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Tag: "animals"

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Principal drowns hundreds of grade school students in school basement

Principal drowns hundreds of grade school students in school basement

ASSIMULATED PRESS 2009

As the police were hauling Principal Soeht away in handcuffs, a reporter shouted one last question:

“Why did you drown hundreds of students in the basement of Tarara Elementary School?”

Soeht stared angrily at the reporter and replied, “Because almost all of those children were badly behaved and because I am the principal. I am in charge and no one answers to me!

A bystander then advised the reporter that a handful of students had survived. After ordering the entire school into the basement on the pretense of an emergency, Principal Soeht had opened some large water spigots. As the water started to fill the basement, Soeht quickly appointed a fifth grader named Timmy Ahwon to hand-select a small group of six of his friends and allowed only Ahwon and his six friends to leave the rising waters of the basement of Tarara Elementary School.

As these seven survivors left the basement, Principal Soeht reportedly locked the remaining hundreds of children behind large gates, then opened the valves on several large pipes in the basement (seen here), leading to loud screaming, vigorous splashing, sobbing and, eventually, silence.

Image by chrislugosz at Flickr (creative commons)

Although they escaped death, the seven survivors were not allowed to leave the school. Soeht forced Ahwon and his friends to live in a second floor classroom for one-hundred and fifty days while the waters filled the school basement all the way to the basement ceiling.

On their way up to the second floor, Soeht required the seven surviving students to hand-select and feed pairs of various animals that the students had been keeping in the classrooms as pets. While bodies of hundreds of children’s rotted in the flooded school basement for months, then, the hand-selected students carefully fed and cared for pairs of turtles, goldfish, birds, hamsters and other animals.

After the seven survivors had lived in the second-floor classroom for five months, Principal Soeht instructed Ahwon to allow several of the pet birds to go free by letting them fly out the second floor window.

The police charged Soeht with mass murder. They characterized him as a hideous madman.

The surviving children were apparently not upset with the actions of Soeht, however. Instead, they praised him for saving them. Ahwon himself reportedly referred to Soeht as “a completely honorable man.” In fact, Ahwon seemed intent on carrying out a command repeatedly given to him by Soeht during the basement flood: to fill the school with new students who were well-behaved, to replace the badly-behaved dead students.

A woman who lived near the school was inconsolable. This is the second horrible incident I’ve learned of today. God help us!

2

Major league petting zoo.

Have you ever been to a petting zoo like this? It’s in Argentina, and it’s called the Zoo Lujan. I wondered whether this was a legit story, but I’ve seen confirmation at other blogs like this.

This reminded me of an advertisement for a snake amusement park which I spotted when I was in China ten years ago. The ad indicated that for an admission fee, children get to enter a swimming pool full of snakes. The ad even included a photo of children in a big pool full of snakes.

I’m such a coward . . .

3
The not-simple question of defining “species”?

The not-simple question of defining “species”?

There are a lot of simple things out there that aren’t really simple once you start trying to understand and explain them. The concept of “species” is one of those non-simple concepts. I had assumed that I had a good gut understanding of “species” until I read an article called “Speciation,” by Andrew P. Hendry, published in the March 12, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). Hendry suggests that the term “species” as a technical classification in the field of biology is “ambiguous and amorphous.” He starts by quoting Darwin, from on the origin of species:

In short, we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merrily artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be free from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species.

Hendry suggests that modern biological research has proved Darwin. No universal easily applicable concept of “species” exists; instead, more than two dozen approaches exist with regard to “species.” The most common version is the “biological species concept” (BSC). This definition holds that species are “groups of actually or potentially interbreeding individuals that are reproductively isolated from other such groups (that is, they exchange few genes). Hendry elaborates:

The BSC is sometimes interpreted to imply the extreme situation where two groups are separate species only when successful hybrids cannot ever be produced-and any two such groups certainly are separate species. But many other groups that are widely accepted to represent separate species frequently violate the strict criteria; for example, some estimates hold that 25% of all plant species and 10% of all animal species hybridize successfully with at least one other species. Probably for this reason, the BSC is often relaxed to the point that different groups are considered separate species if they can maintain their genetic integrity and nature. This more useful, albeit more ambiguous, criterion allows for some genetic exchange (gene flow) between species as long as they do not become homogenized.

Hendry then goes on to discuss various challenges to BSC.

10

The sad sad story of downer cows and the USDA

I learned of the issue of “downer cows” by reading a report on Common Dreams:
You wouldn’t think you could “spin” a video that shows slaughterhouse workers electric shocking downer cows, “water boarding” them, jabbing their eyes with herding paddles and ramming them with forklift blades while they squeal in pain, posted at www.hsus.org, but USDA [...]

14

Why eating meat is bad for the environment

This issue of eating meat is gaining more momentum, as people start realizing the toll that meat-eating is putting on the environment.  Raising farm animals contributes more greenhouse gases to the environment than all transportation (cars, trains, airplanes and anything else) combined.
This excerpt is from an article on Common Dreams, entitled “Nuggets and Hummers and [...]