Peta

Thursday

Cockburn

PETA wants to replace K-9 units with tactical robots

Picture this: you’re walking down the sidewalk on a bright summer’s day. A K-9 patrol vehicle parks nearby – but instead of a dog getting out of the backseat, a tactical robot emerges. This is the future that PETA has imagined for us all, judging by a letter from the animal rights group in response to a K-9 injury in Michigan last week. Digo, a canine with the Grand Rapids Police Department, was nonfatally stabbed three times, once in the head, while working to help police apprehend a violent suspect.  In response, PETA wants robots and drones to replace the animals entirely. "Unlike their human counterparts, K-9s do not sign up to risk their lives," PETA manager of special projects Allison Fandl wrote in a June 2 letter to interim chief Joseph Trigg.

robot dogs k-9s

Friday

Cockburn

PETA comes for Punxsutawney Phil

The ever-joyful People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have put the nail in their no-fun coffin by announcing a new target: the bizarre and beloved Pennsylvania-Dutch tradition of pulling a groundhog out of his burrow to predict the weather.  On this Groundhog Day morning, Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, but PETA had to go and rain on everyone’s parade by reminding us that Phil “is not a meteorologist.”  PETA branded the celebration “a cruel holiday display” because groundhogs are “naturally shy, sensitive prey animals who react poorly when handled in front of raucous crowds.

Thursday

Hermione Eyre

Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?

From our UK edition

I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I put my head in my hands when I realised there were photographs), it was also dispiriting, because it showed up my hypocrisy. Like so many, I would gratefully accept perfusion brain-cooling techniques if they helped me survive surgery, yet I do not wish to read about how these techniques were developed on primates. It would be enough for me just to know that their suffering was minimised. This book asks even more of its reader, by focusing on gruelling experiments that lead nowhere.