Darick Dashon Stallworth, 31, has been charged with three counts of felony animal abuse and two counts of misdemeanor animal neglect in the torture and death of five dogs at an abandoned house in the 5300 block of Wells Avenue in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood.
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Ken Henderson may only be guilty of loving too much.

Ken Henderson's van was searched at the Boone County Fairgrounds last June, and police found some unusual contraband -- seven alligators. The gators were seized, and Henderson was charged with 17 counts of animal abuse. The gators were returned to him in August, because a judge banned them from the county.

According to the Columbia Tribune, Henderson would very much like that ban lifted so his gators can attend the July 5  trial on his behalf.
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Danielle Faulkner-Schaffer

Narco the cat, formerly of Hopeville, now looking for a new home.

Even in Hopeville, there were pets. The stray cats who wandered in found homes, of sorts, with the stray human who had set up camp there.

"There aren't any feral cats," says Dawn Blaloch, a volunteer with the St. Louis Area Community Cat Coalition. "They're better socialized than my cats. They're the sweetest, most loving animals you'll ever meet."

So when word came that all the humans in Hopeville were being relocated in advance of the bulldozers scheduled to roll through this morning, it was clear that the cats had to go with them.

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Got elk? We do. And we're getting more.

Got elk? Missouri does. And we're about to double the population by trucking in 35 more from eastern Kentucky.

Last year -- despite dire warnings from the Farm Bureau -- the Department of Conservation reintroduced 34 elk to a confined ranch in the southeastern part of the state. (And we say "reintroduced," because these creatures roamed Missouri's hills long before the arrival of the White Man, but were wiped out by the end of the Civil War).

Opponents had grumbled in a letter to the governor that

"Elk obstruct roads, trample fences, and decimate crops and forage.  Disease transmission between elk and livestock is a major concern.  Landowners suffer the brunt of the unintended consequences of elk restoration.  If imposing these risks associated with elk is deemed acceptable today, then will 'native' wildlife species that pose greater risks be next?"

But none of that has happened - at least so far.
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Earl Richardson

They're back!

Happy news from Prairie Chicken Land, aka Wah'Kon-Tah Prairie in far western Missouri, just outside El Dorado Springs: The prairie chickens that workers from the Missouri Department of Conservation captured in Kansas last year and transported east are alive and booming and, best of all, reproducing.

We realize that the phrase "transported east," not to mention the bland reassurances of prairie chicken happiness, makes this sound like Stalinist propaganda, but there is proof that this is not a cover-up by the MDC. Nobody's sure how many prairie chickens are at Wah'Kon-Tah right now, but it is an indisputable fact that there are now than there were five years ago when the relocation project started.

Back then, the number of prairie chickens at Wah'Kon-Tah was precisely zero.

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Belle yawns languidly in her temporary home.

That bobcat who was hit by a car in Belleville and saved by compassionate citizen Mike Neiner is doing very well at her temporary home, TreeHouse Wildlife Center -- as is her kitten.

"Belle," as the mother bobcat is called, gave birth sometime in mid-April. Because bobcats are by nature extremely secretive, the TreeHouse staff doesn't know for certain when it happened. They also don't know if the kitten, named "Bobbie," is a boy or a girl because they don't want to stress the cats with an examination.
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Missouri Department of Conservation

The Missouri Department of Conservation confirmed this week the presence of an adult mountain lion in Grundy County.

A trail camera captured an image (right) of the big cat on April 2 as it walked through a wooded area around 8:45 p.m. The cougar is the 29th verified sighting in Missouri since mountain lions were once again spotted in the Show-Me State in 1994. Thirteen of the animals have been verified in Missouri in just the past year.
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Last spring, the live "eagle cam" feed from Decorah, Iowa blew up the Internets, making national news and entrancing millions of people in 184 countries who watched bald eagles hatch their eggs in real-time.

But this spring -- as you read this sentence, actually -- the folks behind that project are toggling their lenses around the nesting area of the eagle's ugly cousins: Turkey vultures in Marshall, Missouri.

"As far as I know, it's a first [for this species]," says Bob Anderson, director of Raptor Resource Project, an Iowa-based non-profit dedicated to protecting falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks, and owls -- as well as their habitats. (Check them out on Facebook). And Anderson would know -- he's "been in the bird-cam world" for 20 years.
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Click here to view an interactive map of the mountain lion's travels.

First things first. The word Missouri in the headline above probably should be in quotes. Why? Because the cougar photographed in north-central Missouri's Linn County in December 2010 is probably not originally from the Show-Me State. 

How do we know this? Because conservationists tracking antelope along the South Dakota and Nebraska border caught a very similar cougar in April 2010 and tagged its ear and put a radio collar around its neck.

Jeff Beringer, a furbearer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, tells Daily RFT that the combo of the collar and the tag makes the cat unusual. "Most cougars -- when caught -- are collared with a GPS device that can track their range far past the limited scope of a radio collar," notes Beringer. "And this radio collar, in particular, has a big external antenna that's easy to identify."

So assuming that the cat collared and tagged in South Dakota in April 2010 is the same photographed by a trail camera in Linn County in December 2010 (as Beringer and his colleagues at the Conservation Department believe is likely) the cat would have traveled at least 500 miles to arrive here.

That's not all that strange. Biologists believe that all of the 28 confirmed mountain lions sightings in Missouri since 1994 are cougars -- most, if not all, males -- that have wandered here from the Dakotas looking for a mate.

But what is somewhat mind-boggling is that the Linn County cat may have just been starting its road trip.
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(c) Jostens 2012

The 2011 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals received their rings on Saturday, and oh my are they ostentatious. Made of 14 karat gold, each ring features 103 round diamonds and 50 custom cut rubies for a total ring weight of 73 grams.

There's also a stowaway.
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