Posted on 01/26/2008 6:15:59 AM PST by meandog
MARSHALL, Texas (AP) - An animal protection group on Friday rescued more than 200 animals, including 26 hissing cockroaches and two bearded dragons, from an eastern Texas home. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said the animals were still being counted Friday night.
The group was acting under the authority of the Harrison County Sheriff's Department and had gone to the property on a warrant regarding medical neglect.
Besides the cockroaches and bearded dragons, the animals included 68 dogs, 16 rabbits, 15 guinea pigs, 13 gerbils, seven doves, two dwarf hamsters, two hedgehogs, an opossum and a pink toe tarantula.
The SPCA said some animals were found in outdoor pens while others were in sheds scattered around the property. Others were in a doublewide trailer living in filth.
The SPCA said many of the dogs were very thin and appeared to be suffering from eye and ear infections. One dead frog and a dead guinea pig were found. The saved animals were to be taken to an animal care center.
A sheriff's department spokesman said he had no information on the raid and didn't know if any arrests were made.
Sounds like the typical supporters at a Hillary campaign stop
They needed to “rescue” cockroaches?? Whatever happened to stepping on them?
Should I now call animal rescue when I see a fly in a grasshopper in a spider web, or animal control when I see a fly has flying around my house?
Notice how there was only one pink toe tarantula; apparently he “ate” his male partners?
Five goooooool-den rings ...
Yikes, these things can get up to 3 inches long, and are live-bearers!
http://www.petbugs.com/caresheets/G-portentosa.html
Hope these folks who rescued the cockroaches don’t open an office in Houston!!!! Working off commission they’d become millionaires in a year!!!
...and this made the Fox breaking news! Wonder why I quickly go to FreeRepublic??...
Hissing cockroaches are a different breed from Africa, they’re actually pretty freaking cool. And they’re jungle creatures not sewer creatures so all that dirty stuff you normally think of with cockroaches really doesn’t apply.
LOL! “Upper class” cockroaches!
They’re neat. The biolab at the college where my wife works has them, only problem is they’ve gotten so used to being handled they pretty much don’t hiss any more. What’s funny is they also have dwarf hamsters (different cage of course) and the roaches are bigger than the hamsters.
Learn something new here at FR every day!
Thanks for the link..
Apparently, they can be used as food for other bug species...such as that tarantula they rescued (?)
Cockroaches have always given me the creeps, just as they do to most people. But their creepiness factor went way up in my book about 15 years ago, when I read a book called “Divorce Among the Gulls”. It’s a pretty fascinating and very offbeat look at animal behavior, and implications for human behavior.
In one anecdote, an animal behaviorist/entomologist was doing an experiment to see if cockroaches were capable of learning, or if they operated entirely on instinct. It was part of a bigger question re the role of learning ability in evolution, and whether the ability to learn was a key evolutionary advantage. Cockroaches made good subjects, being an ancient species which can survive in a huge range of environments and has been predicted to be able to survive global nuclear war, yadda, yadda.
So the guy lines up his cockroaches on a special platform, designed to give them a little vibration, followed almost immediately by a mild electric shock to their front arms. Would they learn to raise their arms when they felt the vibration, so as to avoid the shock? Yes, in fact, they all learned this trick.
Then the experimenter — having the sort of twisted mind that one might expect in someone whose job involves things like teaching cockroaches — had another idea. How about chopping off their heads, and then lining them up on the platform, giving them the vibration signal, and seeing if they’d still lift their front arms? Alas, the headless cockroaches did indeed lift their arms in response to the vibration, and I’ve never been able to look at cockroaches quite the same way since.
I thought this was a joke from the onion.
The original post, or my post #14?
The original of course hissing cockroaches, bearded dragons
come on this is news?
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