Kenya seizes massive ivory haul

BBC NEWS | Africa | Kenya seizes massive ivory haul 

Kenyan authorities have seized almost 700kg of ivory worth millions of dollars in a night-time raid at the country's main airport.

The Kenya Wildlife Service says a similar amount was intercepted in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

Both consignments - with a potential value of more than $1.5m (£938,000) - were reportedly headed for Thailand.

The BBC's Will Ross in Nairobi says poaching is on the increase mostly owing to high demand for ivory in Asia.

Our reporter says it is not yet clear whether the ivory, recovered at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport, had been trafficked from other parts of the continent or was from East Africa.

Twenty years ago the world's elephant population was plummeting and the trade in ivory was banned.

But over the past decade the ban has been periodically relaxed and occasional supervised ivory auctions have been allowed.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Kenya seizes massive ivory haul

AFP: Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces

 

Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces

(AFP) – 20 hours ago

PARIS — Brain-destroying prion disease can spread among deer through faeces shed by animals which have been infected by the deadly pathogen but are not sick, a study published on Wednesday suggests.

The paper implies that the mysterious disorders known as chronic wasting disease (CWD) and scrapie -- cousins of mad-cow disease -- could be transmitted in a hitherto-overlooked way, posing a headache for farmers.

The scientists are led by University of California neurologist Stanley Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into prions, the rogue proteins blamed for turning brains spongey.

Prion diseases are well-researched disorders in deer (CWD), cattle (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE), sheep and goats (scrapie), cats (feline spongiform encephalopathy, FSE) and in humans (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CJD).

Many aspects about them are unclear, though. In deer, CWD is known to be handed on from mother to offspring, but other paths of infection are deemed possible.

Publishing in the British journal Nature, Prusiner's team probe a theory that deer may pass on the prion in their faeces, thus creating a risk that other deer will pick up the pathogen in the soil when they graze.

AFP: Healthy deer can spread prion disease through faeces

Brookfield Zoo helps restore addax antelope herds -- chicagotribune.com

 

Brookfield Zoo helps restore addax antelope herds

Big plans rest on baby antelope at Brookfield Zoo

Chad, a 10-week-old addax, hangs out in his pen at Brookfield Zoo. Chad, sickly from birth, has been hand-raised by the zoo in an effort to keep him alive. (Chicago Tribune / August 27, 2009)

Weak and near death when he was born at Brookfield Zoo, a baby antelope named Chad now carries big hopes on his little shoulders that he will grow up to help save his species by siring lots of calves.
"He had a rough start when he was born," Joan Daniels, the zoo's associate mammal curator, said as she watched the now-robust 10-week-old bound across his grassy enclosure to a keeper holding out special formula in nippled bottles.
Daniels said keepers decided to take Chad from his mother soon after birth so they could hand-rear him.
"I am quite sure he would have died because normally they stand up within the first hour," she said. "That was the only reason we intervened."
Chad is an addax, an endangered type of antelope from the Sahara Desert, which is so dry that the species has learned to go years without drinking water, living off moisture in plants.
And they face extinction not because of lost habitat, like so many other species, but because of the arrival of ATVs and automatic weapons in the desert after World War II.
Saving Chad, Daniels said, is important because the genes he inherited from his father are rare among the 197 addax living in North American zoos. His offspring, therefore, would be important for increasing the genetic diversity of zoo addax.
Now only about 300 are left in the wild, 200 in one corner of Niger, the rest scattered in tiny, fast-disappearing herds.

Brookfield Zoo helps restore addax antelope herds -- chicagotribune.com