by Michael Marshall If you've ever wondered what crows are saying when they caw at a perceived threat from the treetops, here is a sample: "I'm telling on you!" By watching who their neighbours and parents scold, one group of crows has learned to recognise and scold a dubious human. John Marzluff of the University of Washington in Seattle discovered five years ago that crows can recognise individual humansMovie Camera who posed a threat. He briefly trapped American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) on his university's campus while wearing a distinctive "caveman" mask. Afterwards, crows that had been trapped scolded anyone they spotted wearing the caveman mask, following them around and cawing harshly, but studiously ignored people wearing a neutral mask. Since then Marzluff has been monitoring the birds' response to the masks. Tests in which researchers toured the campus wearing masks showed that more and more crows had taken to scolding people sporting the caveman mask. Two weeks after the trapping, 26 per cent of crows scolded people wearing the offending mask, but 2.7 years later a remarkable 66 per cent did so. In the fifth year of the study, Marzluff barely got 50 metres out of his office in the caveman mask before a mob of crows started scolding him. The behaviour also gradually spread outwards from the original trapping site. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 15513 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By John Matson As Operation Enduring Freedom , the war on terror in Afghanistan, winds down and some 33,000 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen return from overseas in the next year, a plan announced by President Obama on June 22, the psychological issues that veterans face back home are likely to increase. Some of the key psychological issues affecting the approximately two million American troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have been traumatic brain injury (TBI), depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—and the diagnoses often overlap. A 2008 report by the RAND Corp. think tank estimated that more than 26 percent of troops may return from the wars on terror with mental health issues. It is reasonable to expect a continuation of these brain and mental health trends, only multiplied by the anticipated dramatic uptick in returning troops. On top of that, such issues also tend to crop up several months or even years after service members settle in, rather than directly after homecoming, as researchers learned following America's wars in the late 20th century. A false honeymoon can deceive health care workers and family into a perception that all is well among members of the military reentering society stateside. After the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Vietnam in 1973 "the only thing that happened is that rates of problems went up," says George Mason University assistant professor of clinical psychology Keith Renshaw. "The longer people are back, the more people come forward as potentially struggling." A study in the April issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders showed that among service members injured in Iraq or Afghanistan, health care usage—and psychiatric problems—increased over time. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 15512 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By Alyssa Danigelis A stroke is like a meteorite impact. There’s a central “core of death” surrounded by silenced neural networks. So far, no one has figured out a way to turn those neurons back on. But by adding adult stem cells to a "brain in a dish" comprised of rat neurons, researchers at the University of Florida could find a way to reboot the brain -- essentially waking up quiet circuits and regenerating the core. “We take normal neurons, simulate a stroke event, and implant adult stem cells,” said Thomas DeMarse, a research scientist at the University of Florida who is working on the transplant model with assistant professor of biomedical engineering Brandi Ormerod and PhD student Crystal Stephens. The brain in the dish, or as the scientists prefer to call it, the "“biologically relevant neural model,” is a computer chip with an array of 60 microelectrodes that measure the action potential of neurons grown on top. The microelectrode array, or MEA, records the brain cell signals so the scientists can analyze them. “The beauty of the MEA is that it doesn’t just tell you the activity of one neuron, it tells you the activity of hundreds at the same time,” DeMarse said. Using MEAs is not new -- DeMarse used one in 2004 to show that brain cells could be used to control a flight simulator -- but adding adult stem cells to the mix in vitro, that is, in an experiment outside the brain, is the new part. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15511 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Valerie Ross According to a study published in January by neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor at the Montreal Neurological Institute, music can activate the same reward circuits in the brain as food and sex. Participants listened to their songs of choice in a PET scanner, which detects the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, and again in an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity. The scans showed that just before feeling enjoyable chills in response to the music, listeners experienced a dopamine rush near the frontal striatum, a brain region associated with anticipating rewards, followed by a flood of dopamine in the rear striatum, the brain’s pleasure center. “It’s like you’re craving the next note,” Salimpoor says. That cycle of craving and fulfillment may be what keeps music lovers coming back for more. Not all music is created equal, of course. Biologist Nick Hudson of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia wondered what distinguishes forgettable tunes from lasting masterpieces. He proposed that one key difference might be found through lossless compression, which exploits repetition and redundancies in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content. When Hudson compared contemporary hits and enduring classics that had been compressed, he found that pop, rock, and techno boiled down to 60 or 70 percent of their original size, while classics such as Beethoven’s Third Symphony shrank much further, to just 40 percent. He suspects that great works’ appeal may stem from a hidden simplicity: “They seem complicated but can be distilled to surprisingly basic terms.” Composers who want to make their mark might do well to create a piece that sounds complex but is actually built on a foundation of simple patterns. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 15510 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP A couple of days ago my students and I darted a young adult hyena named Dionysus. This is a particularly interesting animal, as it is the youngest adult offspring of our last alpha female, Murphy, who was killed by lions in April. Murphy’s youngest adult male offspring will almost certainly disperse voluntarily to a new clan within the next year or two, but her youngest adult daughter should remain throughout her life in her natal social group, called a “clan,” and take over there as the alpha female. In the latter case, assuming this animal is able to fend off attacks from its very brawny older sisters, Juno and Loki, Dionysus will rank first in a clan of more than 90 hyenas! If Dionysus ranked first, she would be able to usurp food from any other hyena in the clan, live a long life and produce more surviving offspring than any other female. Although spotted hyenas are notoriously difficult to sex, my students and I are typically very good at determining the sex of hyenas using a variety of subtle morphological cues as they move around or engage in “greeting ceremonies” with one another. However, every once in a while a hyena fools us, and an individual believed to be a male for two or three years one day shows up nursing cubs at the den! None of us had ever been able to sex Dionysus with complete certainty, even though this animal will be 2 years old in a few weeks. We had all thus been looking forward to darting Dionysus because we expected this animal would be easy to sex once we could examine it very closely. However, this time, even after the animal fell asleep and we rolled it over so we could examine its genitalia, we continued to get mixed messages. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15509 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News Supportive text messages can double the chance of someone successfully quitting smoking, according to UK researchers. Just over 10% of 2,900 smokers who received encouraging texts such as "you can do it" had quit after six months, but only 4.9% of a similar number who did not have the same support gave up. The study, published in The Lancet, called for texts to be included in services to help people kick the habit. Other scientists said a text service could be offered globally. According to government statistics two-thirds of UK smokers say they want to stop. This study looked at 5,800 of them. Supportive texts were sent to 2,915 of the smokers for six months. The rest received only messages thanking them for taking part. They were sent five texts a day for the first five weeks and then three a week for the next 26 weeks. Participants could also text back for specific advice when they had cravings or had lapsed back into smoking. Saliva tests for cotinine, which is made when nicotine is broken down by the body, were taken to determine if people had really given up. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15508 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Mitch Leslie African sleeping sickness is one of the most neglected of the neglected diseases. But thanks to a new collaboration, researchers have crafted a compound that kills the parasites that cause sleeping sickness in the blood and the brain. After promising studies in rodents, the compound will enter human safety trials later this year. Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), the formal name for the disease, sickens an estimated 30,000 people per year. The culprits are two subspecies of the microscopic parasite Trypanosoma brucei. Injected by the bite of the tsetse fly, the invaders first dwell in the blood and then infiltrate the brain, causing confusion, hallucinations, lethargy, and other symptoms. Untreated HAT is fatal, but treatment can be as well. The drug mainstay, melarsoprol, contains arsenic and kills one in 20 people who take it. A newer medicine, eflornithine, isn’t as harsh but is complex to dispense, requiring four intravenous infusions per day for 2 weeks. This bleak situation could be starting to change. Last year, a team led by scientists at the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom reported synthesizing a molecule that killed sleeping sickness parasites in the blood of mice, although it couldn’t enter the brain. Other scientists have resurrected fexinidazole, a compound tested as an antimicrobial in the 1970s and '80s but never developed into a drug. Phase I safety trials of fexinidazole in people recently concluded. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15507 - Posted: 06.30.2011

Analysis by Marianne English Gene expression plays a larger role than thought in the development of temporal lobe epilepsy, a common form of epilepsy, finds an international team of scientists. The study was published in the journal Annals of Neurology by scientists from France's biomedical institution Inserm, the University of Marseille in France and the University of California-Irvine. Previously, experts thought neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain began acting abnormally after they were damaged by head trauma or previous illnesses that caused high fevers. Healthy neurons normally transmit messages to one another by moving ions -- or charged particles -- back and forth in channels between cells. These coordinated efforts allow humans and animals to do a variety of things, ranging from eating to reading science news articles on the Internet. But for people living with epilepsy, neurons in the brain can behave abnormally, sometimes firing uncontrollably and causing seizures. Though epilepsy can be caused by many things, the majority of cases cannot be traced back to a particular cause. Looking beyond neurons, the research team found that a "master switch" gene called NRSF controls the expression of some 1,800 genes suppressed in patients with epilepsy. Researchers think brain trauma still activates the gene, but there's evidence that keeping its proteins from influencing other genes can prevent brain tissue from becoming epileptic. So what does this mean for the 50 million people worldwide living with epilepsy? © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15506 - Posted: 06.30.2011

By Linda Carroll, msnbc.com contributor For years we’ve been told that caffeinated coffee was bad for us. It’s unhealthy and addictive, doctors warned. But as vindication for all who stuck by their energizing elixir, a new study shows that guzzling caffeinated coffee may actually be good for our brains. In fact, it may help keep Alzheimer’s at bay. The study, which was published early online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, was in mice whose DNA had been tweaked to contain a human Alzheimer’s gene. Just like humans with familial Alzheimer’s, these mice become increasingly forgetful as they age. Amazingly, the equivalent of four to five cups of caffeinated coffee every few days led to much improved memories in the Alzheimer’s mice, says study co-author Gary Arendash, a scientist at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Tampa. Earlier research by Arendash and his colleagues showed that caffeine could at least partially block the production of beta amyloid, the sticky protein that clogs the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. They also found that a substance called granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, or GCSF, sparked the production of new axons, the communication cables that link nerve cells together, as well as new nerve cells themselves. What’s really interesting is that caffeinated coffee -- but not decaf -- boosted the production of GCSF. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15505 - Posted: 06.30.2011

by Andy Coghlan Mutant fruit flies have helped solve one of the biggest puzzles in genetics: how the stress of starvation or drug addiction can pass on its ill effects to the sufferer's children and grandchildren. Stress is thought to cause "epigenetic" changes that do not alter the sequence of DNA but leave chemical marks on genes that dictate how active they are. Previous studies have shown that if mice are stressed for two weeks after birth, their offspring will show signs of depression and anxiety, despite enjoying the usual levels of maternal care. And there is mounting evidence that common health problems including diabetes, obesity, mental illness and even fear could be the result of stress on parents and grandparents. However, until now attempts to identify changes in inherited DNA that might explain how these effects are passed on have failed. Now, Shunsuke Ishii at the Riken Tsukuba Institute in Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have identified a molecular mechanism by which the effects of stress can be handed down without altering genes or DNA. "We believe we can convince many sceptics by clarifying the mechanism," says Ishii. His team have shown that chemical or environmental stress detaches a protein called activating transcription factor 2 (ATF-2) from chromatin, the densely packed DNA that makes up chromosomes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Epigenetics
Link ID: 15504 - Posted: 06.28.2011

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Do people yawn when they are asleep? Why do they yawn in the first place? Enlarge This Image A. Yawning is certainly less common during sleep, but cases of it have been documented, said Matthew R. Ebben, director of laboratory operations at the Center for Sleep Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. As for why people yawn, “it is not entirely known,” Dr. Ebben said. “However, the most recent data suggests that it is part of a thermoregulatory response that helps cool the brain by shunting blood to facial muscles that act as radiators and offload heat from the redirected blood.” In a case study published in 2010 in the journal Sleep Breath, two women who had chronic, debilitating bouts of yawning were studied. Despite getting adequate sleep, they had frequent daytime attacks of yawning so severe that their eyes watered and their noses ran. Both women found that they could alleviate or postpone their symptoms by nasal breathing or applying cool cloths to their foreheads. One woman found she could stop an attack by taking a cold shower or swimming in cold water. The other woman discovered that she had a half-degree drop in oral temperature after her attacks. The researchers commented that the results were consistent with growing evidence linking excessive yawning to temperature imbalances rather than to blood levels of oxygen or carbon dioxide or some kind of sleep disorder. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15503 - Posted: 06.28.2011

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. One day during medical school, my classmates and I learned that one of the most well-liked doctors-in-training in the hospital had had a seizure while leading morning work rounds. The sight of him writhing had caused the other doctors and nurses on the ward to panic. Some stood mute, frozen with fear. An intern, believing that the seizure arose from low blood sugar levels, took his half-eaten jelly doughnut and held it against the mouth of his seizing colleague. Others yelled to the ward secretary to “call a code,” and continued to do so even after another dozen doctors and nurses had already arrived on the floor. The young doctor eventually recovered. But for many of the medical students and doctors who heard about the episode or were on the wards that day, the dread of that morning would linger long beyond our years of training. Epilepsy was, and remains, a frightening and mysterious malady. For the last 20 years, Dr. Brien J. Smith has tried to change how doctors and patients view epilepsy. Earlier this year, Dr. Smith, chief of neurology at Spectrum Health in Michigan, became chairman of the Epilepsy Foundation. Being elected head of a national organization does not seem unusual for a doctor who is a well-recognized authority and advocate in his or her field. What is extraordinary is that Dr. Smith knows firsthand about the disease and what his patients experience: He learned he had epilepsy when he was in high school. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 15502 - Posted: 06.28.2011

Anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal was the first to see--and illustrate--what neurons really do. His exquisitely detailed drawings changed our understanding of the brain and nervous system. Cajal relentlessly pursued his microcopic study of animal tissues, leading to an essential discovery: Brain signals jump from cell to cell rather than flow through a continuous web of fibers, as was believed at the time. Cajal began to study histology because it was cheap. He was a man of poor health and modest means, and examining stained specimens required little more than a microscope and patience. The fact that he had no access to the fancy tools of leading bacteriologists--he held only an obscure academic post in the scientific backwater of Zaragoza, Spain--turned him toward the study of animal tissues and cells. These "captivating scenes in the life of the infinitely small," as he called them in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life, went on to inspire ideas that overturned how scientists understood the brain and the nerves.? Here are two of his cutaway views of the cerebellum, which coordinates movement. The top drawing has a rich diversity of cells, including treelike Purkinje cells, seen in red and tan, and stellate cells, shown in black. The bottom drawing is a longitudinal cross section of the cerebellum. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15501 - Posted: 06.28.2011

by Kai Kupferschmidt BERLIN—Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study presented here on Saturday at the International Headache Congress reveal that six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD, showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of the attacks for weeks or months. "Some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year after they were treated with the compound," says John Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of the investigators involved in the study. "Nobody has ever reported these kinds of results." Cluster headaches, sometimes referred to as "suicide headaches" because of the almost unbearable pain they cause sufferers, usually involve just one side of the face; patients often liken the pain to someone trying to pull their eye out for hours. They can occur in bouts lasting many weeks, with several attacks a day. "What causes these attacks is still not clear," says Peter Goadsby, a headache expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who is not connected with the research. But recent studies suggest that changes in the structure of the hypothalamus are involved. Because that part of the brain is responsible for, among other things, circadian rhythms, the daily cycle of our body that dictates when we sleep but also regulates body temperature and blood pressure, it could explain the periodicity of attacks and why they seem to occur particularly often around the solstices. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15500 - Posted: 06.28.2011

By Molly Zametkin, Afew weeks ago, after completing my last class of college, I Googled my name. I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw, but I did it anyway. Eight hundred forty-five Google hits later, I was having a panic attack about what prospective employers and graduate schools would find: my tainted online reputation. Rewind five years. It’s my senior year of high school. I’ve been accepted to several colleges, and I’ve just come to terms with the fact that I grew up with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and finally begun to embrace the diagnosis as part of who I am. Accepting that I had attention issues was a breakthrough for me. I had spent my entire academic career struggling with shame and stigma. I hated being labeled ADHD; it made me feel as if people would think I was hyper, lazy, unmotivated and unfocused, which simply wasn’t the case. I remember finding it hard to resist chatting with my classmates when we were supposed to be doing assignments, and I was always doing my homework at the very last minute, but I also remember my teachers telling me I was a “bright” little girl. I was creative, I liked to work hard and I got good grades. Yet even when people told me I was bright, it felt as if they were saying, “You’re bright . . . for someone who has an attention problem.” I truly hated having my teachers and my parents think I was abnormal or flawed. During my senior year of high school, however, I learned that a family friend with whom I was close had ADHD and wasn’t ashamed of it at all. She was beautiful, popular and smart, and she freely broadcast the fact that she was living with ADHD and taking stimulant medications to treat it. Somehow, her open attitude relieved me. I began to think, “Hey, if she has ADHD and people still think she’s cool, no one’s opinion of me will change if I ‘come out’ with the fact that I have it, too.” © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 15499 - Posted: 06.28.2011

By RONI CARYN RABIN Doctors are warning cocaine users they may develop a painful, disfiguring skin reaction after taking the drug, because it often is mixed with levamisole, a veterinary medicine that can set off severe allergic reactions. In a paper published online June 9 in The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, physicians at the University of California, Los Angeles, described six patients who developed patches of purple, discolored skin after using cocaine. A few suffered permanent disfigurement to the ears, and several experienced neutropenia, abnormally low white blood cell counts. The patients — two from Torrance, Calif., and four from Rochester — “may represent the tip of the iceberg as a looming public health problem,” the authors wrote. Almost 70 percent of cocaine in the United States is adulterated with levamisole, an antiparasitic drug banned for human use, according to the Department of Justice. In December 2009, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported that 21 cocaine users in New Mexico and Washington State had developed agranulocytosis, an acute systemic disease. One of the patients died. Though only a small fraction of cocaine users will have acute reactions, Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and an author of the report, said, “It’s like playing Russian roulette.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15498 - Posted: 06.28.2011

Erika Check Hayden Scientists have identified the molecular players central to an incurable brain injury common in premature babies, and have shown how such injuries might one day be treated, sparing people from lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. In babies born before their lungs are fully developed, lack of oxygen can disrupt nerve cells' ability to make a protective coating, called myelin, that makes up the brain's 'white matter'. Without myelin, brain cells die, leaving children vulnerable to neurological deficits such as cerebral palsy. Some 20% of babies born before 6.5 months gestation experience lasting brain damage (see The most vulnerable brains). "We have become very good at keeping these premature babies alive, but we have no strategy to prevent the long-term neurological consequences that can occur in them," says Vittorio Gallo, a neuroscientist at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC. Writing in Nature Neuroscience1, David Rowitch at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues point the way towards such a strategy. By studying the brains of babies who had died after incurring brain injuries caused by a lack of oxygen, they discovered that a gene called AXIN2 was expressed in infants with white-matter brain injuries. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15497 - Posted: 06.27.2011

by Andy Coghlan They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules. Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says. To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls. Although many animals, including dogsMovie Camera, parrotsMovie Camera and apes are known to interpret and construct "sentences", and recognise human words for individual objects, Abe says that only his finches have been shown to have a form of grammar in their utterances. Similar claims have been made for whale songSpeaker, however. In the wild, Bengal finches call back vigorously whenever they hear unfamiliar songs, usually from intruding finches. In the lab, Abe and colleague Dai Watanabe of the Japan Science and Technology Agency in Saitama exploited these reactions to gauge whether finches could notice "ungrammatical" songs. The rules First, they played finches unfamiliar songs repeatedly until the birds got used to them and stopped overreacting. Then they jumbled up syllables within each song and replayed these versions to the birds. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15496 - Posted: 06.27.2011

By Nadia Drake Indiana Jones, intrepid cinematic archaeologist, is famously afraid of snakes. Perhaps he wouldn’t need to be if he had a new ointment developed by scientists in Australia. Quickly applying a nitric oxide–containing ointment near the bite site slows the spread of some venoms, including the notorious eastern brown snake’s, the researchers report online June 26 in Nature Medicine. “This treatment might make all the difference between dying on the road and getting to the hospital in time,” says physician and emeritus professor of tropical medicine David Warrell of the University of Oxford, who was not involved with the study. Worldwide, snakebite causes approximately 100,000 deaths and 400,000 limb amputations each year. Physiologist Dirk van Helden at the University of Newcastle and his colleagues showed that in humans, applying an ointment containing nitric oxide within one minute of a simulated snakebite slows the transit of injected tracer molecules. Foot-to-groin venom travel times increased from an average of 13 minutes without the ointment to an average of 54 minutes with the ointment applied in a 5-centimeter diameter circle just up the limb from the bite site. The group also tested the effects of the cream on rats injected with venom from the brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis). Its potent venom travels through the body’s lymphatic system, eventually halting respiration and causing death. “It’s particularly nasty, one of the most toxic things in the world,” says van Helden. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15495 - Posted: 06.27.2011

By JOHN TAGLIABUE AMSTERDAM — It has not been a good year for Ahmet Kilic. Sales are down in the store where for the last two and a half years he has sold groceries and meat, slaughtered according to halal conditions. The store, on the southern edge of this Dutch city, was started 22 years ago by his brother and uncle, natives of Turkey, who took it over from its former Dutch owners. But many of the Turks who are their clients have moved farther out of the city; moreover, customer access is blocked by work to lay tram tracks on the street in front. “Things are not good,” he said, tallying up sausage, an all-beef variety, and Turkish white cheese, which the Greeks call feta, for a shopper. Now he fears they could get worse. The Dutch Parliament will vote Tuesday on a bill that, if enacted, will effectively require even Jewish and Muslim butchers to stun animals — mechanically, electrically or with gas — before they are slaughtered, eliminating an exception in current law. A tiny animal rights party, which has two seats in Parliament, proposed the bill, arguing that failing to stun the animals before slaughter subjects them to unnecessary pain. The debate over the bill has divided the Dutch. Because the bill would mainly affect Muslims, of whom there are about 1.2 million in a Dutch population of about 16 million, compared with a Jewish population of 50,000, the debate has become a focus of Dutch animosity toward Muslims. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15494 - Posted: 06.27.2011