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Posted: 24-10-2004 22:25 Post subject:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/southsouthwest/chi-0410220073oct22,1,3810331.story

Escaped Bird Dies After Its Capture

By Stanley Ziemba
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 22, 2004

The big bird had eluded police in Frankfort for days, flitting through cornstalks and dodging tranquilizer darts. On Thursday, he finally was captured by his owner, only to die as he was being driven home in a pickup truck.

The loss of the South American rhea nicknamed No Neck was "very upsetting" to Jackie Juby, 46, who has been raising the birds as pets with her husband, David, for 10 years.

"At least he's not going to hurt anyone now or get hit out on the road somewhere," Juby said as she placed the carcass on a bed of straw in a barn behind her home in the 21100 block of South 80th Avenue in Frankfort.

No Neck was the second rhea, which is similar but smaller than the ostrich and Australian emu, that Juby lost this week. He and two other rheas flew their back-yard coop when frightened by dogs. One died and one was captured by motorcyclists. When they returned the bird, they asked Juby for the dead one. They wanted to freeze it, they told her.

She lamented, "Maybe they want it for Thanksgiving dinner."

In their native South America, rheas live in the wild and are raised by farmers for their meat, Juby said. Because of their exotic looks and the fact they pose little or no threat to humans, rheas mostly are pets in this country, she said.

"He [No Neck] was sort of feisty at times, but mostly docile and tame," Juby said. "He was fun to watch strutting around in the pen we built for the rheas in the yard. Everything was fine until last Friday."

On that day, a group of dogs entered the Jubys' sprawling back yard and managed to get inside the rheas' pen. The three birds, each weighing about 100 pounds and standing 5 to 6 feet tall, bent a section of wire fencing around the pen and took off in different directions.

Soon after, the two cyclists spotted one rhea, tackled the fleet-footed creature and returned it.

The second rhea was confronted by police and animal-control officers and apparently went into shock and died along Lincoln Highway, Juby said.

No Neck wound up in a large cornfield about 3 miles to the west of Juby's house, where it eluded police and animal control officers armed with dog nooses, nets and tranquilizer guns for six days.

On Thursday morning, No Neck was spotted south of Lincoln Highway in the Hunters Woods residential subdivision. Juby, accompanied by Frankfort police, managed to get a net over the bird.

"We held him down until my husband came from work," Juby said. "We then tied him up and placed him in the truck. A couple of blocks from home, he just collapsed and died.

"Maybe if I tried to gently lead him back home he would've survived. I don't know. I guess the shock was just too much for him."

Frankfort Police Chief Robert Piscia was sorry about the bird's demise.

"It's really too bad," he said. "We took up a lot of time and effort to catch it and return it home alive. It should have been a better outcome."

Juby, who has been fascinated by exotic birds and animals since she was a child, said she hopes to obtain more rheas next spring.

"She looks so alone out here," Juby said as the remaining rhea paced back and forth inside its pen.

Posted: 18-07-2005 23:04 Post subject:

Posted: 01-01-2006 20:46 Post subject:

I see a load (100+) of boar have been let out on Dartmoor, I do like some of the emotive language:-

Villagers under siege in the Exmoor boar war.

In the shadow of Exmoor, the tiny village of West Anstey (pop: 100) is besieged. By the beasts. They escaped - 100 of them, hairy, weighing up to 440lb, males with razor-sharp tusks, most of the females heavily pregnant - after a raid on the Woodland Wild Boar farm which has been blamed on animal rights extremists.

By last night 40 had been corralled, but that still left 60 wild boar at large, striking fear into much of West Anstey. They terrified the local postmistress. They ripped up fields with their snouts and left farmers fearing for their livelihoods.

Children and family pets were ordered indoors. Old ladies were told to be careful if they went out on to the moor.

Christine Pennells, the landlady of the Jubilee Inn, said: "I was helping two draymen deliver beer. This massive one came from nowhere. It barged the cellar door and got its nose in." Her husband Robert added: "A customer saw seven of them walking down the lane on Boxing Day."

Mrs Pennells is afraid to let her red setters out, fearing the boar would make "mincemeat" of them. "Our one and three-year-old granddaughters are staying," she added. "They can't go out at all. I'm still frightened."

From the pub window yesterday, it was possible to see hairy forms in the field opposite, snouts churning the ground.

Jo Howard, 45, the postmistress, said: "This big one ran past 18 inches away. I turned and saw another four of them trotting towards me. I screamed, and jumped into my car."

And this could be just the beginning. Alan Dedames, 38, who owns Woodland Wild Boar, thinks wild boar will be roaming Exmoor for decades.

"Ninety per cent of my females are pregnant, and it's a Garden of Eden of nuts, roots and mushrooms out there for them. You have got a wild boar population in Devon and Somerset now."

When the Sunday Telegraph arrived Mr Dedames was taking a telephone call about another sighting. "Where? But that's 30 miles away!"

As he showed us how the raiders had cut apart yard upon yard of 5ft high boar-proof wire fencing, we were surrounded by angry neighbours. "I've got 120 lambs ready for market but I can't sell them now," said Keith Bavin, 62.

Gabby, the woman beside him, scowled. "I was intimidated by your animals," she said. "I was chased. I only felt safe coming here on my tractor."

Mr Dedames, whose farm is two miles south of Exmoor, claimed he had been hamstrung by confusion over livestock movement regulations introduced after the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak.

He discovered the crisis on December 22. "My girlfriend saw them first, all over the road. £200,000 of stock has wandered off. I am out of business."

He struggled all night to retrieve boar, before someone claiming to be from Devon trading standards telephoned about livestock movement rules on December 23.

"He told me: 'If your animals stray onto another farm, that farm is on standstill, and nothing can move off it.' It meant a £5,000 fine for every animal I retrieved.

"It's bureaucracy gone mad. I don't know if I'm facing a £5,000 fine for every boar I take back - and officials I need to talk to have been on holiday."

Mr Dedames admitted: "I had everybody screaming, I didn't know what to do, it was Christmas Eve, I thought 'b******s.' I went to stay with friends."

He tried to explain to the neighbours about the fines and counselled against "hysteria", explaining that boar would not attack unless cornered or wounded. Gabby conceded that the running boar might have been dashing away frightened.

Wild boar became extinct in Britain in the 16th century, but a handful of captive animals escaped when storms damaged their enclosures in Kent and East Sussex in the 1980s. Before last week, there were about 500 feral boar in England.

It wasn't until Friday that the legal problems were resolved when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs granted Mr Dedames an emergency licence allowing him to round up his animals.

"We were only told of this situation on December 29," a spokesman insisted.

Mr Dedames was left planning to enlist the local hunts for a boar round-up. He was not optimistic. Each family group of about eight would take 20 people to round up.

Some boar had not been seen at all, others were miles away. Mr Dedames sighed. "At least they will remember me: 'Dedames, he had the farm where the boar came from'."

Source:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/01/nboar01.xml

Posted: 02-01-2006 00:42 Post subject:

These ones are quite domesticated,search on here for my other posts on Wild Boar and on the CFZ Site.(Can't be arsed to link,you'll have to do it yourselves !) Wink

Posted: 02-01-2006 01:43 Post subject:

Typicly because they are london journolists, they seem unaware of the Wild boar in the gwent borders Rolling Eyes

here's the old thread on the welsh borders boar from the CFZ messageboard:
http://www.forteanzoology.com/cgi-bin/CFZ/YaBB.cgi?board=oop01;action=display;num=1102110366

Posted: 03-01-2006 01:00 Post subject: Animal escapes

The problem is that this was one of the largest releases known in the UK, the owner admits that many (most?) of the sows were pregnant, and this is an area that was affected a few years ago by foot and mouth.

For those of you that don't know all the pigs act as foot and mouth virus factories when infected, they produce more virus than any other animal, and a group this big will, by definition spread out quite quickly. If we get foot and mouth back a population of this size would potentially really assist the disease in spreading.

Economically there is also the fact that the boars break into pig farms and "rape" the sows there. The offspring are not as valuable as ordinary domestic pigs. There is also the damage done to fields, hedges, etc.

This liberation is potentially more harmful than any that have happened so far.

Chris. M.

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