17th April, Yuba County, USA.
via: animalliberationpressoffice
According to press, someone broke into a falconry, smashed the gift shop, released 11 birds, then arranged a cow skull and bones and left a slashed falconry glove alongside it:
‘Walter, a four-year-old great horned owl, is one of three birds still missing after a break-in at West Coast Falconry on April 17. Owner Kate Marden has had Walter since he was two days old and says he has no survival skills in the wild.
The three cow skulls had been arranged in a row on a bench. A jawbone sat to one side, hip bones to the other. On the ground directly in front of them, someone had placed an eagle-handling glove, its heavy leather cut and sliced. Someone had worn it to remove a large eagle from its enclosure, then slashed the leather and left it behind.
That was only part of what Kate Marden’s housemate found around 6 a.m. on Friday, April 17, at West Coast Falconry in Browns Valley. In the weight room and the small gift shop, equipment had been damaged. Gloves had been slashed. And in the enclosures where 11 raptors had gone to sleep the night before, the birds were gone. The tracking devices each bird wore had been cut off. The enclosure doors had been closed behind them, so the birds could not return to roost.
“It felt a little symbolic,” said Marden, who has operated the falconry business for 20 years. She paused, then let the thought go. “I don’t know. It was just — ”
While Marden has her suspicions about who was responsible, no one has claimed credit for the break-in and the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office has not publicly identified a motive. What Marden is certain of is that the 11 birds had no business being released. All of them, she said, are non-releasable. Some were imprinted on humans as hatchlings and never developed survival skills. Others are injured and some are non-native species from a breeding project.
“It felt like an animal rights kind of thing,” Marden said. “Except that the sad part is that this is sentiment, not science.” ‘
