Christmas Fox

Feminism, Anthropology, Grizzlies & Vultures

[Compassion in World Farming UK @ciwf]

The Government consulted on phasing out cages for laying hens, now we need to see the results published and legislation introduced!

All this week we've been in the Houses of Parliament to make our voices heard.

#EndTheCageAge

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

Hycosan has the worst, clumsiest bottle for dispensing eye drops, plus a ridiculous waste of solid hard plastic - for only 7.5ml ! The bottle beside it is 10ml. Please redesign this bottle! #hylo #URSAPHARM

[Philip Lymbery @philip_ciwf]

A closed season to protect pregnant hares was promised – where is the legislation?
“In the King’s Speech last week, the government quietly dropped a bill that would have finally given legal protection to hares after centuries of persecution”
Why????
Such a simple thing to save beautiful hares and their families
#madness
https://t.co/Ajn4JmSbrl

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@One_NationUK I'm vegetarian and don't appreciate a leaflet through my door asking me to donate to a mass slaughter of animals #qurbani @hwbcharity @RSPCA_official #halal

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Spraying one dandelion with Roundup can kill over 100 bees.

The flower doesn't die instantly. Bees will keep visiting it for days, taking the poison back to their nests and hives.

Never spray dandelions in spring and summer.

They're one of the first major food sources for emerging pollinators.

Let them bloom or remove them by hand.

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@SoveyX What a waste of plastic! Just put the bunches on the shelf and let people snap off individual bananas of differing ripeness

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A single veterinary painkiller killed 500,000 people in India.

The drug was for cows. It was harmless to humans, but it shut down the kidneys of any vulture that fed on a treated carcass. Over a few years it killed 99.5% of India's vultures.

With the vultures gone, dead cattle piled up in fields where the birds used to clean a carcass down to bone in 40 minutes. Stray dogs took over the job and multiplied around the dumps. India loses more people to rabies than any other country in the world, and the dog population was suddenly booming around mountains of rotting cow.

Two economists ran the numbers. Eyal Frank at the University of Chicago and Anant Sudarshan at the University of Warwick published a paper in 2024 in the American Economic Review. They compared death rates across more than 600 Indian districts, separating places that used to have lots of vultures from places that never did. In the vulture-rich districts, human death rates climbed 4.7% above normal between 2000 and 2005. That works out to about 100,000 extra deaths a year, half a million in total, and roughly $69 billion a year in economic damage.

The drug behind it was diclofenac, a cheap anti-inflammatory you might recognize as the active ingredient in Voltaren. Indian cattle owners gave it to their animals for pain. Any vulture that ate the carcass of a recently treated cow died of kidney failure within days, and they ate a lot of treated carcasses. A team led by Lindsay Oaks at The Peregrine Fund pinned down the cause in 2003. India banned the veterinary version in 2006. Some populations are slowly coming back, but the three worst-hit species are still 91 to 98% below their 1990s numbers.

Africa is running the same experiment with different chemicals. A January 2024 study in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution went through 42 species of African birds of prey and found 88% of them shrinking, with vultures and eagles falling fastest. The poison this time is carbofuran, a farm pesticide poachers smear on dead elephants and lions. The point is to kill the vultures that circle overhead, because circling vultures show rangers where the poaching happened. Three poisoned elephants killed 537 vultures in a single 2019 incident in Botswana. In May 2025, one poisoned elephant in Kruger National Park killed 123 more in a morning.

A vulture's stomach acid is some of the strongest in the animal kingdom, strong enough to dissolve bones, hide, and the pathogens for anthrax, cholera, botulism, and rabies. When the vultures disappear, the pathogens that used to die inside them spread instead. They end up in the water, the soil, and the dogs that took the vultures' place.

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@jan_murray At St. Hilda's, the all-girls college 😐

[Jenni @hashjenni]

In case anyone isn’t aware, Trump is demanding Zambia to hand over its mineral rights by end of day tomorrow or the U.S. gov’t will cut off the country’s access to the AIDS medications that are literally keeping its citizens alive.

Just thought y’all should know.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Vultures eat anthrax, botulism, rabies, and cholera for breakfast.

Their stomach acid is among the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, with a pH around 1, low enough to dissolve the bones, hide, and pathogens of dead animals that would kill almost anything else.

A vulture eating a diseased carcass isn't a vector for disease, it's a terminus. The disease chain ends in the vulture's gut, and that's pretty hardcore.

When vulture populations crashed in India in the 1990s, rotting livestock carcasses sat where vultures used to clean them.

Feral dogs and rats took over the cleanup, both of which actually do spread rabies. Researchers later linked the vulture collapse to roughly 500,000 deaths in India over the following decade.

The same collapse is now underway in sub-Saharan Africa. Six of eleven African vulture species are threatened with extinction, primarily from poisoned poaching baits.

The animals nobody finds cute are doing more public health work than most of the species we actively protect.

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

I can't get through an episode of #theOtherBennetSister 👒 without crying 😭😭😭

[Alex Macdonald @alexfmac]

I hope this photo is a watershed moment.

Forced to carry on to the end of the race with a broken back.

Collapsed & died after the finish line.

RIP Gold Dancer.

If you’re making money off this kind of suffering - how do you look at yourself in the mirror?

[Hedgehog Cabin @HedgehogCabin]

Ah, dandelions. 🌼
If only they were rare, fragile, and hard to cultivate.
Then we'd treasure them.
But because they are hardy and successful and forgiving and adaptable, we disparage them.
Consider them unworthy of our respect.
Even though they are the perfect plant - providing green all year round and cheerful flowers in the spring, are edible and highly nutritious, containing vitamins A, C, and K, along with minerals like calcium and iron, and are our precious pollinator's lifeline.
Please find a little love for these hard working flowers and leave them undisturbed, this month at least.

[Compassion in World Farming UK @ciwf]

This is the complete opposite to the direction we should be going in.

Allowing intensive farming to expand will increase animal suffering, undermine food security, increase pollution, fuel the climate crisis and put all of us at risk.

Read more: https://t.co/ID2Mp60PJj

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Cut your plastic rings. It'll only take a second out of your life and you will save wildlife.

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@kendie I can't believe any of the places on #fourinabed actually gets those rates.

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@clsyoshimoo I think it is gross. Maybe ok on a train or somewhere confined you just need to wash your hands quickly, but not where you're staying overnight and need to wash your face and brush your teeth, straddling the toilet 😐🤢

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

@Tubbs24805830 I think it is gross. Maybe ok on a train or somewhere confined you just need to wash your hands quickly, but not where you're staying overnight and need to wash your face and brush your teeth, straddling the toilet 😐🤢 #fourinabed

[UKSwifts @swifts_uk]

It’s time to share this around again and spread the word! 🐦

[Christmas Fox @Ruppells]

I'm so disappointed to learn you don't do your cod liver oil liquid anymore 😭 The capsules are lower strength £ for £, and have added stuff, instead of simply cod liver's naturally occurring vitamins @HB_HereToHelp