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PHOTOGRAPH BY GILBERT CARRASQUILLO/GC IMAGES
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No more fur: Pop singer Billie Eilish persuaded design label Oscar de la Renta to stop selling fur in its stores as a condition for working with her. Eilish wore a nude tulle dress from the brand (pictured above) to the Met Gala, the fashion industry’s version of the Super Bowl. Chief executive Alex Boren told the New York Times he made the change to get rid of fur, long debated at the company, after listening to Eilish, who is a vegan and animal rights activist.
Gorillas with COVID-19: Thirteen western lowland gorillas at Atlanta’s zoo tested positive for the virus, and are being treated, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. They will get the Zoetis coronavirus vaccine developed for animals, which Nat Geo reported was first used in February on infected great apes at the San Diego Zoo. The vaccine is now being used on bears, baboons, hyenas, and tigers in U.S. zoos as well.
Dolphins killed: For hundreds of years, fishermen would drive hundreds of dolphins into a fjord in the remote Faroe Islands, kill them, and distribute the meat to locals for consumption. This year’s hunt, however, rounded up a pod of more than 1,400 dolphins and killed them—the biggest slaughter on record, the BBC reports. After widespread revulsion, fishermen in the North Atlantic territory acknowledged they underestimated the size of the pod—and the killing was excessive. “Somebody should have known better,” the chairman of the Faroese Whalers Association, Olavur Sjurdarberg, told the BBC.
Still loose: Animal control officials in Maryland are still trying to catch the zebras that escaped a farm two weeks ago. The feeding station they erected failed, and now they’ve put up an eight-foot corral around the area where the zebras have been feeding. "They are animals that you just can't walk up and put a lasso on," Chief Rodney Taylor from Prince George’s Animal Control told NBC Washington.
Heat prompts culling: The megadrought and heatwaves in the Sun Belt are causing farmers to slaughter animals at alarming rates due to exhaustion, Slate reports. The average feeder cattle will find ideal living conditions at about 25 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. At temperatures between 80 and 100 degrees, they quickly become exhausted, and at temperatures above 100, they will die.
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