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SNIP A professional hunter was killed when an elephant that had just been shot fell on top of him, according to reports. South African big-game bagger Theunis Botha, 51, was leading a hunt in Zimbabwe on Friday when his group accidentally walked into the path of a herd of breeding elephants near Hwange National Park and three of the elephant cows charged at them, the Telegraph reports. Botha fired at the rampaging pack but was caught by surprise when a fourth cow came in from the side and picked him up with her trunk. SNIP

Hillary Clinton was a secret guest at the Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday and she appeared to have arrived straight off a Star Wars set. Photos shared by fans show a pale Hillary slouching in a chair on the stage. As filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow as upright in her chair, Clinton laid back, looking very pale and wearing something all black that looked like it was right out of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

NEW YORK (AP) -- The premiere of a virtual reality short by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow was already a high-profile event at the Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday night. And then Hillary Clinton walked onstage. Clinton was an unannounced panelist, there to discuss the scourge of elephant poaching - the subject of Bigelow's eight-minute film "The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers' Shoes," about park rangers trying to save elephants in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She spoke about her work to save elephants from poachers slaughtering them for their ivory tusks, both as secretary of...

According to an aerial count in 2014 there are around 44,000 elephants at Hwange Elephant numbers across Africa have been declining rapidly under the onslaught of ivory poachers. However, one national park faces an entirely different problem. Hwange’s elephant population just keeps growing. But what, on the face of it, might appear to be good news has become an equally serious problem, one that is more a threat to the elephants long-term survival than ivory poaching. Quite simply, Hwange has too many elephants reports Martin Dunn. Zimbabwe’s Hwange National park is a six thousand square mile area founded in the...

One of Kenya's last great tusker elephants was reportedly shot and killed by poachers. During a routine flyover on January 4 by the conservation group Tsavo Trust in southern Kenya, the body of a famous, roughly 50-year-old African elephant known as Satao II was discovered, though news of his death was only announced Monday. While the cause of death has not been confirmed, conservationists believe he was killed by a poisoned arrow while feeding in the eastern region of the park. The area is known as a "poaching hot spot." African elephants are traditionally referred to as "tuskers" when their...

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Cheryl Konrad has spent the last 35 years educating visitors to her Lahaina, Hawaii, store about the centuries-old history of scrimshaw. Konrad fills the shelves in Lahaina Scrimshaw with the etchings of local artists on fossilized walrus and mammoth ivory. But if a bill to ban the sale of ivory becomes law this year, she worries that she will be forced to close her store. “I feel like I’ve been a part of history. It’s just so hard to fathom that it could be criminal eventually,” Konrad said. Similar legislation in previous years has failed largely because of pushback from...

A team of Pakistani researchers claims to have unearthed a 1.1 million-year-old stegodon tusk in the central province of Punjab, potentially shedding new light on the mammal's evolutionary journey. They've finally found a fossilized mosquito full of prehistoric blood! So a real "Jurassic Park" is right around the corner, right? Stegodonts, distant cousins of modern elephants, are thought to have been present on earth from around 11 million years ago until the late Pleistocene period, which lasted until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,700 years ago. The tusk measures some eight feet (2.44 metres) in length and...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

Battle scars on male mastodon tusks show these Ice Age giants were not the peaceful creatures once thought... The scars reveal they fought in brutal combat each year during seasonal phases of heightened sexual activity and aggression. The discovery, announced at a recent Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Ontario, counters the view that now-extinct mastodons were peaceful, passive creatures that rarely engaged in battles. It also strengthens the link between mastodon and modern elephant behaviour, since male bull elephants also fight seasonal, hormonally-charged battles to show their dominance and win desired mates... "Mastodon tusks curve upward strongly at the...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

<p>Calle the ailing elephant died at the San Francisco Zoo on Sunday morning, hours after another elephant attacked her -- an attack that zoo officials are blaming on animal rights demonstrators who they say agitated the beasts.</p> <p>Zoo veterinarians quietly euthanized Calle, a 37-year-old female Asian elephant, at about 5 a.m., after she dropped to her belly and rolled on her side.</p>

SAN PASQUAL VALLEY – For 50 years she called San Diego County home. That's why animal-welfare activists are upset that Peaches, the oldest African elephant in the country, died earlier this week at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Activists are criticizing the San Diego Wild Animal Park for its decision to move Peaches and two other older elephants, Wankie and Tatima, to the cold-weather city in early 2003. With two of those elephants now dead, they called the move "grossly irresponsible." Peaches, 55, died of "complications due to old age," according to Lincoln Park officials. She was found lying on the...

PARIS - Cecile de Brunhoff, the inspiration for Babar, the enchanting little elephant whose adventures captivated generations of children, has died in Paris. She was 99. De Brunhoff suffered a stroke Saturday night and died Monday in a hospital in Paris, where she lived, said Mathieu de Brunhoff, one of her sons. She first invented the tale of a little elephant as a bedtime story for her boys in 1931. They in turn told their father, painter Jean de Brunhoff, who illustrated the story and filled in details, naming the elephant Babar and creating Celeste, Zephir and the "Old Lady,"...

The good news is that even though TB is highly contagious, the three infected elephants at the zoo did not spread the disease to visitors, including those who attended one of Rama's painting parties in which he created splatter paintings. About 5 percent of the captive Asian elephants in North America are infected. The disease can be deadly to elephants. Three pachyderms at an exotic animal farm in Illinois died from the disease between 1994 and 1996, according to the CDC. One handler in that outbreak got sick as well. At the Oregon Zoo, the first case popped up in...

Many animals get cancer just like humans do, but there are a few mysterious species that rarely develop it.... A few animals don't seem to get cancer very often, or at all. Understanding why could help us treat it, or even prevent it.....

"Watch as this 17-year-old elephant named Thongsri comes to the aid of her caretaker in Chiang Mai, Thailand."

Difficult to hold out hope for Zimbabwe elephants and lions being shipped like so much coal off to China In faraway Zimbabwe, when the veterinaries had to come to put down the family pets, because of widespread poverty, few outside the country noticed. The Western World never heard from animal rights activists until an American big game hunter dentist took down Cecil, the Lion, who now has his own Facebook page. The screams of animal rights activists went up worldwide. In the aftermath of Cecil the Lion, we learn of reports that staff at Hwange National Park have been suddenly...

As part of the celebrations for his 91st birthday next Saturday, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will be served a feast featuring five impala, two buffalo, two elephants, two sables, and one lion. According to a report in Zimbabwe's The Chronicle, the menagerie was donated by Tendai Musasa, owner of the prominent Woodlands Farm near the Elephant Hills Resort at Victoria Falls, where the 20,000-person shindig will take place. While you'd think that eating elephants and lions, icons of wildlife conservation, would be illegal, it turns out it's not—neither under Zimbabwean nor international law. As of 1997, elephant populations in Botswana,...

Are committed fathers an endangered species in our culture? Fr. Gordon MacRae draws a troubling corollary between absent fathers and burgeoning prisons.Wade Horn, Ph.D., President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, had an intriguing article entitled “Of Elephants and Men” in a recent issue of Fatherhood Today magazine. I found Dr. Horn’s story about young elephants to be simply fascinating, and you will too. It was sent to me by a TSW reader who wanted to know if there is any connection between the absence of fathers and the shocking growth of the American prison population. Some years ago, officials at...