Pet owners who lived in what still stands of Florida’s partly collapsed condo tower want the structure’s planned demolition delayed until any animals who might still be alive there are rescued.

The search for human and animal survivors in the building’s rubble in Surfside next to Miami Beach was suspended Saturday as officials prepare to demolish the remaining part of the 12-story structure ahead of Tropical Storm Elsa.

But an online petition has been started to halt the demolition until “all animals are safe” and already garnered almost 4,300 signatures, the Miami Herald reported.

Julie Miró, a Miami resident who signed the petition, said she also sent emails to Gov. Ron DeSantis, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and local emergency officials urging them to try to save any animals stuck inside the teetering building before it is knocked down.

“If there were people in there, they would have

A New Zealand farmer has been convicted of mistreating his sheep after 226 of them had to be euthanised.

The animals were found to be severely malnourished and ill and were put down.

Famer Bevan Scott Tait had pleaded guilty although his defence said he had been suffering from depression and had not received enough support.

On Monday, he was sentenced to nine months home detention and 150 hours community work under the Animal Welfare Act.

He will also be barred from managing or owning farm animals for four years.

Mr Tait’s farm in Russock Creek at the southern end of South Island first came to the attention of authorities when inspectors found several dead sheep there in April 2019.

His other animals showed signs of starvation and some were flyblown, suffering from fly borne infections. Some of the sheep had not been sheared

HONOLULU (KHON2) — On June 7, Hawaii became the 48th state to ban animal sexual assault, taking a step forward in the fight against animal abuse.

In addition to the ban on sexual assault the state passed two other bills that work to offer animal and animal care protections.

Hawaii House Bill 416 prohibits unsafe tethering practices and the unsupervised tethering of puppies.

“I am grateful to the bill sponsors, House and Senate leaders and our community advocates for supporting Hawaiian Humane’s commitment to enacting laws to protect the animals of Hawaii and their caretakers,” said Steph Kendrick, Public Policy Advocate for the Hawaiian Humane Society. 

Kendrick said animal lovers constantly ask the Hawaiian Humane Society about expanding the tether restrictions to all dogs. She said that is not a stance the organization supports.

“It’s kind of an equity

It’d be just another normal day, nearly 17 feet above Highway 101 in Agoura Hills. 

A southern alligator lizard and a western toad hide from the heat in the greenery of restored native vegetation. Mountain lion cubs pounce on rocks and spring into the nearby canyons. The sun glints on the feathers of a golden eagle soaring overhead.

This is the scene environmentalists hope will someday become reality on a massive overpass above the ten-lane freeway that cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles. The project known as the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing is one step closer to happening now that Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a budget that includes $7 million to help build it — and another $54.5 million for similar

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

One fall morning in 1978, David Willard, an ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, walked to the nearby McCormick Place convention center — a hulking structure along Lake Michigan — to look for dead birds. He’d received a tip that birds were crashing into the building’s many windows on their journey south.

He found a few birds lifeless on the concrete that morning. And as any good scientist might do, he brought them back to the museum to measure them and store the winged creatures in the museum’s collection. His curiosity piqued, he returned to McCormick Place the next morning. He found still more birds and brought them, too, back to the museum.

Four decades later, Willard has helped collect more than 100,000 birds from window

It may seem like humans have conquered the entire planet — and in many ways we have. But Earth’s wild places still hold an astonishing number of secrets. 

Every year, researchers find hundreds of new species of plants and animals — along with a mind-boggling thousands of new insects. Yet they’re still only scratching the surface of what may be out there. Scientists say a huge fraction of Earth’s biodiversity is still unknown. While estimates vary, it’s thought that 86 to 99 percent of species are yet to be discovered, depending on how you count the microbes.

The idea of discovering a new species may conjure up an image of pith-helmeted adventurers trekking through the jungle in search of a legendary creature. And it is true that rainforests are biodiversity “hotspots” that yield their fair share of discoveries. But many new species are found in familiar places or even museum

“No, no, no, no, Brian. No, no, no, no.”

I had asked Stephen Emlen, a Cornell emeritus professor of neurobiology and behavior, what seemed to me an obvious question: When he brought birds into planetariums in the 1960s and 70s, did they ever, um, make a mess in there?

“No poops in the planetarium,” Emlen assures me.

I had called Emlen to talk not about poops, but a series of experiments that have captured my imagination. He brought migratory birds into a planetarium at night and turned the stars on and off, as though erasing them from the universe of a bird’s brain.

Through these experiments, Emlen pieced together what was then a mystery: how birds know which way is which, even flying in the dark of night without the sun for guidance.

We still know incredibly little about animal migration — where they go, why they go, and

TORONTO —
Health Canada is warning that there will be a global shortage in euthanasia drugs for animals due to an explosion at a manufacturing plant overseas, but according to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA), pet owners in Canada shouldn’t worry.

On Tuesday, Health Canada posted an alert for veterinarians, stating that they became aware earlier in 2021 that an incident at a manufacturing site would cause a global shortage of pentobarbital sodium, which is the “active ingredient used in most euthanasia products for animals,” the alert explained.

“A shortage is expected to impact the existing Canadian supply in mid-to late 2021 and continue until mid-2022,” the agency stated.

“Health Canada is working in collaboration with CAHI (Canadian Animal Health Institute), the CVMA, drug manufacturers, importers and distributors to mitigate the impact on the veterinary health system and Canadians requiring end-of-life care for their animals/pets.”

The CVMA told

Peacocks, panther chameleons, scarlet macaws, clown fish, toucans, blue-ringed octopuses, and so many more: The animal kingdom has countless denizens with extraordinarily colorful beauty. But in many cases, scientists know much more about how the animals use their colors than about how they make them. New work continues to reveal those secrets, which often depend on the fantastically precise self-assembly of minuscule features in and on the feathers, scales, hair, and skin—a fact that makes the answers intensely interesting to soft-matter physicists and engineers in the photonics industry.

Many of the colors seen in nature, particularly in the plant kingdom, are produced by pigments, which reflect a portion of the light spectrum while absorbing the rest. Green pigments like chlorophyll reflect the green part of the spectrum but absorb the longer red and yellow wavelengths as well as the shorter blue ones. Which specific wavelengths get reflected or absorbed depends

A ban on farm feed made of animal remains introduced during the BSE crisis is to be lifted in the EU to allow cheap pig protein to be fed to chickens over fears that European farmers are being undercut by lower standards elsewhere.

The change to the regulations come into force in August following a last-ditch attempt by a coalition of MEPs, led by the Greens, which failed on Tuesday to kill the policy. The EU’s member states have already endorsed the regulation, with only France and Ireland abstaining.

The use of processed animal protein (PAP) from mammals in the feed of cattle and sheep was banned by the EU in 1994 as the full horrors of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, emerged.

The first case of BSE was reported in 1986 in the UK. The disease was spread widely by farmers feeding cattle with the meat and bone meal