WebClawer: Pair shot puppy to skin it, Susan Boyle loves her cat, Thailand loves to sell ivory

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Animals are all over the news once again today; we only wish we could tell you that all the stories are happy ones.

-- Don’t they have Wal-Marts in Oklahoma any more? Two Oklahoma residents were charged Tuesday after they shot a Jack Russell puppy 10 times and then skinned him, allegedly to make a belt. Poplin was just 7 weeks old when Austin Michael Mullins shot him and Krystal Lynn Lewis skinned the pup and nailed the hide to a board in her apartment. Although Lewis claims she had the puppy killed because she didn’t feel that the pair could afford to keep it, the local newspaper is reporting that investigators seem to think that it had something to do with the fact that Poplin was a gift from a female ex-lover of Lewis’ who is now estranged. (News OK)

-- In the market for some (illegal) ivory? Thailand is still the place for your black market elephant tusks. According to a report by Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring group, despite cutting down from 88,000 pieces in 2001, Thailand is still responsible for 26,000 pieces this year so far. Reuters writes, ‘The report said Bangkok should close ‘elephant-sized loopholes’ in its wildlife protection laws that enable sellers to pass off illegal ivory as coming from a legal source of domesticated animals.’ (Reuters)

-- Everyone’s favorite ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ runner-up missed a concert the other night because she couldn’t find her cat. The Dish Rag tells us that the the Daily Mirror is reporting that the singer freaked out at a hotel when her ‘moggy’ (that’s what they call cats on the other side of the pond) Pebbles wandered off. The DM wrote ‘one witness said: ‘She kept shouting, ‘I want my cat! I need my cat!’ I think people felt sorry for her as she was clearly unhappy.’ ‘ No word if the pet was returned, but one can assume that if it was in fact purrloined, we’d have heard about it by now. (Daily Mirror)

-- Tony Pierce