Telus Goats

 t.,

 Toronto, ON M5J 2V5 

Woodland Animals: Bison

BISON

(1) Pin by Marie King on Animals and Reptiles. | Pinterest:
Source:
http://greenwichworkshop.blogspot.ca/2011_06_01_archive.html

'via Blog this'

Goats fighting America's plant invasions

12 January 2015 Last updated at 19:00 ET

Each country has its own invasive species and rampant plants with a tendency to take over. In most, the techniques for dealing with them are similar - a mixture of powerful chemicals and diggers. But in the US a new weapon has joined the toolbox in recent years - the goat.

In a field just outside Washington, Andy, a tall goat with long, floppy ears, nuzzles up to his owner, Brian Knox.
Standing with Andy are another 70 or so goats, some basking in the low winter sun, and others huddled together around bales of hay.
This is holiday time - a chance for the goats to rest and give birth before they start work again in the spring.
Originally bought to be butchered - goat meat is increasingly popular in the US - these animals had a lucky escape when Knox and his business partner discovered they had hidden skills.
"We got to know the goats well and thought, we can't sell them for meat," he says. "So we started using them around this property on some invasive species. It worked really well, and things grew organically from there."
They are now known as the Eco Goats - a herd much in demand for their ability to clear land of invasive species and other nuisance plants up and down America's East Coast.

Poison ivy, multiflora rose and bittersweet - the goats eat them all with gusto, so Knox now markets their pest-munching services one week at a time from May to November.

Over the past seven years, they have become a huge success story, consuming tons of invasive species.

"This is old technology. I'd love to say I invented it, but it's been around since time began”  Brian Knox Eco Goats

"I joke that I drive the bus, but they're the real rock stars," says Knox, who also works as a sustainability consultant.

Typically, chemicals and/or machinery are used to clear away fast-growing invasive plants, but both methods have their drawbacks. Chemicals can contaminate soil and are not effective in stopping new seeds from sprouting. Pulling plants out by machine can disturb the soil and cause erosion.

Goats, says Knox, are a simple, biological solution to the problem.

"This is old technology. I'd love to say I invented it, but it's been around since time began," he says. "We just kind of rediscovered it."

One of the reasons goats are so effective is that plant seeds rarely survive the grinding motion of their mouths and their multi-chambered stomachs - this is not always the case with other techniques which leave seeds in the soil to spring back.
 
Unlike machinery, they can access steep and wooded areas.

And tall goats, like Andy, can reach plants more than eight feet high.

A herd of 35 goats can go through half an acre of dense vegetation in about four days, which, says Knox, is the same amount of time it gets them to become bored of eating the same thing.

"When they move on to a new site, you can see the excitement in the way they eat," he says.

"They like the magic of getting on the trailer when all the food has gone and then they ride around for a bit and the next thing, the door opens and there's a whole new smorgasbord to eat."

Even more plant species could be added to the goat's diet, judging from some new research.

At Duke University in North Carolina, marine biologist Brian Silliman has spent 20 years working on understanding and eradicating the invasive species phragmites.

This reed, which thrives in salt marshes, can grow up to 10 feet tall, pushing out native species and blocking bay and sea views for coastal residents.

One way of tackling phragmites is to burn it Silliman says at first he tried insects and other forms of "bio control" to tackle the plant, but nothing worked.

"Then I took a holiday to the Netherlands, where the plant comes from, and saw it wasn't a problem there because it was constantly being grazed by animals," he says.

In studies, Silliman found that goats were very effective - in one trial, 90% of the test area was left phragmites-free.

"I think all wetland managers should take up this method," he says. "It's cheaper, less polluting, better for the environment and goat farmers get paid."

One plant goats are increasingly being used to clear is kudzu. This fast-growing vine, native to east Asia, was first introduced into the US in 1876, as a ornamental plant that could shade porches and prevent soil erosion.

But it is now often described as "the vine that ate the south" because of its ability to grow up to a foot a day in the warm environment of south-eastern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Over the last 10 years, however, many landowners have successfully removed it using goats who repeatedly graze the plant until it loses the will to grow back.

Brian Cash runs one of three animal grazing businesses in Georgia where kudzu is a huge problem, not just because of the ground it covers but of the "kudzu bug" - a small beetle which thrives on the plant and which causes a burning sensation when squashed by bare skin.

He learned about keeping a grazing herd on the US West Coast, where there are several dozen well-established goat grazing companies, but decided to adapt the formula.

"In the end we used herds of mostly sheep with some goats mixed in as we found the goats were harder to control," he says of his company Ewe-niversally Green. "We found that the goats led all the mutinies."

Brian Knox, in Maryland, agrees that some goats can be troublesome and he even admits to donating his grumpiest animal to a local butchery class.

But overall, he says he has a happy relationship with the animals.
"They certainly earn their keep," he says.

One of the more high profile jobs they have worked on was cleaning up the Congressional cemetery in Washington two years ago.

Large crowds came to watch as the animals spent a week chomping the overgrowth of Honeysuckle, Ivy and Poison Ivy. The goats even featured in newspaper and news programmes around the country.

This is one of the things he likes about taking goats into urban areas - the response of the city-dwellers, who are "fascinated", he says, to see how efficiently the goats gobble up the vegetation.

"It's still quite novel," says Knox.

Goats aren't a silver bullet. Knox often combines the goat clearance with some manual root cutting and even with a chemical treatment if needed.

But his goats have started to make an impact on the weeds choking America and, he says, they are having a lot of fun doing it.



Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30583512

Great Pyrenees, working dog babysits infant goats - Kids

AnimalWelfareApprv'd @AWAapproved · Apr 16


Working dog lends a hand during kidding season at AWA's Windshadow Farm & Dairy in Bangor, MI http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/04/guard_dog_cares_for_newborn_ki.html …

BANGOR, MI -- It's "freshening" season at Windshadow Farm and Dairy in Bangor, when dairy goats give birth to their kids and begin producing milk again.

With 120 does, the occasional problem arises, said farmer Ron Klein, and when that happened last week, flock guardian Libby, a Great Pyrenees dog, stepped up and out of her usual job description of protecting the flock from predators.

Goats who have never before had a kid can become totally bewildered and confused by birthing, Klein said, wandering off in a daze, then frantically searching barn and lots for the kids they left behind.

When that happens, he said, it is not unusual to find an older doe has taken charge of the abandoned kid.

Klein said that few days ago, he discovered a distressed La Mancha doe exhibiting obvious signs she had had a kid.

"But no kid was in sight -- not in the barn, huts, lean-to or with any member of the herd," Klein recently posted in EatLocal SW Michigan, an internet group endorsing locally produced foods.  "It was a bad sign," Klein said. " I checked the cracks, crannies, base of the feeders--nothing."

Then behind one of the waterers, he found the newborn kid, safe, warm and dry  with Libby.

"These guardian dogs are really amazing," Klein said.

Farmers, share your working dog stories and photos in the comments below.

Link: http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/04/guard_dog_cares_for_newborn_ki.html

Source: https://twitter.com/AWAapproved

Umberella

 

 

 

 

Goat spider Hybrid

Adam Rutherford, left, and Randy Lewis milk Freckles, the silk-producing goat. PR

Synthetic biology and the rise of the 'spider-goats'

Horizon presenter Adam Rutherford looks at the advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering that have resulted in, among other things, computer-made life forms and cancer assassin cells

Freckles looks like a perfectly normal kid. She has bright eyes, a healthy white pelt and gambols happily with Pudding, Sweetie and her five other siblings, exactly as you might imagine young goats do. Until I fend her off, she's very keen on chewing my trousers. To the casual observer, and to goatherds, she shows no signs that she is not a perfectly normal farmyard goat.
But Freckles is a long way from normal. She is an extraordinary creation, an animal that could not have existed at any point in history before the 21st century. She is all goat, but she has something extra in every one of her cells: Freckles is also part spider.
That is what we can now do with genetics: extreme crossbreeding. If 20th-century biology was about taking living things apart to find out how they work, the current era is defined by putting them back together, but not necessarily as evolution decreed, and certainly without the clumsy constraints of mating. Freckles is the result of genetic engineering. But our mastery of manipulating DNA has evolved into an even more extreme form of tinkering, broadly called "synthetic biology". I've been tracking this emerging field since finishing my PhD in genetics 10 years ago, but intensely in the last year as a presenter for the BBC's flagship science strand, Horizon.
Freckles is the creation of Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah State University. The farm is a university outpost where they research modern farming techniques, teach animal husbandry and raise what are inevitably referred to as "spider-goats".Randy, like many of the other scientists here in Logan, Utah, has farming in his blood. So although a creature that is part goat, part spider might seem like an idea born of science fiction, as far as Randy is concerned it's simply advanced farming: breeding animals to produce things that we want.
"We're interested in dragline silk – the silk that spiders catch themselves with when they fall," he tells me in his midwest lilt. "It's stronger than Kevlar. It really has some amazing properties for any kind of a fibre."

 

In a sense, spider-goats are an extension of the farming we've been doing for 10,000 years. All livestock and arable has been carefully bred, each cross being a genetic experiment of its own. "The trouble is, you can't farm spiders," Randy says with an almost comic deadpan face. "They're very cannibalistic." He and his team took the gene that encodes dragline silk from an orb-weaver spider and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the udders. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. Now, when Freckles lactates, her milk is full of spider-silk protein.
We milk Freckles together and process it in the lab to leave only the silk proteins. With a glass rod, we delicately lift out a single fibre of what is very obviously spider silk and spool it on to a reel. It has amazing, and desirable, properties, which is why Randy's seemingly bizarre research is so robustly funded. "In the medical field, we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair," he tells me. "We already know we can make it strong enough as an elastic. We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill. We hope within a couple of years that we're going to be testing to see exactly the best designs and the best materials we can make from it."
The instructions for all creatures that have ever lived (as far as we know) are written in the code of DNA tucked away in the heart of living cells. Given the bewildering diversity of life on Earth, this system is incredibly conservative. All life is based on an alphabet of just four letters, which, when arranged in the right order, spell out proteins. And all life is made of, or by, proteins. So what this means is that the code for making silk in a spider is written in exactly the same language as the code for making goats' milk.
Since the advent of genetic engineering, we have been able to exploit the universality of this code and cut and paste bits of DNA from any one species into any other. Identifying the genetic basis of all cancers and inherited diseases came from this technology: human or mouse genes have been spliced into bacteria so we could study and experiment on those damaged bits of code. Now, this editing technology has progressed to the extent that all bits of DNA code are effectively interchangeable between all species. In fact, Freckles and the other spider-goats are not even on the cutting edge. The loosely defined field of synthetic biology has come to incorporate even more extreme forms of genetic tinkering.
The most striking headlines so far came when American biologist Craig Venter announced in 2010 that he had created the world's first synthetic life form. Synthia, aka Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn 1.0, was a cell whose genetic code, copied and modified from an existing bacterium, had been assembled not by its parent, but by a computer. That code, including literary quotations and website addresses, was then jammed into the eviscerated chassis of another similar cell and the whole thing booted up. It did live and it hadn't lived before.
But to say that he had "created life" is a stretch that Venter – a master of PR as well as an accomplished scientist – allowed to foment and the press lapped up. It's more accurate to say that he rebooted life, his aim being to create a living template on to which new genetic functions could be built. Nevertheless, it remains an astonishing technical achievement, showing our dominance over DNA; not only can we modify one or two genes, we can make enough to power up a living thing.
The scientists who work in synthetic biology often take a perfunctory, reductionist view of what they do. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ron Weiss is a founding father of this field, a purist who started fiddling with the code of life while coding computers. "I decided to take what we understand in computing and apply that to programming biology. To me, that's really the essence of synthetic biology."
This may sound glib. Life forms are complex at every level. If there is one concrete thing we have learned from the billions spent on reading our own genetic code, it's that biology is messy. Scientists are often confounded by baffling "noise" in the molecules that make up living organisms, unpredictable variation set among unfathomable sophistication. Weiss and his comrades at the BioBricks Foundation want to strip out all the noise in biology and turn it into pure engineering, where organisms can be treated like machines and their inner workings are component parts.
Genes have evolved over millions of years to bestow survival on their hosts by having very specific functions. By standardising these genetic elements in an online registry, anyone can piece them together in any order to create biological circuits with entirely designed purpose. Even the language used is more the stuff of electrical engineering than traditional biology.
"Imagine a program, a piece of DNA that goes into a cell and says, 'If cancer, then make a protein that kills the cancer cell; if not, just go away.' That's a kind of program that we're able to write and implement and test in living cells right now." What Ron Weiss is describing is a study his team published last autumn showing that, by using the logic of computer circuits combined with BioBricks parts, they had built a cancer assassin cell. The logic of the genetic circuit initially distinguishes a cancer cell from a healthy cell using a set of five criteria. It then destroys the tumour cell if it satisfied those conditions. This sniper targeting is the opposite of the blunderbuss approach of chemotherapy, which can destroy both tumour and healthy cells with reckless abandon.
Over the last few years, BioBricks has grown into a global phenomenon. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts currently contains thousands of bits of DNA, all freely available, and this democratisation of science is built into the BioBricks ethos. Every year, undergraduate students compete in an international competition to think of a problem and design and build its solution, using only the parts available in the registry. 2011's European champions, from Imperial College London, designed a system for preventing soil erosion and the conversion of land into desert. There is a remix culture within these teams; it's serious play (the grand prize is a silver Lego brick) and they come from diverse backgrounds – maths, engineering, even astrophysics – unfettered by the narrowly defined science disciplines under which I did my DNA research.
The ease of access to this bleeding-edge technology is breathtaking. Last summer, in suburban Sunnyvale, California, I hung out at a gathering of synthetic biology weekend hobbyists, self-styled as "bio-hackers" with the excellent name BioCurious. There, high-school students were learning about biology by introducing fluorescent proteins from deep-sea jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow in the dark. In 2009, three scientists won Nobel prizes for this work. Already, it is literally child's play.
As with any great revolutions, there are those who stand to make a killing after the doors are kicked open. At the other end of the scale from the open-source, open-access utopia of BioBricks, synthetic biology commercial enterprises are emerging. The tech may be new, but the fields are not. With synthetic biology only a few years old, the most intense areas of commercialised synthetic biology are in fuel and drug production. California biotech companies such as LS9 and Amyris have ploughed millions of dollars into developing synthetic organisms that will produce diesel. In its futuristic labs in Emeryville, Amyris has modified brewer's yeast so that instead of fermenting sugar to produce alcohol, diesel seeps out of every cell. This synthetic biodiesel is already used to power trucks in Brazil. Amyris's ambition is to scale up from pilot plants to industrial-scale production. When I ask chief science officer Jack Newman if they envisage their biofuel replacing natural oil, he is suspiciously coy: "I'll be excited about a billion litres."
One significant fear has less to do with the science and more to do with the shifting balance of economic power. Technology watchdogs and campaign groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC Group initially called unrealistically for a total ban on synthetic biology, even though it lacked a workable definition. ETC has modified its stance to focus on the industrialisation of these processes, and specifically the fact that synthetic biodiesel organisms need food.
Jim Thomas, who works for ETC, passionately feels that the control of fuel production is simply shifting from one set of corporate giants to another. "Large companies are buying up bits pieces of land so that they can grow sugarcane and then they're feeding it to vats of synthetic microbes to make fuels," he tells me. "Synthetic organisms at this point should not be out there in the environment; they shouldn't be out there in industry. That's irresponsible and inappropriate."
The culture of biology is rapidly changing and scientists and the public need to keep up. Synthetic biology has the potential to generate a new industrial revolution. It is perhaps the defining technology for the 21st century and it is happening now. Without an informed public discourse, fear of this unprecedented and sometimes unsettling technology may hinder the world-changing promise it harbours.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," as the great physicist Niels Bohr once said. But science fiction never got close to the outlook that came with the advent of synthetic biology. It is now easy to picture a world in which your torn ligaments are replaced with ones made from spider-silk produced by goats; where medicine is served by living programmable machines that seek and destroy only the cells that cause the disease; and where you will drive a car powered by diesel grown by brewer's yeast. Welcome to the future.






Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics








 

Honolulu Museum of Art » Natural Unnatural Supernatural Monkey and Dog Art

Lizbeth Stewart (American, 1948-2013). 'Monkey with Roses,' 1999. Handbuilt and painted ceramic. Gift of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, 2011, and gift of Evelyn Twigg-Smith, 2008 (TCM.2008.23.11a-c)

Anthropomorphic Victorian Taxidermist Walter Potter 

Link: http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.ca/2013/09/anthropomorphic-victorian-taxidermist.html

Honolulu Museum of Art » Natural Unnatural Supernatural: