Do animal vandals feel any moral qualms? After seeing rugs, suitcases and furniture destroyed by my pets, I’m not convinced that evolution has endowed animals with any reliable sense of property rights. But I’m heartened by Eugene Linden’s stories of contrite vandals in his book on animal behavior, “The Parrot’s Lament.”

He tells of a young tiger that, after tearing up all the newly planted trees at a California animal park, covered his eyes with his paws when the zookeeper arrived. And there were the female chimpanzees at the Tulsa Zoo that took advantage of a renovation project to steal the painters’ supplies, don gloves and paint their babies solid white. When confronted by their furious keeper, the mothers scurried away, then returned with peace offerings and paint-free babies.

Check out the full article here.

I started being a vegan as part of a bet (which ended last night), but it’s been such a riotous hoot that now I think I’ll stick with it.

A word to the wise: don’t watch this film if you love dogs and your sinuses are acting screwy and you’re dosed up on lots of Lemsip and you’ve just eaten spicy food, because someone could look at you at an inopportune moment (like, say, when you’re blowing your nose) and think that you’re crying, which is obviously totally ridiculous.

Of course, the best part of all this is that for the first time in my life I’m not contributing to the abuse of animals, and that makes me feel good too, so on balance veganism is looking like a pretty viable lifestyle to me right now.

As for veganism itself, well, it’s not much fun. It turns out that dairy or egg is in just about everything that isn’t fruit, vegetables or bread. I mean, there’s milk in all the soup in my house. There’s eggs in many kinds of pasta. There’s even shellac in sweets like Skittles. And soya milk is not very nice.

The only reason I intend to stick with it is that for every day I stay a vegan, my friend won’t eat meat, so I’m effectively doubling my vegetarianism. Besides, to re-tread a line of thought that has served me very poorly in the past, if it’s good enough for Woody Harrelson then it’s good enough for me.

I don’t even know exactly what this guy does, but it looks amazing.

When I read the headline ‘Spanish town holds referendum on its bullfight’ in my BBC RSS feed I was quite pleased, hoping that maybe this signaled the beginning of the blood sport’s demise. Instead, it turns out that the measure is due to a shortage of funds in the town’s budget. At least the global economic downturn is good for something.

I don’t know why the Japanese government allows this. Animals are mistreated all over the world for bad reasons and slightly less-bad reasons, but I can’t imagine that a very solid economic argument exists for letting this kind of thing take place, especially if it only happens in one village. Sure, there might be a political cost in the form of a traditionalist/nationalist backlash against the government for bowing to the pressure of foreign repugnance at the practice, but overall it would surely be worth it.

Then again, Canada doesn’t have a problem with seal pups getting their skulls bashed in every winter, Denmark doesn’t care to stop the Faeroe Islands killing whales with a method similarly gruesome to the one used by the Japanese villagers, and Sarah Palin’s Alaska allows, neigh encourages, hunters to shoot wolves with shotguns from helicopters (yes, really), so maybe Japan has little to fear in terms of bad press for letting this practice continue. The world is a sick place.

The fortune left by late real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley can go to charities other than those solely related to dogs, a US court has ruled.

A New York City judge said that Helmsley’s legal documents allowed her estate’s trustees “sole discretion” in donating the money to charity.

When Helmsley died in 2007 it was widely reported that she wanted her $8bn fortune spent only on canines.

…

Animal rights groups had reacted gleefully at the reports last year that all of Helmsley’s fortune would go to the care of dogs.

Charities had said the money could be used to rescue dogs from disaster zones and to tackle dog fighting, rabies in China and India as well as the canine over-population problem.

It is not clear now if any dog-welfare organisations will receive any of the funds.

If I left a lot of money in my will to something I cared about, I don’t think it would be alright for a judge to award the money to some other ‘more worthy’ causes after I died. I can’t speak to the legal reasoning involved in this judgment, but it seems to quite obviously go against the spirit of the law involved in the making of wills.

The point I’m trying to make here is that something drastic ought to be done about conservation efforts in general and global warming in particular, but the requisite improvement in these areas will never arrive in democratic societies until people are convinced to vote away their cars in order to save penguins, and this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Please be advised that Dr Lucy James requested that the Signpost session on Friday 30th January is from 09.30 – 10.00!

Kindly amend this in your timetable, thank you.

I used to see it far too often in text messages too. Thankfully that girlfriend left me because I’m insufferable.

– Redacted –

– Redacted –

Rah-rah…

Best television show ever. Even David Hasselhoff’s a fan.