Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

These reviled birds of prey literally save people’s lives

News Feed
Friday, August 2, 2024

A vulture in India in 2022. The country saw its native vulture population fall from tens of millions to only a few thousand in the 1990s, with terrible effects for the human population. | Faisal Khan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images As a young man in the 1990s, walking to school in New Delhi, Anant Sudarshan would watch the vultures perched along telephone wires, waiting for the discards of nearby leather tanning factories. So when the birds started to disappear, he couldn’t help but notice. What Sudarshan, who now researches environmental policy and economics at the University of Warwick in the UK, did not realize at the time but would help discover decades later, was that the extinction of India’s vultures had far-reaching consequences for the humans who lived alongside the birds. In just a few years, the species’s disappearance contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. Together with Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, Sudarshan used his adolescent experience as inspiration for a new study being published in the American Economic Review. As in other developing nations, they found, the scavengers functioned as a natural sanitation system for communities with a less developed infrastructure than the US or Europe, helping control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume. Outside experts unaffiliated with the study say it will be a classic that unlocks further research on how the loss of critical species can have disastrous effects on human populations that depend on them, in often underappreciated ways. The findings should reshape how the public and policymakers alike relate to the world around us, and how we consider the unforeseen consequences of ecological destruction.  “We’re interconnected with the rest of the natural world,” Frank said. “I think for a lot of people, it’s this hippie, quasi-tree-hugger concept. Turning it into numbers and an outcome that people care about like mortality does change how people think about this statement: that we’re one with nature. What does that actually mean? It’s not a spiritual statement. It’s a statement about causal mechanisms.” The human costs of India’s extinct vultures Sudarshan and Frank estimate that from 2000 to 2005, an additional 500,000 people died in India above the preexisting trend, after the rapid dying off of vultures in the 1990s. The near-extinction was an unexpected (and for a long time unknown) byproduct of the country’s farmers introducing a medication to livestock that had previously only been prescribed to humans. Within a few years, 95 percent of the country’s vulture population was wiped out, dropping from tens of millions to a few thousand. A decade later, researchers discovered the drug led to kidney failure and death in the vultures when they fed on dead livestock that still had it in their system. Sudarshan and Frank compared death rates in the years following the die-offs between regions that had previously been home to vulture populations and those that hadn’t, finding that people started dying at higher rates in areas where the birds had lived. In the communities that lost vultures, there were an estimated 104,000 excess deaths annually — deaths that may be attributed to the species’ near-extinction — from 2000 to 2005, the years immediately following their dramatic decline that were the focus of Sudarshan and Frank’s study. It adds up to more than half a million deaths over five years, costing India an estimated $69 billion annually. “I would not have guessed the effect would be so large,” Sudarshan said. But as he and Frank came to realize the various vectors by which diseases might spread without vultures around, Sudarshan realized the extinction was “the largest sanitation shock you could imagine, where you have 50 million carcasses every year not being disposed of.” Keystone animal species are vital to human health Ecologists and conservationists have long known that some species — called “keystone” species — play a pivotal role in their ecosystems. Scientists have also suspected that those species’ role is so important that their loss could have life-and-death consequences for human beings. That relationship, though, has been hard to prove. There has been plenty of circumstantial evidence. In India, vultures are known to be extremely efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it. Before the extinction, Indian regions that were home to vultures already recorded lower baseline mortality rates than those without them. After the birds died off, people in affected areas reported seeing more feral dogs and more rotting carcasses building up in fields. Without vultures to consume them, there were more dead animals lying around, which sometimes ended up in rivers or other bodies of water, tainting local water supplies. The absence of vultures became an opportunity for other scavengers, such as rats and dogs. India did not attempt a census of feral dogs until 2012, well after the study period. But when they did, there were more of the animals in the areas previously hospitable to vultures, which Sudarshan and Frank argue implies the dogs may have flourished after the birds were eliminated.  Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from potentially disease-carrying carcasses, creating more opportunities for a person to come in contact with infected remains. They’re also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Orders of the rabies vaccines started to rise in the years after the vulture population plummeted.  “I was mind-blown that it happened so drastically, so quickly,” Frank said. “We often say that anecdotes are not evidence, but the amount of anecdotes about how people were negatively affected by the disappearance of the vultures, we read more and more and more of it and said, ‘Okay, this has got to show up in data.’” Sudarshan and Frank have now provided a template for studying the impacts of species loss on human health, and researchers unaffiliated with the study told me that they expect more such research to follow.  Frank hopes future work might be able to identify whether specific causes of death increase after the elimination of a keystone species. Rethinking our relationship to the animals we live alongside The findings should inform conservation efforts in other regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where vultures play a similar sanitation role, the researchers argue. Small investments to support local populations could have big payoffs. More broadly, supporting species believed to be ecologically critical, of which vultures are only one, is a wise investment.  It is also clear that farmers and agricultural officials should consider the potential ripple effects when giving new medications to livestock. This is a textbook example of One Health, the public health paradigm that says we should protect animal and environmental health to protect the well-being of humans.  The drug in question, diclofenac, had been introduced because it was a cheap way to treat fevers and inflammation in farm animals. The medicine was banned once Indian officials learned of its role in the vulture die-off, but by then, the damage was already done.  Vultures remain critically endangered in India, with only a few thousand individuals. Sudarshan and Frank argue their findings should encourage conservation efforts in India, though vultures’ life cycles will make them difficult to restore: They lay, at most, one egg in a year and take years to sexually mature. The enormous consequences of their near-extinction in India remind us that promoting biodiversity means embracing every species, not only those that look good on a T-shirt; they and we are all part of a whole. “We need to really remember these connections. They are crucially important,” Andrea Santangeli, a conservation scientist at the Research Centre for Ecological Change at the University of Helsinki, told me. “We cannot live a healthy life without a healthy nature.” A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

As a young man in the 1990s, walking to school in New Delhi, Anant Sudarshan would watch the vultures perched along telephone wires, waiting for the discards of nearby leather tanning factories. So when the birds started to disappear, he couldn’t help but notice. What Sudarshan, who now researches environmental policy and economics at the […]

A vulture in India in 2022. The country saw its native vulture population fall from tens of millions to only a few thousand in the 1990s, with terrible effects for the human population. | Faisal Khan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

As a young man in the 1990s, walking to school in New Delhi, Anant Sudarshan would watch the vultures perched along telephone wires, waiting for the discards of nearby leather tanning factories. So when the birds started to disappear, he couldn’t help but notice.

What Sudarshan, who now researches environmental policy and economics at the University of Warwick in the UK, did not realize at the time but would help discover decades later, was that the extinction of India’s vultures had far-reaching consequences for the humans who lived alongside the birds. In just a few years, the species’s disappearance contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens.

Together with Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, Sudarshan used his adolescent experience as inspiration for a new study being published in the American Economic Review. As in other developing nations, they found, the scavengers functioned as a natural sanitation system for communities with a less developed infrastructure than the US or Europe, helping control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume.

Outside experts unaffiliated with the study say it will be a classic that unlocks further research on how the loss of critical species can have disastrous effects on human populations that depend on them, in often underappreciated ways. The findings should reshape how the public and policymakers alike relate to the world around us, and how we consider the unforeseen consequences of ecological destruction. 

“We’re interconnected with the rest of the natural world,” Frank said. “I think for a lot of people, it’s this hippie, quasi-tree-hugger concept. Turning it into numbers and an outcome that people care about like mortality does change how people think about this statement: that we’re one with nature. What does that actually mean? It’s not a spiritual statement. It’s a statement about causal mechanisms.”

The human costs of India’s extinct vultures

Sudarshan and Frank estimate that from 2000 to 2005, an additional 500,000 people died in India above the preexisting trend, after the rapid dying off of vultures in the 1990s. The near-extinction was an unexpected (and for a long time unknown) byproduct of the country’s farmers introducing a medication to livestock that had previously only been prescribed to humans.

Within a few years, 95 percent of the country’s vulture population was wiped out, dropping from tens of millions to a few thousand. A decade later, researchers discovered the drug led to kidney failure and death in the vultures when they fed on dead livestock that still had it in their system.

Sudarshan and Frank compared death rates in the years following the die-offs between regions that had previously been home to vulture populations and those that hadn’t, finding that people started dying at higher rates in areas where the birds had lived.

In the communities that lost vultures, there were an estimated 104,000 excess deaths annually — deaths that may be attributed to the species’ near-extinction — from 2000 to 2005, the years immediately following their dramatic decline that were the focus of Sudarshan and Frank’s study. It adds up to more than half a million deaths over five years, costing India an estimated $69 billion annually.

“I would not have guessed the effect would be so large,” Sudarshan said. But as he and Frank came to realize the various vectors by which diseases might spread without vultures around, Sudarshan realized the extinction was “the largest sanitation shock you could imagine, where you have 50 million carcasses every year not being disposed of.”

Keystone animal species are vital to human health

Ecologists and conservationists have long known that some species — called “keystone” species — play a pivotal role in their ecosystems. Scientists have also suspected that those species’ role is so important that their loss could have life-and-death consequences for human beings. That relationship, though, has been hard to prove.

There has been plenty of circumstantial evidence. In India, vultures are known to be extremely efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it. Before the extinction, Indian regions that were home to vultures already recorded lower baseline mortality rates than those without them. After the birds died off, people in affected areas reported seeing more feral dogs and more rotting carcasses building up in fields.

Without vultures to consume them, there were more dead animals lying around, which sometimes ended up in rivers or other bodies of water, tainting local water supplies. The absence of vultures became an opportunity for other scavengers, such as rats and dogs. India did not attempt a census of feral dogs until 2012, well after the study period. But when they did, there were more of the animals in the areas previously hospitable to vultures, which Sudarshan and Frank argue implies the dogs may have flourished after the birds were eliminated. 

Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from potentially disease-carrying carcasses, creating more opportunities for a person to come in contact with infected remains. They’re also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Orders of the rabies vaccines started to rise in the years after the vulture population plummeted. 

“I was mind-blown that it happened so drastically, so quickly,” Frank said. “We often say that anecdotes are not evidence, but the amount of anecdotes about how people were negatively affected by the disappearance of the vultures, we read more and more and more of it and said, ‘Okay, this has got to show up in data.’”

Sudarshan and Frank have now provided a template for studying the impacts of species loss on human health, and researchers unaffiliated with the study told me that they expect more such research to follow.  Frank hopes future work might be able to identify whether specific causes of death increase after the elimination of a keystone species.

Rethinking our relationship to the animals we live alongside

The findings should inform conservation efforts in other regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where vultures play a similar sanitation role, the researchers argue. Small investments to support local populations could have big payoffs. More broadly, supporting species believed to be ecologically critical, of which vultures are only one, is a wise investment. 

It is also clear that farmers and agricultural officials should consider the potential ripple effects when giving new medications to livestock. This is a textbook example of One Health, the public health paradigm that says we should protect animal and environmental health to protect the well-being of humans. 

The drug in question, diclofenac, had been introduced because it was a cheap way to treat fevers and inflammation in farm animals. The medicine was banned once Indian officials learned of its role in the vulture die-off, but by then, the damage was already done. 

Vultures remain critically endangered in India, with only a few thousand individuals. Sudarshan and Frank argue their findings should encourage conservation efforts in India, though vultures’ life cycles will make them difficult to restore: They lay, at most, one egg in a year and take years to sexually mature.

The enormous consequences of their near-extinction in India remind us that promoting biodiversity means embracing every species, not only those that look good on a T-shirt; they and we are all part of a whole.

“We need to really remember these connections. They are crucially important,” Andrea Santangeli, a conservation scientist at the Research Centre for Ecological Change at the University of Helsinki, told me. “We cannot live a healthy life without a healthy nature.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

How Safe Is It To Let Your Dog Lick Your Face?

How much truth is there to the adage that a dog's mouth is actually cleaner than a human's?

“A dog’s mouth is actually cleaner than a human’s mouth” is an oft-repeated adage by dog owners who happily accept their pet’s slobbery affections. However, having seen my own pup go to town on a freshly laid pile of “kibble” the deer left for him in the yard, I highly doubt that.When he wants to share his love and bestow my face with kisses, I’m in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, he is the light of my life and the most perfect baby boy. How can I tell him “no” when he wants to give me a little affection?On the other hand, as a skin care writer and former face-toucher, I’m all too aware of how bacteria and other impurities can wreak havoc on our skin.While the occasional breakout may be a small price to pay for accepting your furry friend’s love and affection, you may remember the 2019 news story in which an Ohio woman lost all four limbs from an infection caused by a kiss from her own puppy.Although that was a very rare case, should we nevertheless practice caution when allowing our pets to lick our faces? Or is the regular smooch from Fido fairly harmless?We spoke to experts in the dermatology and veterinary fields to find out more.How ‘Clean’ Is Your Dog’s Mouth, Actually?“All mouths are ‘dirty’ in the sense that they are full of microbes,” said Dr. Tessa LeCuyer, an assistant professor and veterinary clinical microbiologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.“A dog’s mouth is not any cleaner than a person’s mouth, as both are full of hundreds of different types of bacteria,” LeCuyer said.As dogs see the world with their noses, many are drawn to two particularly pungent sources brimming with bacteria and parasites — feces and carrion (aka dead critters). And to their owners’ abject horror, many dogs love to chow down once they find one of these forbidden snacks. While LeCuyer says that, generally, your dog’s love of “other chocolate snacks” won’t lead to disease, she does note that there are some parasites and bacteria that dogs can pick up from eating feces. “Dogs can ingest bacteria like salmonella from feces of other animals,” said LeCuyer. “Dogs that eat feces from other dogs are at increased risk for parasites such as roundworms.” She said the risk of your dog picking up certain pathogens can also depend on which animal’s feces is their treat of choice. “Bird feces are more likely to harbor salmonella than mammalian feces,” LeCuyer said. It’s no surprise that microscopic nasties could living in an animal corpse that your dog decides to chomp on. However, despite the popularity of feeding dogs raw meat as a part of a “raw food diet” in recent years, this trend could put your dog (and you) at risk of getting sick. “Ingestion of raw meat, whether carrion or food-grade, increases the risk of exposure to foodborne bacteria such as salmonella and listeria, which can cause disease in dogs as well as people,” LeCuyer said. Fortunately, LeCuyer says that dog owners can drastically decrease their risk of picking up a disease from their dog with good handwashing hygiene – particularly after handling your pet and/or their poop. And if your dog has a habit of going to the feces and carrion buffet, it may be time to implement a “no kissing on the lips” rule. “Transfer of bacteria or parasites could potentially occur when a dog licks someone around or in the mouth,” LeCuyer said. Zero Creatives via Getty ImagesWhat exactly has he been eating today?Can The Bacteria In My Dog’s Mouth Harm My Skin?You already have a highly sophisticated defense system that protects you against any germs living in your dog’s mouth, as well as any other environmental contaminants — your skin.“Most of the potentially harmful bacteria in a dog’s mouth can only cause disease in a person when there is a break in the skin that allows the bacteria to infect deeper tissues,” LeCuyer said.Generally, the most common way bacteria from a dog’s mouth can infect the deeper tissues of the skin is if it bites you. Dr. Danielle Dubin, a board-certified dermatologist and assistant professor of dermatology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says dog bites on the hands and face, as well as deep bites, are prone to skin infections, particularly for immunocompromised patients. “It is important to have these types of injuries evaluated by a health care professional to determine if antibiotics are indicated,” Dubin said.Although it’s far more common to contract a skin infection from a dog bite rather than a dog kiss, our experts still urge exercising caution if your dog tries licking an area where your skin barrier might be weakened.“If you have any breaks in your skin, such as from rashes, cuts or pimples, the [dog’s] saliva could potentially cause an infection,” said Dr. Jennifer Chen, a board-certified dermatologist and clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University.Consider Your Dog’s Smooching StyleWhen it comes to determining how “bad” it is for your dog to lick your face, think about the way your dog expresses affection. Does Fido give you a quick little peck when you return from a long day at work? Or do they treat your face to their full doggie-spa special?“A wet kiss or two is unlikely to cause any problems in an otherwise healthy adult with intact skin,” Dubin said. “However, repeated licking, even in [a healthy adult] population, carries a risk of developing irritant contact dermatitis,” Dubin said.Although your skin can probably withstand a kiss or two from your pup every now and then, constant licking could cause some issues.“The constant wet-dry cycle of exposure also disrupts the skin barrier,” said Chen. “This can result in a rash consisting of peeling, dry skin that may crack and bleed and become uncomfortable.”Beyond Bacteria: Other Ways Dog Saliva Can Affect Your SkinWhile most are concerned about the bacteria living in their dog’s mouth, that isn’t the only way your dog’s kisses can irritate your skin. Dubin points out that some individuals could potentially have an allergic reaction to the proteins in their dog’s saliva, resulting in allergic contact dermatitis.However, even if you aren’t allergic to dogs, Chen notes that saliva itself can be a skin irritant.Another risk factor, according to Chen, is that your dog may inadvertently pick up and transfer irritants to your skin. So, if your fur-baby particularly loves exploring the neighborhood poison ivy patch, you may think twice before letting them lick your face. “Sometimes we will also see patients become allergic to their dog’s products,” said Chen.Who Should Avoid Getting LickedWhile people with healthy skin should be OK accepting a slobbery peck from their pup every once in a while, some should exercise more caution.“[For] patients with pre-existing skin conditions such as acne, rosacea or eczema, dog saliva can trigger disease flares and/or skin-limited infections,” said Dubin.Our dermatologists also warn that if you have any cuts, rashes or breakouts on your face, you should also hold off on letting your dog lick you. “Patients who have medical conditions or are on medications that result in a suppressed immune system will also be at higher risk [of infection],” Chen said.Beware of Skin Care Ingredients That Can Harm Your PetEven if you are OK with putting up with the occasional breakout or risking a potential skin infection for the love of your pet, there is one other thing to consider before allowing your dog to kiss you: Certain skin care ingredients can potentially harm dogs if ingested.“Don’t let your pet lick any topical medications you apply to your skin or hair,” said LeCuyer.Several skin care ingredients can be harmful to pets, LeCuyer warns. “One of the biggest concerns is xylitol, which can be toxic to dogs even in relatively small amounts and is in many skin care and toothpaste products.”While many dog owners are well aware of xylitol’s presence in gum and other sugar-free products, they might not realize that this sweetener is also used as a moisturizing agent in some skin care products.Another common ingredient to look out for is zinc oxide. Though beloved by dermatologists for its ability to gently protect your skin from the sun’s harmful rays, it can trigger stomach upset or an allergic reaction in your pet if they ingest it, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.Additionally, the ASPCA also warns that there are a number of topical ingredients, including many topical pain relievers like diclofenac, lidocaine and dibucaine, that can cause severe damage or death if ingested, even in small doses (i.e., if your dog licks the area where you applied the topical).When in doubt, LeCuyer recommends contacting the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center via their 24/7 hotline, (888) 426-4435.

Thousands of Glendale Unified students ordered to shelter-in-place due to wayward bear cub

Multiple agencies were monitoring an adolescent cub as it sat in a tree in front of Crescenta Valley High School, unable to compel the creature to go home.

When the ranger’s away, the bear cub will play — and the kids will stay locked in school.At least that’s what happened Tuesday in La Crescenta, where multiple law enforcement and wildlife personnel spent the afternoon monitoring a bear cub hanging out in a tree in front of Crescenta Valley High School, powerless to compel the creature to go home.As authorities determined what to do, Glendale Unified School District officials ordered the high school and nearby La Crescenta Elementary to shelter in place.“We want to stress that things are OK, and the situation is actively being monitored,” said district spokesperson Kristine Nam.Classes continued as scheduled on each campus, though students were not allowed to go outside, Nam said. The school issued the shelter-in-place order from 10 a.m. to shortly after noon and then again at 1 p.m.Though the district occasionally sends out warnings about bears and mountain lions, this is the first time Nam said she had seen a bear-induced shelter-in-place order since she joined the district nine years ago.One parent of an elementary school student confirmed to The Times that La Crescenta dismissed students at their regularly scheduled 2:40 p.m. release time, while Crescenta Valley High dismissed students out a back exit.There are about 2,950 students, total, enrolled in the two schools.Nam said she’d received texts from parents who claimed the bear was one of a group seen in the area that included a mama bear and another cub.The cub in the tree, however, was the only one that deputies from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Crescenta Valley station were monitoring.Deputies first received reports at 1 a.m. of a cub around Crescenta Valley High.Lt. Michael Gonzalez said his office contacted a local humane society and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to report the creature.“Unfortunately, we didn’t receive assistance from either,” Gonzalez said. “We don’t have personnel trained for this situation or have equipment to handle or transport animals back to their homes.”Gonzalez said deputies could only respond with lethal force in a life-and-death situation.Nonetheless, he said, deputies were monitoring the bear and would continue to do so.“We hoping that, by nightfall, the bear will move out and back into its habitat,” Gonzalez said. “We’re not allowed to subdue or really do anything to move the bear home.”Steve Gonzalez, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife information officer, lamented that his office’s bear wrangler was sick and that his department did not have on-the-ground personnel to help.The department was attempting to send an environmental scientist to the school to help with the bear’s reunification with its family and eventual return home.Steve Gonzalez confirmed that the bear was not tagged, so the department was not certain of the bear’s exact home, though it’s likely the nearby national forest.“I wouldn’t say this is a highly uncommon occurrence,” the Fish and Wildlife officer said. “In this case, though, we’re deferring to local law enforcement.”

Social Media Star Squirrel Euthanized After Being Taken From Home Tests Negative for Rabies

A pet squirrel who was a social media star before being seized by authorities in upstate New York has tested negative for rabies

Peanut, the social media star squirrel at the center of a national furor after it was seized from its owner in upstate New York and euthanized, has tested negative for rabies, a county official said Tuesday.The state Department of Environmental Conservation took the squirrel and a raccoon named Fred on Oct. 30 from Mark Longo's home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border. The agency said it had received complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally and potentially unsafely, but officials have faced a barrage of criticism for the seizure. Government workers said they have since faced violent threats.The DEC and the Chemung County officials have said the squirrel and raccoon were euthanized so they could be tested for rabies after Peanut bit a DEC worker involved in the investigation.Chemung County Executive Chris Moss said tests on the two animals came back negative during a news conference detailing the county's role in the incident. He said the county worked with the state and followed protocols.Peanut gained tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms in the more than seven years since Longo took him in after seeing his mother get hit by a car in New York City. Longo has said he was in the process of filing paperwork to get Peanut certified as an educational animal when he was seized.Longo on Tuesday said the negative test results were no surprise and criticized the government's actions.“It’s no real big shocker to me, considering I lived with Peanut for seven-and-a-half years and Fred for five months. I’m not foaming at the mouth,” he said. “I knew the test results were going to be negative.”The DEC said in a prepared statement there was an internal investigation and that they were reviewing internal policies and procedures.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Can Democrats Keep Young Men From Turning Fascist?

Noted animal mutilator and brain-worm host Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hopes to run the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, or even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the second Trump administration. Not long after Trump’s victory, he started to lay out what the “big role” the president-elect promised him in the White House might entail: taking fluoride out of water supplies; dismantling mandatory vaccination programs; eliminating “entire departments” within the FDA. The Trump campaign reportedly tried to distance itself from him not long afterward.Whether RFK Jr. gets a Cabinet post or not, how such a noted kook became a serious candidate for such positions is something people will likely be pondering for weeks, months, and potentially decades. Some piece of the story is how strongly young men—many of whom frequent the corners of the internet that champion RFK-esque mantras—have swung toward Trump. Fifty-six percent of young men nationwide voted for Biden in 2020. In 2024, 56 percent of them backed Trump. CBS exit polls found that Trump won young men in Pennsylvania by 18 points this year; in 2020, Biden captured the same demographic with a nine-point lead.The Trump campaign seems to have done a decent job selling itself to the so-called manosphere: a sprawling informal online community encompassing a multitude of unrelated podcasts, YouTube channels, and Twitch streams whose content runs the gamut from half-baked, freshman dorm–style philosophical debates and anodyne self-help advice to virulent misogyny and fringe conspiracy theorizing. At its core is an aspirational masculinity loosely grounded in extreme notions of personal responsibility: rising and grinding, maximizing your physical attractiveness (“looksmaxxing”), driving up your own “Sexual Market Value,” etc. As Mother Jones and other outlets have noted, the sheer amount of that content means that young men looking to get in shape or upgrade their wardrobes can quickly get pulled into a bizarre web of right-wing propaganda stylized as lifestyle content.RFK Jr. tried to appeal to these same disaffected young men in his own campaign for president. As Liza Featherstone has written for TNR, his emphasis on physical fitness and the dangers of certain types of environmental pollution—including when appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast—holds some appeal for young men rightfully concerned about their own well-being. While RFK Jr.’s bizarre claims that microplastics are causing people to become trans and nonbinary are obviously wrong and dangerous, Featherstone writes, “it’s legitimate not to want microplastics in your balls, and research does suggest that pesticides, PFAS, and microplastics are bad for people’s endocrine systems.”The predictable irony of all this is that—if he does make it to a top White House post—RFK Jr. will be carrying water for the people responsible for depositing microplastics and all manner of other toxic chemicals into the balls of American men. In September, Trump reportedly offered microplastic-manufacturing oil and gas executives whatever policy changes they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions.And that, as Featherstone suggests, points to a possible opening for Democrats and others on the left: Tackling toxic plastics production head-on could present an inroad to the manosphere and its preoccupations with clean living and virility. Ideally, that’d be part of a deeper project to figure out what ails men. Part of that would necessarily involve building a thriving, independent media ecosystem to counter the one that fuels right-wing and right-wing-adjacent influencers. As Taylor Lorenz argues, the financial incentives that have driven billionaires to invest in eccentric right-leaning podcasts just don’t exist on the left. “Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors,” she writes, “primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.”Taking that project seriously would carry serious political upsides for Democrats; the party faces a real risk of permanently losing young men to some of the darkest corners of the right—and maybe even losing young people altogether. While young people in the U.S. have leaned to the left politically in recent years, buoyed by Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020, young people in other countries seem to be moving rightward. In Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 16 percent of voters aged 16 to 24 in this year’s European elections—up 11 points from the previous election in 2019. Voters aged 25 to 44 moved toward the AfD, as well. Support for Narendra Modi’s ruling, pogromist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, among voters under 35 in India has been stubbornly consistent since 2019, hovering around 40 percent. Last November, nearly 70 percent of young voters in Argentina backed Javier Milei and his far-right party.Yet the popularity of the manosphere’s most noxious elements might better be understood less as a partisan communications challenge than a symptom of a broader social crisis worth dealing with in its own right. Labor force participation among 25- to 34-year-old men in the U.S. has dropped over the last 20 years, when men under 30 spent an hour more of their waking hours alone than women in the same age range. Those figures have climbed steadily over the last several years, and continued to swell even after Covid-19 lockdowns eased. In 2019, young men spent 5.6 hours alone per day, according to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, or AESG; in 2023, that had jumped to 6.6 hours per day. Two-thirds of men aged 18 to 30 surveyed by the nonprofit Equimundo reported feeling that “no one really knows me.” Roughly a quarter of unmarried men younger than 30 say they have no close friends.Steve Bannon famously set out to take advantage of that fact and court “rootless white males” into the MAGA orbit. Progressives, by contrast, have barely even attempted to present a positive, fun, even aspirational picture of what it means to be a guy. While the Democratic Party bizarrely decided to embrace an album about being a woman who parties in your thirties, leaning hard on Charli XCX’s endorsement of Kamala as “brat,” its most prominent men are either wholesome Midwestern dads, cringey wife guys, or people who look and act like they play politicians on TV. This isn’t a problem that can be solved exclusively with better messaging, either: Winning young men means embracing policies that actually make their lives better. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the male loneliness epidemic has coincided with a decline in union density and rising economic instability for young people saddled with student debt, rising rents, and unaffordable health care. Decades of bipartisan divestment from public goods like pools and parks means there are fewer inviting places to meet and hang out with friends—especially if you don’t happen to have a bunch of expendable income. If you’re working two or three jobs to afford car payments and insurance, letting YouTube autoplay might sound more relaxing than driving a half-hour to get a drink with a buddy.The Harris campaign’s strategy of racking up endorsements from liberal celebrities didn’t work out much better than it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Going on Joe Rogan probably wouldn’t have saved her campaign, of course. But there’s a lot of work to be done to keep him and those even further to his right from turning a generation of young men into degenerate fascists.

Noted animal mutilator and brain-worm host Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hopes to run the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, or even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the second Trump administration. Not long after Trump’s victory, he started to lay out what the “big role” the president-elect promised him in the White House might entail: taking fluoride out of water supplies; dismantling mandatory vaccination programs; eliminating “entire departments” within the FDA. The Trump campaign reportedly tried to distance itself from him not long afterward.Whether RFK Jr. gets a Cabinet post or not, how such a noted kook became a serious candidate for such positions is something people will likely be pondering for weeks, months, and potentially decades. Some piece of the story is how strongly young men—many of whom frequent the corners of the internet that champion RFK-esque mantras—have swung toward Trump. Fifty-six percent of young men nationwide voted for Biden in 2020. In 2024, 56 percent of them backed Trump. CBS exit polls found that Trump won young men in Pennsylvania by 18 points this year; in 2020, Biden captured the same demographic with a nine-point lead.The Trump campaign seems to have done a decent job selling itself to the so-called manosphere: a sprawling informal online community encompassing a multitude of unrelated podcasts, YouTube channels, and Twitch streams whose content runs the gamut from half-baked, freshman dorm–style philosophical debates and anodyne self-help advice to virulent misogyny and fringe conspiracy theorizing. At its core is an aspirational masculinity loosely grounded in extreme notions of personal responsibility: rising and grinding, maximizing your physical attractiveness (“looksmaxxing”), driving up your own “Sexual Market Value,” etc. As Mother Jones and other outlets have noted, the sheer amount of that content means that young men looking to get in shape or upgrade their wardrobes can quickly get pulled into a bizarre web of right-wing propaganda stylized as lifestyle content.RFK Jr. tried to appeal to these same disaffected young men in his own campaign for president. As Liza Featherstone has written for TNR, his emphasis on physical fitness and the dangers of certain types of environmental pollution—including when appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast—holds some appeal for young men rightfully concerned about their own well-being. While RFK Jr.’s bizarre claims that microplastics are causing people to become trans and nonbinary are obviously wrong and dangerous, Featherstone writes, “it’s legitimate not to want microplastics in your balls, and research does suggest that pesticides, PFAS, and microplastics are bad for people’s endocrine systems.”The predictable irony of all this is that—if he does make it to a top White House post—RFK Jr. will be carrying water for the people responsible for depositing microplastics and all manner of other toxic chemicals into the balls of American men. In September, Trump reportedly offered microplastic-manufacturing oil and gas executives whatever policy changes they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions.And that, as Featherstone suggests, points to a possible opening for Democrats and others on the left: Tackling toxic plastics production head-on could present an inroad to the manosphere and its preoccupations with clean living and virility. Ideally, that’d be part of a deeper project to figure out what ails men. Part of that would necessarily involve building a thriving, independent media ecosystem to counter the one that fuels right-wing and right-wing-adjacent influencers. As Taylor Lorenz argues, the financial incentives that have driven billionaires to invest in eccentric right-leaning podcasts just don’t exist on the left. “Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors,” she writes, “primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.”Taking that project seriously would carry serious political upsides for Democrats; the party faces a real risk of permanently losing young men to some of the darkest corners of the right—and maybe even losing young people altogether. While young people in the U.S. have leaned to the left politically in recent years, buoyed by Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020, young people in other countries seem to be moving rightward. In Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 16 percent of voters aged 16 to 24 in this year’s European elections—up 11 points from the previous election in 2019. Voters aged 25 to 44 moved toward the AfD, as well. Support for Narendra Modi’s ruling, pogromist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, among voters under 35 in India has been stubbornly consistent since 2019, hovering around 40 percent. Last November, nearly 70 percent of young voters in Argentina backed Javier Milei and his far-right party.Yet the popularity of the manosphere’s most noxious elements might better be understood less as a partisan communications challenge than a symptom of a broader social crisis worth dealing with in its own right. Labor force participation among 25- to 34-year-old men in the U.S. has dropped over the last 20 years, when men under 30 spent an hour more of their waking hours alone than women in the same age range. Those figures have climbed steadily over the last several years, and continued to swell even after Covid-19 lockdowns eased. In 2019, young men spent 5.6 hours alone per day, according to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, or AESG; in 2023, that had jumped to 6.6 hours per day. Two-thirds of men aged 18 to 30 surveyed by the nonprofit Equimundo reported feeling that “no one really knows me.” Roughly a quarter of unmarried men younger than 30 say they have no close friends.Steve Bannon famously set out to take advantage of that fact and court “rootless white males” into the MAGA orbit. Progressives, by contrast, have barely even attempted to present a positive, fun, even aspirational picture of what it means to be a guy. While the Democratic Party bizarrely decided to embrace an album about being a woman who parties in your thirties, leaning hard on Charli XCX’s endorsement of Kamala as “brat,” its most prominent men are either wholesome Midwestern dads, cringey wife guys, or people who look and act like they play politicians on TV. This isn’t a problem that can be solved exclusively with better messaging, either: Winning young men means embracing policies that actually make their lives better. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the male loneliness epidemic has coincided with a decline in union density and rising economic instability for young people saddled with student debt, rising rents, and unaffordable health care. Decades of bipartisan divestment from public goods like pools and parks means there are fewer inviting places to meet and hang out with friends—especially if you don’t happen to have a bunch of expendable income. If you’re working two or three jobs to afford car payments and insurance, letting YouTube autoplay might sound more relaxing than driving a half-hour to get a drink with a buddy.The Harris campaign’s strategy of racking up endorsements from liberal celebrities didn’t work out much better than it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Going on Joe Rogan probably wouldn’t have saved her campaign, of course. But there’s a lot of work to be done to keep him and those even further to his right from turning a generation of young men into degenerate fascists.

Orphaned Squirrel Who Became Social Media Star Was Euthanized After Being Seized From Home

An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut is dead after being seized by New York state from his caretakers' home

PINE CITY, N.Y. (AP) — An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut was euthanized after state authorities seized the beloved pet during a raid on his caretaker's home, authorities said Friday.After anonymous complaints, officers from the state Department of Environmental Conservation took the squirrel and a raccoon named Fred from Mark Longo's home near the Pennsylvania border in rural Pine City on Wednesday, Longo said. On Friday, the DEC and Chemung County Department of Health confirmed both animals' fate.“On Oct. 30, DEC seized a raccoon and squirrel sharing a residence with humans, creating the potential for human exposure to rabies. In addition, a person involved with the investigation was bitten by the squirrel. To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized,” the agencies said in a statement, CBS News in New York reported. “The animals are being tested for rabies and anyone who has been in contact with these animals is strongly encouraged to consult their physician.” Neither agency responded to The Associated Press's requests for comment. Peanut amassed tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms during the seven years since Longo, who runs an animal sanctuary, said he took him in after seeing his mother get hit by a car in New York City. Peanut's Instagram account shows the squirrel leaping on to Longo’s shoulder, jumping through a hoop, holding and eating waffles and wearing miniature hats. “It is with profound sorrow that we share the heartbreaking news: on October 30th, the DEC made the devastating decision to euthanize our beloved Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon. Despite our passionate outcry for compassion, the agency chose to ignore our pleas, leaving us in deep shock and grief,” an Instagram post said Friday, accompanied by a video montage of the animals interacting with their smiling caretakers.Longo and his wife, Daniela, opened P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary in April 2023. It now houses about 300 animals including horses, goats and alpacas, Longo said. He said he was in the process of filing paperwork to get Peanut certified as an educational animal when he was seized.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.