Both the NSW and Australian Government have upgraded Cumberland Plain Woodland from Endangered to Critically Endangered. You would assume any development that proposed to clear over 200 ha of critically endangered bushland would be struggling to get approval. We can assume nothing these days in Australia. Here is another focus where Australians need to unite to help each other get back democracy and protect fauna and flora from the growth lobby. The community has fought to save this area for nearly 20 years.See also related articles.

Possum drawing by Chloe and Kathleen, Anderson's Creek Primary School, Victoria, Australia

Lanamania is a distributor for possum yarn from New Zealand.

Its website boasts: "Our passion for knitting, our love of nature and our New Zealand heritage all come together in one product...Possum handknit yarn of Zealana -the light and soft touch of New Zealand."
But this view of Australia's native animal is somewhat different to those of Anderson's Creek Primary School in rural Victoria, Australia.

Landholders in Victoria are being given permits to kill tens of thousands of protected kangaroos every year, even in good seasons and in areas not affected by drought. This is despite research showing that kangaroos do not compete with stock for pasture. Kangaroos are also being shot without proper assessment of population numbers, locally or regionally, putting them at risk of local and regional extinction. This is despite the some one million native animals killed on Black Saturday.
(photo source: www.business.vic.gov.au)

Nichols (NZ) Ltd is a "supplier of quality tanned skins of New Zealand and Australian origin." It is based at 29 Wickham Street, Bromley, Christchurch, New Zealand and is a subsidiary of UK based L H Nichols Ltd.

Nichols slaughters Australian native possums for commercial profit.

American Republican politician Katherine Harris of Florida is shown here in August 2006 during her campaigning for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, holding a native opossum by the tail.

Jumps racing in Victoria will cease at the end of 2010 but key stakeholders say they will fight the decision announced by Racing Victoria Ltd.  The fact that some will be condemned to the knackers if the "sport" is banned shows just how little the lives of the horses are valued, nothing but meat, outside the industry. It is a reflection of the exploitation of these fine and hard-working animals, and how little the owners,
trainers and jockeys bond with them.

Yesterday every senior official and staff workers of the Toronto Humane Society were arrested for animal cruelty.

Farmers are illegally slaughtering thousands of threatened hairy-nosed wombats in South Australia. Brigitte Stevens from the Wombat Awareness Organisation says burrows of southern hairy-nosed wombats are being bulldozed or blown up on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas and in the Murraylands.

How dare John Kelly of the despicable commercial kangaroo killing industry ask for handouts due to the fallout from Russia placing a ban on kangaroo meat imports! Our taxpayers should not be giving handouts to help "restructure" this vile and cruel industry.

Denmark's shame.... what an atrocity, a sad shame. Around 950 Long-finned Pilot Whales are killed annually, mainly during the summer. During the cut of a pilot whale's spine, their main arteries also get cut. Because of this the surrounding sea tends to turn a spectacular bloody red. Entire schools of whales are killed on the shore and in the shallows of bays with knives which are used to sever the major blood supply to the brain.

Canadian Voice for Animals-Argentina report that an official culture in Argentina that refuses to spay strays or help the poor spay domestic pets has resulted in a huge population of strays. The local authorities appear to be quite depraved in their treatment of these animals. Canadian Voice For Animals - Argentina is trying to focus international attention on the crisis of management and unspeakable cruelty because the mainstream press is not doing so. Please sign the petition and tell everyone you know about this unspeakable shame.

Professor Steve Garlick writes that he has received a disturbingly poor account from the RSPCA of their supervision of the mass killing of kangaroos in the ACT.

Swine flu linked to "factory" farming in pigs and poultry. Influenza in pigs is closely related to pig density. Residents in Mexico believe that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak.

See also: The Worst Way of Farming in the New York Times of 31 May 08, Swine-flu outbreak linked to Smithfield Factory Farms in the Health Freedom Alliance blog of 25 Apr 09.

How can the FATE program, ironically acronymed as Future of Australia's Threatened Ecosystems (which is just a fancy way of getting shooters onto farmers' property to commercially shoot kangaroos because they are running out of kangaroos in other areas), have such sloppy population counting methods and expect it to be 'sustainable'?
An FOI report reveals how junk science is driving our national icon to the brink....

There is another drive for a big kill of kangaroos in Majura ACT (in rare-grassland fragments coveted by developers near the new airport). Conventional wisdom is that kangaroo numbers have increased in Australia since European settlement due to cessation of predation by Aborigines and dingoes, as well as increased availability of water. It seems probable, however, that at the time of settlement kangaroo numbers exceeded the present population at least threefold. Dr Giles Auty estimates their pre-1788 number at around 200 million.

During February's bushfires, the Victorian government's Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has allowed nearly all of the natural ecology of the northern half of Wilsons Promontory to burn. Is the Prom fire (now having destroyed 24,800 hectares of native habitat) being deliberately left to burn by DSE? DSE and CFA have protected private property at Tidal River and Yanakie. So is what's really happening down at the Prom away from public scrutiny?

See also "Wilsons Promontory – DSE fire management risking local extinctions" of 26 Feb 09.

Since Black Saturday - Feb 7, 2009 - when Australia's worst-ever bushfires on the hottest day in Victoria's recorded history completely destroyed all infrastructure at Wildhaven animal rescue and release center, Alan and Stella Reid have had a few visitors, including Steve Irwin's father, Bob Irwin, and Maryland Wilson of the AWPC, and four kangaroos that also escaped with their lives. Allan Reid tells an incredible story of his own survival as the place burned to the ground leaving him and perhaps four kangaroos alive. Please consider donating money for hay and rebuilding.See alsoImportant Wildhaven Shelter in St Andrews NE Victoria perished needs rebuilding and video.

In September 2008, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) issued orders prohibiting the aging Kuwaiti ship "Al Messilah" from proceeding to Portland to load 72,000 sheep. Rural Export and Trading (representing Kuwait Livestock Transport and Trading appealed the original decision and won. AMSA appealed in the Federal Court in February 2008, winning the appeal. So what is AMSA going to do about stopping these ships coming into Australian waters and ports?

Update: Federal Court bans polluting live export death ships from Australian waters.

See also: www.liveexportshame.com, Stop Tasmanian Animal Cruelty at www.stoptac.org.

It would be much harder to condemn the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana if the institution had obviously made a great effort to compensate its experimental chimpanzees by giving them trees and a lovely environment between 'sessions'. But they have confined these forest creatures to an environment as friendly as a toilet block for life. A nine-month-long undercover investigation by The HSUS has exposed the mistreatment of nearly 300 chimpanzees and other primates. These chimps, living lives of deprivation and misery, are among the more than 1,000 chimps languishing in laboratories across the United States. Video available here. I describe the video contents in the article, if you need to fortify yourself first. It is a thoughtful video; I could cope. Please act, whatever you do.

Kristina Keneally, NSW Planning Minister, sells out public land and the environment to Delfin Lend Lease. Now many gentle wild creatures will die the most abject deaths and 1000s of trees will give up their carbon to the atmosphere. How much more nature to be destroyed for narrow corporate interests in a dead-in-the-water economy for the grasping few? See also "Council bastardry..."

Over two weeks since lightning struck the east coast of Wilsons Promontory on the Cathedral Range just north of Sealers Cove, most of the northern half of ‘the Prom’ has been burnt. The Victorian Country Fire Authority (CFA) website reports 23,000 hectares burnt out. The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) website shows the following map of the burn (shaded area below). The fire has burnt the Cathedral Range, along the east coastline right across and along the Corner Inlet shoreline to Millers Landing.

On 13th February, the fire on Wilson's Promontory was almost extinguished. However, Victoria's Country Fire Authority, seemingly unconcerned with preserving the dwindling remnants of our natural bushland where human lives and property are not threatened, failed to act to extinguish the blaze. As a result, almost 50% of our precious Prom has been burnt out.

See also: "Crews unable to slow Wilsons Promontory blaze" on ABC online on 17 Feb 09, "Huge blaze threatens the very heart of the Prom" in the Age of 19 Feb 09.

Over 200,000 cats and dogs are "put down" each year because they are homeless. The government allows the indiscriminate breeding of dogs and cats but they do not cover the costs of rehabilitating and re-homing abandoned animals! Because the pet shop market exists in Australia, backyard breeders and "puppy farms" continue to churn out more and more poor puppies and kittens, whilst thousands are being killed at pounds every year.

Mother cows are known to have highly developed maternal instincts and can bellow for days for their stolen babies! We kill over one million new-born calves each year. the dairy industry accounted for 39% of the total irrigated area of pasture in the Murray Darling Basin.

Thousands of animals are attacked each year. Peanut was more than someone's property. Criminals of this level should lose their human rights. "Mental illness" is not an excuse. We are sliding down a vortex of evil and permissiveness. There needs to be more laws to protect the vulnerable in our society.

These animals are victims of planning failure, and our governments now are only interested in the economy! More than ever we have to recognise that we need green wedges, conservation corridors as buffers against further biodiversity losses and climate change.

That two socially immature males would cruelly bash and kick unconscious a kangaroo, whilst capturing the sickening spectacle on video in an apparent attempt to impress their social peers, should hardly come as a surprise in a country which stigmatises the magnificent kangaroo as a pest, unlike, for example, South Africa, which nurtures and celebrates its own herds of wildebeests.

See also: Nationwide hunt for kangaroo basher (Western Australia Today) of 11 Sept 08, RSPCA launches nationwide hunt for kangaroo basher (ABC) of 11 Sept 08, RSPCA, police hunt for roo thug.

Saccharine Republican Valkyrie an immodest advocate for barbarity to wildlife, using jet-fuel.

See also:
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin Wins 2008 Rubber Dodo Award in biologicaldiversity.org of 17 Sep 08, Sarah Palin's record on environment is abysmal in seattlepi.nwsource.com of 5 Sep 08 by Rick Steiner and readers' comments,
New Orleans: The City That Won't Be Ignored in The Nation of 3 Sep 08 by Naomi Klein. How Democrat Barack Obama has incredibly surrendered critical ground to McCain in New Orleans, in which the the Rebublican Bush administration scandalously mismanaged the relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The continuing loss of tens of thousands of animals every year in horrific circumstances confirm one of the conclusions reached in two major inquiries into the trade - that the trade by its very nature had animal welfare implications. The incidents listed in this article demonstrate that the trade can never be made humane.

This article also published on WebDiary with the permission of Animals Australia.
See also: Why Australia's trade in live animal exports is world's WORST practice of 18 Jun 08, Live Exports – Another 36,408 animals dead on ships yet the trade goes on of 28 Aug 08 on WebDiary.