Stephan: You don't hear much about 82-year-old Ted Turner these days, but that doesn't mean he has stopped his ecological support work. Yesterday I did that horrible report about the Trumpian Cultist move to kill 95% of the wolves in that state. Just a sickening story. Today here is some good news about wolves, thanks to Turner.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — One of Ted Turner’s ranches in southern New Mexico will be the new home for a pair of Mexican gray wolves and their pups as federal wildlife managers look at more options for boosting the genetic diversity of the endangered species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is teaming up with the Ladder Ranch for the project. While the ranch has been involved over the years with captive breeding efforts and other endangered species work, this will mark the first time a translocation of Mexican gray wolves has been done on private land.
Mike Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, said the invitation for wolves to roam the ranch has been open for many years and the team is excited that the arrival of the new pack is imminent. He said the pair and their pups deserve a shot at trying to make a go of it in the wild.
“The lion’s share of the credit for this goes to the Fish and Wildlife Service and the state of New Mexico for taking yet another […]
Stephan: I think Eugene Robinson is absolutely correct. The word Republican dating back to Abraham Lincoln may continue to be used, but it now means something very different than it did as recently the 1960s before Richard Nixon became president. What was once a political party is now an authoritarian anti-democracy, White supremacist, christofascist cult that has divorced itself from the fact-based world. In my view this cult is the greatest threat America faces, and I am going to stop using the term Republican, and replace it with Trumpian Cult, as in Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are leaders of the Trumpian Cult.
House Minority leader of the Trumpian Cult Kevin McCarthy. Credit: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
The greatest threat to our nation’s future is not covid-19 or the rise of China or even the existential challenge of climate change. It is the Republican Party’s attempt to seize and hold power by offering voters the seductive choice of rejecting inconvenient facts and basic logic.
For the American experiment and people to survive, much less prosper, this iteration of the GOP must fail.
The blind-loyalty-even-to-dishonest-insanity Republican litmus test that is about to cost Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) her leadership job is only the most acute manifestation of the party’s decline into utter irresponsibility. It’s bad enough that those who want to remain in good standing must embrace the “big lie” about purported fraud in the 2020 election. But the requirement doesn’t stop there. On issue after issue, Republicans are cynically adopting a kind of pre-Enlightenment insistence on the primacy of belief over evidence.
If some voters want to believe that covid-19 is somehow being overblown by the world’s leading experts in infectious disease, then it becomes mandatory for GOP governors — ambitious ones, at […]
Stephan: This statement by the Vatican's doctrine office, which by definition must have Pope Francis' approval is not getting much coverage in the media, but I think it is a big deal, and good news. The American bishops are a singularly unimpressive lot, and many are Trumpian cultists. This statement of the Vatican's position relative to President Biden, and the cautioning of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is going to have a significant impact on U.S. Catholic community.
President Biden and the Pope
The head of the Vatican’s doctrine office is warning U.S. bishops to deliberate carefully and minimize divisions before proceeding with a possible plan to rebuke Roman Catholic politicians such as President Joe Biden for receiving Communion even though they support abortion rights.
The strong words of caution came in a letter from Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed to Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB will convene for a national meeting June 16, with plans to vote on drafting a document on the Communion issue
There is division among the bishops, with some pressing for Biden and other Catholic public figures to be excluded from Communion over their abortion stance, and other bishops warning that such a move would be politically polarizing.
Ladaria, in his letter, said any new policy “requires that dialogue occurs in two stages: first among the bishops themselves, and then between bishops and Catholic pro-choice politicians within their jurisdictions.”
Stephan: How cognitively aware are dogs? This report shows we may have to reconsider our answer to that question.
Bunny the talking Dog Credit: Instagram/@what_about_bunny
When Bunny, TikTok’s beloved talking Sheepadoodle, stared at herself ina mirror and asked “who this?” using her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device’s buttons, many believed she was having an existential crisis. Since then, the Internet-famous dog has seemingly only become more interested in her own — dare we say — sense of self.
More recently on April 24, Alexis Devine, Bunny’s human parent, posted a video of Bunny pressing a button for “dog,” then a second button for “what,” a third button for “dog” and a fourth one for “is.” “Dog what dog is?” Devine narrated.
“This is happening so frequently that I’m going to add the buttons ‘animal’ ‘same’ and ‘different,’” Devine wrote in the caption which accompanied the Instagram post.
The canine Bunny, who has 6.5 million followers on TikTok, is one of nearly 2,600 dogs and 300 cats enrolled in a project called “They Can Talk.” The study’s aim is to understand if animals can communicate with humans through AAC systems. AAC systems, such as Bunny’s giant labeled buttons that speak a single word when pressed, were Read the Full Article
Stephan: From 12 to 23, when I came out of the Army, where I had been a medic, and threw all of my guns into the sea, I was actively involved in target, skeet, and trap shooting, and was so good at it that the Army initially wanted to make me a sniper to which I would not agree. In that period of a little over a decade I never had the slightest interest in hunting, although spending time in the wilderness has been one of the great themes and passions of my life.
A shooter armed with a 30 ought 6 rifle and a scope, who knows what they are doing -- an amazing number do not -- is not engaged in sport. Hunters like the camaraderie, and the primordial time in the wilderness engaged in killing animals. Shooting a deer in the woods is not really more challenging than shooting a dog in your driveway, or a cow in a field. Shooting an animal like a tiger or a rhinoceros as the Trump sons like to do is, or ought to be, criminal and prosecuted with lengthy prison time.
The hysteria about wolves is just that hysteria and delusion. The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reported 2,835 cattle and 453 sheep killed by wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains (Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming) from an inventory of 13.6 million animals. More importantly, as the National Park Service has discovered, when wolves are reintroduced and protected, the entire ecosystem of the parks becomes healthier. They also learned that the wolves attack and kill the weak, and damaged animals in a kind of culling process.
We so desperately need to understand the matrix of life before the damage we have done is irreparable. This Trumpian cultist move in Idaho is the exact opposite of what is needed.
Gray wolfCredit: Shutterstock
Wildlife advocacy groups are sounding the alarm about a new “extermination” law in Idaho, signed this week by GOP Gov. Brad Little, that will allow hunters and private contractors to kill up to 90% of the state’s gray wolf population—about 1,350 animals.
“Backed by an array of misinformation and fearmongering, the state Legislature stepped over experts at the Idaho Fish and Game Department and rushed to pass this horrific wolf-killing bill,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.
“And Republican lawmakers have promised that this is just the beginning, even though the new measure would doom 90% of Idaho’s wolves,” Zaccardi noted. “We’re disappointed that Gov. Little signed such a cruel and ill-conceived bill into law.”
Before Little approved the measure, Fast Companyreported that “it’s one of a handful of Western states’ aggressive pushes to cull predator populations. But, this one goes a step further: hiring hitmen for wolves.”BREAKING: Idaho Governor Brad Little has signed a gray #wolf extermination bill […]
