Kisses & Hisses to Animal Friends & Foes

Get ready to practice your high-fives and Bronx cheers—here’s our quasi-monthly round-up of animal friends and foes:

• Kisses to California for making the water safer for sharks. The state banned the sale, trade, or possession of shark fins, which are cut off live sharks who are then thrown back into the water to sink to the ocean floor and die. An extra smooch goes to the Toronto City Council for voting to ban shark fins in that city.
• Fish foe Alex Andon makes our hiss list for developing the Desktop Jellyfish Tank, in which up to five jellyfish can be imprisoned. To help understand what’s wrong with this, take a look at the online documentary Jellyfish Lake.
• A kiss to the New York state government for passing a dissection choice law that lets students choose not to cut up frogs and other animals and instead opt for state-of-the-art-computer programs that leave animals in peace.   
• Rihanna has crawled her way onto the year’s worst-dressed list, first for her penchant for fur—and now for ostrich feathers, which are cruelly torn off live birds or birds who have been sent to slaughter.
• Kisses to the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation for adopting dogs from shelters to be trained as disaster search dogs. The dogs are paired with a human rescuer who provides them with a real home and affection.
• And finally, a kiss for truth in advertising to Dex Media Inc. When the company listed Bozeman and Belgrade, Montana’s Bar 3 Bar-B-Q restaurants in its yellow-pages directory under “Animal Carcass Removal,” it certainly had the restaurant’s number!

Written by Michelle Sherrow