Girl Bitten by Dolphin at Orlando SeaWorld

Wow, that hurt. Not the dophin's fault however.

At the Orlando Sentinel, "SeaWorld attack: Video captures dolphin biting little girl."

Video Allegedly Shows Workers Abusing Turkeys at Butterball Plant

My wife bought a Butterball and it was delicious. The birds should be treated humanely, however.

At NBC Los Angeles, "'Shocking Abuse': Butterball Accused of Kicking, Stomping Turkeys at World's Largest Turkey Plant."

And here's the secret camera report: "Hidden Camera Video: Shocking Truth Behind Butterball Thanksgiving Turkey."

The abuse is awful, but the radical left's animal rights groups have freakin' jumped the shark. See Dustin Stockton, "PETA: The Plight of Turkeys is Like That of Blacks, Women and Gays."

Wildlife Populations in the U.S. Have Experienced an Astonishing Resurgence

At WSJ, "America Gone Wild":

This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town's herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 "miracle on the Hudson," when US Airways flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.

Those conflicts often pit neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A brick was tossed through a city official's window, city-council members were peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor's car with deer innards.

Welcome to the nature wars, in which Americans fight each other over too much of a good thing—expanding wildlife populations produced by our conservation and environmental successes. We now routinely encounter wild birds and animals that our parents and grandparents rarely saw. As their numbers have grown, wild creatures have spread far beyond their historic ranges into new habitats, including ours. It is very likely that in the eastern United States today more people live in closer proximity to more wildlife than anywhere on Earth at any time in history.

In a world full of eco-woes like species extinctions, this should be wonderful news—unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, or your child's soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, or feral cats have turned your bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, or wild turkeys have eaten your newly planted seed corn, or beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting your trash cans. And that's just the beginning.

More at the link.

There was a coyote outside on the sidewalk next to our parking lot as I was loading my kid up for school last week. We see them running through our neighborhood all time. I guess they scrounge around for food, but they're absolutely fearless of humans. They might run away when approached, but they know that people are not going to come after them with a shotgun. They're all around, the nasty little suckers. I'd hate for a child to be attacked by one of them, and some mothers over at my kid's school are frightened. Nature's right up in your face sometimes. Weird. I'm just glad it's not bears!

Deer Gets Stuck in Hurricane Surf in Monmouth County, New Jersey

Via Pat Dollard, "WATCH: Deer Trapped In Surf By Sandy":

Baby Walrus Adapts to Life in City

I'm a sucker for these animal stories, at the New York Times:

A team of 15 is caring for him around the clock. His favorite toy is a plastic bucket. He has taken swimmingly to a large pool. And on Friday, he had his first taste of solid food — surf clams.

“He’s hitting every milestone we’re hoping to see,” said Jon Forrest Dohlin, director of the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, Brooklyn, part of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “He still has some issues with his bladder, but they are trending in the right direction. Behaviorally, he’s doing great and we’re feeling good about his progress.”

He was describing Mitik, or Mit for short, one of two walrus calves separated from a herd in the Artic Ocean and orphaned in Alaska in July. The Alaska SeaLife Center took them in and found new homes for each. (The other walrus, Pakak, went to the Indianapolis Zoo.) The New York Aquarium, eager for a young companion for its two older walruses, stepped up, flying a staff member, Martha Hiatt, to Alaska to work with Mit for a month.

On Oct. 11, Ms. Hiatt, the aquarium’s behavioral husbandry supervisor, along with a veterinarian, accompanied Mit on a FedEx cargo jet from Anchorage to Newark. The walrus, believed to be about 16 weeks old, stayed in his crate during the six-hour flight. “It was loud,” Ms. Hiatt said of the trip. “He pretty much sang to us the entire time. We stayed with him, talked to him and hosed him off now and then.”

At the aquarium, Mit has adapted to his new environment, a state-of-the-art medical facility built in 2008 that was designed for marine mammals. There is a large, eight-foot-deep pool that is a considerable leap from the one he used in Alaska. “He’s in it from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep,” Ms. Hiatt said this week. “He’s a big swimmer. He plays and swims literally until he falls asleep.”

RTWT.

Trainers are worried the walrus will not warm up to his own species when they prepare him for exhibition at the zoo. I guess they should have thought more about that when they decided not to return him to the wild.