Activists Force Cancellation of South Korean Dog Meat 'Festival'

The Korea Dog Farmers' Association had scheduled a 'festival' aimed at promoting traditional dog meat consumption this week, but it was cancelled following the rising drumbeat of protest from animal rights activists.

This unfathomable 'festival' was planned to be held in the city of Seongnam just south of Seoul, and would showcase various canine delicacies...which frankly yours truly is unable to convey here as it is simply too upsetting to detail

Beyond Barbaric

How is it possible that this unfathomable practice is still legally going on in South Korea!?! How is it possible tthat nearly 600 farms still raise dogs for meat in South Korea? Un-freaking believable. The good news is that an increasing number of South Koreans are staunchly opposed to this practice and step-by-step, Korean animal activists are working to put an end to it, though it has unfortunately been a slow process due to grey areas in the legal system.

An "International Embarrassment"

A growing numbers of Koreans oppose the practice and consider it an international embarrassment, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the planned festival stirred fury from South Korean animal rights groups and many Internet users, who aided in the ultimate cancellation.

Park So-Youn, head of Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth, told the AFP this week "This is making our country an international laughing stock, and making the whole world mistakenly believe that all South Koreans eat dogs."

"Canines are the animals emotionally closest to humans. You can't just publicly celebrate killing and eating them," Park told the AFP.
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Fish Can Count...Up to Three

Fish can distinguish between larger and smaller quantities, with an additional ability to "count" up to three, according to research on tropical angelfish.
Angelfish are regarded as being one of the world's most intelligent fish, but scientists believe other fish species also possess the math-related skills outlined in a new Animal Cognition paper.
Doing something akin to counting up to three might sound underwhelming, but math itself is a very human-centric concept that may need reconsideration if comparisons are to be made with the abilities of non-human species.
"We all think we know what we mean by 'counting,' but do we really?" asked co-author Robert Gerlai. "Is recounting a series of 1 to 100 counting? Is 2+3=5 counting? Is calculating the square root of a number counting, or perhaps is the mathematics necessary for quantum physics counting?"
"The point is that even within our own species, mathematical abilities vary tremendously," Gerlai, a University of Toronto Mississauga professor of psychology, told Discovery News. "So far, most biological, including behavioral, traits we initially believed to be unique properties of our own species have turned out to have some homologues in animals."
Gerlai and Luis Gomez-Laplaza of the University of Oviedo in Spain exploited the previously determined tendency of angelfish to seek protection in unfamiliar environments by joining the largest possible fish group, called a shoal. To rule out possible confounding effects arising from sexual interactions, the researchers only used juvenile angelfish for their experiments.
Test fish placed in special compartmentalized tanks were given a simultaneous choice between shoals containing different numbers of fish. The angelfish were always able to select the larger of two groups so long as the ratio between the shoals was 2:1 or above. Below that ratio, their choices were less predictable, suggesting a limit to their quantity estimation abilities.
After the findings were published, the researchers, according to Gerlai, "have already collected new data suggesting that angelfish can discriminate much more precisely than this. That is, angelfish can tell the difference between 3 and 2, for example."
He added, "This ability does resemble 'counting' individual items as opposed to estimating quantities, but this counting ability does not extend beyond three."
Precise counting ability likely does not benefit fish much, so they have probably not evolved skills beyond those detected by the scientists. Estimating group sizes, however, allows the fish to enjoy better protection in larger groups and improved food detection, with more eyes on the lookout for food sources. The ability to choose between larger and smaller quantities, therefore, has survival value for fish.
Angelo Bisazza, a professor in the Comparative Psychology Research Group at the University of Padova, has performed studies on mosquitofish suggesting that they too have quantity estimation skills. Bisazza and his team were even able to train the mosquitofish to discriminate between more difficult to detect ratios.
Bisazza told Discovery News that the studies "are slowly unraveling the cognitive abilities of fish and, as for the case of numerical abilities, they often suggest that the capabilities of these creatures are not so dissimilar from those of the organisms (monkeys, rodents and pigeons) that have traditionally been employed for these studies."
Nicola Clayton, a leading animal cognition expert at the University of Cambridge, told Discovery News that the research is reminiscent of studies on lions and salamanders, and how these animals can also estimate quantity. She additionally predicts that other species of fish that live in shoals have the ability.
Given how widespread the basic math-related skills are throughout the animal kingdom, Gerlai thinks it's possible that ability to count "could have arisen in one ancestral species from which all species with this ability evolved." Alternatively, he said the skill "could have arisen independently in several species."
In the future, studies on genes could provide the answers, Gerlai predicts. Discovery of a gene or sets of genes that underlie counting, estimation, and other math skills could be traced across multiple species.
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