Geen evolutie en ecolutie zonder revolutie!

Albert Einstein:

Twee dingen zijn oneindig: het universum en de menselijke domheid. Maar van het universum ben ik niet zeker.
Posts tonen met het label S. Bird. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label S. Bird. Alle posts tonen

zaterdag 22 juni 2019

Welgestelden en kakkers in GB en de VS laten zich fêteren met chimpansee vlees

Het is om werkelijk schijtziek van te worden, welgestelden die van gekkigheid niet meer weten wat ze moeten doen om boven het alledaagse plebs uit te steken en daar is alweer wat nieuws op gevonden: chimpansee vlees eten....... 

Vooral in de VS en grote Europese steden schijnt apenvlees 'hip' te zijn.... De Britse douane onderschepte een paar weken terug zo'n 900 kilo bushmeat dat bestemd was voor de VS.....

Hierbij wil ik de ook de hoop uitspreken dat dit westerse geteisem t.z.t. wordt afgeknald en zelf wordt opgegeten. Gaat misschien wat ver, maar ze ebola wensen (veelal opgelopen door het eten van 'bushmeat', waartoe uiteraard ook chimpansee vlees behoort) is niet zo slim daar deze ziekte zo uitermate besmettelijk en dodelijk is.

Het volgende artikel van het Care2 team werd geschreven door Susan Bird:

Chimpanzee Meat Being Served as a Delicacy in the UK and US

If you’re attending a ritzy event in the U.K., pay attention to the meat being served. Some high-end private events in Britain are offering chimpanzee meat as a “delicacy.” That’s bizarre, illegal and dangerous, primate experts say.

This isn’t just a U.K. problem, by the way. Customs officials revealed a few weeks ago they found and confiscated 2,000 pounds of “bush meat” on a flight bound for the U.S.

It’s rife. It’s there — it’s in all the major cities across Europe and the U.S.,” primate scientist Ben Garrod told The Telegraph. “We have seen bush meat confiscated in the U.K. in check points at borders and in markets.”


Bush meat is meat taken illegally by poachers of wildlife, including chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, antelopes, pangolins and many others. Somehow it has become a prized delicacy in Western countries, selling in Britain for five times the price of beef or pork, according to The Telegraph.

Bush meat poses more serious problems than people may realize. In addition to the fact that bush meat comes from illegally killed endangered animals, it’s also a tremendous threat to human health.

The greatest danger is a doozy: Bush meat can carry the Ebola virus.

In most cases, people get Ebola through contact with an infected animal, such as a fruit bat or nonhuman primate. When an animal infects a human, it’s known as a “spillover event.” Once a human begins showing symptoms, the virus will spread from human to human via direct contact with bodily fluids.

While Ebola is not normally transmitted by food, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that “in certain parts of the world, Ebola virus may spread through the handling and consumption of bushmeat (wild animals hunted for food).”


Therein lies the problem. If you eat or handle Ebola-infected bush meat, you’ve begun a potential chain of events that could ultimately infect and kill many innocent people.

The biggest worry for health authorities at the moment is that a disease that can be passed between humans and animals will be the next big pandemic,” Garrod told The Telegraph. “For example, HIV originally came from primates. We are so similar, so the potential is there for various pathogens and viruses to be transmitted or mutate.”

Renowned primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall agrees with Garrod that bush meat poses a real threat. “Interpol is becoming increasingly involved in animal trafficking and could, perhaps, be persuaded to take a more active role in the bush meat smuggling,” she told The Telegraph.

It’s reportedly quite easy to get bush meat past customs officials because it’s often smoked and blackened first. Bush meat looks like any similar meat that’s been cooked in that way. How are customs officials to know the difference? One way, Garrod suggests, is to begin DNA testing imported meats.


With advances in DNA analysis and the price of them coming down it’s not unreasonable that we could be checking for these things,” he told The Telegraph.

To avoid the potential for a pandemic, DNA testing seems to be a reasonable recommendation.
An even more effective way to eliminate the problem is to eliminate the demand. Educate those who desire bush meat that they’re putting their lives at risk — along with the lives of many others — for the sake of a “delicacy.”

Respect the chimpanzee. Don’t eat it. The same goes for any endangered or vulnerable-status animal. Those who are importing bush meat to the U.S. or U.K. are not people who must eat that kind of meat to survive. They’re self-centered and uninformed — and they’re creating unnecessary risk for the rest of us.

Photo credit: Kylie Nicholson/Getty Images

woensdag 12 juni 2019

Wetenschappers gebruiken inktvissen als proefdier

Inktvissen zijn uiterst intelligente dieren, met een aantal zeer opmerkelijke eigenschappen, zo  heeft de inktvis 3 harten en blauw bloed (maar inktvissen zijn heel wat beschaafder dan wat men 'de adel' noemt, de erfgenamen van psychopaten die de bevolking middels ongebreideld geweld onder de duim hielden.....)

Lees het volgende artikel, geschreven door Susan Bird en gepubliceerd op Anti-Media en verbaas je over de vele eigenschappen van deze wonderlijke zeedieren, dieren die in een aantal landen levend worden geserveerd en waar wetenschappers hun oog op hebben laten vallen om ze te martelen in onderzoeken die prima met computermodellen kunnen worden uitgevoerd..... Lullig dat Bird het deels nog opneemt voor dierproeven......

Jammer genoeg is er geen petitie aan dit artikel van het Care2 team verbonden, daar een verbod op dierproeven met deze dieren (en alle andere dieren) van het grootste belang is, deze dierenmishandeling op grote schaal moet eindelijk eens afgelopen zijn (zoals ook aan het eten van inktvis een eind moet worden gemaakt):

Scientists Think Octopuses Would Make Terrific Lab Rats

The octopus is a smart, curious and mysterious being. So does it surprise you to learn that these very qualities mean scientists are turning octopuses into 21st century lab rats?

Yes, it’s true. There are now thousands of octopuses and other cephalopods living in laboratories. The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is at the forefront of the effort to study all aspects of cephalopod physiology. Whether that’s a good thing depends on your perspective.

It’s the only place on the planet that you can go where we are culturing a number of these species through every life stage, through successive generations, with the goal of creating a genetically tractable system,” Marine Biological Laboratory’s Bret Grasse told NPR.


Scientists study many types of animals for different reasons. They call certain creatures “model organisms” because their biology is often similar to ours and we already know quite a lot about their genetic makeup. Such organisms include yeast, fruit flies, worms, zebrafish and mice.

To understand tissue regeneration, scientists study zebrafish and worms, who can regrow appendages they injure or lose completely. To study the interaction of genes with environment, they look at honeybees and fruit flies. To study aging, the sea urchin has been a useful study animal because it can regrow body parts through its lifetime.

Octopuses have the largest, most complex brain of all invertebrate animals. That makes them of great interest to scientists, especially those who do research on genes. Scientists can now alter octopus genes, meaning they are breeding these creatures and fiddling with their genetic makeup to see what effect those changes have.

With these organisms, you could understand what genes did by manipulating them,” Marine Biological Laboratory biologist Josh Rosenthal told NPR. “And that really became an indispensable part of biology.”

ALL ABOUT THE OCTOPUS

Octopuses — yes, that’s the correct plural term, not “octopi” — are eight-legged ocean dwellers who have three hearts and blue blood. They are a type of highly advanced mollusk. Completely boneless, they can squeeze into impossibly small spaces, making them rather infamous escape artists from aquariums.

They are curious, inquisitive animals,” Roger Hanlon, Marine Biological Laboratory senior scientist, told Live Science in 2016. “They forage hundreds of meters per day looking for food and mates and different shelters. This is an ambulatory animal, so the idea that they would want to move outside their tank in an aquarium is not at all surprising.”

The octopus is a solitary wanderer. Except when mating, it explores the world by itself. When placed together in lab aquariums, octopuses fight one another. They therefore each need their own living space. And speaking of containers, an octopus has no trouble unscrewing itself from inside a jar.


Each leg of an octopus — technically, it’s not a “tentacle” — contains 200 or more highly sensitive suckers they use for both taste and touch.

An octopus has amazing defensive mechanisms. It can quickly change its color to camouflage itself, hide among ocean waves by matching their speed exactly, flatten itself to mimic being a fish and, when cornered, squirt ink to create a distraction or screen from predators.


ANIMAL WELFARE RULES ARE LACKING


Of course, any impressive and intelligent animal eventually becomes the focus of scientific experimentation. Now, it’s unfortunately the octopus’s turn. That could be a problem for them, as animal welfare rules for scientific research don’t apply to invertebrate animals — those without a spine — except in the European Union.

Marine Biological Laboratory has some 3,000 cephalopods and is breeding more all the time. For animal lovers, that’s not good news. But it’s heartening to know that despite the lack of regulations to protect these creatures, Marine Biological Laboratory says it’s taking their welfare seriously.

Researchers are working on keeping living conditions as stress-free as possible. Marine Biological Laboratory is also putting effort into determining what anesthesia will work best for cephalopods and developing what they call a “one-of-a-kind policy for cephalopod research.”
I wish we could find other ways to research than to poke at animals. How sad that these wonderful, intelligent creatures live their entire lives in labs instead of free in the oceans where they belong.

That said, I’m grateful these researchers are actively thinking about how to make captive octopus lives better, even when legally they aren’t required to do so. But it’s time we regulate cephalopod research to make sure we don’t have to depend on the conscience of those doing the experimenting.


Photo credit: fotokon/Getty Images
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