Word: fur
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...dogs a "keystone" of the Great Plains ecosystem because their dens serve as motels for many other mammals, insects and even birds. Researchers are beginning to discover how their barks and squeaks constitute one of the most complex languages in the animal kingdom. Animal-rights advocates defend the winsome fur balls: they are, in the words of a Hutchinson member of the Doris Day Animal League, "delightful to watch, even if they are of the rodent form...
Cynomys ludovicianus (known locally as sod poodles) have traditionally been viewed as pariahs of the prairie. They are detested by ranchers because their holes can snap the legs of livestock like dry twigs and their fur plays host to fleas that sometimes carry the plague. (Prairie dogs have infected 24 people in the U.S. in the past 27 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) They are so unpopular that for decades the Federal Government has conducted poisoning campaigns to eradicate them from rangeland. Several rural communities even hold contests for "sport shooters," who find the animals...
...chooses to believe: there may have been more than one crash site; the U.S. government may have recovered dead aliens (the number varies) as well as a salvageable spacecraft; the craft may have been a secret government prototype and the dead aliens may have been test chimps with their fur eerily singed off or, as Popular Mechanics hypothesizes this month, imported Japanese pilots who had been flying similar experimental craft during the war; then again, the wreckage may really have been extraterrestrial, and one of the aliens may have been taken into custody alive (the docudrama Roswell, which aired...
...precision. Working under cover of darkness, a small group of antifur activists cut through a wire-mesh fence, pepper-sprayed a watchdog, bypassed an alarm system, opened cages and set free as many as 10,000 scurrying animals, most of them destined to be made into sleek, high-priced fur coats. It was a daring act of ecovandalism, perhaps the largest illegal animal release in U.S. history...
...Dallas-based Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade was somewhat more restrained. "Even if some of them died," says founder J.P. Goodwin, "at least they had a shot at freedom." That's true, says Bruce Coblentz, a professor of wildlife biology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Coblentz allows that a few of the animals may survive in the wild. But the rest, he says, will just "die a different death than they would have otherwise...