A Bit More Detail

• Tanya Mok at blogTO shares a vintage short film from 1970 at the Toronto Coach Terminal, "Depot."


• The shortages of food in Toronto food banks are terrible. CBC Toronto reports.


• Dogs will be free to swim in select City of Toronto swimming pools this weekend. CBC Toronto reports.


• I will have to look for these TTC floor stickers installed at St. George station. blogTO reports.


• Richard Trapunski leads a roundtable discussion at NOW Toronto about the challenges facing party promoters in a gentrifying Toronto.

• A highly-publicized campaign to get Islanders to return to PEI failed to produce significant results, many arguing the government did nothing to create conditions for a return. CBC PEI reports.


• Tourism numbers have continued to grow on the Island, with 1.58 million recorded visits estimated by the end of this year. CBC PEI reports.


• Overall enrollment has continued to grow at UPEI, with particularly large spikes in international student enrollment. CBC PEI reports.


• Landlords on PEI can keep tenants from bringing their pets with them, sadly. (The contrast with other provinces is noteworthy.) CBC PEI reports.


• CBC PEI notes the political career of long-time Liberal MP Lawrence MacAulay, who has served for three decades.

During a 17-year study, chimps in the West African country of Guinea were observed on numerous occasions imbibing a fermented milky sap from raffia palms, tapped by local people to make into an alcoholic drink.

Incidents of lone drinkers and communal sessions were seen, according to a paper published in the British journal Royal Society Open Science.

Researchers suggested the findings give insight into the social habits of chimpanzees in the wild. They also back the "drunken monkey" theory, which holds that apes and humans share a genetic ability to break down alcohol that was handed down from a common ancestor.

Under observation, the apes scrunched up leaves in their mouths, molding them into spongy pads that they then dipped into the sap-gathering container, which villagers attach to the tree near its crown.

Tests showed that the beverage's alcoholic content varied from 3.1 percent to 6.9 percent — the equivalent of strong beer.

In the alpine grasslands of eastern Africa, Ethiopian wolves and gelada monkeys are giving peace a chance. The geladas – a type of baboon – tolerate wolves wandering right through the middle of their herds, while the wolves ignore potential meals of baby geladas in favour of rodents, which they can catch more easily when the monkeys are present.

The unusual pact echoes the way dogs began to be domesticated by humans [. . .], and was spotted by primatologist Vivek Venkataraman, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, during fieldwork at Guassa plateau in the highlands of north-central Ethiopia.

Even though the wolves occasionally prey on young sheep and goats, which are as big as young geladas, they do not normally attack the monkeys – and the geladas seem to know that, because they do not run away from the wolves.

"You can have a wolf and a gelada within a metre or two of each other and virtually ignoring each other for up to 2 hours at a time," says Venkataraman. In contrast, the geladas flee immediately to cliffs for safety when they spot feral dogs, which approach aggressively and often prey on them.

When walking through a herd – which comprises many bands of monkeys grazing together in groups of 600 to 700 individuals – the wolves seem to take care to behave in a non-threatening way. They move slowly and calmly as they forage for rodents and avoid the zigzag running they use elsewhere, Venkataraman observed.

• The Dragon's Tales links to news of remarkably thorough reconstruction of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.


• Eastern Approaches visits eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis notes that Pakistan still apparently lays claim to the former Muslim-run princely state of Junagadh in Gujarat.


• Joe. My. God. and Towleroad both note a proposed bill before the Russian parliament that would require the fingerprinting of all HIV-positive people in a national database.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes a continuing crisis in the availability of rental spaces in the American housing market, linking it to low-density zoning.


• Torontoist notes the sad loss of a pet pigeon on Queen Street West.


• Towleroad notes continuing controversy over the use of the HIV drug Truvada as a prophylactic against infection.


• The Volokh Conspiracy visits controveries over affirmative action in the United States where different minorities (here, Asian-Americans) have different claims.


• Window on Eurasia visits the increasingly problematic lot of Crimean Tatars in their Russian-occupied homeland, notes that traditionally pro-Russian Belarus is newly wary of its eastern partner, and quotes from a journalist who predicts catastrophe from a Russian pursuit of empire.

[Gareth] Morgan's newly launched campaign, Cats to Go, is pushing for much tighter controls on New Zealand's cats, which prey on native birds and are considered an invasive species on the island country. He's not asking all cat owners to euthanize their beloved pets (though his website says "that is an option"), but Morgan wrote in a Jan. 23 op-ed in Wellington's Dominion Post that owners should acknowledge that they are harboring "a natural born killer."

"At the very least responsible people should consider not replacing it when it dies and meanwhile either keep it indoors or invest in a cat-proof enclosure in the backyard," he wrote. Morgan also suggested neutering and cat collars with bells, and the campaign's website has a petition to lobby local governments to require that all owners register their cats.

[. . .]

"He is not proposing anything that hasn't been tried elsewhere — and that hasn't been opposed vigorously by the cat activists of the world," Stanley Temple, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus in conservation, told LiveScience. A cat owner himself, Temple said that Morgan's pitch to keep cats indoors should not be controversial.

"We have long accepted the fact that you can't let your dog run free, and yet cat owners seem to take offense at the idea that they would be asked to keep their cats indoors," he said.

Once let outside, cats often look more like hunters than cuddly creatures whose main enemies are stuffed toys. A 2011 study in the Journal of Ornithology showed that in suburban areas outside of Washington, D.C., 80 percent of gray catbirds were killed by predators before reaching adulthood, and nearly half of those deaths were caused by cats. Though exact figures are hard to come by, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) estimates that more than 500 million bird deaths in the United States can be attributed to cats, both pets and strays.

In an effort to keep vulnerable migratory birds out of feline mouths, ABC has been urging responsible cat ownership with its Cats Indoors campaign. Conservation goals aside, ABC officials said keeping a cat inside is safer for both the pet and its owner.

Bob Johns, a spokesman for the organization, said outdoor cats have one-third the life expectancy of indoor cats, and they are also more likely to pick up diseases from interactions with feral animals. While dogs are usually associated with rabies, cases of rabid cats are on the rise. In 2009, there were three times more reported cases of rabies in cats than dogs, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). From contact with cat feces, humans can also get the mind-controlling parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which has been linked to a variety of brain problems and mental health issues, including suicide attempts. The parasite is the reason pregnant women are advised not to change cat litter boxes. The deep bite of cats also can transmit the infection-causing bacteria Pasteurella multocida.

That soft and fluffy ball of fur that is cuddling up on your bed at night may be wreaking carnage in your backyard during the daytime, researchers reported Tuesday. Using cameras attached to the collars of your friendly neighborhood cats, researchers at the University of Georgia found that the feline fighters kill much larger numbers of wildlife than previously thought. That may be because such earlier studies didn't consider animals that the cats ate or simply left behind, said biologist Kerrie Anne Lloyd, who presented her findings at a Portland, Ore., meeting of the Ecological Society of America.

In cooperation with the National Geographic Society's CritterCam team, which attaches cameras to animals to record the activities of a variety of species, Lloyd and her colleagues recruited 60 cat owners in Athens, Ga. The owners attached the tiny cameras to the cats' collars every morning when the animals were let out, then dowloaded the day's images every night. Each animal was followed for seven to 10 days.

The team found that about 30% of the cats killed prey, an average of two animals per week. The cats brought home nearly a quarter of the animals they killed, ate 30% and left 49% to rot where they died. About 41% of the prey were lizards, snakes and frogs; mammals such as chipmunks and voles accounted for 25%; and birds only 12%. The low percentage of birds may be because they can fly, but with an estimated 74 million cats in the country, the total carnage is high.

The cats were also not very careful. About 45% crossed roadways, 25% ate and drank things they found, 20% entered storm drains and 20% entered crawlspaces where they could easily become trapped. Male cats were more likely to take risks than female cats, and younger animals were more likely to do so than older ones.

[A]nimal lovers around the world had been on [Magnotta's] trail for two years.

They notified humane societies and police departments in Toronto and Montreal, posted rewards, spent countless hours poring over videos and photos for clues, established a thick dossier on Magnotta, and identified fake Internet personas that seemed to be leaving false trails to confuse the people pursuing him.

They were motivated by four horrible videos in which a young man gleefully kills kittens. In the first one, in 2010, a young man alleged to be Magnotta suffocates two kittens in a plastic bag. A few weeks later, he posted a related video.

By January of 2011, after frantic online searching, animal lovers tentatively had identified Magnotta as the suspect. They meticulously compared photos that Magnotta posted of himself, identifying jewelry and furnishings that appeared in both, until they were certain they had found the right guy.

They then focused on finding him, something which was made more difficult by the many apparently fake photos Magnotta seems to have posted — using a host of false online identities — showing him in cities around the world.

Volunteers analyzed the digital fingerprints of the photographs and identified the camera used to make the videos, linking it to photos of Magnotta. They tracked down products in the background of his pictures, tried to figure out when and where they were sold.

They tried to place him in particular places at particular times, using film posters and landmarks in the backgrounds, analyzed accidental reflections of his camera, and established that he was in the Toronto area.

In December 2011, he posted two more videos, in which kittens were killed in horrible ways.

On the Facebook group where they shared photos, member after member fretted that he would move on to human victims.

"He might end up killing human beings one day though," wrote one member in December 2011. "He might just not stop with animals. He needs to be caught ASAP."

[. . .]

In a statement released Thursday, the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reported that after being informed of the allegations in February, 2011, they reached out to Toronto Police, the FBI, the RCMP, the Quebec Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Montreal police.

Montreal police are dealing with a Mafia war, various corruption investigations and, more recently, a mass student protest, and may not have had time to track down a kitten killer.

[. . .]

Commander Ian Lafrenière, of the Montreal Police Service, told me Thursday that he doesn’t know yet what kind of information the force received about Magnotta and the kittens, but animal protection law is not as strong in Quebec as it is in other jurisdictions.

"The question is, when this is over, can we backtrack and check this out? You know what, we've been there for more than 130 years and we're still improving. So if something could have been done better we're more than happy to do so."

His police force and others should ask themselves these questions. Well-meaning people around the world were ringing alarm bells about Magnotta, and the police seem not to have heard.