New Company Offers Green Spray-Paint Service for Dead Lawns

All those banks trying to sell off foreclosed homes with dead, brown yards have a new, convenient, guaranteed non-eco-friendly option available to them: spray paint.  Chances are, you’ve seen the sickly, unnatural blue-green look of grass that’s been spray-painted in order to appear alive on the side of the highway once or twice.  Now, a company called Greener Grass Co. is offering the same service for foreclosed homes.

From RecordNet, via BoingBoing:

For between $175 and $225 per yard, Terlouw uses a motor-powered 50-gallon insecticide sprayer designed for treating orchard trees. He waves his magic wand and in broad sweeps, a la painting a house, makes tired, if not expired, turf sit up and sparkle like Shirley Temple.

“Looking good from over here,” hollered Chad Lam, a homeowner watching Terlouw spruce up a brown lawn across the street. “I’m glad to see that happen. It gives us all a lift around here.”

Terlouw, who formerly had a window-cleaning business, said he got the idea for the new business from football games.

“They paint logos on football fields,” he said. “Why can’t we do the same for homes?”

Yeah, because surely potential buyers will be totally fooled that the foreclosed home they’re looking at has a bright green, totally alive lawn.  Just ignore that crunchy feeling when you’re walking on it.  Seriously, this really is ‘putting lipstick on a pig’.  And what’s in this stuff? It’s undoubtedly seeping into the soil and going down storm drains.  FAIL.

Link [RecordNet via BoingBoing]
Photo credit: Craig Sanders/The Record

More Farmers Should Use the Lounge n Pick

Farmers, are you tired of your wives and daughters lounging around in the sun, soaking up rays while you’re out plowing the field and picking the harvest? Well, now you can put them to work with guaranteed 50% less complaining.  They won’t have to actually touch dirt at all, and the risk of coming into contact with insects is minimal.  With the Lounge n Pick, you can even employ paraplegics and the elderly.  The convenient removable cover allows your harvesters to sun themselves on nice days, and be shielded from the rain when necessary.  The convenient conveyer belt system delivers your harvest directly into containers at the end of the line.  It can be yours for only $999.99!*

*Fashionable camouflage bench pads extra.

Link [Wacky Archives]

Eat Rats to Solve World Food Crisis

An Indian official says that he has the ultimate answer to solving the world’s food crisis. Vijay Prakash, secretary of the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, wants to put rats on food menus. According to Prakash, regular rat snacks would result in fewer rodents eating grain stocks – plus, you know, rats are packed with protein.  And just look at that photo - doesn’t it make your mouth water?

From Breitbart.com:

Prakash’s plan promotes consumption of rat meat in homes, street stalls, restaurants and even international five-star hotels.

He said he was also holding talks with prestigious hotels outside India to encourage them to put rat meat on their menus, but admitted his scheme had to overcome public prejudice.

“The only issue is how people react to rat meat, but I think it will not be a problem,” he said.

“Some socially deprived people in Bihar have always consumed rat meat. If they can eat rats, why can’t the rest of the people?” he said.

Members of the Mushar community and some other impoverished groups have traditionally eaten rats in India.

Call me crazy, but somehow I just don’t see this catching on in most areas of the world, especially the United States. Something tells me that rat fritters and the rodent filet sandwich would be the least popular items on the McDonald’s menu. We could certainly all benefit from eating a wider variety of foods, but rats are probably not the answer to the food crisis.

But, hey, it’s the Year of the Rat – and as you can see on this National Geographic video, residents of the West African country of Togo have been doing it for ages.

Link [Breitbart] + [YouTube]

Orange County, California’s Sewage to Drinking Water Treatment Plant Finished

Here in America, we have a water problem – and I’m not just talking about shortages. We waste incredible, mind-boggling amounts of it. There are so many things we can do to use water more wisely, and in parched Santa Ana, California, officials are getting creative in a way that has some residents angry and disgusted. They’re recycling toilet water. Like it or not, people might as well get used to ideas like these – it’s wasting so much water that’s really disgusting.

From The New York Times:

When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Recycling sewage into potable water was a no-brainer for Orange County; an ever-rising population meant that a new $200M sewage pipeline would have needed to be built, and they over-pumped their groundwater basin to the point of drawing seawater into their water supply. So, the sewage to water plan works out for a lot of reasons. It sounds gross at first, but the process used to clean the water really is incredibly thorough.

If you think about it, though, why are we flushing so much fresh, clean, potable water in the first place? Greywater systems that at least divert used water from the bathroom sink and/or shower could be used to flush toilets instead. It seems absurd to foul perfectly good drinking water in such a way. The way we use water is so messed up and backwards. Hopefully we’ll do a lot of catching up in the coming decades as people realize how precious a resource it really is.

To read about the full treatment process that transforms the sewage into drinkable water, read the full piece in The New York Times.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user Oracio Alvarado

Slaughterhouse Worker Injured by Falling Dead Cow; Karma Wins Again

A 30-year-old slaughterhouse worker was doing what he does every day – waiting for big dead cows strung up on hooks to come down the line so he could butcher them. But on Monday, one of those dead cows got the last laugh. In an apparent attempt to posthumously exact revenge from one of the humans that robbed it of its life and desecrated its remains, the cow fell off the hook and right on top of the butcher.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee Fire Department spokeswoman Tiffany Wynn said the cow fell off the hook and onto the man, hitting him on the shoulder and neck at Cargill Inc., 1915 W. Canal St., just before noon. She said it was a whole cow and the victim was about to butcher it. He suffered moderate but not life-threatening injuries and was taken to Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare-St. Francis hospital for treatment.

Police are investigating how the cow fell on top of the man and determining whether an investigator from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will have to look at the details of the case as an industrial accident.

Revenge of the Undead Cows! There’s this thing called karma.  In all seriousness, this guy’s life must suck. He stands around wielding a big knife, covered in blood and guts all day and then gets taken out by a giant carcass.

Link [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
Photo credit: PETA via Vegan Outreach

Celebrity Chef Nearly Kills People with Salad

UK celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson made a misstep that might have had some serious repercussions if the magazine printing his quote hadn’t noticed the mistake. Thompson accidentally recommended a deadly plant for use in organic salads. The chef and TV presenter told the magazine “Healthy & Organic Living” that the weed henbane, also called stinking nightshade (yum!), is a delicious addition to summertime meals.

From Reuters:

Henbane, or Hyoscyamus niger, is toxic and can cause hallucinations, convulsions, vomiting and in extreme cases death.

Worrall Thompson, who was discussing his passion for organic foods, had confused the plant with another of a similar name.

Henbane, a close relative of deadly nightshade, was used by Dr Crippen to kill his wife in 1910, and is thought to have been the main ingredient in the poison Romeo took in Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet.”

Thompson apparently confused henbane with ‘fat hen’, a weed rich in vitamin C. Um, oops.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Flickr user Catsper

Granite Countertops May be Tainted with Uranium

Would you like some cancer with those sweet granite countertops? Granite has been all the rage for the last decade or so, gaining 5% in popularity with each passing year. Homeowners might be getting more than they bargained for when completing kitchen renovations, however. Rice University physics professor W.J. Llope says that some granite countertops contain high levels of uranium which can endanger human health.

From Chron.com:

“Most stones, in terms of radioactivity, are relatively quiet,” Llope said. “But there are a couple I have found that are insanely hot.”

Using a Rice University spectrometer, Llope has examined 55 stones, representing about 25 varieties of granite purchased from Houston-area dealers. Some, he said, could expose homeowners to 100 millirems of radiation — the annual exposure limit set by the Department of Energy for visitors to nuclear labs — in just a few months.

Llope, who said he plans to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal, declined to name the most hazardous varieties of granite he has thus far examined. But he said dangerously radioactive varieties include striated granites from Brazil and Namibia.

As many as 1,600 varieties of granite from 64 countries are sold for household use in the United States. None of them is routinely tested for radioactivity.

Scientists are currently being assembled to develop a protocol for testing granite for radioactivity. While the granite industry has grumbled about the findings, saying that competitors selling non-granite products have made a bigger deal out of this than it is, Llope applauds the industry for taking an important first step to protect consumer safety.

In the meantime, homeowners worried about their countertops can get inexpensive radon testing kits from most hardware stores to test the levels in their homes themselves.

Link [Chron.com]
Photo credit: Sinks for Less

How to Throw Away a Car

Wait, that’s not how you do it?

Link [Bits & Pieces]

Eating Pigeons as Part of a Local Food Diet

Here in America especially, people have pretty narrow ideas of what is acceptable to eat. We’ve cut back our produce variety to a very small percentage of what’s actually out there, and there are only a handful of animals that are considered standard fare. So, it’s not surprising that people might balk at the idea of eating pigeons – those little waste-scavenging creatures commonly known as ‘rats with wings’.

From Wired:

You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They’re still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.

Numbering in the hundreds of millions, they could be a new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centers. Instead, we’re still trying to kill off our species’ former pet birds, which (as any city-dweller can attest) doesn’t work.

“Killing makes no sense at all,” Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. “The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they’ll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.”

Our own wasteful practices are what has encouraged these birds to be fruitful and multiply. Our culture has gotten so prosperous, we routinely throw insane amounts of food away. Wired declares that eating pigeons is ‘green tech at its finest’, given that the birds live off our trash – we don’t have to spend money to feed them. The author of this piece attempted to get information about the safety of eating pigeons, but wasn’t successful. Still, he says he’s ‘65% not kidding’.

Would you be open to eating things not commonly considered appropriate as food? Pigeons? Squirrels?

Link [Wired]
Photo credit: Flickr user weaponofchoice

Kids Nearly Starved to Death by Improper Vegan Diet

Three young children in Scottsdale, Arizona nearly died because their misguided parents were feeding them what they supposedly thought was a healthy vegan diet. When Blair Parker called 911 because his youngest daughter seemed to be having a seizure, doctors discovered that all three emaciated children were much smaller than they should be. The 3-year-old weighed only 13 pounds, the 11-year-old was the size of a 5-year-old and the 9-year-old was the size of a 3-year-old.

Both parents were arrested and criminally charged. The mother may see as much as 30 years in prison after a jury found her guilty of 3 counts of intentional child abuse. The parents say that their diet stems from Blair’s college studies in nutrition.

From Azcentral.com:

He described a daily regimen with the children that included prayer, study, chores, exercise and rigid adherence to diet, right down to what liquids they could drink and when.

“My children might have been short and light in weight, but I never considered they were unhealthy,” he told the jury.

Parker claimed that he could not find a doctor of his own religious faith or dietary beliefs that he trusted. Instead, he consulted with a naturopath who lived in Washington state and who could not actually see or examine the children.

Parker still claims that the children suffered from “malabsorption,” an inability to absorb vital nutrients.

The prosecutor said that Parker obsessed about the children’s bowel movements and gave them enemas that further impeded absorbing any nutrients of the food they ate.

“Vegan children who are fed properly grow,” said Deputy County Attorney Frankie Grimsman.

And in fact, when the children were placed in foster homes, they immediately began to gain weight - while still maintaining vegan diets.

This is why it’s so important to be educated about nutrition, period, but especially when you want to be vegan. You can’t just eat salad all day every day and hope for the best, and when children are involved, it’s all the more important. A lot of people don’t have a great understanding of what it means to be vegan, and how to get all of the nutrients you need.

Clearly, these children nearly lost their lives and the parents intentionally kept their condition from the public by homeschooling them and rarely taking them outside the home. 30 years does seem like a bit much, though – this isn’t too different from ignorant people feeding babies sugar water in bottles instead of breast milk or formula, which, crazy as it sounds, does happen. Clearly, we need better nutrition education in this country!

I hope somebody is feeding those kids big, juicy sandwiches right now.

Link [Azcentral.com]
Photo credit: Flickr user moria

Taking a Second Job Going #2: Indian Villagers Getting Paid to Not Crap in Local River

Talk about a cush job- the residents of Musiri, India are being paid not to crap in the local river. If they use one of the special designated areas (also know as toilets), they can make up $.14 a month!

That might not sound like a lot, but in Musiri broadband internet only costs a penny a month and a cup of coffee at the local Starbucks goes for ten for a penny.

CNN has it:

The government-backed program serves two purposes: It encourages people to discard age-old practices of urinating and defecating in the open, leading to diseases. And the waste products go into research to test their effectiveness as fertilizers.

“We’re motivating people to know the value of their urine,” said Marathi Subburaman, who came up with the novel idea. “The urine that is collected goes into fields for paddy crops, and of course the feces becomes good compost in a matter of months.”

Aid groups estimate that more than 330 million people in India do not have access to proper sanitation facilities. And in the case of Musiri, many residents relieve themselves on river banks, leading to infectious diseases such as diarrhea.

And while both governmental and non-governmental agencies have taken on projects to build toilets in rural areas, they also have had to undertake campaigns to encourage people to use them.

On top of the extra cash, villagers get a bit of a free health check- if they visit the WC more than three or four times a day they are told to go visit the doctor.

Check out the photo, that toilet empties directly into the water below. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “dropping the kids off at the pool”.

Eww….

Link [CNN] via [Adventures in Capitalism]

Thieves Around the U.S. Stealing Manhole Covers

A sign of true desperation: with the U.S. economy sagging, people have started resorting to stealing manhole covers to sell as scrap metal. The price of metal has skyrocketed lately, so thieves around the country have started stealing the 200-lb covers by the hundreds. Funny thing is, for all the effort it likely takes to haul off an iron manhole cover, you can only get $10-$15 each for them.

From USA Today:

“It’s a sign of the times,” says Sgt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, where 28 manhole covers disappeared in April and May. “When the economy gets bad, people start stealing iron.”

It’s the first year he has seen such thefts since he started with the department 16 years ago.

Long Beach has lost more than 80 covers this year. People who have damaged their cars driving over manholes have filed claims with the city, Alsop says.

“Our No. 1 concern” is safety, he says. “A small kid can fall into these holes,” which can be 20 feet deep.

Hey, I guess meth heads gotta get their fix somehow! Seriously though, what’s next? They’re stealing copper wire off construction sites, catalytic converters straight from parked cars all over the place, and now manhole covers. Should I be locking down my metal patio set?

Link [USA Today]
Photo credit: Drugfree.org

Bicyclist Injured After Hitting a Bear in Colorado

Normally, we hear stories about bicyclists having run-ins with vehicles while out on the streets. In this case, however, the obstacle that one cyclist unexpectedly ran into had claws and sharp teeth. Tim Egan, 53, was riding in Boulder, Colorado one afternoon and hit a speed of 45 mph when a bear suddenly appeared in front of him.

From Rocky Mountain News:

This bear looked at me with a look of terror on his face and sort of made a noise,” said Egan. “I looked at him with a look of terror and we went, ‘aaaahhhhh.’”

He cracked some ribs, suffered cuts on his head and had road rash. Egan said he and the bike flipped and flew over the bear, hitting the pavement hard.

The bear ran away after the accident when a deer appeared.

Afterwards, he got back on his bike and pedaled to a hospital.

I guess I’d rather hit a bear than a tree – it’s at least softer – though trees don’t chew on your foot after you hit them.

Link [Rocky Mountain News]
Photo credit Daquella Manera

‘RepRap’ Robot Can Replicate Itself

It’s begun. The robots are taking over – plastic robots, to boot. English researchers have created a robot that can create 3-D replicas of objects like shoes and coat hooks – and can even replicate itself. It’s meant for the average person to have on their desktop, so you can create common plastic items as needed in your own home.

From PC World:

Scientists from the University of Bath in England unveiled an open-source machine that acts like a three-dimensional printer. Instead of printing out documents or pictures on paper, this printer uses blueprints to produce 3-D plastic objects.

The machine has been dubbed RepRap, which is short for replicating rapid-prototyper.

The goal is to eventually build a robot that can produce individual processors and circuit boards so people can build their own computers, according to Zack Smith, director of the RepRap Research Foundation.

Smith explained that unlike a regular printer that uses ink, RepRap heats up plastic and then squeezes it out into a line. The lines are built up into usable forms as they solidify. So far, the robot has made everyday plastic objects, like door handles, sandals and coat hooks. The machine has also successfully copied all of its own structural pieces.

It’ll likely be about 20 years before the robot can fully replicate itself. So, those of us with the sense to realize that giving machines intelligence is a deadly mistake have some time to start preparing.

Seriously though, this machine has the potential to either produce tons of useless plastic junk that will end up polluting the earth – or it could reduce our dependence on China for cheap manufacturing. (Chris DiBona, Google’s Open Source Programs Manager, said “Think of RepRap as China on your desktop”.)

The jury’s still out on how good it would ultimately be for the planet. It certainly seems like it could potentially cause a copyright lawsuit extravaganza as people stopped purchasing everyday items from stores and just created them at home.

Get more details at the RepRap website.

Link [PC World] + [RepRap]

Officials in California Filling Pools with Mosquito Fish

For months, there have been little mentions here and there about how officials all over the country are worried about mosquitoes breeding in the brackish pools behind abandoned, foreclosed homes. You would think that the standard response would be a) drain the freaking pools, b) put forth some kind of community effort to either get people back in the homes or c) drop some mosquito dunks in there. But, the brilliant officials in California have decided that mosquito-larvae-eating fish are the solution.

From Treehugger:

The mortgage crisis is not only wrecking peoples’ lives, it’s not doing much good for the environment, either. The swimming pools of abandoned homes are perfect mosquito breeding grounds, there are worries about rampant West Nile Virus infections. In California, authorities are using airplanes to find green pools and are filling them with the Gambusia affinis, or mosquito fish, which eats the larvae.

“They are real heroes,” says Josefa Cabada, a technician at the Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District, a government agency, in the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve never seen a mosquito in a pool with mosquito fish.”

The problem (despite the obvious one of, uh, fish in swimming pools) is that these fish wreak havoc on each new ecosystem they’re placed in. They’ve displaced native species all over the world, and are apparently ‘master escape artists’, able to travel in as little as 3 millimeters of water.

Surely, there is a better solution than this – it sounds like a story in The Onion.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: DAVID CARLSON / The Californian

Fewer Traffic Signals, Signs & Curbs for Better Safety?

Two European towns have proven that you don’t necessarily need road signs, curbs, sidewalks and stop lights to have safe intersections where motor vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists can share the road. Though this seems counterintuitive, for the Dutch town of Drachten and Bohmte, Germany, it has worked brilliantly to reduce accidents and provide an all-around safer atmosphere for everyone.

I first heard of the idea on NPR back in January, as Kyle James explained Bohmte’s reasoning for removing all traffic control implements in an attempt to manage a busy, often jammed intersection where 12,000 cars and trucks pass through on an average day. Drivers who pass through the area now that it’s been revamped say that traffic moves slower, but in a more orderly way as every person is more aware of those around them. Instead of a free-for-all where each person tries to cut in front of the other in order to get ahead, drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists actually communicate through eye contact and hand gestures to safely navigate the streets.

From NPR:

Advocates of this traffic-management philosophy, called Shared Space, say it works. Ben Hamilton-Baillie is a leading Shared Space advocate based in Bristol, England.

“If you’re faced with a traffic signal, you don’t have to think anymore. Whether you go depends on whether the light is red or green,” he says. “In the absence of such things, we’re perfectly capable of reading and understanding the situation so that if grandma’s in the road ahead of you, you don’t run her over.”

He compares the Shared Space concept to an ice skating rink. It might look chaotic, but people usually navigate the shared area pretty well. In a traffic context, it means cars, bicyclists and pedestrians are in much closer proximity than they usually are.

But common sense and courtesy, as well as drivers feeling more a part of the space they’re moving through, is supposed to cut down on accidents.

OntheCommons.org also explored this idea, citing the case of Drachten, where the main thoroughfare sees 22,000 cars per day. Once they adopted the ‘shared space’ approach, casualties at one junction dropped from 36 over the previous 4 years to only 2 in the 2 years following the removal of traffic lights. Traffic jams no longer occur at all.

From OntheCommons.org:

The idea is to return public spaces to people in order to encourage them to take greater personal responsibility. Monderman explained, “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior….The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

I think this is a great idea, in that it forces people to stop talking on their cell phones, daydreaming, fiddling with the radio and other things that distract them and actually, you know, DRIVE. Being aware of your surroundings is a huge factor in traffic safety. Navigating the streets of America, you’ll most often find that everyone is so engrossed in themselves and where they need to go that they hardly pay attention to everyone else – they weave in and out of traffic at will and expect everyone else to get out of the way. Removing traffic signs would certainly be one way of making sure people were alert.

One thing that I wonder, though, is how much the training of drivers plays into the success of these programs in the Netherlands and Germany. After all, both countries are known for the rigorous training periods that potential drivers must go through before receiving a license. Many drivers in Holland must take up to 25 two-hour driving classes before obtaining certification. In Germany, a license costs $1500-$2,000 and requires a minimum of 25-45 hours of professional instruction plus 12 hours of theory.

In America, you barely have to meet the low standards of DMV employees for 10 minutes and pass what basically amounts to a memorization test in order to get a license. It’s mind-bogglingly easy to get and retain a driver’s license here, opening the roads up to all sorts of half-blind idiots who don’t even grasp the concept that the left lane is for passing. So, I’m not sure that such a concept would work here without a retooling of the whole driver licensing song-and-dance.

It’s a great theory, though, and I’d love to see more cities adopt it all over the world so we can get a better idea of exactly how well it works. We certainly need some kind of push for drivers to be more conscious of bicyclists and pedestrians, so that the roads are safer for all of us.

Link [OntheCommons.org] + [NPR]
Photo credit: Khuê Pham for NPR

Gross Olympic Souvenir: Goldfish in a Key Ring

If you were going to fly to China to attend the Olympics this summer, what kind of souvenir would you want to bring home? A t-shirt, a framed photograph? How about a plastic bag full of murky water and a decaying goldfish to attach to your key ring? Sounds like such a wonderful way to remember your great Chinese vacation.

From InventorSpot:

A plastic bag with a picture of Huan Huan, one of the cartoon mascots of the Games, on the outside. And inside: a live goldfish. The bag is part of a plastic key ring. According to the Telegraph story, the bags are sealed, so the fish live in a small pool of water, with little access to air, and no food whatsoever. The goldfish key rings are, of course, not a piece of official Olympic merchandise.

The story quotes a spokesperson from the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals calling the key chains a gimmick which “show no respect for the animals at all,” though there’s no record of the story on the RSPCA’s web site. A manufacturer of the key chains could not be identified. This could mean the entire thing is a hoax, although there is a picture here of something that looks like a live goldfish in a tiny plastic bag.

A lot of people seem to think it’s a hoax, and we sure hope it is. A few months driving around with that thing on your keys and you’d be sure to end up with rotting fish remains all over your lap at some point or another.

Link [InventorSpot]

Student Group Eats a Cat in the Name of Animal Welfare

A group of students in Denmark have had their Facebook profiles suspended after uploading a video of them eating a cat. The students planned the cat-eating performance as a way to call attention to the plight of food animals such as pigs and cows. The reaction from the community wasn’t what they had hoped for; animal rights organizations are attacking the group for the act, calling it inhumane.

From The Copenhagen Post:

Before ending up on the students’ plates, the main course lived a life as a feral cat. It had been shot by a farmer trying to control the number of cats on his land.

In addition to the 30 pictures that have now been removed from Facebook, the group’s profile also included a recipe for a dish called ‘litter box’.

According to the group, the cat was killed humanely and prepared by a professional chef. They said they had received a few raised eyebrows when plans of their meal slipped out, but were nevertheless surprised by people’s reactions and were ‘disappointed’ that the profile was no longer accessible.

‘We wanted people to think about what it was they were putting in their mouths,’ said Laura Bøge Mortensen, a group member and the editor of Citat, a student magazine that carried an article about the meal.

‘It’s hypocritical for us to spend thousands of kroner on our pets, yet buy the cheapest pork from Netto that comes from pigs that have lived a horrid life. And just why is it that it’s worse to eat a cat than a pig?’

I see their point; I am an animal rights advocate myself, and if it weren’t for my husband, I’d be a certifiable crazy cat lady. I can’t imagine ever eating a cat, but I would never eat a pig, cow, chicken or other animal deemed ‘acceptable’ by society, either - and I do think there’s a big disconnect between how we view treatment of domestic animals vs. animals traditionally raised for food. I think their act of protest is a very gutsy, but in the end a bit too much like a PETA stunt - plus, it doesn’t take into account the fact that millions of cats suffer worldwide due to overpopulation.

If you’re wondering what the cat tasted like, the students described it as “a little like chicken, with an aftertaste of fur. Slightly chewy.” Mmm!

Link [Copenhagen Post]
Photo credit: Flickr user allygirl520

Dumped Corpses Give Sharks a Taste for Human Flesh

Experts believe that a pack of bull sharks in Mexico is intentionally targeting humans, after recent attacks have killed two surfers and injured another. A fourth swimmer is missing. The deadly 10-ft long sharks may have developed a taste for human flesh after feasting on corpses dumped by the mob. There are enough dead bodies ‘swimming with the fishes’ to cause sharks to crave people?

From The Sun:

The beach at Zihuantanejo – near Acapulco and popular with British tourists – had not previously recorded a shark incident in more than 30 years.

And, with an annual average of only four fatal shark attacks globally, the fact that two people have died along the same stretch of coast within weeks has astonished international experts.

The Zihuantanejo deaths come halfway through what is already turning into a bumper year for shark attacks.

Zihuantanejo is now gripped by fear. Police have been guarding beaches and signs warn against going into the water.

Local businessmen, worried the deaths will devastate the tourist industry, hired fishermen to kill the sharks.

We sense another ‘Jaws’ script being written at this very moment…

Link [The Sun] via [Frost Fire Zoo]

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