Tag Archives: animals

Animal Planet Is Being Sued for a Whole Bunch of Insane Things

by LesNewquist565 Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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A Kentucky farmer has accused Animal Planet of setting a fire, damming a creek, chopping down trees, and illegally trespassing and building structures on his property during the production of the reality TV show Call of the Wildman.

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Ratings of Animal Planet Show Nosedive After MoJo Exposé

Scandal is all too familiar for viewers of this once-popular show, which follows the supposedly real-life antics of a wily Kentucky wildlife rescuer nicknamed “Turtleman” and his buddies. First, Mother Jones uncovered evidence of repeated animal mistreatment, including drugging an endangered zebra and trapping a sick coyote and other animals for elaborately faked scenes. Then came revelations of state and federal animal welfare investigations, abrupt cancelations of broadcasts, and plummeting viewership—all the while Animal Planet representatives denied any wrongdoing.

Now, Turtleman, a.k.a. Ernie Brown Jr., along with his fellow cast members and producers, is facing a potential trial over allegations stemming from an episode filmed in the summer of 2014, called “Call in the Cavalry.” During the episode (part of which can be watched online), the so-called “Turtle Team” builds an elaborate tree house, using only materials that they find in the woods, and the “backwoods wisdom” for which the show is famous. “Everything we’re going to get is going to come from the backwoods,” Turtleman instructs his team—and the cast can be seen chain-sawing at least one tree, cutting shingles, and mixing cement.

But behind the scenes, J.D. Long, a 54-year-old resident of the rural hamlet of Liberty, Kentucky, says the show’s producers came onto his approximately 49-acre property after his sister, who lives there, explicitly told them they weren’t welcome. Long was furious when his sister told him that the team had built the tree house at least partly out of lumber he says they logged on his land. (One of Long’s lawyers, Andrew Trimble, says he saw multiple tree stumps at the site during a survey—consistent, he said, with claims in the broadcast that the tree house was built using local materials.) Long told local police that he commissioned a survey and found that three-quarters of the new tree house along with a recreational zip-line was built on his property, near the boundary line he shares with his neighbor, Rodney D. Finn.

The tree house in question, as featured in the episode “Call In The Cavalry.” Animal Planet

“They didn’t cut just any tree,” Long said. “Some of these trees they cut, they’re not replaceable. They only grow in certain places. They grow in deep, dark hollows.” Long, a landscaper and nurseryman by trade, says people tend to pay a top dollar for this type of wood, which is prized in log cabin design.

Along with trespassing and cutting down his trees, Long also alleges that people working for the show chipped away at the rock face of a waterfall Long says is also on his property to make the concrete (a scene that plays out in the actual broadcast), and then used that concrete to dam up one of his creeks.

Also Read “The Cruelest Show on Earth,” our yearlong investigation into elephant abuse at the Ringling Bros. circus.

But the most bizarre part of the incident, Long says, came in the middle of the night some months after filming had wrapped up—around November 20, 2014—when he woke to the sound of machinery. “My sister jumped out of bed, she was scared to death,” he said. “It made this whizzing that sounded like the whole neighborhood was going to blow up.” He called 911.

It turned out the whizzing was coming from a crane, Long said, which had arrived under the cover of darkness to tear down the tree house. Long says the remains of the tree house were then set on fire. “I mean, they could have set the whole mountain on fire, that’s what got me,” he said. “I was really aggravated.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Jamie Walters says he saw evidence of burned wood at the site of the tree house when he went to look, and found debris in the creek, according to a police report he filed about the incident. In the same police report, Long’s neighbor, Finn (whom he is also suing), admits to building the tree house that the production company had wanted for the episode. In court documents filed in his defense, Finn admits to being an “associate” of Turtleman, but denies the other allegations.

Finn did not respond to a voicemail left by Mother Jones, but in an interview with Deputy Walters last year, Finn said he had rented a crane and attempted to move the cabin after Long complained. Walters wrote: “He said when they tried to move the cabin it buckled in the center and came apart. Some of the cabin was salvaged but the remaining parts were burnt.”

According to Walters, Finn said he admitted that he “made a mistake when he constructed the cabin because he thought it was on his property.” Long refused to accept $1,000 from Finn as an apology.

Animal Planet and Sharp Entertainment—the New York-based production company that makes the show—did not respond to repeat attempts to seek an interview for this article. Neither did attorneys Rebecca Schafer and Emily Newman, from the Louisville legal firm representing the bulk of the defendants. Schafer and Newman filed documents asking the court to dismiss the case in May, and denied all the central allegations. The judge has yet to rule on that request.

In March, Long filed a suit against Animal Planet and its parent company Discovery Communications, along with the show’s production company, Sharp Entertainment, CORE Media Group (which owns Sharp), the cast of the show, and his neighbor Rodney D. Finn, who he says also trespassed and was involved in the construction and destruction of the tree house. Long has since been locked in the back-and-forth pre-trial exchange of documents between lawyers. No trial date has been set.

For his part, it seems like Turtleman might need all the financial help he can get from the production company he has worked for since 2011. “People think I have a million dollars,” he told The Post Standard, in March. “I got the famous part, but I haven’t got the rich part figured out yet. I’m the poorest famous guy around. I only made $50,000 last year, and that’s before taxes.”

Call of the Wildman is still under investigation by the US Department of Agriculture, which is looking into multiple claims of animal mistreatment raised by Mother Jones reporting last year:

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Animal Planet Is Being Sued for a Whole Bunch of Insane Things

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These Bats Look Exactly Like Teddy Bears and Cute Little Piggies

by RudolphMott Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Despite the fact that Dr. Merlin Tuttle, 74, has saved millions of bats around the world through his research and advocacy, and has taken hundreds of thousands of pictures of bats (sometimes shampooing them beforehand), he won’t judge you if you are afraid of them.

He won’t even get mad if you’ve tried to hurt one. In his more than fifty-year-long career, Tuttle has encountered just about every sort of reaction one could have toward a bat, and witnessed every horrible thing you could do to one. His reaction? To try to be understanding and then calmly list, as he did with me below, all the ways bats are amazing critters who will, in fact, make your life better.

Since he first discovered bats as a teenager in a cave close to his house in Tennessee, he has devoted his life to them, founding Bat Conservation International, the world’s leading bat advocacy group (which he has since left to found Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation); publishing more than 50 research articles on bats; and lending his work to several National Geographic features. Last week, he a released a charming memoir: The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World’s Most Misunderstood Mammals. In it he recounts his amazing adventures saving the stigmatized species from moonshiners in Tennessee caves, poachers in Thailand, politicians in Austin, Texas, and on and on.

He recently talked to Mother Jones about what makes bats so important, how he started photographing them, and why he is optimistic for their future despite the continuing threats facing the species.

On why people fear bats: It’s human nature and animal nature that we fear most what we understand least, and bats, because they are active at night, dart around unpredictably, it’s easy to fear them. But the more we learn about them the easier it is to like them. And most people are just amazed when they find out that there is this incredible variety and that they have highly sophisticated social systems, similar to those of primates and dolphins, and then they find out how valuable they are and probably most importantly learn that the bats just don’t go around attacking people and looking for trouble—even a sick bat is extremely unlikely to ever attack anyone. We all love our dogs and yet dogs are vastly more dangerous in terms of human mortality than bats are. Bats have one of the finest records of living safely with people of any animal in our planet.

In 55 years of studying bats on every continent where they exist, dealing with hundreds of species, sometimes surrounded by thousands, even millions at a time in caves, I’ve never once been attacked by a bat, I’ve never seen an aggressive bats, and I’ve never contracted any disease from a bat.

On why bats are valuable to humans: Bats contribute billions of dollars annually in protecting farmers against crops pests, reducing the need for pesticides that already threaten nearly every aspect of our lives. If you go to a tropical fruit market you’ll find that some 70 percent of the fruit on sale are pollinated or seed dispersed by bats. The whole tequila liquor industry is based on agave that is highly dependent on bats for pollination. Many of our most valued timber trees are dependent on bats for pollination or seed dispersal. If you go to the East African savannas, the famous baobab tree is highly dependent on bats for pollination. You go to Southeast Asia and the durian is so dependent on bats for pollination that you can’t even grow it in an orchard without bats to pollinate the flowers. And take the banana: all commercial bananas come form wild ancestors that continue to rely heavily on bats for pollination.

On the change in attitude towards bats since he started studying them decades ago: When I began devoting my life fulltime to bats back in 1982, just about everybody knew that bats were just ugly, dirty, rabid vermin that were dangerous, and now that is improved rather dramatically. At that time the most frequent call zoos got about bats was ‘Oh my god, I saw a bat in my yard last night, I’ve got children, what can I do,’ thinking that the bat was going to attack their children. And yet today those same institutions report that they are much more likely to get a call asking how to put up a bat house and attract bats to the yard. In fact, since the three decades since I introduced the idea of bat houses to North America there are now hundreds of thousands of bats living in people’s bat houses.

On how he got into bat photography: Back in 1978, because of my research on bats, National Geographic asked me to write a chapter in their new book Wild Animals of North America on bats. I worked real hard to write a chapter explaining to people that they didn’t have to be afraid of bats, that bats were actually quite valuable to have around. And then I went to Washington DC to meet with the editors and see the layout for my chapter in their book. All the pictures were just horrible! They were bats that were caught and tormented into snarling, and then photographed with their teeth bared.

I was rather shocked to find that after all my efforts to get people over their fear, they were going to put that kind of picture with my story. They agreed that that wasn’t a good thing and sent one of their staff photographers to go to the field for month with me to get some good picture of bats to go with the chapter. But bat photography is difficult, it’s definitely not easy. And in that month he just got three pictures that were really useful for the chapter, and by that time he realized there was as much involved with knowing bats as with knowing photography, and while he was with me I had hardly let him rest for a moment without asking him how and why he was doing what he was doing. So when he left he said look, you know what I know about photographing animals now, I’ve got some spare leftover film, let me leave it with you and why don’t you go out and buy yourself a little bit more equipment and see what you can contribute for the book. And I ended up being the second most used photographer in the book.

On the power of photographs to convince people of bats’ value: I began my photography strictly out defense of bats. It dawned on me that these pictures were incredibly powerful at changing people’s perception and so I got excited about photography. Without photography there would have been no real conservation progress in my opinion.

It’s so easy to change people’s minds about bats when you are armed with pictures. For kids that love dinosaurs, the dinosaurs all died out, there are bats still alive that are just as fascinatingly strange as any dinosaur, and yet if you like panda bears or something else that’s cute, there are bats that’ll run them stiff competition, too.

On other methods he used to convince people of bat’s benefit: I asked a Tennessee farmer one time for permission to go in his cave to study bats, and he said ‘Oh yeah, you’re very welcome, and just kill all you can while you’re there.’ He just assumed if i was a scientist i knew bats were bad and I would try to kill them. I came out and I said, ‘You know i really appreciate your letting me go in and look at your bats, I’m interested in learning exactly what all they are eating. You ever seen anything like these beetles?’ And he looks and goes, ‘Oh my god them suckas eat potato bugs?’ I said, ‘Well a colony the size of yours can probably ear 100 pounds in a night.’

I came back a month later to do some more research and he on his own decided each of his bats was worth 5 bucks and by George, anyone got near to doing anything bad to his bats was going to have a big problem with him.

That’s how it works, being able to listen to people no matter how crazy their fears are and trying to stand where they’re coming from, and then instead of getting upset when they tell you they’ve been killing them all their lives, just point out that we’ve all made mistakes in the past and that I’m not worried about what they’ve done in that past, but I assume that now that they understand bats, they’ll probably have a different attitude toward bats in the future.

On white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that’s wiped out nearly 6 million bats in North America: There is no question that the fungus has had terrible consequences, particularly in the Northeast. We definitely need to help them rebuild. We probably never needed conservation action more than we do right now for bats. But the good side of this story is that because of this calamity, millions of people have learned about the value of bats, and learned to care about bats who didn’t know anything about them previously. Now, because of the spread of white-nose syndrome, I’m seeing programs starting up all over the country to monitor the status not just of a few endangered species in a few select locations, but to monitor bats in general and to track them as we do birds, and that’s a very, very important step in the right direction because white nose-syndrome is not the only thing we have to worry about. We can do a whole lot better at protecting bats in the future because of what we’ve learned through white-nose syndrome, and I’m optimistic in that regard.

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These Bats Look Exactly Like Teddy Bears and Cute Little Piggies

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

by ShelliHollars Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ecotourism—the practice of visiting natural places not just to observe wildlife, but to actively conserve it—has seen dramatic growth in recent years: 7 percent annually, says the International Ecotourism Society, making it the fastest growing segment of the travel market. It’s not hard to understand why when you consider the promise of fun and charitable rewards in equal measure: In one fell swoop, zip-line through the cloud forest and save the orangutans that swing through it, too.

But new research may give travelers pause before dusting off the binoculars or snorkels for their next ecotourism adventure.

A paper published Friday in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that visitors to protected wildlife areas may be harming the local fauna, no matter how good their practices and intentions. In an analysis of 100 studies on animal behavior, researchers found evidence that animals let down their guard in environments where human activity makes predators scarce. Those behaviors could spill into interactions with poachers and natural predators—particularly at night or in the off-season, when the din of humanity abates—to potentially lethal effect.

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No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors

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Watch the Government Shoot Thousands of Moths Out of a Drone

by BonnyRebell91 Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pink bollworms are a species of pest (they’re baby moths) that love to feast on cotton. They’ve been largely eliminated from the United States, but flare-ups do occur now and then, causing an expensive headache for farmers. So the US Department of Agriculture is experimenting with an innovative but also kind of weird and gross solution, which you can see in the video above.

The process starts by raising bollworms in a lab that are fed a red, oil-based dye. When the bollworms mature into moths, the coloration stays with them, so they can be distinguished from wild moths. The lab moths are blasted with radiation, which makes them sterile. Then they’re released into the wild over fields with bollworm infestations. When the sterile lab moths mate with the wild ones, they’re tricked into thinking they’re going to reproduce, but don’t. So no new moths.

Scientists have experimented with releasing sterile moths for the last few years. But now, they’ve enlisted a new tool: drones equipped with moth cannons. Anytime a bollworm infestation pops up, just call in a drone to deliver a few thousand irradiated moths.

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Watch the Government Shoot Thousands of Moths Out of a Drone

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Want to slow climate change? Stop killing sharks

by bukaroso Posted on September 30, 2015

Want to slow climate change? Stop killing sharks

By on 30 Sep 2015commentsShare

With shark attacks on the rise in Australia, a handful of researchers gathered in Sydney on Tuesday to discuss potential shark repelling technologies. A new study published in Nature Climate Change, however, suggests that repelling sharks from vegetated coastal areas — or even more drastic options like partially culling shark populations — could be bad news for the climate. (And, it probably goes without saying, bad news for the sharks.) The Guardian reports:

With about 90% of the world’s sharks and other large predator fish wiped out through overfishing and culling, potential prey such as sea turtles, stingrays and crabs have flourished.

As a result, turtles have been free to munch their way through larger amounts of seagrass and crabs have been able to disturb a greater amount of seabed sediment. Such consequences have “far reaching consequences on carbon cycling and, by implication, our ability to ameliorate climate change impacts” the paper warns.

The research, conducted by academics from Deakin University, University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University, said vegetated coastal habitats store 50% of the carbon buried in all ocean sediments, representing about 25bn tonnes.

The links between predators and vegetated coastal areas (like salt marshes and mangroves) have been previously established, but this study is one of the first to take a deep dive into the actual mechanisms at play and connect these mechanisms to carbon sequestration and climate change.

The scientists write, “Sea turtles and dugongs preferentially forage in seagrass microhabitats that are low in predation risk. Seagrass microhabitats associated with low predation risk have lower [carbon] stocks than do microhabitats associated with high predation risk.” Basically, in the presence of animals like tiger sharks, grazers like sea turtles and manatees tend to feed elsewhere, and slow-growing, carbon-trapping seagrass is allowed to grow unadulterated.

For further evidence of sharks’ utility, just take a look at this animated diagram, as published in Nature Climate Change*:

via Giphy

Immediately, it should be obvious that the derpshark (Carcharodon derpius) and its toothy relatives are not only important keystone species, they are also significantly less frightening than one might have imagined. (The derpshark is, however, deeply terrifying in a more existential sense, much like the fact of Go-Gurt or Justin Bieber’s monkey.)

So Grist’s advice to the Australian policymakers responsible for solving the shark attack problem: Skip the “underwater gates that release electro-magnetic fields and flexible plastic nets” to repel sharks. Instead, why not simply mandate surfers to wear large shark costumes instead of wetsuits? Fighting climate change and shark bites with the same stick — that’s a policy with some teeth.

*Diagram not actually published in Nature Climate Change. Which you probably could have guessed.

Source:

Shark culling could indirectly accelerate climate change, study warns

, The Guardian.

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Want to slow climate change? Stop killing sharks

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Watch This Boston Bro Totally Lose His Shit Over a Weird Fish

by HomerPSCwxnsyw Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is what happens when a guy from Malden, Mass., sees a weird-looking fish in Boston Harbor, and decides to record his reaction, bro.

“I don’t know, man. I went nuts. We didn’t know what the hell it was,” Michael Bergin told the Boston Globe. “It was scaring me to death, it was like a dinosaur. It was so … ugly.”

H/t to Business Insider’s Facebook page (features some NSFW salty Boston language):

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Today was a great way to end summer thank u

Posted by

Michael Bergin on Thursday, September 17, 2015

By the way, it’s an ocean sunfish, which, to be fair, looks pretty damn weird:

Wikimedia Commons

It’s a strong contender for the new Double Rainbow:

Happy Wednesday.

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Watch This Boston Bro Totally Lose His Shit Over a Weird Fish

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Marco Rubio Uses Cecil the Lion to Shame Planned Parenthood Supporters

by SOYTerri5434 Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today, Marco Rubio couldn’t resist attempting to conflate two recent controversies—an American dentist’s admission he killed Cecil the lion and a sting operation currently targeting Planned Parenthood—for the following take:

The tweet, aside from demonstrating a clear lack of grammar skills, mirrors similar statements from the likes of Rush Limbaugh asserting the same blend of crazy. Rubio should probably lay off of Twitter and get back to actually doing his job.

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Marco Rubio Uses Cecil the Lion to Shame Planned Parenthood Supporters

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Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

by Reinaldo96Q Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bees are having a really hard time right now. For about a decade, they’ve been dying off at an unprecedented rate—up to 30 percent per year, with a total loss of domesticated honeybee hives in the United States worth an estimated $2 billion.

At first, no one knew why. But as my colleague Tom Philpott has reported extensively, in the last few years scientists have accumulated a compelling pile of evidence pointing to a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These chemicals are widely used in commercial agriculture but can have lethal effects on bees. Other pesticides are also adding to the toll. So are invasive parasites and a general decline in the quality of bees’ diets.

Clearly, that combination of factors poses a pretty serious problem for anyone who likes to eat, since bees—both the domesticated kind and their wild bumblebee cousins, both of which are in decline—are the main pollinators of many major fruit and nut crops. The problem is so severe that this spring President Barack Obama unveiled the first-ever national strategy for improving the health of bees and other key pollinators.

Now, it appears that lurking in the background behind the ag-industry-related problems is an even more insidious threat: climate change. According to new research published in the journal Science, dozens of bumblebee species began losing habitat as early as the 1970s—well before neonicotinoids were as widespread as they are today. Since then, largely as a result of global warming, bees have lost nearly 200 miles off the southern end of their historic wild range in both the US and in Europe, a trend that is continuing at a rate of about five miles every year.

As temperatures increase (the US is about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer today, on average, than in 1900), many plant and animal species in the Northern Hemisphere are shifting their range north. But by analyzing a vast archive of bee distribution records reaching back more than a century, ecologists at the University of Ottawa showed that bees are not joining that trend. Instead of shifting north like many other species, the bees’ range is only compressing in from the south, leaving less and less available habitat. That finding is illustrated in the chart below (and explained in more detail in the video at the bottom of this post, produced by Science).

Kerr et al, Science 2015

In a call with reporters, lead scientist Jeremy Kerr stressed that although pesticide use is a critical cause of bee mortality at local levels, it doesn’t explain the continent-wide habitat shrinkage that stands out in the bee data. But temperature trends do.

“They are in serious and immediate risk from human-caused climate change,” Kerr said. “The impacts are large and they are underway.”

The question of why bees aren’t pushing northward is a bit trickier, and it isn’t resolved in this paper. But Kerr said he suspects the answer could be the relatively long time it takes for bees to reach a critical mass of population that can be sustained in new places.

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Here’s Why All the Bees Are Dying

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We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

by WilmaR93bxwinuf Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States remains one of the globe’s most carnivorous nations, but things have changed subtly in recent decades. While our consumption of chicken has skyrocketed, we’re eating much less red meat.

Carolyn Perot

Overall per capita meat consumption has fallen nearly 10 percent since the 2007-‘8 financial meltdown; and as we cut back on quantity, we’re more likely to pay up for animals raised outside and not dosed with all manner of drugs.

Meanwhile, though, the meat industry lurches on, consolidating operations and stuffing its factory-scale facilities ever tighter with animals, as the organization Food and Water Watch shows in a recently updated map:

See the interactive version of this map here. Food and Water Watch

The charts below show the big picture. Note that the overall number of animals kept on US farms is leveling off, and in the case of beef cattle and meat chickens (broilers), actually dropping a bit. But the number of animals stuffed into each facility remains steadily on the rise for beef and dairy cows, hogs, and egg-laying hens. The number of meat chickens per site has plateaued—at the stunning level of more than 100,000 birds.

Among the many ecological problems you create when you concentrate so many animals in one place is massive loads of manure. How much?

These factory-farmed livestock produced 369 million tons of manure in 2012, about 13 times as much as the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population. This 13.8 billion cubic feet of manure is enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium 133 times.

When humans live together in large numbers, as in cities, we’ve learned to treat our waste before sending it downstream. The meat industry faces no such requirement, and instead collects manure in large outdoor cesspools (known, picturesquely, as “lagoons”) before being spread on surrounding farmland. Some individual counties churn out much more waste than large metropolises. Here’s Food and Water Watch on the nation’s most dairy- and hog-centric counties:

Recycling manure as farm fertilizer is an ecologically sound idea in the abstract—but when animals are concentrated in such numbers, they produce much more waste than surrounding landscapes can healthily absorb. As a result, nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus leach into streams and rivers, feeding algae blooms and fouling drinking water. Then there are bacterial nasties. “Six of the 150 pathogens found in animal manure are responsible for 90 percent of human food- and water-borne diseases: Campylobacter, Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli 0157:H7, Cryptosporidium and Giardia,” Food and Water Watch reports.

Air, too, is a problem, as anyone who’s ever gotten close to a teeming cow, pig, or chicken facility can testify. Thousands of people, of course, are forced to live near them or work on them, and it’s no picnic. “Overexposure to hydrogen sulfide a pungent gas emanating from lagoons can cause dizziness, nausea, headaches, respiratory failure, hypoxia and even death,” Food and Water Watch states. “Workers in factory farm facilities experience high levels of asthma-like symptoms, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.”

And these counties tended to be bunched together in great manure-churning clusters. Note, for example, how most industrial-scale hog production takes place in the Midwest and in eastern North Carolina:

While Big Chicken has chosen to alight largely upon the southeast, the Mississippi Delta, and California’s Central Valley:

So why are these large facilities humming even as US eaters cut back? Globally, demand for meat continues to rise, and the dark-red spots on the maps above have emerged as key production nodes in an increasingly globalized meat market. US meat exports have tripled in value since 1997 (USDA numbers), and the industry wants more, as evidenced by its push to support the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with Asia.

Continued: 

We’re Eating Less Meat—Yet Factory Farms Are Still Growing

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US beekeepers lost almost half their honeybees last year

by TrudyNorthern Posted on May 14, 2015

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, […]

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo

This New York Times best-selling guide to decluttering your home from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes readers step-by-step through her revolutionary KonMari Method for simplifying, organizing, and storing. Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant […]

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White Dwarf Issue 67: 09th May 2015 – White Dwarf

Conqueror protocols, engaged! White Dwarf 67 strides forth like an automata of death – well, of weekly hobby goodness – but beside it the Kastelan battle robots, the real mindless machines of death and destruction. What are these relics of an age ancient even by the standards of the Imperium? We’ve got the knowledge you’re […]

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Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog – Cesar Millan

After more than 9 seasons as TV’s Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan has a new mission: to use his unique insights about dog psychology to create stronger, happier relationships between humans and their canine companions. Now in paperback, this inspirational and practical guide draws on thousands of training encounters around the world to present 98 essential lessons. Taken together, they will […]

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Codex: Imperial Knights (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

Thundering across the battlefield, the towering walkers known as Imperial Knights scatter the foes of the Imperium with booming battle cannon shots and roaring swings of their massive chainblades. The Knights are piloted by proud and deadly warriors of ancient cultures, each one part of a noble family whose lineage can stretch back to before […]

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Linking Our Lineage: 12 Techniques from 12 Master Smiths – Victoria Lansford

Linking Our Lineage is a book of jewelry and metalsmithing techniques with chapters by Nanz Aalund, Lessley Burke, Juan Carlos Caballero-Perez, Andy Cooperman, Ronda Coryell, Robin Gordon, Mary Lee Hu, Linda Kaye-Moses, Brian Meek, Dawn M. Miller, Chris Ploof, and Jayne Redman, and edited by Victoria Lansford. The processes illustrated range from beginning to advanced […]

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Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul – Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen & Marty Becker

For thousands of years, dogs have been cherished as devoted companions and exuberant playmates—their unconditional love, limitless affection, and unwavering loyalty never fail to melt our hearts. The stories in Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul truly capture the special joy these four-legged creatures bring to our lives and hearts.  The family that learns […]

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of […]

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis – Instaread

PLEASE NOTE: This is a  summary and analysis  of the book and NOT the original book.  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis   Inside this Instaread: Summary of entire book, Introduction to the important people in the book, Key Takeaways and Analysis of the Key Takeaways. […]

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White Dwarf Issue 66: 02nd May 2015 – White Dwarf

Feel the earth tremble as White Dwarf 66 stamps down and with it the Imperial Knight Warden! Making not one, not two, but five classes of Imperial Knight – the Warden, Crusader and Gallant, plus the Paladin and Errant with a host of new options – you’re going to want to pick up White Dwarf […]

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US beekeepers lost almost half their honeybees last year

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, Smith's, solar, solar power, Thayer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US beekeepers lost almost half their honeybees last year