Year: 2024

As the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is worsening day after day under the devastating Israeli onslaught, #GazaStarving is trending on social media platforms with videos showing hungry people eating animal food and animals nibbling decomposed human bodies lying on streets.

Only in a matter of few days, the hashtag – #GazaStarving – is almost nearing 5 million interactions on X platforms, while on other social media platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, the hashtag is also broadly used to highlight the looming famine and Palestinian suffering.

#GazaStarving spotlights the growing fear of famine in Gaza, as reports began to surface on social media showing Palestinians grinding animal fodder due to a lack of wheat and bread.

Several videos showed hungry Palestinians eating animal food, while cats and dogs nibbled the human bodies lying on streets.

Fatal attractions are a standard movie plotline, but they also occur in nature, with much more serious consequences. As a conservation biologist, I’ve seen them play out in some of Earth’s most remote locations, from the Gobi Desert to the Himalayan Highlands.

In these locales, pastoralist communities graze camels, yaks and other livestock across wide ranges of land. The problem is that often these animals’ wild relatives live nearby, and huge, testosterone-driven wild males may try to mate with domestic or tamed relatives.

Both animals and people lose in these encounters. Herders who try to protect their domestic stock risk injuries, emotional trauma, economic loss and sometimes death. Wild intruders can be displaced, harassed or killed.

These clashes threaten iconic and endangered species, including Tibetan wild yaks, wild two-humped camels and Asia’s forest elephants. If the wild species are protected, herders may be forbidden from chasing or harming them, even in self-defense.

TEST

Anyone who has picnicked on the beach has experienced the unpleasant crunch of a sandwich with a surprise helping of sand. But for primates, the tolerance for sand may depend on whether their energy is better spent reproducing and fighting rivals or on protecting their teeth from a mouthful of grit, according to a new Dartmouth study.

Social rank may determine whether animals prioritize immediate energy consumption over long-term health, or vice versa, the researchers report in the journal eLife. They observed the eating habits of long-tailed macaques on Thailand’s Koram Island and found that the dominant and lowest-ranked animals briefly rubbed sand-covered food on their fur or between their paws before devouring it, along with most of the sand, and moving on to the next morsel.

Middle-ranked monkeys, however, having more time on their paws, carried their food to the water’s edge and washed it in the sea to remove the sand. These animals often expended time and energy scrubbing their snacks past the point when they were clean and would even amble down the beach on their hind legs with their front paws full of food.

Do dog supplements work? It depends on what the supplement is used for and how it is manufactured, veterinarians say. Clinical trials are rare. “It’s hard finding quality evidence for the efficacy, much less the need for these products,” Boothe says