An animal rights group pressing to have a tiger relocated to a sanctuary from the road-side enclosure where it has lived most of its life was granted permission to be party to the lawsuit filed against the state by the truck stop owner. The ruling by District Judge Janice Clark will allow an attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund to aid attorneys for the state defending the constitutionality of Louisiana’s ban on ownership of big cats like the 550-pound Siberian-Bengal named Tony housed at the Tiger Truck Stop in Grosse Tete.
Michael Sandlin, the truck stop owner, was originally grandfathered in when the state ban went into effect — an exemption the ALDF overturned through a lawsuit against the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries last year. Sandlin’s permit to keep Tony expired at the end of last year and, in ALDF’s view, he has been lodging the animal illegally ever since. However, last week a Baton Rouge district court judge ruled that ALDF lacked standing to force the state to remove Tony from the truck stop.
There’s been little shortage of media reports underscoring the dangers of private ownership of big cats including the forced killing of more than a dozen big, exotic mammals in Ohio last year after the owner of a private “zoo” committed suicide moments after releasing the animals and, over the weekend, the mauling of a Scottish woman at a game park in South Africa, the latter of which ALDF executive director Stephen Wells references in a press release touting Monday’s court victory: “Upholding Louisiana’s big cat ban will prevent untold harm in the future to other big cats like Tony, who deserve better than a sad life at a roadside truck stop, and to the general public, who — like the woman mauled by a ‘tame’ cheetah at a game park just this past weekend — are endangered when wild predators are treated like pets.”
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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