cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/56554213

Cases of Cruelty Galvanize Country’s Young People.

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In late June, videos of four boys cruelly mistreating and burning a dog and her puppies in Jieyang, Guangdong province, circulated widely online. Public outrage was swift and overwhelming: paid billboards and other advertisements appeared in over 100 cities across the country called for an end to animal abuse. More than 70,000 people signed an online petitiondemanding accountability and a national animal protection law.

Animal protection supporters abroad crowdfunded a billboard in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district and purchased screen advertisements in Taipei and New York’s Times Square.

On June 30, the government, while acknowledging that the abuse occurred and explaining the consequences for those responsible, also urged "netizens not to spread related information."

Suppression followed. Social media platforms removed posts about “Wang Wang,” a generic and endearing term supporters used for the puppies’ mother. The Chinese social media site Weibo also reportedly blocked a celebrity’s statement and a related trending topic. Online, people have reported that police ordered memorial advertisements taken down from public screens in several cities. An organizer told the BBC that police had questioned and threatened dozens of others, telling them to stop their activism.

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The Jieyang response follows a pattern. Earlier in June, police in the municipality of Chongqing forcibly dispersed hundreds of residents who had gathered for days to protest another reported case of dog abuse. They injured several people and briefly took dozens away before detaining—under public pressure—the alleged abuser.

Animal abuse has clearly touched a nerve in China, especially among young people for whom pets have become an important source of companionship. Peaceful expressions of public outrage should never be considered a threat to state security. Chinese authorities should stop suppressing public discussion of animal abuse, free any protesters still detained, and investigate police violence in Chongqing. They should also listen to what people are saying, whether it’s about personal freedom, the rights of the public, or the protection of Wang Wangs.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53575796

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The Center for Biological Diversity has submitted a petition to NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S.] Fisheries, urging the agency to identify and impose sanctions on China for extensive shark finning conducted by commercial fishing vessels. According to the environmental group, Chinese-flagged ships have caught and finned thousands of sharks in offshore waters, yet China has failed to take sufficient measures to stop the practice.

[...]

The group notes that in 2024, China and Japan blocked an attempt by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas to adopt a fins-naturally-attached policy, despite support from about 80 percent of member parties.

An investigation by the Environmental Justice Foundation released earlier this year reported widespread shark finning among China's distant-water fleet. The nonprofit interviewed 81 fishers from 60 Chinese-flagged vessels and found that 60 percent of those vessels allegedly engaged in finning sharks and disposing of their bodies. The report also noted that China's regulation on controlling shark finning does not apply to squid vessels operating in the Southeast Pacific.

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In its petition, the Center for Biological Diversity asserts that China's distant-water longline fishing fleet regularly targets sharks and also harvests them as bycatch within regional fishery management organization convention areas globally. The group claims that in 2023, Chinese-flagged vessels discarded more than 10,000 blue sharks and nearly 1,700 shortfin mako sharks in the Western and Central Pacific.

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Charlotte, a young female orangutan, was released into the Busang forest in Borneo after a long rehabilitation journey at the Jungle School, the jungle school for orangutans rescued from captivity. Found as a baby chained under a house terrace in Sumatra, her life seemed doomed: deprived of freedom and separated from her mother, she was destined to suffer physically and mentally.

But that didn’t happen. Her name is no accident: Charlotte means “free woman” in French, and every day of training brought her closer to the life she deserved. The Borneo Orangutan Rescue Alliance (BORA), in collaboration with Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry and Environment and the Orangutan Project, oversaw every phase of her recovery.

Learning from jungle school

Orangutans have one of the longest childhoods of any species: they’re born without knowledge and learn everything from their mothers, from safe foods to techniques for avoiding predators, building nests, and moving through trees. Deprived of these lessons, orphaned orangutans risk death if left alone.

At Jungle School, Charlotte learned to climb trees, forage for natural food, build safe nests, and use simple tools, under the guidance of human caregivers who replaced the maternal figure. Where before she had been fed inadequately—bread, sweets, and chips—now Charlotte knows fruits, leaves, and insects, essential for her survival in the wild. Emotional and mental healing

The period of captivity had left deep scars: Charlotte was afraid of almost everyone, withdrew from new stimuli, and slept on the ground instead of in nests. Jungle School doesn’t just teach physical skills: it promotes mental and emotional healing, transforming a fearful orangutan into a brave and joyful one.

Assistants teach digging into logs to find termites, folding leaves to form soft nests, and swinging safely between branches. Each gesture, repeated multiple times daily, helps make Charlotte independent and ready to live in her natural habitat.

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After four years, Charlotte was transferred to a pre-release island, where she could practice all the skills she’d learned, spending most of her time in the tree canopy. Today, Charlotte finally lives free in the Busang ecosystem, alongside other previously rescued orangutans like Mary, Jojo, Bonti, and Popi.

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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45810913

Cows are not usually credited with thinking on the hoof. They eat, they chew, they stand in fields performing an activity that may look like contemplation but is generally written off as digestion.

They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.

The research describes what experts claim is the first documented case of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in cattle, observed in a cow named Veronika.

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Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. More than a decade ago he noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body.

When video footage of this behaviour reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, it struck her as unusual, largely because Veronika used the brush in different ways to scratch different parts of her body.

“It was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg said. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

Auersperg and her colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró conducted a series of trials. They placed a long-handled brush on the ground and recorded how Veronika used it.

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When scratching broad, thick-skinned regions such as her back or rump, Veronika tended to use the bristled end, applying it with sweeping, forceful movements. When targeting softer, more sensitive areas of her lower body, she switched to using the handle to scratch herself, moving more slowly.

Because Veronika directs tools at her own body, researchers describe this as egocentric tool use, which is usually regarded as less complex than tool use aimed at external objects. Even so, flexible, multi-purpose use of a single tool is rare. Outside humans, it has previously been demonstrated convincingly only in chimpanzees, the researchers say in their paper.

They wrote in a study published in the journal Current Biology that the findings “invite a reassessment of livestock cognition”.

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The researchers suspect that Veronika’s life circumstances have played a role in the emergence of this behaviour. Most cows do not reach her age and they are rarely given the opportunity to interact with a variety of potentially useful objects.

Her long lifespan, daily contact with humans, and access to a rich physical landscape probably created favorable conditions, they said. If that is true, there may be nothing very exceptional about Veronika, other than the opportunities she has been given to exercise her brain.

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I respect the Green Party but if Elizabeth May wants to strengthen the green movement she would go vegan as that would show she was serious about ethics and sustainability.

This is why I support the Animal Protection Party instead. As we need a federal party that focuses on advocating for compassion towards the animals.