Rest of the Species

Bear has been following the aftermath of Australia’s bushfires since January, finding sick, injured or starving koalas that otherwise would have perished. He has now found more than 100.

As air pollution plummeted to levels unseen in living memory, people shared pictures of spotless skies and even Himalayan peaks from cities where the view had been obscured by fog for decades.

On one social messaging group, a resident of the capital, Delhi, which regularly records some of the foulest air in the world, celebrated the city’s “alpine weather”. Politician and author Shashi Tharoor wrote that the “blissful sight of blue skies and the joy of breathing clean air provides just the contrast to illustrate what we are doing to ourselves the rest of the time”.

“He doesn’t seem to think having people over is a problem,” Helen* tells Radio 1 Newsbeat about the man she lives with, who’s also her landlord.

She says he’s not been following any of the government rules regarding social distancing and staying inside during lockdown.

“He’s been bringing multiple women over and there’s no such thing as social distancing for him,” she says.

Because of the number of people visiting her home, Helen is worried about the risk to her health.

“We know the virus lives on surfaces for a long time. So if they’ve used something and not washed it properly, it exposes the entire apartment to the virus.”

She now stays isolated in her room because she feels it’s become “impossible” to live in the rest of her flat.

“I’ve deep-cleaned my entire room. I rarely go to the kitchen – only when it’s absolutely essential,” she says.

Helen spends half of her salary on rent and says it’s “pretty sad” that she’s stuck in just one room while her housemate doesn’t even follow the two-metre distance rule.

On the afternoon of 25 March, Julia sat down at her laptop and logged into a phony Facebook account. She’d opened it in middle school, to surreptitiously monitor boys she had crushes on. But now, many years later, it was about to serve a much more serious purpose.

“Can you please look into Smithfield,” she typed in a message to an account called Argus911, the Facebook-based tip line for the local newspaper, the Argus Leader. “They do have a positive [Covid-19] case and are planning to stay open.” By “Smithfield”, she was referring to the Smithfield Foods pork-processing plant located in her town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The factory – a massive, eight-story white box perched on the banks of the Big Sioux River – is the ninth-largest hog-processing facility in the US. When running at full capacity, it processes 19,500 freshly-slaughtered hogs per day, slicing, grinding and smoking them into millions of pounds of bacon, hot dogs and spiral-cut hams. With 3,700 workers, it is also the fourth-largest employer in the city.

The official twitter handle of Kruger National Park has shared a glimpse of a pride of lions sleeping peacefully on a road as humans remain locked in their homes.

“Kruger visitors that tourists do not normally see. #SALockdown This lion pride is usually resident on Kempiana Contractual Park, an area that Kruger tourists do not see. This afternoon they were lying on the tar road just outside of Orpen Rest Camp,”.

But although there is a ban on commercial whaling, some governments have bent the rules by killing whales for “scientific research” – with the meat from these “scientific” catches going straight to the supermarket. Around 1,000 whales are killed for “scientific research” annually.

We strongly oppose this, and are fighting to help devastated whale populations to recover.

Virtually the whole of the Southern Ocean – a vital whale habitat – was declared a whale sanctuary in 1994, thanks to the lobbying efforts of WWF and many other organizations. Today, the Southern Ocean sanctuary links to another whale sanctuary in the Indian Ocean. However, much work is still needed to clamp down on unmanaged “scientific” whaling which still occurs in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary.

In the late 1990s we helped convince the governments of France, Italy and Monaco to create the Ligurian whale sanctuary. It covers 80,000 sq km between the coasts of northern Corsica, northwest Italy and southwest France.

Brutus has been Casey’s best friend ever since Casey rescued him from being euthanized at an overcrowded wildlife park when Brutus was just 5 months old. That’s also when Casey founded the Montana Grizzly Encounter, an educational sanctuary where Brutus grew up. There, Brutus and Casey developed a deep emotional bond that Casey later described to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2009.

“This connection goes beyond just taking care of Brutus,” Casey told Oprah back then. “They’re very, very emotional animals… When he was a little baby, I was bottle-feeding him and I looked down in his eyes. He had a little tear in his eye. I just kind of chalked it up to [him] straining as he was sucking down the bottle. Several years later, Brutus got a bit of a bellyache. In his eyes, he had the same tear. At that moment, I realized that grizzly bears can feel the same emotions we do.”

Not only does Casey believe that Brutus experiences emotion, but he also told Oprah that his best friend can also sense — and react — when Casey is upset as well.

“I was having a hard time, was really upset about some things… I was crying,” Casey said. “I could see that he wanted to take the pain away from me. He came up to me very gently and nudged me. He just stood by me unconditionally and he listened to me and he was there when I was crying. It’s truly what I needed from him. This relationship is a give-and-take.”