World Wildlife News

You might blame the dog for eating your homework, or a traffic jam for being late to work. But if you ever find yourself facing a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit for contaminating the world’s number one food crop with an unapproved genetically engineered variety, just do what biotech company Bayer does. Blame God!

Yes folks it seems that according to Bayer, God hasn’t been dealing with the big issues lately. Instead of answering millions of prayers, stopping wars or ending famines, God has left all the important things to gather dust in the heavenly inbox whilst ensuring Bayer’s unapproved variety of genetically engineered (GE) rice goes forth and multiplies around the world instead.

According to documents submitted to the court by Bayer, last year’s massive contamination of US rice with an unapproved, experimental variety of rice called LL601 was due to ‘acts of God’ or the rice farmers themselves.

Pushing the blame onto the rice farmers is no surprise as the farmers are the ones suing Bayer for millions of dollars of lost income. The price of US rice plummeted last year, immediately following the discovery of the GE contamination in rice exported to Europe and Japan, where consumer resistance to Bayer’s less-than-divine intervention in their food is strong.

The LL601 rice was originally grown as an experimental field trial all the way back in 1999-2001. The trial ended with no approval for growing the strain commercially.

That should have been the end of LL601 for good. But five years later, testing of US rice imports across Europe and Japan showed the experimental LL601 very much alive and contaminating.

“Bayer is aggressively pursuing commercial approvals for its GE rice globally, including in Europe and Brazil, yet refuses to accept responsibility for the major financial damage its unauthorised GE rice has caused in the US and elsewhere.”

“Indeed, Bayer is blaming hardworking farmers or ‘acts of God’ for these problems when all signs point to Bayer being at fault,” said Adam Levitt, a partner in the law firm of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz – one of the law firms leading the prosecution of these cases against Bayer.

Shifting the blame isn’t new for big business trying to avoid responsibility for their mistakes. But God as scapegoat? That’s probably a new low in the GE industry’s pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Source: Greenpeace

The most endangered big cat in the world, the Asiatic lion found only in Gir in Gujarat, now finds itself in an ego tussle between the Centre and the state of Gujarat.

With less than 350 lions, Gir is in a very vulnerable position. On the one hand that is not a viable population of the big cat. There needs to be at least 1500 animals for a population to be viable.

But in Gir, 350 is proving to be too great a number as every ecosystem has only a certain carrying capacity. With all the lions concentrated in just one area, anything from a disease to a natural disaster could spell the end.

And now if all negotiations fail, the only hope of appeal lies with the Prime Minister.

There is no denying that the lions are a major part of Gujarat’s heritage and conservation history, but they belong to the world, not just India or even Gujarat.

They have a right to life and protection and all avenues to save them must be explored. One cannot allow the lions to become a mere memory that exists on India’s Ashoka Pillar.

Swati Thiyagarajan, Asiatic Lions

A new census estimates that only 25 to 34 wild Amur leopards remain—at least 66 fewer than are needed to ensure survival, experts say.

Also known as the Far Eastern leopard, the Amur has been painted into a deadly corner by habitat-slashing, conservationists said this week.

Weighing in at about 55 to 130 pounds (25 to 59 kilograms), the large cat once flourished along the Korean Peninsula, in the Russian Far East, and in northeastern China. But habitat fragmentation and the hunting of the leopard and its prey have eviscerated wild populations, conservationists say.

The Amur’s long legs and long fur set it apart from other leopards, allowing it to prowl in deep snow and withstand Siberian cold.

The leopard’s snow tracks were the basis of the census, which covered some 1,930 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) of Amur territory near Vladivostok (Russia map).

The international conservation organization WWF, the Russian Academy of Science, and the Wildlife Conservation Society announced the results yesterday at Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources in Moscow. (National Geographic)

Of the eight subspecies the Far Eastern, or Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) shows the strongest and most divergence in coat pattern. The coat is typically pale-cream (especially in winter) and exhibits widely spaced rosettes with thick, unbroken rings and darkened centres. The length of the coat varies between 2.5cm in summer and 7.5cm in winter.