Mumble Herder

Keepers at the Ayutthaya-Elephant Kraal in Thailand gave their elephants a paint job to draw attention from the national frenzy over a newborn panda cub.

India's Forest Department has proposed building the first State-run Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre for captive elephants at Tiruchi. "The centre would have experienced mahouts, veterinary facility, elephant shelter, feeding area, treatment shed, ramp, dung pits, elephant walking path, fodder plot, circular ponds, water facility and a kitchen."

Investigators are using DNA evidence to trace the sources of illegal ivory. "DNA fingerprinting helped investigators three years ago to make the largest seizure of illegal ivory since the global trade ban went into effect in 1989 - 10 tons of ivory contained in two separate shipments. All of the ivory was traced to a small area near the border of Tanzania and Mozambique."

I'm going to try to be regular about this again. Of course, I'm about to head out traveling for two weeks, so "regular" may be a relative term for a bit.

It appears that Indonesian villagers poisoned four rare Sumatran elephants, probably to protect their palm oil plantations. Last month two male elephants were poisoned with cyanide-laced pineapples in the same area.

Kenya--which is still in the midst of a drought--has seen a wave of elephant killings by poachers, who are also killing other wildlife for food. Also in Kenya, work to excavate a rock quarry in Amboseli Park may cut off wildlife migration corridors for elephants and other animals.

Lastly, some good news from Kenya: a pilot study has found that fences made from wire, wood, and beehives can be an effective deterrent against elephant raids on farms. Seems the elephants recognize the shape and smell of the beehives and steer clear: "The bees aren't likely to be able to sting though an elephant's thick hide. But they can and do sting elephants around the eyes and inside the trunk. It seems that this only has to happen once for an elephant never to forget the experience."

Yeah, I'm against elephants in zoos, but damn if this little girl isn't adorable:



Click on the pic for more. They're supposed to announce her name tomorrow.

1. Dollhouse premieres tonight. I am warily giddy. I am also mindful that I watched BTVS the night it premiered, decided it wasn't worth my time, and only got hooked on it a year later. Also that Angel's first few episodes were rather shitty. Only Firefly hooked me from the start. So even though Dollhouse's premise has much more potential for skeeviness, I'm going to give it a few episodes to find its feet.

2. Periodic Table of the Elephants. (Via jaylake.)

3. I don't think you heard me before: DEADWOOD VALENTINES!!! They are the best and probably most offensive thing you will see today.

4. I ended up seeing New In Town with my folks, because we Minnesotans like to see our local color reflected back at us. (Well, maybe like is the wrong word.) It was actually worse than you'd expect. It was like someone pitched Fargo meets Gung Ho, wrote the script over a weekend and hired a flagpole to do the cinematography. Oh, and filmed it in Canada. Plus Harry Connick, Jr. = Never Good. And was J.K. Simmons wearing a fatsuit, or what?

5. I have been thinking about mrissa's One Year Closer to Balance thing. It's actually fairly apt for me right now, because until recently my life has been overbalanced in one big way, in that everything was pretty much weighted towards writing. And lately I've been thinking, there are other things. Which doesn't mean that writing won't be important, still, but that I have been realizing that my life is, in fact, unbalanced and that needs to change. I am in the process of figuring out how to do this. Which is a short and fairly lazy way of saying that I am thinking about this too.

(Via used_songs.)

Zoo elephants live far shorter lives than their counterparts in the wild; according to a study published in Science--between 22 and 39 years shorter. Naturally the zoo administrators are saying that facts aren't true.

Most of the time when my news alert sends me elephant stories they are about something that I already knew; but this is both new and awesome:

The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break the habit.

So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani's collar, then set up a virtual "geofence" using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory's boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.

They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer's field four months ago.

First, the good (or at least hopeful) news. The Christian Science Monitor is running a four-part series on the Kenyan election, compromise, and aftermath. From part one, yesterday:

In the next five weeks, led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a team of African statesmen and women, known as The Panel of Eminent African Personalities, they achieve what few thought was possible: a cessation of fighting and a power-sharing deal to put Kenya back together again.

[Graça] Machel's presence, along with Mr. Annan, and former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa, would provide important ballast. Machel and Annan are part of The Elders, a dozen experienced leaders from around the world, set up in 2007 by Mr. Mandela and others to address global problems.

At a time when Kenya's angry "young turks" were whipping up the emotions that fed violence, these African elders had the calming influence of a stern grandparent, in front of whom one doesn't misbehave.

In news distressing enough that I've been putting off posting about it, elephant poaching in Africa is at a critical level, higher in fact than the rate before the ivory ban was put into effect:

Evidence gathered from recent major ivory seizures shows conclusively that the ivory is not coming from a broad geographic area but rather that hunters are targeting specific herds. With such information, [University of Washington biology professor Samuel] Wasser said, authorities can beef up enforcement efforts and focus them in specific areas where poaching is known to occur as a means of preventing elephants from being killed. But that will only happen if there is sufficient public pressure to marshal funding for a much larger international effort to halt the poaching.

. . .

"The situation is worse than ever before and the public is unaware," he said, "It's very serious because elephants are an incredibly important species. They keep habitats open so other species that depend on such ecosystems can use them. Without elephants, there will be major habitat changes, with negative effects on the many species that depend on the lost habitat.

"Elephants also are a major part of ecotourism, which is an important source of hard currency for many African countries."

This article does a pretty good job of summarizing it:

On they came, until they began to assemble around the bloody remains of the baby elephant, some stamping their feet and snorting in the direction of the lion family they knew still to be near. But most would lightly touch and sniff the body with their trunks and then move to a respectable distance, standing in silent groups. . . . Still more elephants arrived until there were at least 100 in all, the latecomers filtering their way to the body, seemingly paying their respects, then moving to the rear of the congregation.