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Pele'sDaughter wrote:http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/13969266-animal-trainer-mauled-to-death-in-mexico-circus-performance

I believe it should live and be freed into an animal/safari park.

OSTROMECHEVO, Belarus—The fisherman wanted his photo shot with a beaver. The beaver had other ideas: It attacked the 60-year-old man with razor-sharp teeth, slicing an artery and causing him to bleed to death.

It was the most serious in a string of beaver attacks on humans in Belarus, as the rodents have turned increasingly aggressive when confronted by humans after wandering near homes, shops and schools.

"The character of the wound was totally shocking for us medical professionals," recalled village doctor Leonty Sulim. "We had never run into anything like this before."

Once hunted nearly to extinction in Europe, beavers have made a comeback as hunting was banned or restricted and new populations were introduced. In Belarus, a former Soviet nation between Russia and Poland, the beaver population has tripled in the past decade to an estimated 80,000, according to wildlife experts. That has caused beavers increasingly to wander into populated areas, creating more grounds for conflict.

The Belarusian emergency services said that this year, for the first time, they have received a rash of reports of aggression by beavers, which can weigh up to 30 kilograms (about 65 pounds) and stand about a meter (three feet) high. Officials have responded to some calls by sending out crews to drive away the animals, often by spraying them with water from a fire-hose.

The fisherman, who has not been named at the request of his family, was driving with friends toward the Shestakovskoye lake, west of the capital, Minsk, when he spotted the beaver along the side of the road and stopped the car. As he tried to grab the animal, it bit him several times. One of the bites hit a major artery in the leg, according to Sulim.

The man's friends were unable to stop the blood from spouting, and he was pronounced dead when he arrived at Sulim's clinic in the village of Ostromechevo.

He is the only person known to have died from a beaver attack in Belarus.

Wildlife experts attribute the upsurge in attacks partly to spring bringing about more aggressive behavior in young beavers that are sent away to stake out their own territory. Largely nocturnal, beavers can also become disoriented during the daytime and attack out of fear, according to Viktor Kozlovsky, a wildlife expert.

Kozlovsky said the large beaver population is beginning to cause significant damage to forests and farms. The Forestry Ministry said it was encouraging the hunting of beavers, once prized for their fur and gland secretions, which were used for medicinal purposes. But since they're such easy targets near dams, says ministry spokesman Alexander Kozorez, "beaver hunting holds little sporting interest."

"Hunting them is more like work," he said.

Kanzi the chimpanzee can start fires and cook, making him one of the world’s smartest monkeys
Steve Pope/AP

Kanzi is one smart monkey.
The 31-year-old bonobo chimpanzee not only knows how to use tools -- he knows how to start fires and fry himself a meal.

Not unlike human campers, Kanzi enjoys roasting marshmallows over an open fire and pan-frying hamburgers.

Scientists have documented chimpanzees' abilty to use tools, but Kanzi shows unique skill at cooking his own food, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.

Kanzi lives under the care of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh of the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where scientists taught him to use matches.

"Kanzi makes fire because he wants to. He used to watch the film ‘Quest for Fire’ when he was very young, which was about early man struggling to control fire. He watched it spellbound over and over hundreds of times," Savage-Rumbaugh said, according to the Daily Mail.

The ability to control fire marks a major evolutionary step that helped improve humans' diets, propelling the species toward the development of larger brains, more sophisticated means of communication, and eventually world domination.

Chimpanzees may not be so far behind -- Kanzi is teaching his son Teco how to make fires too, the Daily Mail reports.

News of Kanzi's cooking is one of several recent advances in our understanding of the true potential of the monkey mind.

A study published in the January 2012 edition of Philosophical Transitions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences indicates that chimps' unique ability to accurately throw objects -- a trait shared in the animal world almost exclusively by humans -- may play a role in the development of the area of the brain responsible for speech.

Chimpanzees' throwing behavior also showed the human-like animals' ability to plan for the future, a form of abstract thought.

"Some of the chimpanzees will pile feces or wet chow in their cage and wait for visitors to pass by before throwing this at them," the authors of the study noted.

Earlier this year, an experiment at the Milwaukee County Zoo proved that orangutans can use iPads.

Inspired by a fake report called "Planet of the Apps" published in the April Fool's Day edition of the U.K. Sun, the Milwaukee zookepers began allowing orangutans to play with iPads this year.

They quickly learned how to use the computer tablets and the program had begun to expand by August, according to MSNBC.

"One of the biggest hurdles we face is that an orangutan can snap an iPad like you or I could rip cardboard," Director of Orangutan Outreach Richard Zimmerman told MSNBC.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... z2VBTB4IAP

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic
Published July 30, 2013

The tiger Shere Khan was lord in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, but his modern-day descendants are king no more: The big cats have seen their central Indian forests dwindle and fracture.

The remaining tigers are only surviving by moving through critical—but unprotected—corridors of land that link distant populations, a new study says.
Using hair and fecal samples, Sandeep Sharma, of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and team studied genes from 273 individual tigers that live in four distinct locations within India's 17,375-square-mile (45,000-square-kilometer) Satpura-Maikal region.

Tigers once roamed across Asia from Turkey to the Russian Far East, but have vanished from over 93 percent of that range. (See tiger pictures.)

The 20th century was especially tough on the now-endangered beasts, when three subspecies became extinct, leaving six—all of which are at risk. (See a National Geographic magazine interactive of big cats in danger.)

At a glance the region's tigers seem to live in four populations, each occupying its own territory in what's called a designated tiger conservation landscape, or TCL. Those are Kanha-Phen, Pachmari-Satpura-Bori, Melghat, and Pench.

But the genetic study suggests otherwise: Corridors of woods and undeveloped land up to 125 miles (200 kilometers) long actually link Kanha and Pench into a single genetic unit, and Satpura-Melghat into a second.

That means the four populations of tigers are breeding as two much larger populations—and keeping their genetic diversity alive in the process.

Corridors also aid tiger survival on the ground, Sharma said, making the cats more likely to withstand many types of threats. (Related:"Tigers Making a Comeback in Parts of Asia.")

"If one of two connected populations drops, say because of poaching or some other factor, the other can expand and repopulate the area," he explained. But if these corridors aren't protected as wildlife habitat by the government or other entities, the land may be developed and leave the tigers in "islands."

If this happens, "eventually they are doomed."

Tiger Family Tree

Sharma and colleagues looked at the tiger population tree in the Satpura-Maikal region, which has seen dramatic declines in tiger habitat. (Read "A Cry for the Tiger" in National Geographic magazine.)

The team found two distinct periods in which tigers' genetic populations divided rapidly, and each was tied to known historical events.

"One was about 700 years ago, and that's [around] the time when Mughal invaders came into the region and they started clearing river valleys and intensified agriculture in those valleys," he said, noting that the major threat facing tigers at that time was habitat loss.

The second period was about 200 years ago, Sharma said, when the British Empire not only felled trees to fulfill its enormous need for timber, but also introduced a vast arsenal of firearms that dramatically increased the number of tigers killed by hunters.

"You can really see these two distinct patterns of genetic subdivision in this population," said Sharma, whose study appeared July 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Sharma and colleagues also used their data to look back in time some 2,000 years and compare the present situation with ancient patterns of tiger gene flow.

Only tigers in those populations still connected by these corridors are maintaining similar levels of gene flow [to what] we saw historically," he explained.

In areas "that have lost the corridors, the gene flow has significantly decreased."

Living With Tigers

By illuminating the past and present the study provides a roadmap for where future conservation efforts must be focused—keeping the fragile links open between different population groups, according to the authors.

Today, however, these tiger corridors have no legal protection. They are simply forest landscapes, used by local peoples and subject to development, including mining in one of India's prime coal regions.

Earlier this year the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests gave Coal India Limited permission for coal-mining development in the crucial Satpura-Pench wildlife corridor.

Officials stated publicly that the mine is an underground rather than open facility, and thus shouldn't interfere with the tigers' migratory corridor.

But Sharma is unconvinced, suggesting that mining brings with it settlements, roads, and infrastructure, which can be a major threat to the corridors just at the time when hard genetic data have shown that tigers are using them to travel and reproduce.

Conservationist Luke Dollar, a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer who manages the society's Big Cats Initiative, said the tough decisions faced here are common where big cats prowl.

"India has half of all the remaining tigers on Earth, but it's also a perfect example of what we face in big-cat conservation, whether it be here or in Africa," he said. "The cats and people are colliding in a struggle for space and existence."

Dramatic Interventions

Where populations become very isolated, dramatic human interventions may be necessary to save inbred cats, Dollar added.

For instance, in 1995 Texas cougars were released to breed with and revitalize a Florida panther population so small and inbred that Dollar described them as "walking dead."

Protecting wildlife corridors is the best way to avoid such drastic measures and offers a better chance of success as well.

"In conservation it's not individuals or individual populations that we worry about if we're going to play the long game," he said.

"We worry about the overall genetic integrity of the species, which is exactly where corridors are critical as the mechanism for genetic exchange that can maintain a robust population."

"Floating in a Human Sea"

Sharma stressed that tigers need to be managed not with a myopic approach, as isolated populations, but as one big population connected by corridors.

"India has the second largest human population in the world, and these tigers are floating in a human sea," he said.

"We can't create new tiger habitat, and there is no hope outside these areas. The only hope is these corridors. If you cut them down, and fragment these populations, eventually they will only exist in history books."

Like something out of the Wild West, grazing cattle are breaking through fences and roaming the 14,000-acre state park, scaring hikers, mountain bikers and campers and trampling sensitive riparian habitat.

State rangers have hired cowboys to lasso the cows with limited success. Dozens remain hidden in the park’s corners, leaving open the possibility the next encounter between the wild bovines and a hiker could result in an injury or death.

Rampaging elephant smashes up house but then 'saves crying baby trapped under debris'

Mar 07, 2014
Do elephants call ''human!''?
Elephants flee the sound of local people whilst emitting the telltale 'human' alarm call rumble.
African elephants make a specific alarm call in response to the danger of humans, according to a new study of wild elephants in Kenya.

Researchers from Oxford University, Save the Elephants, and Disney's Animal Kingdom carried out a series of audio experiments in which recordings of the voices of the Samburu, a local tribe from North Kenya, were played to resting elephants. The elephants quickly reacted, becoming more vigilant and running away from the sound whilst emitting a distinctive low rumble.
When the team, having recorded this rumble [listen to the rumble here], played it back to a group of elephants they reacted in a similar way to the sound of the Samburu voices; running away and becoming very vigilant, perhaps searching for the potentially lethal threat of human hunters.
The new research, recently reported in PLOS ONE, builds on previous Oxford University research showing that elephants call 'bee-ware' and run away from the sound of angry bees. Whilst the 'bee' and 'human' rumbling alarm calls might sound similar to our ears there are important differences at low (infrasonic) frequencies that elephants can hear but humans can't.
Do elephants call ''human!''?
Lucy King and Joseph Soltis film elephants reacting to Samburu voices.
'Elephants appear to be able to manipulate their vocal tract (mouth, tongue, trunk and so on) to shape the sounds of their rumbles to make different alarm calls,' said Dr Lucy King of Save the Elephants and Oxford University who led the study with Dr Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert from Disney's Animal Kingdom, and colleagues.
'We concede the possibility that these alarm calls are simply a by-product of elephants running away, that is, just an emotional response to the threat that other elephants pick up on,' Lucy tells me. 'On the other hand, we think it is also possible that the rumble alarms are akin to words in human language, and that elephants voluntarily and purposefully make those alarm calls to warn others about specific threats. Our research results here show that African elephant alarm calls can differentiate between two types of threat and reflect the level of urgency of that threat.'

Significantly, the reaction to the human alarm call included none of the head-shaking behaviour displayed by elephants hearing the bee alarm. When threatened by bees elephants shake their heads in an effort to knock the insects away as well as running – despite their thick hides adult elephants can be stung around their eyes or up their trunks, whilst calves could potentially be killed by a swarm of stinging bees as they have yet to develop a thick protective skin.
Lucy explains: 'Interestingly, the acoustic analysis done by Joseph Soltis at his Disney laboratory showed that the difference between the ''bee alarm rumble'' and the ''human alarm rumble'' is the same as a vowel-change in human language, which can change the meaning of words (think of ''boo'' and ''bee''). Elephants use similar vowel-like changes in their rumbles to differentiate the type of threat they experience, and so give specific warnings to other elephants who can decipher the sounds.'
This collaborative research on how elephants react to and communicate about honeybees and humans is being used to reduce human-elephant conflict in Kenya. Armed with the knowledge that elephants are afraid of bees, Lucy and Save the Elephants have built scores of 'beehive fences' around local farms that protect precious fields from crop-raiding elephants.
'In this way, local farmers can protect their families and livelihoods without direct conflict with elephants, and they can harvest the honey too for extra income,' says Lucy. 'Learning more about how elephants react to threats such as bees and humans will help us design strategies to reduce human-elephant conflict and protect people and elephants.'
Explore further: Elephant age estimated from voice

Games Better Than Kindergartners

(ISNS) -- Look out, gamers: chimpanzees might be coming for your high scores. Panzee, a 22-year-old female chimp, significantly outperformed 12 children and 4 adults on a complex maze in a virtual-reality computer game.

Researchers pitted four adult chimps against twelve human children ranging from 3 to 12 years old, and four adult humans. The chimpanzees tended to do about as well as the kids between 3 and 6 years old, completing the maze in a similar amount of time. The scientists were also recording “travel efficiency,” or how much distance the gamers covered before beating the game. That’s where Panzee shined: on the most difficult maze, she took a significantly shorter route to the prize than the kids - and even the adults.

As the games became more complicated, some of the humans tried to get a boost from their species-mates in the room. “The humans would ask me for answers, but I would tell them, 'I can’t give the chimps answers,'” said Francine Dolins, a primatologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and first author on the study, which was published online in the American Journal of Primatology in January.


The humans and chimps were both evenly split, gender-wise. The humans were British; the chimpanzees were from the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. All the primates at the LRC - chimps included - volunteer to participate in any given experiment.

If a scientist asked Panzee, or any of her fellow chimps, to work and she didn’t feel up to the task, she could shake her head "no" and play hooky for the day. The researchers, however, were not above bribing a reluctant primate with a grape, or the universal favorite, M&Ms. The human adults were coaxed along with the promise of a bookstore gift certificate, while the human kids were rewarded with pencils and stickers.

The joysticks used in the game were oriented so each position was associated with a cardinal direction – for example, up was north, and east was right. The humans were given 10 to 20 training sessions. The chimpanzees, who already had experience with the joystick and similar virtual reality games, were given five to 10 sessions to review how the game worked.

Throughout the game, players had to search through alleys and peek around the corners of “brick” walls, looking for the goal. Each wall had either a blue square, to let the gamer know they were on the right track, or a brown triangle to warn them away.

“Everything about testing is easier on a computer screen. You have so much more control, especially in non-human animals. You can’t just take them to a mall and say, ‘Go from here to there,’” said Dorothy Fragaszy, the director of the Primate Cognition and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Georgia in Athens. She has worked with all of the chimps in the virtual-reality study before, though she was not a part of the study itself.

Video games make it easy to add a symbol or change a maze, but they can never recreate the entire environment familiar to a wild chimp. An ape raised in the Language Research Center spends its entire life well-fed, so it doesn’t have the same pressure to find food or starve.

Wild chimps must also compete with one another for food. Male chimps tend to rove in bands, beating up on unwary females, who have to find less obvious sources of food. Dolins thinks this might be one explanation for a pattern she’s seen - “In the small number of studies I’ve done, females do better than males” on goal-oriented maze and puzzle games, she said.

When it comes to judging a captive chimp over one raised in the forest, three of the four chimps at the Language Research Center have a decidedly unnatural skill, which might indirectly reinforce their video game ability. From a young age, they’ve been taught to use a Lexigram board. The board has a series of symbols that represent words; when the chimp presses a symbol, a computer says the word aloud.

All but one of the chimps, Mercury, know how to use the board. This gives them a leg-up in the treat department. While Mercury understands English and can shake his head yes or no to an offered snack, the others can ask for their favorites by name by pressing a key on the board. “Panzee is especially fond of Chex Mix,” Dolins said.

The language training might also help chimps on maze tasks, if researchers put symbols they recognize on the walls of the maze. “In a sense, symbols are like landmarks - which exist in the wild, of course, but you give them meaning. Chimpanzees who have practice learning these linguistic skills may do better on these kinds of tests than those who don’t,” said Paul Garber, a primatologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved with the study.

So will humans one day be fending off Panzee in Skyrim? “If you gave a chimp who liked doing the task enough time, maybe,” said Dolins. “They’re curious, and intrinsically motivated to find more information about the world.”

Chimpanzees escape Kansas City Zoo exhibit by using tree branch, caught using malted milk balls
Garrett Haake, KSHB
9:11 AM, Apr 11, 2014
45 mins ago

Zoo officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are worked to track down multiple chimps after they escaped from their enclosure April 10, 2014. KSHB/KCTV
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A group of seven chimpanzees at the Kansas City Zoo got the briefest taste of freedom on Thursday afternoon, before being lured back into their enclosure with a more familiar taste: dinner and dessert.

Zoo officials believe a chimpanzee broke off a six-foot tree branch and used it to scale the enclosure wall. After the ringleader climbed, he beckoned six others to follow him. Three chimps jumped off the other side of the wall, out of their enclosure, into a zookeeper area not open to the public.

“Chimps are so smart and they live in this big social group. So hey - I found a way out, why doesn't everybody come join me,” explained Kansas City Zoo director Randy Wisthoff.

The incident happened as the zoo was preparing to close for the afternoon, and officials estimate there were only a few hundred people left in the park. They were never in danger, officials say, but animals getting outside of their enclosure triggered a so-called “code red” for the zoo, which put the entire 200 acre property on lockdown and moved remaining patrons to interior areas like restrooms, concession stands, and even the penguin exhibit.

REPORT SHOWS PAST PROBLEMS WITH ZOO ENCLOSURES

“They were having fun watching, looking at the penguins, then it got kind of boring,” said Felicia Allen, who spent 45 minutes closed into the penguin exhibit with her children and some 40 other people.

Zookeepers used food, mostly vegetable, to ultimately lure the escaped primates back to their enclosure. Wisthoff said chimpanzees are highly territorial, but curious, and probably weren’t actually interested in escaping.

“They're really like dogs and cats. If you've got an inside dog and a cat, they get outside, rarely do they run off,” Wisthoff said. “They sort of stay around home base. Our animals at the zoo are most of the time that way.”

The last of the chimpanzees were lured back with a little dessert of malted milk balls. Not part of their normal diet, said Wisthoff.

The zoo will be open Friday, but the chimpanzees will not be on exhibit. Zookeepers plan to scour their public enclosure for any other potential escape ladders.

“You try to think of everything that could possibly go wrong,” Wisthoff said. “Once in a while Murphy's Law is there. And a chimp pulling those pieces off a tree today, will it ever happen again? I can't say no.”

Giant anteaters kill two hunters in Brazil
AFP
By Kerry Sheridan 15 hours ago
...
he case studies of two fatal attacks by giant anteaters were described in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, which released the paper online this month, ahead of its publication in the December print issue.

"Both were farmers, were hunting and were attacked by wounded or cornered animals," lead author Vidal Haddad of the Botucatu School of Medicine at Sao Paulo State University told AFP.
...
He stressed that such attacks are rare, but said they are important because they show the need for people to give wild animals plenty of space.
...
"The way they defend themselves is by standing up on their rear legs and swinging their front legs in from the side," she explained.

"They have incredibly muscular forearms and those claws are several inches long."
...
http://news.yahoo.com/giant-anteaters-k ... 58253.html