Free Republic

A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs should be declared the copyright owner of the photos, rather than the nature photographer who positioned the camera, animal-rights activists contend in a novel lawsuit filed Tuesday. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It seeks a court order allowing PETA to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as 6-year-old Naruto, and other crested macaques living in a reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The photos were taken during a 2011...

resident Obama owns two adorable dogs, Bo and Sunny. Clearly, he likes animals. So, itÂ’s puzzling why his administration supports global environmental policies and federally-subsidized energy technology that endangers animals like cats and birds. CATS Sadness and anger echoed around the world when an American dentist shot Cecil the lion, a protected animal, in Zimbabwe. But where is the shock and disappointment over the fact that Australia plans to spend some $6 million to shoot, poison and trap 2 million feral cats? And why has the Obama administration applauded AustraliaÂ’s plans while making a big show of seeking justice for...

Delta Airlines on Monday announced that its banning the shipment of safari hunting trophies like lions, giving a major push to several calls for a national embargo on the shipment of pelts and horns.

Ohio cops are investigating the ransacking of a Circle K store that was overrun early Saturday morning by up to 70 juveniles. According to Akron police, the suspects “entered the gas station and started to destroy and steal property” during the so-called mob and rob attack. As seen above, a couple who stopped at the Circle K for gas shot video of the juveniles fleeing the store with stolen merchandise. A woman in the car called 911 and reported that the suspects were “running around in the parking lot like wild children.” An Akron Police Department report--which classified the incident...

The outrage over Cecil's death is absurd when you think of the other, bigger problems which people are happy to ignore There is a new, pointless ride opening in town designed to give users an instant but ephemeral rush. It isn’t the slide down the ugly, unnecessary Olympic tower, but the convenient and free outrage bus currently stopping on your street and picking up passengers for Cecil, the beautiful dead lion. Out of any and all proportion to the severity of his dreadful act of animal murder, the dentist who killed Cecil has become an international focal point of hate...

From Progressives Today: “Republicans and conservatives are the enemy. They are expendable. They will be targets in the Revolution when it comes” writes Roland Windsor Vincent, in a recent post on his blog, Army Of The Revolution. The entry, entitled “Protect Animals And The Environment. Shoot Republicans“, centers around animal rights and how “active Republican and conservatives voters are enabling the Animal Holocaust” and “If we were to start shooting Republicans, we would likely not harm a single friend of animals or the environment.” You hear about something like this and you want to think of it as an anomaly....

The question of whether animals will join us in the afterlife finally has a definitive response from Rome. It’s a topic that’s been long debated, with Popes weighing in unofficially on both sides. Last December, a story broke nationwide claiming that Pope Francis had declared that animals are going to heaven, but it turns out that the media had conflated two stories, and that it was actually Pope Paul VI who had, many years earlier, told a young boy that “one day we will see our animals in the eternity of Christ.” Paul was later contradicted by Pope Benedict XVI,...

Hip-hop mogul and animal-rights advocate Russell Simmons is comparing New York's horse-drawn carriages to slavery and the Holocaust. Simmons spoke Thursday at an event organized by horse carriage opponents. The Wall Street Journal reports that he likened horse carriages to slavery, ethnic cleansing and "people who put people in ovens."

A little girl, catching a cool breeze from an air conditioning unit in the yard, was blindsided by another child about her same age, who had evidently had some practice with fighting fierce. The small victim wasn’t alone, as there were plenty of nearby witnesses, who could have protected her but didn’t because they were too busy recording the brutal beat down and encouraging it. The video was sent to Mediatakeout, allegedly by a “concerned” relative of the 5-year-old girl on the receiving end of the attack. It’s not known whether this relative bothered to send the footage to authorities, but thankfully,...

Two heads are better than one, and three monkey brains can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, a team has networked the brains of multiple animals to form a living computer that can perform tasks and solve problems. If human brains could be similarly connected, it might give us superhuman problem-solving abilities, and allow us to communicate abstract thoughts and experiences. "It is really exciting," says Iyad Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in Dubai, UAE, who was not involved in the work. "It will change the way humans cooperate." The work, published today, is...

The first comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome reveals extensive genetic changes that allowed mammoths to adapt to life in the arctic. Credit: Giant Screen Films © 2012 D3D Ice Age, LLC ======================================================================== The first comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome reveals extensive genetic changes that allowed mammoths to adapt to life in the arctic. Mammoth genes that differed from their counterparts in elephants played roles in skin and hair development, fat metabolism, insulin signaling and numerous other traits. Genes linked to physical traits such as skull shape, small ears and short tails were also identified. As a...

The Entomology Research Museum at the University of California, Riverside today announced the discovery of a new species of firefly from Southern California, collected by an undergraduate student as part of his semester's insect collection. Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist, said the student, Joshua Oliva, obtained one specimen of the new species while collecting near Topanga, Calif. "He wasn't 100 percent certain it was a firefly, and brought it to me for confirmation," Yanega said. "I know the local fauna well enough that within minutes I was able to tell him he had found something entirely new to science. I...

The release of Jurassic World has reignited our love for palaeontology. Many of us share a longing to understand the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth long before we arrived. But palaeontology is a discipline much broader than this. Dinosaurs dominated the land for 135 million years, but what happened during the rest of the Earth's 4.6 billion-year history? The role of palaeontologists past and present has been to unravel the mysteries of life on Earth, and in doing so they've found a lot more than just dinosaur bones. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. The spiky-backed ocean dweller: Right side up? Credit: Natural Math/flickr,...

It started innocently enough, when there was a curious sighting after the Dodgers lost to the Cardinals on Thursday night at Dodger Stadium -- a skunk, roaming around on the warning track, just minding his own business.... When the Cardinals took the field for pregame warmup, they were greeted with not one, not two, but a family of four skunks, all stuck under one of the photography wells in the visiting dugout.

A Syrian priest who has worked for the restoration of a monastery and for improved relations between Muslims and Christians in Syria has been kidnapped. ​The Syrian Catholic Archdiocese of Homs confirmed the news Friday, said Fides news agency. Just a day before he went missing, Father Jacques Mourad, prior of the Monastery of Mar Elian and pastor of the community in Qaryatayn, wrote an appeal as jihadist forces spread out from the nearby city of Palmyra: "We are currently experiencing a very difficult time because the extremists who call themselves Daech approach our city Qaryatayn after their domination of Palmyra,...

The terror group strips girls naked, conduct virginity tests, and send them to slave auctions after they have attacked their villages, often killing their husbands, fathers and brothers ISIS terrorists are picking out the “prettiest virgins” from the women they capture and sending them to their Syrian stronghold to be sex slaves, according to a UN expert. And there are horrific reports about the fate of the brave women who resist the murderous terrorists - including one victim who was burned alive for refusing to perform “extreme sexual acts”. Fierce haggling usually breaks out at slave auctions, where the girls...

Over decades of studying the oceans' fishes, some species have been found to have partial warm-bloodedness. But scientists say the opah, or moonfish, circulates heated blood — and puts it to a competitive advantage. "Nature has a way of surprising us with clever strategies where you least expect them," according to NOAA Fisheries biologist Nicholas Wegner, who works in the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif. In a news release about the finding, Wegner said, "It's hard to stay warm when you're surrounded by cold water but the opah has figured it out." The opah is not a...

PETA2, a branch of PETA aimed at young adults and teens, posted a new ad on May 13. The ad features several young animals, including a calf, piglet, and chick. The ad reads, "EVERY LIFE HAS WORTH." Unfortunately, the ad also features a fish. Not a fish in water, but a small fish being suffocated because it is being held in the air: Underneath the picture reads, "They are precious lives, not meals." Perhaps PETA's knowledge about what fish need to survive needs to be refreshed.

This is too funny, a dog owner has trained her dog to lower the level of noise when it barks. http://faithtap.com/2870/dog-barks-softly/?v=1&m=1

Nine hundred kilometers off the east coast of Madagascar lies the tiny island paradise of Mauritius. The waters are pristine, the beaches bright white, and the average temperature hovers between 22°C and 28°C (72°F to 82°F) year-round. But conditions there may not have always been so idyllic. A new study suggests that about 4000 years ago, a prolonged drought on the island left many of the native species, such as dodo birds and giant tortoises, dead in a soup of poisonous algae and their own feces. The die-off happened in an area known as Mare aux Songes, which once held...