Steve Hamilton was fishing in Winter Garden when he was attacked by gator, which was later killed
A man fishing at a pond in Florida was killed on Friday by an alligator that was almost 12ft long in a rare kind of animal attack, according to authorities and media reports.
Steve Hamilton, 71, was on the shoreline in the community of Winter Garden when the animal dragged him into the water, the Florida news outlet WOFL reported, citing local police and the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission.
The Georgia officer responsible for killing a 1-year-old miniature donkey, HeeHaw, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against him, claiming the body camera footage proves he "reasonably believed the donkey posed an imminent threat to a fellow officer." But even if it doesn't, the officer argues he is immune from liability.
In the early morning hours of August 30, Hannah Michelle Israel was at her Cedartown home in western Georgia when she received a distressing phone call. A supervisor with the Cedartown Police Department "tersely informed [Israel] that a donkey on her property had been 'dispatched,'" according to her federal lawsuit. After some clarification, she learned that police had not only entered her enclosed private property in the middle of the night without permission while looking for a missing person, but also shot and killed her miniature donkey in the process.
Israel immediately set out to search for her beloved pet, HeeHaw, only to find her bottle-raised donkey's lifeless body alone in her field. Israel told ABC7 News the incident has left her "traumatized and shocked." She continued, "I honestly can't even believe he's not here…There's no words."
Demanding accountability, Israel filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in September against the shooting officer, Officer Trenton Ryan Garner, for violating her Fourth Amendment rights and submitted a separate demand for $1 million from the City of Cedartown.
Last week, Garner responded by asking the court to dismiss the case, arguing in part that he did not violate Israel's constitutional rights when he entered her property. Under the open fields doctrine, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in one's pastureland, even if enclosed. Further, the motion argues, exigent circumstances existed in the search for a missing 12-year-old girl.
As far as HeeHaw is concerned, Garner claims he acted reasonably by using deadly force and argues the footage clearly shows HeeHaw "charging" and posing an "imminent threat to a fellow officer."
However, the footage, posted by the Civil Rights Lawyer Raw, may not be so clear-cut. Garner's body camera was off at the time of the shooting but had a "rolling buffer of video," a recording without audio of the 30 seconds preceding activation of the camera, according to court documents. During the silent portion, two officers and a bloodhound are in front of Garner with flashlights in a dark field. A small donkey, roughly 3 feet tall, appears and slowly moves toward one of the officers. The officer backs away slowly, but the donkey moves closer and picks up speed. Garner pulls his gun and fires. The donkey turns and runs before falling over.
Whether Garner reasonably believed HeeHaw posed an imminent threat to his fellow officer may be up for debate.
When the audio kicks in, a fellow officer asks, "Why'd you shoot it up?" "I don't know," Garner responds rather nonchalantly before telling dispatch he had to shoot a donkey because "it was trying to attack." If another officer on the scene wasn't sure why Garner used deadly force, perhaps the decision wasn't so reasonable after all.
In her lawsuit, Israel accuses Garner of needlessly killing HeeHaw "maliciously…and recklessly, with deliberate indifference…for [Israel's] constitutional rights." The suit continues: "No reasonable officer in…Garner's position would have believed that such force was necessary or justified."
But whether Garner acted reasonably or not by shooting HeeHaw, qualified immunity may still shield him from accountability. Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects government actors from lawsuits alleging rights violations, unless the right is clearly established. In practice, that means plaintiffs must be able to point to a previous court ruling in a case with the same circumstances to show that the right was obvious to government officials.
The bar can be quite high to show a right is clearly established. For example, in March, the Supreme Court reversed a 2nd Circuit decision in a case involving an officer who was sued for using a rear wristlock to arrest a protester. The 2nd Circuit denied qualified immunity, reasoning that a previous case from 2004 clearly established that rear wristlocks used to arrest anti-abortion protesters constitute excessive force. But the Court disagreed, stressing that "principles stated generally, such as that 'an officer may not use reasonable and excessive force,' do not suffice."
And while there may be ample cases involving officers shooting pet dogs, cases involving miniature donkeys are in short supply. If the court finds that there is no clearly established rule that specifically prohibits officers from shooting a miniature donkey moving toward a fellow officer in the dark, the court may end up dismissing the case and sidestepping both the reasonableness and constitutional questions entirely.
Official guidance says ammonia in animal urine should be watered down to stop it corroding bark
A neighbourhood in Vienna has introduced guidelines for dog walking, including the use of bottled tap water to rinse away urine and protect vulnerable trees.
Neubau, an up-and-coming, densely populated district dotted with cafes and galleries, rolled out the Schönes Gassi (nice dog walk) campaign this week.
Horse-drawn carriage rides in New York’s Central Park could be discontinued starting June 1, 2028, under a bill supported by City Council member Zohran Mamdani and City Councilwoman Julie Menin, DPA reported, citing US media. The proposal calls for the gradual phasing out of the attraction, which has been part of the city’s tourism landscape […]
Nearly 183,000 giant tortoises inhabit the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles. This is the highest number ever recorded for the species and the result of decades of conservation efforts. A new study shows that the population is healthy and remains relatively stable, though scientists warn that climate change and invasive animals continue to threaten its […]
The City Council is expected to approve a bill next week that would end the rides by 2028. Three consecutive mayors had called for an end to the carriage rides because of safety concerns, only to have lawmakers yank back the reins.
For Boston Magazine, Kara Baskin explores a growing subculture of tweens and teens who don’t feel entirely human. Some identify as one animal, like a cat or a dog; others identify with multiple animals. One kid Baskin speaks to, Sol, says she “doesn’t summon the animals, but rather they come and go on their own schedule.” These young people call themselves therians (distinct from furries, who are fans of anthropomorphic animal characters). Baskin provides a fascinating glimpse into a world where adolescents can express themselves and explore their identities.
Bafflement is the baseline condition of raising kids right now. The adolescent quest for self-discovery is timeless—but today’s parents experimented in ways that were analog: new hairstyles, inscrutable music, beer snuck in the woods. Their own parents might not have liked it, but they could at least relate.
Now the landscape of adolescent discovery is literally foreign, thanks to social media, which has turbocharged once-obscure subcultures like the furry fandom—and, at its rarer edge, therianthropy—and redefined what “fringe” even means. Even if a kid is the only therian at school, she can find 400 more people just like her online. That’s one of the biggest challenges for parents in the algorithm age: The world your kid actually lives in is one you can’t enter. It touches the fear in every parent, therian kid or not: What happens when our kids inhabit a world we don’t understand, with idols we don’t recognize?
At Bybi in Copenhagen, a dedicated group of staff and volunteers have built a community for all centred on the production of honey – much of which is given away for nothing. Could it be replicated elsewhere?
The bees at Bybi, a collective of beekeepers in Copenhagen, live on the roof. Their home is a complex of Victorian buildings, right in the centre of the city, that looks like an idealised vision of the modern social enterprise, ennobled by the architecture of the past. It’s a place of cottage industry in concert with nature, where the marginalised are brought in from the fringes and corporations stand waiting to help, where jobs happen but a lot of the work is done by volunteers, and where – this bit is important – a lot of time is spent discussing ideas.
Oliver Maxwell, Bybi’s 48-year-old founder, encourages me to examine the buildings more closely. They were once a prison, a workhouse and a hospital; their functions today – a homeless shelter, a young offender institution and, until recently, a job centre – are not so different. Denmark’s Victorian transformation, from “agricultural backwater to industrialised agriculture”, was reflected in how they treated people, Maxwell says.
Portugal’s veterinary authorities have confirmed the presence of the Shamonda virus (SHAV) in the country, an insect-borne infection affecting primarily cattle and sheep. The Portuguese Veterinary Association issued an alert
They aren’t made of asphalt, have no traffic lights, and no cars drive on them. Yet, these unusual “highways” are already saving thousands of lives. In the Brazilian Amazon, conservationists have built rope bridges high up in the trees, allowing monkeys, sloths, and other jungle inhabitants to safely cross over the roads. The results are […]
Scientists have used CRISPR gene-editing technology to create the first dogs lacking a key protein that triggers allergic reactions in humans, the Associated Press reported two months ago. The study, published in *The CRISPR Journal*, describes how specialists from the US company Kindred Companion Sciences created two female Beagles—Bailey and Alfie. They “switched off” the […]
The study challenges prevailing views on the evolution of language A new study conducted by Hungarian researchers reveals that dogs can segment continuous speech into words—a capability previously observed only in humans. Hungarian researchers from Budapest have discovered that human speech changes the way dogs’ brains work, even though the animals cannot speak themselves. The […]
Among the stone tools that early humans left beside a lake in northern Israel, archaeologists found something far bigger: the molar of an elephant, about 8 inches (20 cm) tall and 3 inches (8 cm) wide, lying next to several pieces of tusk. It sat at the same level of ground as handaxes and cleavers […]
Vietnamese police have arrested 12 men accused of stealing nearly 2,700 cats during night-time raids in residential neighborhoods; the pets were taken to be slaughtered for food. Fur-removal machines, cat traps, and weighing scales were among the items confiscated during the investigation into the cat-theft gang in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnamese police and state […]
Animal behavior often seems predictable. Swallows follow the summer, ants build colonies, and most creatures run when they encounter a predator or wildfire. But nature keeps throwing researchers curveballs, sometimes from species humans have studied for centuries. Some of these discoveries reveal unexpected intelligence, while others expose physical abilities that sound nearly impossible. Orcas flee […]
The Great Sphinx has been without a nose for centuries. Now a fossil crocodile skull taken from the same rock turns out to be missing the tip of its snout too. The coincidence has put a name on a species science did not know it had, Herugavialis cairensis, which spent almost a hundred years in […]
In the winter of 2010, residents of a small Arkansas town awoke to find thousands of dead birds littering their lawns. Just days earlier, tens of thousands of dead fish had surfaced in the same state. It was the kind of coincidence that fuels conspiracy theories, yet investigators ultimately traced the two disasters to entirely […]
In 1982, 28 wild donkeys were released into the desert. Decades later, they have created an oasis in one of the most extreme places on Earth. Donkeys are far more than mere beasts of burden; these herbivorous mammals can benefit the environment in ways that would be difficult to achieve through human intervention. More than […]
Of all the animals shown in the tombs and art of ancient Egypt, very few have a name. Almost all of those that do are dogs. A handful of horses are named too, though far fewer survive. Cats, the animal most of us now associate with Egypt, are a different story. The literature offers only […]
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