Showing posts with label Claw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claw. Show all posts
Your Connecticut canary is dead, it is no more, it is an ex-canary
The vicious Saffron Finch in the wild...In Connecticut they have a new sport, setting cage-bird on cage-bird, saffron finches and canaries for preference.
I learn this from the Cape Cod Day, a newspaper given away free in the Provincetown pharmacy, a paper which is supremely positive about anything going on around here (Children explore marsh at Wellfleet Wildlife Sanctuary) but happy to report hotter news from less favoured parts of Obama's America.
It seems that a certain Waldiney Almeida was among 19 people charged in Connecticut with keeping cage birds for the purpose of fighting each other to the status of an ex-cagebird. How you can tell if a canary is being so trained, I am not sure and the story does not say.
There would seem many potential routes for the defence - as well as Monty Python parrot jokes for the jury. But the purpose was gambling - and gamblers are famously not choosey about the form of life that fights for their money.
Would the Saffron Songster from Acapulco un-perch Old Yeller Feller from the Adirondacks? Who could say - except the man with the $8000 stash and the super-charged birdfeed who is now helping the police with their enquiries? It doesn't sound much of a sport but, heck, it's at least a sign that America is moving forward in the post George W.Bush era.
No room for bear-baiting and cock-pits now.
Pit bulls are just too expensive - and so fashionable an accessory this year on the Cape.
And yet?
There must be something of a pause here.
Kinder, gentler, fine.
Smaller, leaner, cheaper, post-crashier, absolutely fine.
But a country where the canaries do the fighting?
Surely a comfort to America's enemies everywhere.
More on the story here.
Thanks to D. B. for this lead.
Killer dogs sow terror in Sicily
 The latest victim was attacked and mauled on Tuesday |
Italian police are hunting a pack of stray dogs which killed a boy aged 10 and mauled a 24-year-old woman in the Ragusa area of southern Sicily.
They caught about 30 strays after the boy was dragged off his bicycle and killed on Sunday but about 20 dogs are believed still to be running wild.
The priest at the boy's funeral accused society of turning animals into icons.
It is an offence to kill a dog in Italy and the country lacks properly funded pounds in which to collect strays.
Reports suggest the dogs had been neglected and starved by a man entrusted with caring for them. A suspect has been arrested.
Animal rights groups estimate there are up to half a million stray dogs, mainly in the south of the country, many of them abandoned by their owners and left to run wild.
Although local town councils are supposed to round up strays and put them in public kennels, the law is often ignored as public funds are not provided for building dog pounds, the BBC's David Willey reports from Rome.
Health officials in Sicily are to meet on Wednesday to decide how to cope with the killer dog emergency.
Deep wounds
In the latest attack, the 24-year-old, a German tourist, was seriously injured while walking on a beach near Ragusa on Tuesday.
 |
"Her face was particularly disfigured," said Christian Ilardi, a rescue official who was on the helicopter that rushed the woman to Catania.
"Her life is in serious danger due to the wounds, which are very deep."
Local police killed two animals which tried to attack them during the day.
Some 7,000 mourners people attended the funeral of Giuseppe Brafa, the boy killed on Sunday.
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