Animals facing conflict in 2012
As humans across the globe dealt with a host of problems in 2012, so too did the animal kingdom. From poaching to war, here’s a look at animals facing conflict in different regions of the world.
NOTE: Some photos are graphic showing visual coverage of injury or death that may be disturbing to some readers.
- A dog is seen at a U.S soldiers position at a hill top near town of Walli Was in Paktika province near border with Pakistan November 6, 2012. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)
- A veterinary surgeon treats a security dog in a French military base in Kabul November 18, 2012. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)
- Three dogs walk past a French Tiger helicopter before the handover ceremony between the French army and the ANA (Afghan National Army) at the forward operational base of Nijrab, as part of the withdrawal of French troops, November 20, 2012. French combat troops are due to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)
- Afghan men attend an organized ram fight in Kabul on April 27, 2012. Spring marks the start of the “fighting season” for humans involved in Afghanistan’s decade-long war, but for birds, dogs, camels and even kites it reaches its peak. The game, as well as dog fighting, camel-fighting and Buzkashi, are part of Afghanistan’s social entertainment. (Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images)
- Two fighting dogs attack each other during the weekly dog fights on the outskirts of Kabul on November 30, 2012. Dog fighting is held in vacant lots and though betting is done, matches are stopped as soon as one dog shows absolute domination. Dog fighting was banned during the Taliban regime. (Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images)
- An oriental white stork spreads its wings before it is released into the wild n Tianjin, November 21, 2012. Rescuers saved the bird along with others after it was poisoned. The endangered storks grabbed headlines in Chinese media recently when 20 of the birds died of poisoning in northern China. According to Xinhua News Agency, poachers poisoned the wild birds within a wetland nature reserve in north China’s Tianjin Municipality, where 20 were found dead and 13 others sickened, sparking a public outcry for intensified protection of wild animals and harsher punishments for those behind the deaths of the storks. (China Daily/Reuters)
- A cat sits in front of a damaged building at the al-Khalidiya neighbourhood of Homs. Picture taken December 3, 2012. (Yazan Homsy/Reuters)
- A dog sits near buildings damaged after a Syrian Air Force fighter jet loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad fired missiles at the town of Ras al-Ain, near the province of Hasaka, 373 miles from Damascus. Picture taken November 28, 2012. (Samer Abdullah/Shaam News Network/Reuters)
- A cat stands among garbage in the damaged old souk of Homs November 15, 2012. Picture taken November 15, 2012. (Yazan Homsy/Reuters)
- A street vendor rides a horse-cart as he sells potatoes on a street in Damascus November 13, 2012. (Muzaffar Salman/Reuters)
- Free Syrian Army fighters transport a weapon on a donkey after clashes with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, in Harem near Idlib. Picture taken October 22, 2012. (Redwan al-Homsi/Shaam News Network/Reuters)
- An abandoned pet tortoise walks on the debris of a damaged house in the neighborhood of old Homs September 9, 2012. (Yazen Homsy/Reuters)
- A rabbit is pictured next to weapons in a Free Syrian Army bus in Bustan Al-Basha district in Aleppo September 18, 2012. (Zain Karam/Reuters)
- An Israeli soldier from the Home Front Command carries a sniffer dog during an earthquake drill in Holon, near Tel Aviv October 21, 2012. Israel held its first major earthquake drill on Sunday, stepping away from simulated Iranian missile salvoes though officials insisted the country remained ready for any war with its arch-foe. (Nir Elias/Reuters)
- An Israeli women holds her dog as a siren sounds warning of incoming rockets in the southern city of Ashkelon November 16, 2012. The latest upsurge in a long-running conflict was triggered on Wednesday when Israel killed Hamas’s military mastermind, Ahmed Al-Jaabari, in a precision air strike on his car. Israel then began shelling the coastal enclave from land, air and sea. (Amir Cohen/Reuters)
- Israeli farmers ride horses as they herd cattle close to the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights November 13, 2012. (Nir Elias/Reuters)
- Palestinian men bathe a horse in the sea in Gaza City on August 28, 2012. Life in the poor and crowded Gaza Strip is going to get harsher still unless action is taken now, according to a new United Nations report. (Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
- A stray dog stands on a rubbish dump at the seafront in Sidon, southern Lebanon, June 9, 2012. The dump, located near schools, hospitals and apartment blocks in Lebanon’s third biggest city, has partially collapsed into the Mediterranean sea several times. (Ali Hashisho/Reuters)
- A member of the Iraqi Mine and Unexploded Ordnance Clearance Organization (IMCO) works with a sniffer dog to find mines in the Shatt-al-Arab district, in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, November 6, 2012. Decades of war have left Iraq with one of the worst mine problems in the world, according to UNICEF, with around 20 million anti-personnel mines and more than 50 million cluster bombs believed to be left over in border areas and southern oilfields. (Atef Hassan/Reuters)
- A shepherd gestures while surrounded by his animals near the Turkish-Syria border on October 5, 2012 in Akcakale, southern Sanliurfa province. Turkish artillery hit targets near Syria’s Tel Abyad border town for a second day on October 4, killing several Syrian soldiers according to activists and security sources, after a mortar bomb fired from the area killed five Turkish civilians. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)
- A baby donkey smells the body of its mother, which was killed during an attack by an armed force in Sigili village in Sudan on November 2, 2012. The local community reported that ten people were killed, one child injured and a young man abducted during the incident which saw 15 houses burnt, all properties looted and camels, donkeys and cows slaughtered. More than 1,000 people from some 140 families of the Zagawa tribe, who resided in the village, have fled to El Fasher and the ZamZam camp for internally displaced persons, 18 miles away. (Albert Gonzalez Farran/UNAMID/Reuters)
- A lion bred for commercial use is pictured on August 3, 2012 at Bona Bona Game Farm in Wolmaransstad, 200 kms southeast of Johannesburg. Around 500 lions are hunted legally every year in South Africa, most of them from commercial lion breeding farms which also supply zoos all over the world. Until recently hunters paid $20,000 just for a trophy to hang above the fireplace, and the carcass was thrown to the dogs. (Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images)
- Police dogs attack a man found stealing from ethnic Somali homes during the second day of skirmishes in the Eastleigh neighborhood of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, November 19, 2012. Police fired tear gas to disperse Kenyans who threw stones and broke into the homes and shops of ethnic Somalis in Nairobi’s Somali-dominated Eastleigh neighborhood on Monday to protest against a bomb attack in the district on Sunday. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)
- Policemen use trained dogs to disperse rioters during the second day of skirmishes in the Eastleigh neighborhood of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, November 19, 2012. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)
- Kenya Wildlife Service officials and security personnel watch over one of three turtles killed by poachers near the Jomo Kenyatta Public Beach at the coastal port town of Mombasa December 3, 2012. (Joseph Okanga/Reuters)
- Patrick Karabaranga, a warden at the Virunga National Park, plays with an orphaned mountain gorilla in the gorilla sanctuary in the park headquarters at Rumangabo in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo on July 17, 2012. The Virunga park is home to some 210 mountain gorillas, approximately a quarter of the world’s population. The four orphans that live in the sanctuary are the only mountain gorillas in the world not living in the wild, having been brought here after their parents were killed by poachers or as a result of traffickers trying to smuggle them out of the park. (Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images)
- A boy carries a goat along a road near the town of Sake, 7 miles west of Goma November 27, 2012. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)
- Dogs rescued from a South Korean-run online dog fighting racket are chained to steel barrels used as their temporary shelters as they wait to be handled by volunteers from the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Pablo City, Laguna province, south of Manila on April 3, 2012. Philippine police on April 1, 2012 rescued the 300 badly injured pitbulls and arrested seven South Koreans after busting a massive online dog fighting syndicate which was broadcasting the fights online to a betting audience. (Ted Aljibe//AFP/Getty Images)
- Members of United Kennel Club Japan care for pets rescued from inside the exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, at the group’s pet shelter in Samukawa town, Kanagawa prefecture. Dogs and cats that were abandoned in the Fukushima exclusion zone after last year’s nuclear crisis have had to survive high radiation and lack of food, as they now face freezing winter weather. Picture taken January 25, 2012. (Issei Kato/Reuters)
- Fishmongers check large bluefin tunas before the first trading of the new year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market January 5, 2012. Fishing nations meet in Morocco to thrash out tuna quotas as experts urge maintaining bluefin catch limits. Hunted to the brink of extinction to feed a burgeoning sushi market, the Atlantic bluefin tuna was placed on the endangered list of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)
- A puppy stands by remains of a dog local residents said was its mother, days after it was killed in an area burnt in violence at East Pikesake ward in Kyaukphyu. Picture taken November 6, 2012. (Minzayar/Reuters)
- This handout picture taken on February 18, 2012 in Muko-Muko, Bengkulu province and released by Kerinci Seblat National Park on November 21, 2012 shows a Sumatran tiger named Dara being trapped by tiger poachers. Indonesian conservasionists have found 120 traps set up by poachers to snare critically endangered Sumatran tiger in Kerinci Seblat National Park, an official said. (Kerinci Seblat National Park via AFP/Getty Images)
- This handout picture taken on February 18, 2012 in Muko-Muko, Bengkulu province and released by Kerinci Seblat National Park on November 21, 2012 shows tiger rangers evacuating a critically injured endangered Sumatran tiger named Dara after it was trapped by poachers. (Kerinci Seblat National Park via AFP/Getty Images)
- Ayu Rosalina, a Sumatran elephant calf that was born on Tuesday, stands near its mother at the Conservation Response Unit (CRU) Sampoiniet, in Aceh Jaya, Indonesia Aceh province, September 19, 2012. The Sumatran elephant could be extinct in the wild in less than 30 years unless immediate steps are taken to protect its rapidly diminishing habitat, environmental group WWF said on Tuesday. IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, raised its listing of the Sumatran elephant subspecies from “endangered” to “critically endangered” after nearly 70 percent of its habitat and halve its population has been lost in one generation. (Junaidi Hanafiah/Reuters)
- A rescued baby pangolin is released in the forest by a government wildlife and conservation officer in Karo district located in North Sumatra province on July 31, 2012. Indonesian police intercepted 85 endangered pangolins, most of them alive, despite being stuffed into sacks by suspected smugglers. (AFP/Getty Images)
- A dog stands on top of an uprooted coconut tree in the village of Andap, New Bataan town, Compostela Valley province on December 5, 2012, a day after Typhoon Bopha hit the province. At least 274 people have been killed and hundreds remain missing in the Philippines from the deadliest typhoon to hit the country this year, the civil defence chief said December 5. (Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images)
- Villagers look at a wounded endangered one horned Rhinoceros that was shot and dehorned by poachers in the jungle of Parku hills near Kaziranga National Park on September 26 2012. Indian veterinarians struggled to save the life of a rare rhinoceros that was shot and had its horn cut off after it wandered out of a flooded national park. (Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)
- A wild elephant grazes near an electric fence marking the boundary of a wildlife sanctuary in Udawalawe National Park on November 9, 2012. Sri Lankan wildlife authorities announced on September 2, 2011 that there were just over 7,300 wild elephants in the country according to the latest wild elephant survey carried out in August 2011. (Lakruwan Wanniarachi/AFP/Getty Images)
- People watch a cock fight at an illegal arena set up in the bush on the outskirts of Havana June 16, 2012. In Cuba, it’s legal to train cocks to fight but since the 1959 Cuban Revolution all forms of betting and gambling have been strictly forbidden. But betting on cock fights is an activity so popular among Cubans that stopping it would pose a huge challenge for the authorities and would be counterproductive to keeping law and order. Picture taken June 16, 2012. (Desmond Boylan/Reuters)
- A one-month-old baby Pudu deer grazes in an artificial environment at an University in Concepcion city, south of Santiago. The Pudu, the world’s smallest deer, was found orphaned in a forest close Concepcion city and inhabits exclusively in southern Chile and part of Argentina. The species is currently in danger of extinction. Picture taken November 12, 2012. (Jose Luis Saavedra/Reuters)
- A cow covered with ashes is seen in the skirts of the Tungurahua volcano after it spews large clouds of gas and ash near Banos, about 110 miles south of Quito August 19, 2012. The authorities are encouraging residents living near the volcano to evacuate due to increased activity of the volcano, according to local media. The Tungurahua volcano has been in an active state since October 1999. (Carlos Campana/Reuters)
- A Brazilian Three banded armadillo also known as a Tatu-Bola in Portuguese, walks on September 18, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. The Tatu-Bola -an endangered species– was chosen as the mascot of the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014. (Vanderlei Almeida/AFP/Getty Images)
- An olive ridley turtle hatchling crawls to the ocean after being released by tourists in Mazatlan November 14, 2012. The Mazatlan Aquarium released 1,100 turtle hatchlings into the Pacific, local media reported. For more than 20 years, the Aquarium has protected 4,400 nests and liberated more than 270,000 hatchlings in an effort to protect and recover the endangered species. (Stringer/Reuters)
- A rooster perches on a pile of clothes after a tornado destroyed several houses in La Providencia, in the state of Nuevo Leon May 9, 2012. A tornado swept through the small village on the evening of May 6, destroying houses and leaving 14 families homeless, according to local media. (Daniel Becerrill/Reuters)
- A homeless woman leaves food for a stray dog at a small street of Athens November 6, 2012. Thousands of Greek workers began a 48-hour strike on Tuesday to protest a new round of austerity cuts that unions say will devastate the poor and drive a failing economy to collapse. (Yorgos Karahalis/Reuters)
- A Lion is pictured in this August 9, 2012 photo in its enclosure at the zoo in Wuppertal, western Germany. Africa’s savannahs and the lions that roam there are disappearing at an alarming rate as ballooning human populations deprive the big cats of their natural habitat, a study released December 4, 2012 showed. About 75 percent of the continent’s savannahs and two-thirds of the lion population have vanished over the past 50 years, according to researchers at Duke University in North Carolina. (Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images)
- Two Przewalski horses graze in the Schorfheide nature reserve in Gross Schoenbeck, eastern Germany, on October 25, 2012. The Przewalski horse is a rare and endangered subspecies of the wild horse and named after the Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky. The Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve was established in 1990 following the German Reunification and is under the protection of the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve Programme. (Patrick Pleul/AFP/Getty Images)
- A five-day-old female Rhinoceros baby named Akili stands next to her mother Ine in their enclosure at the zoo in Berlin on August 10, 2012. The young animal born on August 6 at the zoo belongs to the Black Rhinoceros species, which is native to the eastern and central areas of Africa and classified as critically endangered. (David Gannon/AFP/Getty Images)
- A dog shelters from a blizzard in Catelu, on the outskirts of Bucharest, on January 26, 2012. Southern Romania was paralysed by heavy snow, with dozens of national roads cut off and 28 flights to and from Bucharest’s airports cancelled, Prime minister Emil Boc said. Hundreds of people, including several babies, spent the night stranded in cars, and had to be rescued by authorities in the morning. Two rail lines were closed and 28 villages were deprives of electricity and four ports were shut down. (Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images)
- A stray dog sleeps in the snow as people pass by on a street in Bucharest January 26, 2012. Heavy snow and blizzards have swept across Romania over the past two days, not only causing chaotic traffic, blocking motorways and leaving hundreds stranded in snow, but also forcing the closure of the country’s main Black Sea port. (Radu Sigheti/Reuters)
- Anne Bartlett and her dog Henry look out from their flooded property in the centre of the village of Ruishton, near Taunton, on November 25, 2012 in Somerset, England. Another band of heavy rain and wind continued to bring disruption to many parts of the country today particularly in the south west which was already suffering from flooding earlier in the week. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
- A handout photo distributed on September 20, 2012 by Zoo Antwerpen in Antwerp shows a male okapi called Nkosi, who was born last weekend at the zoo. Okapi live in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo and are on the list of endangered species. (Johan Verhulst/Zoo Antwerpen via AFP/Getty Images)
- A greyhound walks next to the remains of the Gabarri-Valdes family home after a bulldozer demolished it at the Spanish gypsy settlement of Puerta de Hierro, in the outskirts of Madrid November 20, 2012. Fifty-four families had been living in Puerta de Hierro, on the banks of the Manzanares river for over 50 years. Since the summer of 2010, the community has been subject to evictions on the grounds that the dwellings are illegal. (Susana Vera/Reuters)
- A bullfighter’s assistant kills a bull during the first bullfight of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona July 7, 2012. (Joseba Etxaburu/Reuters)
- A dog urinates over a pile of garbage during the twelfth day of a strike by garbage collectors in Chipiona, southcoast Spain, January 27, 2012. The workers are on a strike due to not having received their salary since November. (Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters)
- A reveller tries to hold on to a wild horse during the “Rapa Das Bestas” traditional event in the Spanish northwestern village of Sabucedo July 7, 2012. On the first weekend of the month of July, hundreds of wild horses are rounded up, trimmed and groomed in different villages in the Spanish northwestern region of Galicia. (Miguel Vidal/Reuters)
- Bianca, a female snow leopard, an endangered species, rests in an open air cage at the Royev Ruchey zoo in Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, March 15, 2012. Bianca returned to Krasnoyarsk after a three-year-long stay at a zoo in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, to wait for a male snow leopard, which is wanted by employees to help propagate the species, according to zoo representatives. (Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)
- A woman holds a large snapping turtle washed into her yard by Hurricane Sandy, while cleaning up debris on Staten Island in New York City, November 12, 2012. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
- A dead deer is pictured with driftwood and debris left by a combination of storm surge from Hurricane Sandy and high tide in Southampton, New York October 30, 2012. Millions of people across the eastern United States awoke on Tuesday to scenes of destruction wrought by monster storm Sandy, which knocked out power to huge swathes of the nation’s most densely populated region, swamped New York’s subway system and submerged streets in Manhattan’s financial district. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
- A family in Cecil County is struggling to keep it’s pet goat, Snowbird, suing the county after officials moved to take the goat on a zoning technicality. Craig Balunsat and his wife Lisa say there is no reason why their beloved goat, who they raised inside their home, should be treated different than their dogs and cats. (Lloyd Fox/Baltimore Sun)