Category: Stories

  • Me and My Pet Tiger: “Trespassers Will Be Eaten”

    Eccentric private citizens in the United States own more tigers than exist in the wild worldwide. But owning big cats can be a dangerous hobby, especially when the animals turn on their owners.

    Vincent Lowe, 49, didn’t even have enough time to fire his .357 caliber pistol. In one powerful leap, the 500-pound tiger crashed through the brittle wire of its cage and pinned Lowe to the ground. The tiger’s bite fractured Lowe’s neck like a bread stick, killing him almost instantaneously. “He was not supposed to work that close to the tiger’s cage. He ignored every rule in the book and provoked the cat!” Robert Baudy is sitting in his living room, darkened by heavy drapes, wearing khaki-colored safari clothing and looking like an octogenarian reincarnation of Dr. Marsh Tracy from the 1960’s TV series “Daktari.”

    “I picked up one of my rifles and ran over to him,” says Baudy. “I had to shoot my own tiger!” But then a smile flickers across the face of the 83-year-old. “With an excellent rifle, by the way, a .22 magnum, German-made. It only took me two shots.”

    Baudy clearly enjoys playing the part of the big game hunter. A native Frenchman, Baudy has spent the last 30 years raising tigers, lions, pumas and leopards in Center Hill, Florida. Thousands of big cats have been born under the ancient oaks on Baudy’s farm, “Savage Kingdom.” Baudy apparently views the death of his employee, Vincent Lowe, as little more than a workplace accident. But for others the case merely emphasizes the absurdity of the tiger industry.

    “I’m the enemy number one in the cat business, according to animal rights activists,” says Baudy. He gazes thoughtfully at an enormous painting of two tigers in the snow hanging on his living room wall. “You know,” says the tiger breeder, “those activists are just a bunch of nuts. Is it my fault if people don’t know how to handle these animals?”

    Welcome to America, the land of the predator. There are more tigers living in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Estimates range from 10,000 to 15,000 animals. By comparison, experts believe that there are at most 7,000 tigers living in the wild worldwide.

    Thousands of Americans have succumbed to a fascination with the biggest and strongest of all predatory big cats. Breeders like Baudy supply the industry with cuddly baby tigers. But the kittens soon grow into big, powerful animals, quickly becoming too much for many owners to handle. Animal rights activists are critical of the practice because many of the animals, crippled and traumatized, end up spending their final days in bleak roadside zoos.

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    This world, fueled by an odd mix of adrenaline, dried cat urine and the slightly pungent odor of the fresh meat tigers eat in bulk on a daily basis, is especially prevalent in Florida. This sort of eccentricity that would prompt someone to buy a tiger is evident to anyone who drives through the glitzy artificial world of West Palm Beach. A sign on the heavy metal gate of Steve Sipek’s estate says it all: “Trespassers will be eaten.” The 64-year-old actor, who once played Tarzan, doesn’t just own tigers as pets. He literally lives, sleeps and cuddles with them. In fact, Sipek has transformed his entire house into a cage for big cats. Visitors to the former king of the jungle’s home enter a narrow passageway through a rickety door. The lord of the manor sits with two of his cats, Bo and Little Bo, in a room behind a wire-mesh fence. A thin metal bar is the only thing preventing the two tigers from breaking out of the enclosure.

    Sipek is a giant of a man. Using the stage name Steve Hawkes, he acted in films like “Tarzan, King of the Jungle” and “Tarzan and the Brown Prince” in the 1960s and 70s. He also played a blood-drinking giant turkey in an obscure B movie called “Blood Freak.” But being a tamer of big cats is the role of his life. Sipek says he experienced an awakening of sorts when a lion chained to his arm once pulled him out of a burning film set, and he has believed that he was chosen to take care of big cats ever since.

    “Touching a tiger is like touching the face of God,” says Sipek. He has cared for more than 100 big cats in his house over the years. “I saved my cats from a life in a cage,” he claims. “They can even use the pool here.”

    Then it’s feeding time. Sipek’s girlfriend Kathi drags in two buckets of turkey drumsticks. Sipek is in his element. He holds out the meat at eye level, and the 300-pound cats jump over and eat from his hand. Dessert is milk mixed with egg, served from a baby bottle.

    The cats pay almost no attention to strangers. But if a person turns his back on one of the tigers, it immediately becomes nervous and instinctively crouches as if to pounce. The tension is almost palpable. The person suddenly feels like prey.

    Officer Jesse Lee must have felt that way when Sipek’s tiger Bobo charged him two years ago in July. According to the report by the Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC), “the tigers teeth were showing and his ears were pinned back. Lee stepped back as he fired five rounds from his semi-automatic AR-15.” The tiger lay dead in the bushes. It was 5:20 in the afternoon.

    Bobo had escaped from Sipek’s private zoo the day before. Police officers, wildlife management officers from the FWC and Sipek himself pursued the cat. The tiger was spotted several times, but the stun darts the officers fired missed their target. In the end, Jesse Lee shot the tiger.

    Sipek buried the cat in his front yard. Bobo’s grave is decorated with flowers and animal sculptures. “I wanted to kill that bastard officer bigtime,” says Sipek. “My friends didn’t want to let me, but I would have done it.”

    But according to Lieutenant Charles Dennis of the FWC, “the officer followed agency policy. A 700-pound tiger will injure or kill people. When he grabs you, he has grabbed you. There’s no maybes, no ifs, no buts. He’s gonna kill you.” The heavyset officer sits in his office at the FWC, wearing a cowboy hat, vest and sunglasses. Dennis believes it is far too easy to acquire big cats.

    “In my opinion, we have to be stricter on people who own tigers,” says Dennis, “let me show you why.” He flips open his laptop. A series of blood-covered, mutilated people flashes across the screen. The last image is of a woman with her throat slit open. “Joy Holiday was an animal trainer. The same tiger killed someone else two months earlier.” Why wasn’t the tiger put down? “You know,” says Dennis, “most Americans look at it this way: ‘If you own a tiger, then it’s your problem if that tiger decides to eat you.’”

    According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, five people have been killed by big cats since 2003 in the US alone. More than 40 others have been injured, some severely. In many cases it is the supposed cat experts who become victims. Show star Roy Horn is a famous example. Horn, who with his partner Siegfried Fischbacher formed the world-famous duo Siegfried & Roy, was attacked by a tiger three years ago during a performance at the Hotel Mirage in Las Vegas. The animal, named Montecore, bit into the performer’s neck and dragged the helpless man from the stage. Horn narrowly survived the incident.

    Children have also been killed. Americans are fond of taking posed Polaroid pictures with big cats. It was this kind of photo opportunity that killed 17-year-old Haley Hilderbrand last August. She was posing for a photo next to a tiger in a private zoo in Mound Valley, Kansas. To this day, no one knows why Haley suddenly bent forward. The tiger plunged its teeth into her neck, killing Haley on the spot.

    Even these kinds of incidents haven’t discouraged big cat enthusiasts from allowing their tigers to interact with children. Gloria Johnson, a cat lover from the town of Havana in northern Florida, even refers to “wildlife education” as her mission in life. “There have to be just a few specially, highly trained people to teach children about what extinction means,” says Johnson. “It means never again.”

    Of course, the 51-year-old Johnson counts herself among these cat experts. She bought her one-and-a-half-year-old white tiger Casanova from Baudy for a special price of $5,000. “I volunteered for Robert for a long time,” she explains, “a white baby tiger normally goes for $15,000.” Yellow tigers, she adds, can be had for as little as $1,200.

    Johnson took out a second mortgage so that she could buy Casanova. Her simple wooden house is filled with cat paraphernalia. Groups of schoolchildren regularly crowd into her living room to admire the tiger and her two pumas, Ashukalee and Lakota, in her back yard.

    “I even took Casanova into schools until he was six months old,” says the petite Johnson. She would put the animal, which already weighed 100 pounds at the time, on a leash to show it to the children. Johnson is convinced that the lessons are valuable to kids: “When they look into the eyes of a live tiger, it’s an experience they will not get on the Internet or on TV.”

    Johnson portrays herself in the role of the petite blonde dominating the tiger in her personal version of “Beauty and the Beast.” But animal rights activists say that publicity-hungry cat fans like Johnson merely boost the cat trade because they create even more hype for big cats.

    “Gloria walks her tiger on a leash and takes him to school, while at the same claiming that tigers are not pets,” says Carole Baskin, “that’s just bullshit.” The platinum blonde from Tampa, Johnson’s arch enemy, made a fortune in real estate and used to invest in the big cat breeding business. “I used to think that I was doing something to help protect the species,” says Baskin, “but I know today that none of the industry’s money goes into conservation.”

    Nowadays Baskin strongly opposes private ownership of tigers. She runs an animal sanctuary in Tampa called Big Cat Rescue, which is essentially a home for the rejects of the big cat industry. Retired circus cats live out their final years at the facility, which also provides a home for unwanted tigers.

    Auroara, a tigress, is a little bit cross-eyed, has a decent overbite and her legs are deformed. “She’s a typical example of what they call a throwaway tiger,” says Baskin’s colleague Scott Lope. “Auroara is the result of the extreme inbreeding that’s customary in the industry to breed sought-after white tigers.” But Auroara was not born white and was sold off on the cheap to a private owner. “He just dropped her off here at some point.”

    Shere Khan is another example. “He has weak bones, bad teeth and his legs are much too short,” says Lope. “He probably grew up in a cage that was much too small and didn’t get the right nutrition, so that he wasn’t able to develop properly.”

    “At some point tigers become too big and too strong for just about all handlers,” says Baskin. She says she is tired of running a sort of refugee camp for rejected big cats, and wants to see stricter legislation on the books. “Ten states have absolutely no restrictions,” she says, adding that while Florida does have laws to regulate the industry, they are almost impossible to enforce. “The law requires 1,000 hours of experience with big cats before you can own a tiger. But the problem is that the ones who are certifying that experience are the ones selling the tigers.”

    On the grounds of Robert Baudy’s “Savage Kingdom,” this sort of criticism seems like activist chatter from a faraway world. There is something timeless and eternal about Baudy’s big cats as they move lithely through their enclosures. “I don’t understand all the excitement,” says Baudy. “Sixty thousand Americans get hurt by horses every year, but only two or three get wounded by tigers.” He gently scratches tiger Romeo through the bars of the animal’s cage. The sound of the cat’s purring echoes like rolling thunder.

    Baudy wistfully surveys his sun-drenched property. He knows that his days are numbered. “I’m on the way to extinction,” he says. He still owns 17 big cats. Two female tigers are pregnant and will soon give birth.

    But this time Baudy won’t be selling the baby tigers. There were consequences to Vincent Lowe’s death. After more than 30 years in the business, this tiger breeder has lost his license.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (—> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

  • RoboCup 2006: Silicon Players of the Beautiful Game

    Never mind chess — the cool game for smart machines now is soccer. Humanoid robots stumble around the field but learn quickly. They’re playing their own World Cup this week in Germany, and scientists hope machines will beat human champions in less than 50 years.

    Paul, Franz, Gerd, and the shapely Lara aren’t exactly soccer stars. In fact, they’re not even human. They have feet made of carbon fibers and hips with double AC servomotors, powered by lithium-ion batteries with just enough juice for two ten-minute halves. But they’re preparing for a World Cup of their own this week in Germany. “Look at this — that was no coincidence,” says their inventor, Sven Behnke, pointing at a computer screen displaying the moves from a game last year against Japan’s “Team Osaka.” The fact that his protégés scored a single goal still makes Behnke proud.

    He’s a computer scientist from the University of Freiburg who also serves as head coach of the team “NimbRo,” a group of robot athletes that may make soccer history this week. Last year the Freiburg side placed second in their league. Only the Japanese team beat them, 2-1 — in spite of a heroic goal in the second-to-last minute. … More

  • Our Warming World: The Day the Climate Changed

    The climate change debate may have turned an important corner. Sir Nicholas Stern’s report not only put a price tag on global warming, but also argues for an economically viable solution. But will humanity act in time?

    The day the world’s climate changed was a Monday — Monday of last week, to be more precise, at exactly 10 a.m. That was when a gray-haired man with frameless glasses stood before the press to deliver a clear but alarming message. Now, his message having been delivered, no one can claim not to know the true extent of the damage each individual has been doing to the world.

    The core of that message was a number that immediately drove up the planet’s perceived temperature: 5.5 trillion. Sir Nicholas Stern has attached a figure to a phenomenon that is little more than a set of vague concepts for most people. He converted complex physical processes into a unit of measure that directly affects people’s daily lives: money. … More

  • Climate Change: Carbon Dioxide is Killing Cold-Water Reefs

    The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is acidifying the oceans. The first victims could be cold-water coral, which are believed to populate the edges of all continental shelves. Another endangered species is the plankton in the open oceans — the basic building block of the marine food chain.

    The Skagerrak strait is a gray body of water in March. But under the waves, at a depth of 100 meters (328 feet), an underwater Garden of Eden is growing. Whitish hard corals glint in the beam of the headlights of the Jago, a research submersible. Rosefish and bibs flit by. The coral reefs are home to sea stars, sea urchins, sea squirts, long-legged crabs and yellowish sponges. … More

  • Global Warming: Climate Change Sparks Scrap for Arctic Resources

    While scientists and conservationists worry about the potentially dire consequences of global warming, politicians and businessmen are already battling over how to reap the economic benefits from the Arctic thaw.

    It’s not always easy hoisting a flag on Hans Island. The Canadians even had to bring along their own rocks to weigh down the foot of the mast. But then nothing could stand in the way of the success of operation “Frozen Beaver” — at least from a Canadian perspective.

    It was last July when Canadian soldiers raised the maple leaf banner over the tiny isle between Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Not long after that, Canada’s Defense Minister Bill Graham flew in by helicopter to proclaim that Hans Island will always remain Canadian. The provocation worked: Denmark promptly cabled a note of protest to Ottawa.

    The diplomatic spat marked the current highpoint of a … More

  • ‘Little Princess’ and the Bird Flu Mysteries: Tracking the Spread of Avian Influenza

    When bird flu reached Turkey, experts thought it was carried from Russia by migrating geese or ducks. So when wild birds migrate to Germany this spring, will they bring the disease with them? Not necessarily, say scientists.

    Michael Kaatz, who works for a stork reserve in the eastern German city of Loburg, can see the headlines now: “Little Princess Brings Bird Flu to Germany.” Right now, the stork “Little Princess,” the reserve’s pride and joy, is probably flying over Botswana. But soon enough she will be traveling on to South Africa, where she will spend the winter. And, more importantly, at the end of February, the celebrity stork will begin the trek home. Kaatz, who for the past few years has been using a satellite to track her migration routes, will be closely watching where she flies.

    According to Kaatz, the stork will stop over in Turkey before it gets back home to Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany. And in Turkey, of course, bird flu is rife. Which  means that Little Princess, who will be flying with several thousand other white storks on the way back to Germany, will be closely watched by virus experts. … More

  • Winter Sleepers: Researchers Ask – Can Humans Hibernate?

    In a new take on hibernation, biologists now believe that mammals are not the only ones who use the winter months to store up energy. Birds, and even humans, may have the capacity to switch to standby mode.

    By Philip Bethge

    The Hopi Indians call it Hölchoko: “the sleeping one.” During winter the tiny animal, weighing in at a paltry 50 grams, spends up to 25 days in a row in rock fissures or underneath cactuses. Its body temperature, normally hovering at just below a toasty 40°C (104°F), can drop to less than 5°C (41°F) during icy nights in the desert

    Only when the spring sun provides sufficient warmth and insects begin to move about does Phalaenopitlus nuttallii, the common poorwill, emerge from its winter sleep and take off into the air. The tiny bird, a native of the California and Arizona deserts, is uniquely adapted to life on an economy setting. The phenomenon is known as winter sleep, or hibernation, and it was long viewed as the exclusive domain of the marmot, the bear and the dormouse, mammals that sleep away about half the year.

    (more…)

  • Stem Cell Flambé: Test-Tube T-Bones on the Horizon Say Researchers

    A world which is free of caged chickens, slaughterhouses and avian flu is possible, researchers claim. All that’s needed is labaratory-made meat. While test-tube T-bones are still the domain of futurists, scientists have already taken the first important steps.

    The frog steaks were sautéed in a garlic and parsley sauce, then garnished with chives. When the feast was finally ready to eat, the artists sat down for dinner at the museum.

    Two years ago, at an exhibit in the French city of Nantes titled “L’Art Biotech,” Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary dined on “tiny polymers stuffed with clawed frog cell à la Davis, flambéed with Calvados.” The artists, part of the Australian “Tissue Culture Art Project,” called their installation “Disembodied Cuisine.” They had mounted tissue cells from frogs onto small biopolymer substrates — about three centimeters in diameter — and watched as they grew into small “steaks.” The four frogs from which the tissue had been taken looked on from a nearby aquarium.

    The purpose of the project was to probe the boundaries between the living and the “semi-living,” while at the same time creating “victim-free meat” — meat that doesn’t require the slaughter of a single animal. The comical biotech installation was meant to “disturb,” says Catts. But real life could one day be just as disturbing. The vision of frog-friendly frog legs could soon become reality.

    And it’s not just frog meat that may soon be jumping from Petri dishes onto your plate. Laboratories, some hope, may someday replace slaughterhouses and even now, researchers are working feverishly to pull steaks and hamburger out of their pipettes. Their goal is the development of giant bioreactors where butcher shop wares are grown out of cell cultures, potentially forever relegating mass-production chicken farms, veal calf production and pigsties to agriculture museums. One day, say some scientists, meat incubators could become standard kitchen equipment, allowing consumers to grow their own liver pâté and meat balls, turkey sausage and smoked salami.

    “Animal products without animals”

    “The technology already exists for making a sort of pressed chicken in the laboratory,” says agriculture economist Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland. Researchers in the Netherlands are even studying ways to take the next step — from laboratory meat to industrial production. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs has earmarked €2 million for a four-year research project at universities in Eindhoven, Utrecht and Amsterdam. The project is being co-sponsored by the meat-processing industry, which has kicked in another €2.3 million.

    “We’re trying to develop animal production without animals,” says cell researcher Henk Haagsman, director of the research group in Utrecht. At this point, he says, researchers still haven’t figured out whether laboratory meat can be produced inexpensively enough to compete with traditional meat. “But from a scientific perspective,” says Haagsman, “the sky is the limit when it comes to meat production in the laboratory.”

    The basic concept behind what is known as in vitro cultivated meat sounds surprisingly simple. Meat is mostly made up of bundled muscle cells, interspersed with fat and connective tissue cells. If it were possible to grow these cells in the laboratory and combine them at the right ratios, test-tube meat could become a reality. The patent that serves as the basis for the Dutch research project puts the issue succinctly: “The product has the structure and flavor of lean meat, but without requiring animals to suffer and without involving religious and ethical concerns or causing environment problems, all of which are the case in today’s meat production.”

    As promising as this may sound, biotech meat production still has many hurdles to overcome. Scientists are just now beginning to experiment with ways to reconstruct knuckles of veal and pig stomachs in the laboratory. Three years ago, US researcher Morris Benjaminson of New York’s Touro College was one of the first to experiment with the concept of growing filets in a Petri dish. After placing tiny muscle particles taken from goldfish into a nutrient solution, he observed how the muscle tissue grew by up to 14 percent within a week.

    Fetal calf serum gravy

    He then presented the thumb-sized results, in fresh and sautéed form, to a jury. “The smell and appearance corresponded to that of supermarket fish,” says Benjaminson. The only problem was that no one was interested in eating his fish nuggets, perhaps because his tiny goldfish filets matured in something called fetal calf serum.

    This nutrient medium, derived from cow fetuses, is prized in biology labs all over the world as extremely effective in growing cells. But it’s hardly suitable for use as a culture medium in food production, partly because it’s a potential source of the prions that cause Mad Cow Disease (BSE) and partly because it’s prohibitively expensive. Matheny estimates that a kilogram of laboratory meat would cost about half a million dollars if it were grown in calf serum.

    In order to make faux meat a reality, then, one of the first tasks is to develop an inexpensive ersatz nutrient solution from plants or mushrooms. Maitake mushrooms, for example, have already proved to be a possible alternative.

    One additional step, though, needs to be taken to achieve the dream of meat production entirely without animals. In his pioneering experiments, Benjaminson was still using real goldfish as the starting material for his cultures. But experts now believe they can create flank steak wholly without the flanks. The key? Cells called myoblasts, the non-differentiated precursors to all skeletal muscle cells. Tiny myoblasts are capable of dividing at a tremendous rate. If conditions are right, they ultimately combine and mature into the muscle fibers that characterize meat. “Only when myoblasts fuse does muscle tissue develop, leading to the meat structure we are familiar with,” explains cell researcher Haagsman, who is currently studying the process in pigs. He adds that certain growth factors, electromagnetic fields and a sort of cellular muscle-building are necessary to encourage the cells to fuse. Otherwise, he says, “you get nothing but cell paste.”

    Scientists are already concocting methods to conduct in vitro muscle development on an industrial scale. Matheny, for example, proposes using large support membranes made of edible collagen as a substrate for the cell strains. If the frames were stretched at regular intervals, Matheny theorizes, they would pull apart and essentially train the muscle fibers growing on them. As soon as the wafer-thin sheets of muscle material reached maturity, they could be harvested and processed into meat products.

    Tissue expert Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina has another elegant idea. His plan is to encourage myoblasts to grow on small spheres that expand and contract in respond to changes in temperature. The muscle tissue could then develop on the slowly pulsating spheres in rotating bioreactors filled with nutrient solution. Mironov’s plan also calls for harvesting the tissue balls and then processing them further, into poultry nuggets, for example. Mironov has already produced small amounts of turkey meat using a similar approach.

    Artificial blood vessels

    Nevertheless, the results of cellular bodybuilding are unlikely to live up to the standards of gourmet cooking. “We’re still a long way from juicy steaks,” Matheny admits. The problem, he says, is that not all cells can be supplied with nutrient solution in a filet-shaped tissue base. The laboratory muscle tissue would have to be permeated with blood vessels, so that muscle cells as well as fatty and connective tissue could adhere to these vessels. These types of tissue cultures have already been developed in medical research. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for example, recently grew skeletal muscle tissue that develops its own blood vessels in the laboratory. When they were transplanted into the muscles of mice, a few of the blood vessels grown in the laboratory actually adhered to blood vessels in the mouse body, and then supplied the implanted tissue with nutrients.

    It’s a technology that may one day be used to repair the heart muscles of heart attack patients. But as a technology for creating artificial sirloins and chicken nuggets, it is probably not suitable, says Haagsman. “This kind of approach can only work in medicine,” he says. “It’s far too expensive and therefore virtually unusable in large-scale meat production.”

    All of which means that the world may have to wait a few more decades before the perfect flank steak emerges from a counter-top kitchen incubator. Nevertheless, the disciples of the Petri dish are firmly convinced that the technology will establish itself sooner or later.

    “The benefits for animal protection, the environment and our health are obvious,” says Matheny. He envisions an age free of large-scale animal farming with a concurrent elimination of disease risk and animal waste problems. “Meat grown in cultures doesn’t need pastures or stables, doesn’t need drugs and doesn’t contract BSE or avian flu,” he says. Matheny believes that astronauts and soldiers could be the first target group for laboratory meatballs. He even has plans to tweak the ingredients in the future: “We could make meat healthier, for example, by replacing saturated with unsaturated fatty acids.”

    Test-tube sausage is also likely to be popular among many vegetarians, especially as the culinary quality of laboratory meat is presumably similar to that of tofu cubes. Despite researcher Mironov’s claim that “the taste of meat depends on the fat; we can simply add fat cells to create taste,” the culinary delights of laboratory meat are not exactly earth-shattering at this point. The “ultimate nouvelle cuisine” created by the “Tissue Culture Art Project” artists in Nantes ultimately proved to be a flop.

    Bio-researcher Catts reported that the frog steak was gelatinous, and the substrate had the consistency of material.

    And the taste? “The sauce was good.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> read original story at SPIEGEL Online International