Mystery of the Murdered Gorillas

[sunny]

OMG MacCruiskeen, that is just wonderful.

[Jeff]

Just a reminder:

Binti Jua, Jambo and others.

Binti Jua

Jambo

Koko

[MacCruiskeen]

Another example of cross-species altruism:

Elephant sets antelopes free
08/04/2003 14:05 - (SA)

Empangeni - The matriarch of a herd of elephants in South Africa opened a gate with her trunk to free antelopes being held at a camp in the east of the country, conservationists said on Tuesday.

Lawrence Anthony said that a private game capture company had rounded up the antelopes at their camp near Empangeni to relocate them for a breeding programme.

The team were settling in for the night when the herd of 11 elephants approached, he said.

"The herd circled the enclosure while the capture team watched warily, thinking the herd were after lucerne (alfalfa) being used to feed the antelope," he said.

The herd's matriarch, named Nana, approached the enclosure gates and began tampering with the metal latches holding the gates closed.

She carefully undid all the latches with her trunk, swung the gate open and stood back with her herd.

"At this stage the onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue," Anthony said.

The herd watched the antelope leave the camp before they walked off into the night.

Ecologist Brendon Whittington-Jones said: "Elephant are naturally inquisitive - but this behaviour is certainly most unusual and cannot be explained in scientific terms".

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Afri ... 10,00.html

[FourthBase]

The animals never asked for nor contributed to any of this crap. They deserve better.


"Mountain gorillas become killers when their social groups come face-to-face...One gorilla group will deliberately seek out another and provoke a conflict...An enormous male left a skirmish with his flesh so badly ripped that the head of an arm bone and numerous ligaments stuck out through the broken skin. Another left the battle scene with eight massive wounds where the enemy had bitten him on the head and arms. The site where the conflict had raged was covered with blood...Fossey actually recovered gorilla skulls with canine cusps from other gorillas still embedded in the skull's crest."

HOWARD BLOOM, THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY

"The males from the larger band of chimpanzees began to make trips south to the patch of land occupied by the splinter unit. The marauders' purpose was simple: to harass and ultimately kill the separatists. They beat their former friends mercilessly, breaking bones, opening massive wounds, and leaving the resultant cripples to die a slow and lingering death. When the raids were over, five males and one elderly female had been murdered. The separatist group had been destroyed; and its sexual active females and part of its territory had been annexed by the males of the band from the home turf."

HOWARD BLOOM, THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE: A SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION INTO THE FORCES OF HISTORY


"Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates................

Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn't know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him"

R.A.Wilson - Schrodinger's Cat

I re-iterate that this seems a vile and senseless act and perhaps I'm steering this off topic but I do find it interesting the way we admire human characteristics in animals and despise animal characteristics in ourselves.

Like I said, it's evil and dumb but there are many innocent people who are suffering for no good reason.

I wouldn't enlist in a war to save gorillas etc. because they're "innocent". I'd do it because they're endangered. For the future of humanity, saving them seems more important to me than saving an equal number of the -- what, 6 billion humans on earth?

Also, don't forget the bonobos.
Bonobos > human beings.

[KeenInsight]

Another example of cross-species altruism:

Elephant sets antelopes free
08/04/2003 14:05 - (SA)

Empangeni - The matriarch of a herd of elephants in South Africa opened a gate with her trunk to free antelopes being held at a camp in the east of the country, conservationists said on Tuesday.

Lawrence Anthony said that a private game capture company had rounded up the antelopes at their camp near Empangeni to relocate them for a breeding programme.

The team were settling in for the night when the herd of 11 elephants approached, he said.

"The herd circled the enclosure while the capture team watched warily, thinking the herd were after lucerne (alfalfa) being used to feed the antelope," he said.

The herd's matriarch, named Nana, approached the enclosure gates and began tampering with the metal latches holding the gates closed.

She carefully undid all the latches with her trunk, swung the gate open and stood back with her herd.

"At this stage the onlookers realised this was not a mission for free food, but actually a rescue," Anthony said.

The herd watched the antelope leave the camp before they walked off into the night.

Ecologist Brendon Whittington-Jones said: "Elephant are naturally inquisitive - but this behaviour is certainly most unusual and cannot be explained in scientific terms".

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Afri ... 10,00.html

Score 1 for Nature!

[Jeff]

Monkey Moms Use Baby Talk, Too
08.24.07, 12:00 AM ET

FRIDAY, Aug. 24 (HealthDay News) -- When interacting with their infants, female rhesus monkeys use special vocalizations similar to the "baby talk" used by human mothers to get an infant's attention, University of Chicago researchers report.

"Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin," Dario Maestripieri, associate professor in comparative human development, explained in a prepared statement.

"The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations, called girneys, may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants," he said.

The researchers studied vocalizations among adult female rhesus macaques on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. When a baby was present, there was a significant increase in the amount of grunts and girneys among the adult females.

"The calls appear to be used to elicit infants' attention and encourage their behavior. They also have the effect of increasing social tolerance in the mother and facilitating the interactions between females with babies in general. Thus, the attraction to other females' infants results in a relatively relaxed context of interaction where the main focus of attention is the baby," the researchers wrote.

The study was published in the current issue of the journal Ethology.

link

[chlamor]

They were murdered by colonialism. They were eliminated by the inevitable consequences of technological progress. They were killed by coltan, by the cellphone.

All of the pressures involved in these processes create an omnicidal system that kills everything in its path. Examining a single event and looking for a single culprit ends in false conclusions.

Cellphones fuel Congo conflict
Cellphones may have revolutionized the way we communicate, but in Central Africa their biggest legacy is war.
Nearly 3 million people have died in Congo in a four-year war over coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and playstations. Eighty percent of the world's coltan reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The mountainous jungle area where the coltan is mined is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed "Africa's first World War," pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighbouring countries and numerous armed factions.
The victims are mostly civilians. Starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands and the fighting has displaced 2 million people from their homes.
Often dismissed as an ethnic war, the conflict is really over natural resources sought by foreign corporations -- diamonds, tin, copper, gold, but mostly coltan.
At stake for the multitude of heavily armed militias and governments is a cut of the high-tech boom of the 1990s, which sent the price of coltan skyrocketing to peak at US$400 per kilo. Coltan -- short for colombo-tantalite -- is refined into tantalum, a "magic powder" essential to many electronic devices.
The war started in 1998 when Congolese rebel forces, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, seized eastern Congo and moved into strategic mining areas, attacking villages along the way.
The Rwandan Army was soon making an estimated US$20 million a month from coltan mining.
A May 2002 report from the United Nations Security Council said the huge coltan profits are fueling the war and allowing "a large number" of government officials, rebels and foreigners "to amass as much wealth as possible."
The fighting rages on despite peace treaties signed in the summer of 2002. The peace process was started after the assassination of Congolese President Laurent Kabila in January 2001 and pressure from South Africa. But not all sides signed on. While foreign troops have officially withdrawn, internal factions remain at war.
Digging for "Black Gold"
The war over coltan has transformed Congo in more subtle ways, too. Farmers displaced from their land have little option but to join coltan-mining brigades. Mined much like gold, coltan is found by digging large pits in riverbeds, with armies of miners scraping away dirt to get to the coltan underground.

http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/cell/kinshasa/

It is a war for coltan. It is a massacre for technology. It is impossible for me to get anyone's attention on this. I have tried on discussion board's, leafletting, tabling and people just look away.

Noone wants to face the reality of how their daily habits fuel the slaughterhouse.


Who is calling you all the time, all day all night?

It is me calling you oh techno-man of the West wondering why you come to kill me. Why you seem to think the thunder in my ground is for you to steal. Why you think my life of fourteen- year- old prostitution is here to serve your need to know where you are all the time when you never know where you are any of the time. Is this okay for you to force me into servitude for your colonial consumerism. I know its long distance and collect but really who is paying the price here?
-chlamor

Congo suffering world's deadliest humanitarian crisis, 38,000 dead monthly

War-ravaged Congo is suffering the world's deadliest humanitarian crisis, with 38,000 people dying each month mostly from easily treatable diseases, according to a study published Friday in Britain's leading medical journal.

Nearly 4 million died between 1998-2004 alone -- the indirect result of years of ruinous fighting that has brought on a stunning collapse of public health services, the study published in the Lancet said.

The majority of deaths were due to disease rather than violence, but war has cut off or reduced access to health services for millions of people in the impoverished, Europe-sized nation.

Though major fighting ended in 2002, the situation remains dire, particularly in eastern Congo, because of continued insecurity, poor access to health care and inadequate international aid.

"Rich donor nations are miserably failing the people of (Congo), even though every few months the mortality equivalent of two southeast Asian tsunamis plows through its territory," the study said.

Go here:
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa.asp

[Horatio Hellpop]

I wouldn't enlist in a war to save gorillas etc. because they're "innocent". I'd do it because they're endangered. For the future of humanity, saving them seems more important to me than saving an equal number of the -- what, 6 billion humans on earth?

Also, don't forget the bonobos.
Bonobos > human beings.

From Wikipedia:

"The popular image of the bonobo as a "peaceful ape" has come under fire. Accounts exist of bonobos mutilating one another by biting off fingers and toes. Jeroen Stevens, a Belgian biologist, recounts one incident in which he witnessed a gang of five bonobos assaulting a single victim at Apenheul zoo, in the Netherlands. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth." Other instances of serious aggression were documented by de Waal, who warned in his book not to romanticize bonobos: "All animals are competitive by nature and cooperative only under specific circumstances" (p. 84). It is worth noting that the most striking observations of injurious aggression come from captive groups. Thus far, science has not recorded an instance of lethal aggression among bonobos (no infanticide, no killings across territorial borders), whereas many such instances have been documented in chimpanzees, both captive and wild. Also, the most severe aggression among bonobos concerns female attacks on males, thus further confirming the collective dominance of females over males."

LOL Sorry.

Your statement about endangerment is interesting, I can't quite formulate a reply yet.

[MacCruiskeen]

a single victim at Apenheul zoo

Zoo.

It is worth noting that the most striking observations of injurious aggression come from captive groups.

Captive groups.

LOL

Stop it, you're killing me. ("Laugh? I nearly shat." - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore)

Sorry.

If you're sorry, why do it? There's a back button on your keyboard.

Your statement about endangerment is interesting, I can't quite formulate a reply yet.

Maybe something like: "Sheesh, get over it, guy! Nobody lives forever! ROTFLMAO "

[FourthBase]

It is worth noting that the most striking observations of injurious aggression come from captive groups.

[theeKultleeder]

boo-boo-booo... bah-bah-bah....

Studies show making faces at babies program them in the body-language of local culture.

Nonsense!

boo-boo-bahh, me hearing Led Zeppelin.

Rock & Roll is awesome!

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.coanews.org/tiki-read_articl ... cleId=1939

GORILLAS IN THE BITS

Our genuine conservation heroine and Femme Fatale, Dian Fossey, had been laboring alone for almost ten years at her remote research station at Karisoke in Rwanda, on the steep slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, when her chief study subject and star of many National Geographic specials, the gorilla “Digit,” was killed and mutilated by poachers Fossey suspected of capturing specimens for foreign zoos. Digit died defending his gorilla group or “family unit.”

When Walter Cronkite made the announcement of Digit’s death on the CBS evening news, Fossey’s funding troubles were over. Contributions poured in from all over the world. Thus in 1978 the “Digit Fund” was born. But Dian Fossey, ever above even the whiff of monetary scandal, refused to manage the incoming funds. Fossey hired lawyer Fulton Brylawski to oversee the organization of the Digit Fund—a fund that would not squander resources on high overhead and huge salaries for its staffers. She wrote passionately to Shirley McGreal of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL) explaining how the Digit Fund would work directly to stop poaching within the Virungas. The Digit Fund would not become Digit’s “blood money,” and “every postage stamp” “would be accounted for,” Fossey wrote.

Primatologist Ian Redmond is one of the original students who worked with Dian Fossey at Karisoke in Rwanda for years. “Dian felt very strongly that the little old lady who gives a dollar in some village in the mid-western States (should know) that the money is spent protecting gorillas,” Redmond told Canadian author Farley Mowat, “and not going to a large fund which was supporting officers and vehicles and film shows and all the other stuff which is generally considered to be desirable in the conservation establishment.”

Today Ian Redmond works as chief consultant to the UNEP/UNESCO Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) and as a trustee of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-Europe (the Gorilla Organization). He has authored or co-authored several highly influential and highly funded international reports on the plunder of columbium-tantalite (coltan) out of Congo.

Unknown assailants murdered Dian Fossey at her Karisoke research camp in 1985. It appears that Fossey got in the way of elite smuggling networks operating in the Virunga Mountains. The circumstances of her death are still unresolved. A mysterious orange folder, containing maps supplied by a poacher, has vanished since her murder. Was Fossey murdered for these maps?

Many Rwandan contemporaries of Fossey are under current indictment by the ICTR (International Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal), but Fossey’s death is considered a lesser crime than that of genocide, and so remains largely ignored by the courts. Protais Zigiranyirazo, chief suspect and ex-governor of Ruhengeri Province, where Fossey lived and worked, languishes in custody but remains silent on the topic of Dian Fossey.

Shortly before Fossey’s murder on December 26, 1985, the acting chargé d’ affaires of the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Helen Weinland, returned to the States for some routine medical exams that took longer than necessary. It was this turn of events that left Emerson Melaven as her temporary replacement after the Christmas holiday. Melaven may have been ill-equipped for this sudden elevation to a sensitive diplomatic post, since he had previously been the representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Rwanda. In early interviews with the international media, Melaven stated that he and his colleagues were impressed by the Rwandan government’s response to the murder.

Helen Weinland’s memoirs of those days paint a different picture. She indicates that she followed initial events surrounding the murder with some frustration that she was not back at her post in Kigali. By the time she returned very little progress had been made in the murder investigation. Weinland states unequivocally that “…it is difficult to believe that the trial to find Dian’s killer was a rigorous search for the truth.”

Ten years later, even more suspicious events surrounded the death of gorilla researcher Klaus-Jurgen Sucker—the man believed to have out-fossied Fossey in his work in nearby Mgahinga Gorilla Park. Sucker is the Hanged Man of our series and we will tell his tragic story in Kong: Part Five. Both Fossey and Sucker were at odds with outside conservation BINGOs and DINGOs of their era.

Dian Fossey became a wealthy woman only after her death. Her last will and testament, which gave all of her savings to the Digit Fund, was overturned in 1988 by her stepfather, and the money that was destined for the gorillas was redirected to his private trust.

The Morris Animal Foundation, under the guidance of Ruth Keesling, took over the remains of the Digit Fund in 1986. The name was changed from the Digit Fund to Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, after a court battle erupted, which remains shrouded in secrecy, and which caused the split of the Digit Fund into DFGF-International and DFGF-Europe. Ruth Keesling was ousted in a takeover by the current CEO of the DFGF-I, Clare Richardson, a British national. Richardson was formerly a fundraiser for the Atlanta Zoo, and the DFGF-I currently operates in a tax-free space on the grounds of the Atlanta Zoo. Dennis Kelly, President and CEO of Zoo Atlanta, was elected to Secretary of the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in November of 2006. Note that Zoo Atlanta “partners” include Chevron-Texaco, CNN, Georgia Tech University, and Lockheed-Martin, the world’s largest and most secretive aerospace and Defense Corporation.

The whereabouts of Dian Fossey’s private research materials are shrouded in secrecy. Some insider’s claim that Fossey’s original possessions were literally stolen by DFGF-I from the Digit Fund offices when the new CEO for DFGF-I, Clare Richardson, showed up at the Digit Fund offices in Colorado with a moving van and, without authorization from Keesling, crated everything off to a warehouse in Atlanta. There are claims that some of Fossey’s original letters and artifacts have been removed to the private residences of DFGF-I officials who may be using them—selling them or repackaging her research—to further their private interests and careers.

Clare Richardson, CEO of DFGF-I, sent a fundraising letter in late 2006 about a “DAUNTING” DFGF-I project to restore and protect Fossey’s original papers and diaries, which are “disintegrating with age.” The estimated cost of the project would be $150,000.

Curiously, when we first approached the Fossey Fund in 2004 about viewing the documents, we were told that the files were then under the process of digitization and that the warehouse was “dark and dusty.” Offering to bring a flashlight possibly put DFGF-I on their guard that we might shed some light on the disposition of Fossey’s records, and the disappearance of Fossey’s properties. DFGF-I’s Clare Richardson responded with a request for resumes, references and all manner of background

[Horatio Hellpop]

a single victim at Apenheul zoo

Zoo.

It is worth noting that the most striking observations of injurious aggression come from captive groups.

Captive groups.

LOL

Stop it, you're killing me. ("Laugh? I nearly shat." - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore)

Sorry.

If you're sorry, why do it? There's a back button on your keyboard.

Your statement about endangerment is interesting, I can't quite formulate a reply yet.

Maybe something like: "Sheesh, get over it, guy! Nobody lives forever! ROTFLMAO "

Who you calling cunt, cunt?

[theeKultleeder]

Apes

[MacCruiskeen]

Yet another example of cross-species altruism: a polar bear that hasn't eaten for four months crosses the ice to play with some huskies - and returns every night for a week:

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/ ... seen.shtml

-- See also: "Battle at Kruger":

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... t=altruism