The reptile was suspected of eating livestock on private property in Okeechobee County, and was considered a threat. The owner of the property agreed to have it killed.
“I had no idea the magnitude of how big his body was until we pulled him completely out of the lake,” said Mr Borries.
“Size does matter,” he wrote on his company Facebook wall, Dynamic Outdoors TV, with images of him standing next to the enormous creature, sitting on its back and pulling open its jaws. “To me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he told WXXV News 25.
Mr Borries staked out the animal, estimated to be 80-years-old, before daylight, spotted it on an island in the lake and shot it.
The hunter has come under fire for killing the animal, instead of trapping it or sedating it and having it relocated to a wildlife sanctuary.
“I hope God forgives you for needlessly killing this creature,” wrote one person.
“Pretty hard to kill an 80 -year-old alligator wow be proud,” said another user.
“This is disgusting!!! Do you feel like a big man now you could have put your obvious large ego away and contacted any of the wonderful alligator reserves where this magnificent creature could have lived out its life. But no, the big man’s hunter had to kill an animal that was surviving and you just acted like an animal right back, instead of being a human and understanding nature,” said another.
“Shooting a huge barely moving animal with a high powered rifle and calling it hunting is an insult to real hunters,” commented another.
“What an incredibly cowardly thing to do. Did anyone not think of MOVING it, instead of murdering it?” wrote another.
Dynamic Outdoors defended its actions by explaining how dangerous gators this size can be. “Just like sharks, a small one can leave you with an injury that may be recoverable but an incredible large/oversized specimen can take [you] out,” it wrote on social media.
This gator was about a foot short of a state record, reported the Sun Herald. The longest gator captured in Florida was 14 feet, 3.5 inches and was caught in Lake Washington, Brevard County.
Mr Borries has said the gator will not go to waste – most of it will be used as meat and be eaten, although he will take a trophy for himself and is having a full, life-size mount made of the gator’s hide.
On Thursday, the ARD magazine #PlusMinus (Germany’s first public national television channel) broadcast a program about blood collection from pregnant mares in Iceland.
Scenes of violence against them were unleashed in order to drain 5 liters of blood per “session”.
An outcry went through the social media landscape and many riders, who often celebrate their festivals with bratwurst, steak, schnitzel, etc., were also shocked!
➡ https://www.daserste.de/…/hormone-von-stuten-fuer… As the ARD correctly reported, this torture has to do in particular with the production of cheap meat.
Thus, the pork consumers are also directly involved in this cruelty to animals and therefore partly to blame!
But why is this blood needed at all?
The hormone #PMSG(Pregnant Mare’s Serum Gonadotropin) – also called eCG (Equine Chorionic Gonadotropin) – is found in the blood of pregnant mares.
This is a stimulating sex hormone which, among other things, European piglet producers use to stimulate their sows to become pregnant at a controlled time.
In this way, a group can be influenced to ensure that many sows are ready to conceive at the same time and therefore give birth at relatively the same time.
In intensive livestock farming, this is of course more lucrative in terms of the workflow!
A synthetic alternative would be e.g. Peforelin, which, however, does not lead to superovulation, i.e. the increased number of piglets as a side effect of PMSG, as well as a shortening of puberty, which contributes to earlier willingness to conceive and thus to higher profits.
The use of PMSG or eCG as a drug is approved in Germany for therapeutic and animal breeding purposes (!!!)
Politicians must act here and ban the use immediately and without a transitional period! According to the Federal Veterinary Association, 10-15% of sows in Germany are currently treated with hormones.
But back to #Iceland:
The abuse of the calm Icelandic horses caused particular outrage.
Particularly frightening: In Iceland, the blood buyer Isteka announced an increase in the delivery volume from 170 t to 600 t last year (as of December 2021).
Blood collection in South America has been known to everyone for years, it is not welcomed, but tolerated.
Even outraged riders are not dissuaded from consuming pork.
Now this perfidious form of hormone production has also been documented in Iceland.
And of course there is no obligation to declare on the packaging about the use of this preparation in Germany anyway…
After the “Island research” the German Animal Welfare Associationpoints out that there is also a horse blood farm in Germany. At the Meura Stud in Thuringia, the hormone PMSG is obtained from the blood of pregnant mares for the pharmaceutical industry.
And I mean…Animal Welfare’s videos clearly show the frightened animals being propelled forward through metal passages with bludgeons to the head, until they end up in a tethered position where their blood is drained.
On the so-called blood farms, which are mainly found in South America but even in Europe, hundreds of mares are crammed together
These are artificially inseminated in order to take up to 10 liters of blood once or twice a week for the first 11 weeks of pregnancy!
This insane amount, which corresponds to about a quarter of a horse’s total blood volume, is withdrawn from the horse with huge cannulas within a few minutes. About 30 percent of mares die from this process alone.
If the foal has not yet died from the extreme nutrient deprivation after the end of the 11 weeks, the workers on the blood farms abort it by hand.
The horse’s uterus is slit open with a knife without being anaesthetized, which often means not “only” the foal, but also the foal his mother also finds an agonizing death. The mare will be killed anyway as soon as she can no longer be inseminated quickly. There is no veterinary care.
The mare will be killed anyway as soon as she can no longer be inseminated quickly.
100 grams of the hormone bring in about $900,000.
It therefore makes sense for the authorities and traders to keep the brutal animal abuse used to obtain the hormone under lock and key.
And now in our own country!
According to the Animal Welfare Foundation’s “Island research”, the German Animal Welfare Association points out that there is also a horse blood farm in Germany.
At the Meura Studin Thuringia, the hormone PMSG has apparently been illegally extracted from the blood of pregnant mares for the pharmaceutical industry for over 30 years.
The taking of blood, which is to be regarded as an animal experiment requiring approval, has been illegal for years – this has now been proven by the German Animal Welfare Association.
The valid German guidelines for the protection of horses state unequivocally that no blood may be drawn from a mare that is in foal.
When asked, the owner of the Meura stud farm, Anke Sendig, openly admitted that she did not have any approval for taking blood, because “it is not necessary because it is a manufacturing process that is not subject to any approval requirements,” says Sendig.
Incidentally, the responsible veterinary office also confirmed this outrageously: “The legislator did not provide for this. Accordingly, it is neither necessary nor possible to grant a permit.”
But that violates the law when a county veterinary office unilaterally says it’s legal to rape horses and severely abuse pregnant mares.
Germany’s farm lobby has its own laws, some of which are self-written and controlled by farm dealers.
So the blood dealers of Meuka can breathe easy. They have little to fear because apparently in prosecuting crimes they dictate the state the law.
Scientists have regrown frogs’ amputated legs after giving them a “cocktail” of drugs encased in a silicon stump.
African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) are like humans in that they can’t naturally regrow lost limbs. In the new study, researchers successfully coaxed the frogs to grow replacement limbs in 18 months following a treatment that lasted just 24 hours. While there’s a massive difference between frogs and humans, the finding raises the possibility that in the future, humans could also regrow limbs.
“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” first author Nirosha Murugan, a research affiliate at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said in a statement. “The fact that it required only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may have dormant regenerative
Animals have natural abilities to regenerate themselves. For example, human bodies close open wounds and can even use stem cells to regrow parts of the liver. Some animals, such as salamanders, can regrow whole limbs and other missing parts. The mechanisms behind limb regeneration are not fully understood, but neither humans nor adult frogs are capable of regrowing legs and arms, perhaps because those limbs are so complex.
Both humans and frogs cover an open amputation wound in scar tissue to stop further blood loss and infection. Humans have developed prosthetic replacement limbs but scientists have been unable to recover or reverse the loss of a major limb like an arm or leg.
The latest research used multiple drugs to regenerate lost limb tissue. The team surgically amputated frogs’ legs and then applied a silicone cap they called a “BioDome” to each frog’s wound. The cap released a cocktail of five drugs, including growth hormones, that perfomed different roles, such as encouraging nerves and muscles to grow. One of the drugs also prevented the frogs’ bodies from producing collagen, which normally causes wounds to scar over.
“Using the BioDome cap in the first 24 hours helps mimic an amniotic-like environment, which, along with the right drugs, allows the rebuilding process to proceed without the interference of scar tissue,” co-author David Kaplan, a professor of engineering at Tufts University, said in the statement.
Embryos and fetuses develop in an amniotic sac during pregnancy. The team was able to trigger some of the same molecular pathways in the frogs that are used when an embryo is growing and taking shape.
The new legs looked similar to normal legs with similar bone structure, except for the toes, which lacked underlying bones. The frogs were able to use their new leg to swim like a regular leg.
The findings were published Jan. 26 in the journal Science Advances.
An oil production ship capable of carrying up to 2 million barrels of oil has exploded off the coast of Nigeria.
According to local reports, the Trinity Spirit exploded on Thursday morning at the Ukpokiti oil field off Nigeria’s coast near the Escravos terminal close to the River Niger delta.
Dramatic video shows the ship on fire with thick black smoke rising into the sky as it appears to be sinking.
The vessel is an FPSO, a floating production storage and offloading unit, which is reportedly owned by Shebah Exploration & Production Company Ltd (SEPCOL).
These types of ships are used by the offshore oil and gas industry for the production and processing and storage of oil and serve a similar function to larger oil rigs.
The ship had ten crew members on board, chief executive Ikemefuna Okafor said on Thursday, according to Reuters.
It is not believed the crew members have yet been accounted for.
Mr Okafor said investigations were underway to establish the cause of the explosion while attempts to contain the situation were being made with help from local communities and Chevron, which has a facility nearby.
“At this time there are no reported fatalities, but we can confirm that there were ten crew men on board the vessel prior to the incident and we are prioritising investigations with respect to their safety and security,” he said.
While it is not yet clear how much oil will be spilled by the Trinity Spirit, commentators have warned Nigeria could be facing its second environmental disaster in three months, after a huge oil spill from a disused, capped well head released 20,000 barrels of oil a day for a month into the waterways of Nembe, in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state.
The impact of that spill was described as being “like Hiroshima”, by the Nigerian government,with the leaking oil causing the death of marine life and damage to mangroves and waterways.
An outcry went through the social media landscape and many riders, who often celebrate their festivals with bratwurst, steak, schnitzel, etc., were also shocked!
Blood collection in South America has been known to everyone for years, it is not welcomed, but tolerated.
World Animals Voice 