And they can be blonde, cheerleaders too! (shocking)It’s happening again. Animal rights activists are putting up a stink about a female hunter posting photos of her trophies on social media. Last year it was Melissa Bachman posting a photo on Twitter and now it’s Kendall Jones and her Facebook page. Men post photos of themselves with their trophies all the time but, apparently, it’s only worthy of making an uproar and creating ridiculous petitions when an attractive female does it. As soon as I heard this was happening again, I had to investigate. What is the real issue here? That she’s hunting? That she’s a she? Or is it that she’s an attractive she who is about to be the host of her own TV show and, therefore, was deemed as an adequate target by some conniving activist to be used as an example for their agenda?
So here’s what I have to say to the people who are thinking of signing these petitions: Leave this poor girl alone. Hunting may not be something you like and you may not be able to identify with the hunter’s motivation but, like it or not, hunting is an integral part of conservation when it comes to things like wildlife management and funding research. And by signing that petition, you’re not aiding in conservation, you’re just taking a 19-year-old’s photo off Facebook. #SupportKendall
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In my Google Scholar alert today was a scientific paper that I didn't think would be entirely appropriate to write a blog post about but was too hilarious to pass up..... (disclaimer: this article may not be appropriate for young audiences in that even as a grown-ass woman it made me giggle with immaturity...click at your own risk)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/zoo.21137/full That's right people... this is an article investigating the evolutionary significance of fellatio (if you don't know what it is, look it up). Their results: what probably every male in the known universe could tell you, it happens because it feels good and there's real reward in that kind of pleasure. But, looking past the seemingly obvious results, what I find astonishing about this paper is:
One of the reasons, which I have mentioned before, a decline in carnivore populations can be detrimental to an ecosystem is the spread of disease. Without the proper balance of large wildlife populations (which includes your large carnivores), smaller, disease carrying species (primarily rodents) can overrun an ecosystem causing an increase in disease for local wildlife and humans alike. A study published last week looked at this phenomenon in an area in Africa called the KLEE (the Kenya Long-Term Exclosure Experiment; a well-controlled, replicated large herbivore removal experiment based in central Kenya - an area which includes species such as elephant, giraffe, zebra and lion). Through three years of sampling, this project determined that declines in large wildlife increased the occurrence of landscape-level rodent-borne disease. The concept is pretty simple (although the analysis from the study is fairly complicated); loss of large wildlife causes a loss in the regulation of the rodent population which, in turn, causes an increase in rodents and their parasite carrying friends, the flea, which increases the amount of disease found in humans and other wildlife. The difficult part is figuring out how to counter this effect (aka prevent disease). The options – prevent the loss of large wildlife so the rodent population can naturally regulate itself or artificially regulate the rodent population. Setting out a few rodent traps out in the middle of the African savannah probably won’t do the trick so, I say, let’s try letting the megafauna do its job and keep working on large wildlife conservation to keep those large wildlife numbers where they should be.
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