Eco-Mania
TOO HOT: Italian farmers are installing air conditioners in cowshed and pigsties to cool off animals dealing with 100-plus temperatures, the hottest July in more than a decade. Cows produced 50 million liters less milk in the first 15 days of the month and chicken laid up to 10 percent fewer eggs.
A merry melange: salient or silly.
INDIGESTION: A 12-foot-long snake’s big meal was also its last. After the huge African rock python died, South African park rangers opened its stomach and found a 30-pound porcupine. Its needle-sharp quills apparently punctured the snake’s digestive tract and led to its death. Pythons are some of the world’s largest snakes and kill their prey—some as big as antelopes—by constriction.
SQUIRREL WANTED: That’s the mock headline that police in a Detroit suburb are using to find the thieves who stole a truckload of snack nuts worth about $128,000. Police had hoped that the power of social media and a picture of a squirrel in a wanted poster would help crack the case. But despite a share of more than 400 times on Facebook, it did not garner any credible leads.
CAUTION: FLYING EGGS: That’s the warning sign in Swaton, England, site of the annual World Egg Throwing Championship, which has a 700-year-old history. The two-man teams start at 11 yards from each other and try to throw the eggs without breaking the shell. They move further apart until only one team completes a catch without cracking the shell. The game originated around 1325 when an abbot in the Lincolnshire village, the only person who had chickens, encouraged church attendance by giving alms of one egg—even when the river flooded, when he was said to have thrown the eggs over to them. HEADS MISSING IN SACRAMENTO: Police are puzzled over a series of gruesome packages containing dead goats, chickens, lambs fish, rats and even a tortoise. In most of at least a dozen instances of mutilated animals, they are headless, blood-free and found near train tracks. EcoNews Aug/Sep 2015
NOT TESTY OVER TURKEY TESTICLES: A suburban Chicago pub owner and turkey testicle eat-off founder is not upset over a nearby community’s plan to hold its own celebration featuring the unusual dish. P.R. Westberg said his only criticism of the competing celebration is lack of originality. They use the same name, Turkey Testicle Festival, and schedule it for the same date and time on the day before Thanksgiving. Westberg’s attracts more than 4,000 people—and both will raise money for charity. www.yournec.org
HEROIC RODENTS: An elite rat known as Pit needed only 11 minutes before he detected a deadly mine in a Cambodian field, compared to the five days it would have taken humans and mine detectors to discover. He is rewarded by his two handlers with a banana. Pit is part of a team of 12 rats trained since they were four weeks old in Dahomey and sent by a Belgian non-profit to help clear mines and unexploded shells that have killed 20,000 Cambodians since 1979.
HARM-ADILLO: Larry McElroy, a 54-year-old man in Georgia, accidentally shot his mother-in-law after his bullet bounced off an an armadillo. He fired his pistol at the animal but his bullet ricocheted off its armor, hit a fence, went through her trailer and landed in her back. She was expected to make a complete recovery. PIG GETS FEMINIST AWARD: Miss Piggy, the beloved Muppet star of movies and television, received a feminist award for contributions to society. Along with a retrospective of her career, she had a conversation with long-time women’s rights campaigner Gloria Steinem in which she said she was “thrilled but not surprised” to share the honor to fellow legends and role models.
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