Sad Elephant News

Joyraj the elephant has died. He was 73. The 3.35 metre tall pachyderm had spent his life in the Kaziranga National Park in the Indian state of Assam. He had spent most of his life as a working elephant, transporting tourists into the park's jungle to see rhinoceroses and other animals that lived there. He also helped break up fights between unruly male elephants.

Joyraj has been in retirement since 2008, but was still a much loved fixture in the park. Mohan Karmakar, his mahout, wept at the animal's death, but it seems that that the other elephants in the park have also been mourning Joyraj's passing, loudly trumpeting and visibly crying at their loss.

The picture shows Joyraj with Elke Riesterer, an animal body therapist who treated the elephant for a number of ailments in 2008.

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Poignant Tortoise News

Sometimes I think it is only fairy tales that true love lasts forever. And it seems this is true of tortoises as it is for people. From Austria comes news that their two giant tortoises, Bibi and Poldi, are no longer on speaking terms. The two animals are 115 years old and have been together almost all their lives, becoming a breeding pair when they reached maturity. But now it seems to be over - Bibi no longer has any time for Poldi and went so far as to bite a chunk off his shell last month. Since then the two have had to be separated. Their zoo is trying to effect a reconciliation, but it does not seem to be happening.

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Sad Corgi News

You have probably heard already that Monty the Corgi has died. He was one of three Corgis who greeted Daniel Craig on his arrival in Buckingham Palace as James Bond to escort Queen Elizabeth to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. He was 13. Buckingham Palace has also announced the death of Cider, a Dorgi (Dachshund-Corgi) cross.

The Queen still has two Corgis, Willow and Holly, who both appeared in the Olympics short film. And she has two more Dorgis, Candy and Willow.

More on this sad story.

Pictures (check it out, if only for the picture of corgis climbing down the steps of a plane)

Even more Royal Corgi pictures

image source

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Sad Panda News

Bao Bao the Panda has died in Berlin Zoo. It is believed that he was the world's oldest male Panda when he died, being 32 years old. He was the last of his generation of Pandas who were given by China as goodwill presents to Western countries. He arrived in Berlin in 1980 and apart from a sojourn in London stayed there for the rest of his life.

The picture is from the website of Pambassador Jeroen Jacobs, who has written a memoir of his many visits to see Bao Bao. It includes some pictures of a very tired Bao Bao from only a few days before his death.

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Brave Dog Rescues Puppies From Fire

Reports are coming in of how a brave dog responded when a car bomb caused fire to engulf a house in Santa Rosa de Temuco in Chile. Amanda the dog carried her little puppies out of the building one by one, returning back into the inferno each time to rescue another. She then lay beside her young to protect them and was very protective when vets came to check on their health.

The story does not have an entirely happy ending, as one of the puppies was so badly burned that it died.

You can read more about this here. That article carries no further information on the car bomb that started the blaze, suggesting that these are an everyday occurrence in that part of Chile.

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Sad Animal News

Reuters are reporting that Lonesome George has died. George was the last of a the Pinta Island subspecies of Galapagos giant tortoises. With him gone his kind are now extinct. There had been attempts to mate him with female tortoises from related subspecies, but their eggs failed to hatch.

Lonesome George's exact age is unknown, but he is believed to have been around a 100 years old.

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image source (from a Guardian article reporting false hope in 2005 that he would be able to breed with the tortoises from a related subspecies)

Koala Bears In Danger!

The Australian government has officially classified the Koala Bear as "vulnerable" in much of the country. The popular marsupial is believed to be in trouble because of habitat loss and strikes by cars. Badly controlled domestic dogs have also created great problems for the eucalyptus-eating animals. It is estimated that in some parts of Australia the little animals have seen their numbers collapse by 40% since 1990.

It is hoped that the Australian government measure will bring some succour to the Koala, although some have complained that the classification does not extend to all of Australia. The authorities are saying, however, that the reason why the furry animals are not classed as vulnerable in Victoria and South Australia is that they are thriving there.

Whatever the case there, everyone will be hoping that the Koala Bear pulls through. And of course, despite its teddy-like appearance, Koalas are not actually bears at all, but as a marsupial bear analogue they do have observer status at the International Bear Congress.

Koalas themselves spend more than 20 hours a day asleep, so they are probably not spending too much time worrying about their vulnerable status.

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Even more on this story

Koala Bear Picture Gallery

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Brave Dog Escapes Avalanche

Mr David Gaillard and Ms Kerry Corcoran Gaillard were backcountry skiing in Montana with their dog Oly when disaster struck. An avalanche buried Mr Gaillard, whose last words were to encourage his wife to escape to the nearby trees. When the snow stopped falling, Mr Gaillard had been buried and there was no sign of Ole, who was believed to also have been entombed.

However, four days later the brave little corgi appeared back at the motel where he had been staying with David and Kerry – four miles from the avalanche site. No one knows whether the avalanche somehow missed him, or if he was buried but managed to dig himself out. Either way the return of the brave little dog has been one bright spot in a sad time for the Gaillard family.

More (Christian Science Monitor)

More (Billings Gazette)

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Poignant Panda

Suzanna Hall of San Diego Zoo writes:

"Before that trip to Wolong, I was assisting in a trial study of scent presentations in San Diego, utilizing Bai Yun and Shi Shi. We would present them with a small wooden board, painted with urine collected from bears in Wolong. Ultimately, the purpose of the study was to see what kind of information the bears could extract from the urine scent. Bai Yun could always be counted on to interact with the board for a moment or two, at least giving it a good sniff before moving on to finding her breakfast.

"One day, I presented Bai Yun with a board and was surprised by her response. She sniffed and licked the board, then picked it up and sniffed it again, intensely. She continued to hold the board for some time, sniffing and licking and even performing a flehmen to bring the scent into her vomeronasal organ. Then she started anointing herself with the board, rubbing it over her ears and neck vigorously. In all, she probably spent more than 10 minutes with that board. I couldn't see why her reaction to this scent might have been so strong, so I looked back at the urine vial I had poured the scent from: it was labeled "Dong Dong." Years after leaving Wolong, and long after she had been weaned, Bai Yun seemed to recognize the odor of her mother."


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image of the late Dong Dong

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World's Oldest Panda Dies

Ming Ming the Panda has died. The resident of a Zoo in Guangdong province was 34, the oldest recorded age ever reached by a Panda. The typical lifespan for Pandas in captivity is 22 years, while for wild Pandas it is estimated to be just 15 years.

Ming Ming appears to have been the same Panda who visited Dublin for 100 days in 1986. I was less interested in Pandas then, and so failed to go and see her.

I hope that now she is in Panda Heaven, stuffing her face with bamboo.

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Panda news generally

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RIP Cedric

Cedric the Tasmanian Devil has been euthanised. The fierce little fellow had developed untreatable facial tumours which would ultimately have prevented him from feeding and let to his starvation. The plague of facial tumours is devastating the Tasmanian Devil community, but hopes had originally arisen that Cedric was somehow immune to the disease. This has proved not to be the case.

Tasmanian Devils spread the facial cancers to each other by biting each other while fighting. Scientists have suggested that if they do not moderate their behaviour there is a real likelihood that they will soon be extinct.

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“Hello Mr Bear”

This polar bear is not saying hello to his new friends – he is about to eat them. Apparently polar bears have started scaling cliffs previously considered unclimbable in order to eat cliff-nesting birds, their young, and their eggs. This previously unseen behaviour is believed to be driven by difficulties the bears are having in finding enough of their normal food. These food shortages are probably driven by global warming, so the little birds’ deaths are ultimately your fault.

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Sad Animal News

Sam the Koala (above, being rescued) has died. Sam touched the hearts of millions when she was rescued from the Australian bush fires earlier this year, providing a feelgood aspect to what was otherwise a rather grim episode. However, she has died as a result of cysts associated with urogenital chlamydiosis.

"It's tragic that Sam the koala is no longer with us," said Kevin Rudd, Australia's prime minister.

Meanwhile, in Poland the authorities have raided a farm where St. Bernard puppies were being overfed and transformed into lard. I suppose this counts as a good news story, in that at least some of these puppies will now no longer be turned into lard, but it is still a bit sad.

Lard continues to be made from cows and pigs.

Koala image

lard puppy image

Theatre Fail

The Irish Times reports today that a number of smaller theatre companies are going to the wall after the Arts Council withdrew their subsidies. I will particularly miss Calypso, a group whose work tried to use drama as a way of engaging with and promoting issues. The two productions of theirs I saw (Gavin Kostick's The Asylum Ball and Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia) were both wonderfully inventive pieces of work. Issues-based drama suggests a certain turgid preachiness, but these works had a lightness and stylistic charm that meant that they could be enjoyed for their theatricality irrespective of the message they were meant to be communicating. I do not know if the same was true of Calypso's other productions, but I will miss seeing plays like the above two performed on the Dublin stage.

The world of the theatre must be facing a double squeeze right now. The downturn must mean that fewer people are willing to spend what can often be quite large sums of money on theatre tickets. Arts subsidies, meanwhile, are always an easy thing to cut when the state faces a collapse in its tax revenue. The Arts Council here have apparently decided to respond to cuts by disproportionately hurting the smaller companies (in some cases, as with Calypso, completely withdrawing their subsidies), with the rationale being that it is better in the long-run to keep Big Theatre going.

Media Fail

I read in the Irish Times today that the Dublin Event Guide is folding… sorry, it is discontinuing its print edition and will henceforth exist solely online. This is an ominous development. The Dublin Event Guide was a useful listings magazine, covering events in Dublin. I cannot make any claims for it being totally brilliant or anything, but it was a handy way of keeping an eye on what was going on in this city. The last time I looked, their website was not up to much; maybe they have plans to upgrade it, but I would be surprised if they have the money for it. In any case, listings are one thing where print media scores highly over electronic – it is far easier to browse through a listings magazine than to look at a listings website. I found with the Event Guide that the advertisements placed by the venues would catch my eye as much as the actual listings, something that is not really going to happen with some stupid website (and one I will in all likelihood never look at).

So there is nothing for it, I will have to start buying the Irish Times on Fridays, in order to read The Ticket, their attempt at a listings magazine.

Music Fail

I came back from Morocco to the suckass news that Road Records is closing down: Road Records - A message from the staff (on Thumped). Road Records is a likeable indie record shop in Dublin, probably the shop here for which I feel most affection, though I feel a certain guilt at how most of my recent purchases have been in Tower, Spindizzy, and Claddagh.

I had hoped that all this death of the record store stuff would actually mean that big chains died and the niche stores lived on, but it looks like maybe the indies are going down too. This is a shame, obviously. I can't speak for the young people, but I foresee losing a lot of engagement with music if there stop being record shops in which to look at records.

The Final Countdown, Part 1: Pictures & Background

You may or may not have heard of the Bowlie Forum. It was one of those Internet forum things, having its origin as the forum for Jeepster, then the record label of popular band Belle & Sebastian. After a while Bowlie cut loose from Jeepster (which in any case went into an undead state), but it retained its roots in B&S and indie fandom. It was an entertaining place to hang out and chitter chatter about stuff, but then the guy who ran it decided that he had enough, and he announced that it was going to end in August this year. Meetups had been a Bowlie thing, and The Final Countdown was to be the final Bowlie get-together, taking place about two weeks before the end. I must confess to having coined the name for this last meet-up, which explains why it was named after a song by LAIBACH. Apart from that I had nothing to do with the event's organisation.

The meetup took place in this pub-club in Brixton, at which Bowlie related bands got to play and other people played records between their sets. We couldn't get B&S themselves, as they are money-grubbing sell-out breadheads (and they have some kind of mysterious best-not-go-there feud with the guy who ran the Bowlie forum); instead we got bands that either had a forum member or two in the line-up or else were judged by the programmer to be the kind of thing we would like.

I will tiresomely go through the bands in future posts, but first I must salute the genius of whichever of the event organisers decided to project every image file ever uploaded to Bowlie onto a screen for a few seconds each. OK, so this led to me seeing many pictures of cats, but it also led to many oh-the-nostalgia moments.

Come back next time for unmissable discussion of the bands who played at this exciting event!

more awesome pictures

Sad News From Germany

Some of you may remember Eisbärbaby Knut, the polar bear from Berlin Zoo who had to be hand-reared after his mother rejected him. Some of you may also remember Thomas Dörflein, the zoo keeper who looked after Knut and used to play with him until he got too big and dangerous.

The Guardian reported today that Thomas Dörflein has died; he had been ill for some time. It has already been reported that Knut himself is not in the best of shape. Although now too big to have in the company of people, he is still of an age where in the wild his mother would look after him, so he is on his own and is apparently a sad little bear.

You would really have to wonder about the wisdom of keeping polar bears in zoos. In the wild, polar bears have massive ranges, happily travelling hundreds of miles over the summer hunting season. That the constraints they find themselves in in zoos lead to them going mad and neglecting their young should perhaps not be too surprising. I remember hearing anecdotally that when Dublin Zoo had polar bears, the mothers used to eat their babies, while in Germany another baby polar bear was abandoned by its mother earlier this year.

There have been reports (1, 2) that Berlin Zoo (among others) has been over-breeding cute baby animals to keep visitor numbers up, and then quietly exterminating older and less appealing specimens. If true, these allegations are disturbing, and they challenge the whole idea that zoos serve any kind of useful function.

Thomas Dörflein is succeeded by his partner and three children.

Gary Gygax

Apparently Gary Gygax has died. Gygax was the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons and, by extension, of the entire RPG hobby. I've spent a lot of my life scoving at Gygax and the world of character classes, byzantine tables, and clunky game mechanics he brought us, but the games I actually like playing would not have existed without him.

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obligatory panda image source

Remembering

While in Berlin, I checked out some museums. That inexplicably controversial exhibition on European refugees of the 20th century was fascinating and moving, but did feature a lot of people doing the Children of Men sad face. I also visited the Jewish Museum, which is interesting but maybe slightly hollow, and checked out the Memorial For The Murdered Jews (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden). This is an oddly extensive structure built over an acre or so of uneven ground, consisting of a number of blocks of dark stone pillars, each occupying the same ground area but rising to different heights. The piece was reminiscent of the Giant’s Causeway, though less impressive because of its newness. I really liked it as a piece of art, but did not really find that it worked as a memorial - instead remembering the victims of the Holocaust, I found myself imagining a complicated set-piece shoot out among the pillars, or the crack you could have playing chasing among them or jumping along the tops of them in a dangerous manner. Needless to say, playing chasing in the memorial or running along on tops of the monoliths is strictly VERBOTEN.

They like remembering bad things in Berlin. If you are ever there, check out the Topography of Terror (Topographie des Terrors). This is an open-air museum located in what were once cells in the basement of the Gestapo headquarters. Two periods of history meet with the museum being located right up against one of the few surviving sections of the Berlin Wall. The Topographie des Terrors documents the Nazis progression from bullying their political opponents to plotting the extermination of entire ethnic groups. It is a particularly evocative place to visit in the depths of winter, when the weather and the chillingly bureaucratic activities of the Third Reich combine to suck the life from your soul. Maybe there is something grotesquely inappropriate about engaging aesthetically with a memorial to terrible evil, but it hard not to be impressed with this exhibition's roughness.

If you've ever tried to learn German, you will probably have come across the Vater & Sohn comic strips. It was upsetting to learn that E.O. Plauen, their creator, was driven to suicide by the Nazis in 1944, after he was reported by a neighbour for suggesting in conversation that Germany was unlikely to win the war.