Issue01
Hi, creatures. This one starts with a cow on a surgeon's table and 71 kilograms of plastic — and asks why the fastest fix for almost any animal in India is a human hand. Plus a meme, a good creature, two findings, and notes from the street.
The case
What the Cow Cannot Untie
A cow can't untie the bag. So who filled her stomach with 71 kilograms of plastic — and why is the fastest fix a human hand?
This issue's strip — the cow has no thumbs; you do:
Because it can’t all be plastic and rumen surgery. Proof that holding up your end is a choice, not a budget line:
Read the story →
Meet Loong Dum, who sleeps near a Bangkok train station and sells little bags of limes he didn’t even buy — a stranger donates them — so he can turn the coins into cat food for the strays he’s decided are his. He eats after they do. In his words: “I’m fine with skipping meals, but the cat needs to eat.” Sit with that. A man the whole city is trained to walk straight past looked at the hungriest creatures on his patch and went mine now — no grant, no NGO, no logo. When the internet finally found him, people turned up with limes and kibble, which was the least we could do and also the entire point: if a man with nothing can hold up his end, the rest of us are fresh out of excuses. — story via @warmingfacts; first shared by Warunya Wattanasupachoke
Two findings worth carrying around. Light on pictures, heavy on oh.
Your cold can reach a gorilla
Reverse zoonosis is real — we hand our pathogens to animals. Because great apes share so much of our biology, our everyday respiratory viruses can be fatal to them; human infection accounts for up to a fifth of sudden gorilla deaths. When tourism sites imposed masks and distancing, the outbreaks stopped — through the whole pandemic, none was reported in habituated wild groups.
Source · ScienceDaily →Cleaner doesn't mean more sterile
Dosing healthy livestock with antibiotics breeds resistance that moves between animals, humans and water alike. In July 2019 India banned colistin — a last-resort human antibiotic — across all food animals, a prohibition stricter than the EU's or China's.
Source · Imperial College London →What's stirring on the streets near you. Small items, real places — send yours in and we'll run them.
A mall that lets the dog come too
RMZ Galleria (a.k.a. The Galleria Mall) in Yelahanka is one of North Bengaluru’s few genuinely dog-welcoming malls — a weekend errand that doesn’t mean leaving them home alone. Small shift, big signal: public space that assumes animals belong in it. — check the current pet policy before you go
Send us the good, the grim, and the local
A gaushala that needs fodder, a ward that started segregating, a black-spot where cattle graze the dump. City Notes runs on tip-offs — email us at hi@fellowcreatures.space with what you're seeing.
So — are we doing right by them?
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