To Service Dogs and Other Threats to Air Quality, the Clover School District Says No Thanks

Posted Nov. 3 at 2:00 pm by Vernal Coleman

Clover school district bans teachers from training service dogs on campus. In related news, the terrorists win.

​Take note, Seattle environmentalists: Your green bona fides have been trumped.

Don't believe it? Witness today's news that, citing environmental concerns, the Clover School District in fair Pierce County will no longer allow district employees to bring their service dogs in training to campus.

District Superintendent Debbie LeBeau told the News Tribune that the reasons behind her decision were threefold: the dogs were a potential liability, possible distraction to the children and a "threat to air quality."

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Topics: Animals, Education, and Environment

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Infamous Enumclaw Horse Diddler, Still Diddlin'

Posted Oct. 20 at 1:42 pm by Vernal Coleman

You know what they say: once you go equine, you never go back.

​Turns out that the gentle folks of the Appalachian State are no more tolerant of James Tait's man-on-horse sexcapades than than we are. Surprising, we know.

Tait, one of two King County men implicated in the 2005 horse-sex scandal that prompted the Washington state legislature to promote bestiality to a Class C felony, and gave the world the gift of Mr. Hands, was arrested last week after local sheriff's deputies raided his rural Tennessee home and found evidence that Tait had been loving the animals too much for "some time," reports the Seattle Times.

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Topics: Animals and Crime & Punishment

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Costco Demands This Beef Be Inspected

Posted Oct. 8 at 4:27 pm by Caleb Hannan

​Costco has entered into a new deal with Tyson that will allow the Issaquah-headquartered behemoth to test the beef producer's trimmings before mixing them with other suppliers. (Seriously? "Trimmings"? Ugh.) It seems like a pretty well-timed move in light of that disgusting New York Times feature about the E.coli-tainted hamburger that paralyzed a dance instructor. Nicely played, Costco.

(BTW. In related news, Cargill, the food giant that made the hamburger that paralyzed the woman issued a statement about their faulty product. It reads "Our hearts go out to Ms. Smith and her family, as well as the others whose lives have been so affected by O157:H7." Attention college kids: Stop studying whatever it is you're studying, drop out and start a consulting company catering to big companies like Cargill where all you do is write sorrowful letters expressing remorse to the guy who got maimed by a corndog or the toddler suffocated by a double-stuff Oreo. There is a market for this. And whatever you write, it's got to be better than that crap Cargill got from their apology-bot.)

Topics: Animals and Business

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You Damn Penguins Get Off My Phone!

Posted Oct. 8 at 2:02 pm by Brian Miller

​Has it come to this? Are we so besotted with penguins and other cute animals that the Woodland Park Zoo insists on our monitoring them via smartphone? The answer, apparently, is yes. The zoo announced today that it's offering a 99-cent application via iTunes for your iPhone.

Developed by some Texas software company, the app allows easy access to the zoo's schedule, news, etc., and employs GPS for you to follow and find your friends and children during visits. But not, unfortunately, the animals—which would be so much more fun to track remotely from your phone. ("Look, it's eating its own poop! How adorable!") And of course there's a social networking component: "easy access to Facebook and Twitter so you can share your zoo experience." Because that's just what we need—our friends updating us on the bonobos compulsively humping one another. ("Mommy, why is that monkey sitting on the other monkey?")

For a dissent on all things cute and cuddly, we recommend the cute-backlash site F U, Penguin. Otherwise, more penguin cuteness and full zoo release after the jump...

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Topics: Animals, News, and Technology

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Big Shellfish vs. the Little Guys: On Oysters, Geoducks and Who Gets a Booth

Posted Oct. 7 at 1:54 pm by Caleb Hannan

Dear lord, send it back from whence it came!

​This past Saturday, a bunch of folks who care very much about the health of the world's oceans got together at Pier 66 for the first-annual Blue Festival. They're just like you and me, in that they want to eat fish without toxins and swim without getting sick, only they work very, very hard to make sure that dream becomes a reality. (You and I? Not so much.)

Also at Blue Festival were representatives of Taylor Shellfish. Taylor has been growing shellfish in Puget Sound for 100 years. Seeing as how they claim to be all about sustainable seafood production, and that was the focus of Blue Festival, it makes sense that Taylor was a little miffed when they were denied the right to set up a booth. Except that this has happened before. And Taylor, like all good industry, has a history of pulling out the victim card when threatened.

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Topics: Animals and Environment

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The New York Times Will Make Vegetarians of us all

Posted Oct. 6 at 8:11 am by Caleb Hannan

Meat grinders: Where all the world('s beef by-products) come together as one.

​With the ubiquity of foodie activists like Michael Pollan and release of documentary films like Food, Inc., lately it's gotten harder and harder to ignore the reality that most of what we eat didn't start off looking anything like how it ends up in Safeway's frozen foods aisle. For those still unaware of the grisly details within an industrialized food chain, this Sunday's New York Times feature on Stephanie Smith, a children's dance instructor left paralyzed by E. coli-tainted beef, must have come as quite a shock. The key graf:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled "American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Hungry yet?

Topics: Animals and Rants

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See Squirrel Monkeys See More Color, Thanks to These Huskies

Posted Sep. 22 at 7:34 am by Damon Agnos

Wikipedia

​If you're a male squirrel monkey, you're probably not reading this. (Same holds true for the ladies.) And even if you are reading this, you probably don't realize that you're somewhat colorblind, that the cone cells of your retina are missing a red pigment. But if you are reading and you do realize it, and you want to get it fixed, now you know the place to go: the University of Washington. In particular, the lab of Jay and Maureen Neitz, where they can use gene therapy to get you the pigment, so you can see a fuller range of colors. Just ask squirrel monkeys Dalton and Sam, for whom the world is suddenly a lot more colorful. It's hard out here for a squirrel monkey, no doubt, but at least it should be hard in the full range of hues.

Topics: Animals

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Cute Critters in the 'Hoods

Posted Sep. 21 at 8:58 am by Damon Agnos

​If you're looking for your daily cute animal pic fix, look no further than the neighborhood blogs, which have some great ones. To wit: Fremont Universe covers the lederhosen-cald pooches at Dogtoberfest, while West Seattle Blog has adorable pics of beached seal pups. Click and "aww."

Topics: Animals

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Cockfighting in the 206

Posted Sep. 18 at 8:36 am by Damon Agnos

​It's not a sport often associated with Seattle, where our preferred birds are Seahawks, but the P-I reports that the SPD has a handful of suspects in a cockfighting ring, and sadly, the 36 birds had to be put down, on account of being excessively combative. (Live by the sword...) But it makes me wonder—despite its inherent cruelty (or maybe because of it), cockfighting seems like a tough thing to eradicate. So what ever happened to Oklahoma state senator Frank Shurden's 2005 proposal to have the birds wear boxing gloves and also protective vests that keep score electronically, like is done in fencing? Said Shurden at the time, " Who's going to object to chickens fighting like humans do? Everybody wins. Let the roosters do what they love without getting injured." Indeed, maybe then the sport would go mainstream.

Topics: Animals, Crime & Punishment, and Sports

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Microsoft's Guerilla Recruiting Campaign to Add Even More Awkward Young Males to Its Workforce

Posted Sep. 17 at 4:04 pm by Damon Agnos

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Topics: Animals, Business, and Technology

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Prosecutor Says Seagull-Clubbing Was Poor Judgment, but Not Criminally So

Posted Sep. 17 at 3:38 pm by Damon Agnos

​Thus the seagull-chick affair comes to an end, fortunately a less brutal one than was visited upon the seagull-chicks themselves. If you'll recall, a couple of state troopers, charged with getting rid of a troublesome seagull nest next to the ferry docks downtown, clubbed the baby seagulls to death. (Standard procedure would be instead to call in the feds, who have roving death panels (that phrase will likely earn us a few clicks from angry, deluded health care protesters. "What's all this talk about seagulls?").) Today, the King County Prosecutor's office announced that it will not be filing charges for animal cruelty or unlawful taking of protected fish or wildlife charges, though it commented that the troopers used poor judgment. A couple of idle young whippersnappers were overheard suggesting the troopers try Alka-Seltzer next time instead.

Topics: Animals and Crime & Punishment

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This Is How Bad Things Have Gotten: We Have to Compete With Raccoons

Posted Sep. 14 at 8:05 am by Damon Agnos

​The dwindling pie of the recession—or of the recovery-in-name-only—pits city against city, neighbor against neighbor, and now, human against raccoon. So reports My Ballard: Over the weekend, a raccoon attacked almost the entire Silverstein family—Ma, Pa, and dog. Fortunately, the couple's weeks-old baby was spared, but the rest had to get rabies and tetanus shots

This sort of ugliness is yet another of our contributions to the Rapture Index. Speaking of which, when end days come, what happens to pets? Will they, too, be left behind? A group of atheists offers, in all their secular humanistic goodness, to take on the little creatures even as the fires arrive. But that may be long off; this, by contrast, is now:

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Topics: Animals and City of Seattle

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It Used to Be Known as the MILF Beat

Posted Sep. 2 at 3:35 pm by Damon Agnos

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Of course, for the comprehensive 411 on Northwest cougars, revisit Huan Hsu's SW opus on the subject.

Topics: Animals and Arts & Culture

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Today's Faith-in-Humanity-Reaffirming News: Stolen Animatronic Gorilla Returned to Arts Center

Posted Aug. 18 at 7:50 am by Damon Agnos

The "missing" poster, via Cooper Journal

​The news is regularly filled with stories that will erode your faith in your fellow human beings—such as Sunday's racial invective-filled fight over an attempt to bum a cigarette.

Today, however, brings this piece of uplift: The six-foot tall animatronic gorilla that was stolen from a garage sale at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center a couple weekends ago was dropped off at a Seattle Police station yesterday and then returned to its rightful owners. The owners say the gorilla is a little worse for the wear, but they won't press charges against the culprits, whose license plate number was taken down by witnesses at the scene. They would, however, like the gorilla-nappers to appear in the suit to promote a Youngstown event. So hooray for people. And gorillas.

Topics: Animals and Crime & Punishment

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I Learned It From Watching You: Feds Have Been Offing Gulls for Over a Decade

Posted Aug. 4 at 8:58 am by Damon Agnos

This gull escaped the killing fields to UW's Red Square

​Killing gulls is nothing new—the trick, apparently, is in how you do it. A few weeks ago, the Washington State Patrol got some heat because a couple of their members clubbed baby seagulls to death at the ferry terminal. But it turns out that they were just a little inartful (and inhumane) in their execution. For more than a decade, the US Department of Agriculture (with the approval of the US Department of Fish and Wildlife) has been sending terminators to take care of problem gulls—for example, gulls that divebomb people, or that are suspected of making people sick with their droppings. (Not sure how they'd identify the problem birds on that last one.)

The terminators use pellet guns and, for the little ones, little gas chambers that look like microwaves. (These are the methods that the USDA has approved of as humane.) The carcasses are supposedly removed before the first ferry runs. But just in case they aren't, now you'll know what to tell your kid the next time you take her to the ferry and she sees the men and women carrying the pellet guns and the strange metal boxes. "No, those aren't microwaves, sweetie—those are gas chambers for killing baby birds."

Topics: Animals

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