she had developed a habit of lowering her head and dropping her right tush onto his head. I suggested that this was not a good thing, and he assured me that it was entirely accidental.

My reply: "No, elephants don't make mistakes. That's on purpose." Some folks just can't deal with facts.

Sure enough, shortly after returning home, I got a call. That keeper was dead; the cow had in fact plunged her right tush straight through the top of his skull. Sometimes, reading behavior sucks.

Today:

Thick plumes of black smoke billowed into the sky as the blaze spread through the tourist attraction this afternoon. The fire had taken hold of a building that houses the Monsoon Forest habitat as firefighters scrambled to the scene. Inside the affected enclosure was believed to be Sumatran orangutans, Sulawesi macaques and the Sunda gharial crocodile as well as a number of rare birds.

Chester Zoo is home to more than 21,000 animals, with the affected Monsoon Forest habitat being the UK's largest zoological building.

All animals, staff, and visitors are presently being evacuated from the premises.

 

At It Again

The professional agitators were at it again last evening at Oregon Zoo, claiming that the organization killed an elephant calf just a day before her sixth birthday.

Whatever they do, the agitators aren't about to let a few facts stand in the way of their fake outrage:

Endotheliotropic herpesvirus is a rapidly progressing and often fatal disease. Elephant calves are particularly susceptible to it.

By "rapidly progressing", they mean "highly aggressive", which is a term typically applied to human cancer patients with nasty sarcomas. When I had one, average lifespan from diagnosis was two years. That's how "highly aggressive" works. In veterinary terms, they tend to use the term, "rapid progression", which amounts to the same thing.

EEHV is present in almost all Asian elephants, both in wild populations and those in captivity. Typically, it only causes mild or no symptoms, but for reasons unknown, it can sometimes come out of latency and cause disease.

Once the disease becomes active in calves, it is usually fatal and will often kill them within a few days, even with intensive treatment.

That's right; contrary to the story line the agitators push, the zoo did not kill the elephant calf - she died from a disease that is common in elephants, and one that is spectacularly lethal when it erupts in young animals. These jerks don't "protest" at hospitals when somebody dies of drug-resistant TB or cancer, but by golly, if an elephant calf dies of a common bacterial infection that is notoriously difficult to treat, then the zoo killed it. Get real.

I guess it makes them feel good about themselves, but that's a sad reflection upon what passes for their lives.

 

OZ Does It Again

One day shy of her sixth birthday, another elephant has died at Portland's "Oregon Zoo". They've shut the place down "to allow staff to grieve".

That's never been done before; when other elephants died, they just dug a hole out in Clackamas County and dumped them in. Apparently, they're more "sensitive" these days.

Well, these are "animal care professionals" - as though the place didn't have them until recently. So these "professionals" need to be given time to grieve.

Give me a break!