WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

Search This Blog

WATCH OUR WEEKLY WEBtv SHOW

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON

SUPPORT OTT ON PATREON
Click on this logo to find out more about helping CFZtv and getting some smashing rewards...

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER



Unlike some of our competitors we are not going to try and blackmail you into donating by saying that we won't continue if you don't. That would just be vulgar, but our lives, and those of the animals which we look after, would be a damn sight easier if we receive more donations to our fighting fund. Donate via Paypal today...




Tuesday, January 13, 2015

IT IS DISGUSTING THAT THESE ARE NOT ALREADY ILLEGAL

Petitioning Rt. Hon Oliver Letwin, MP
This petition will be delivered to:
Rt. Hon Oliver Letwin, MP

UNITED KINGDOM NEEDS TO BAN ANIMAL SNUFF VIDEOS LIKE USA

Re: Please have United Kingdom Prohibit Animal snuff and Crush Torture Videos same as United States of America. (HR 5566 signed to law on 09 December 2010--Public Law: Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act of 2010)
Add animal crush video to the Protection of Children Act 1978 as a level five offence

Typical of people who create animal snuff videos (torture, suffocation, crush, etc), uploading to internet sites, they conceal their faces-so it's impossible to track who did it. Therefore banning these snuff videos are of the utmost importance. 

Please let the United Kingdom do the same.

On December 24, 2010 per Dailymail.co.uk news: "A sick teenager who filmed himself killing two kittens by placing them inside an airtight bag and using a vacuum cleaner to suck out the air was being hunted by internet users across the world today. In horrifying footage posted online, the young thug is seen gently stroking the tiny tabby cats before placing them in the bag. As John Lennon's Merry Christmas (War Is Over) plays in the background, he calmly seals the bag and attaches a vacuum cleaner hose."  The air was sucked out and the kittens died a very slow agonizing death, and he enjoyed it while video recording this monstrous hideous  act. 
 
Read more:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1341364/Vacuum-kitten-killer-hunted-making-snuff-movie-suffocation.html#ixzz195XgKgkZ

If a person did that or distributed such a video in the United States would earn them SEVEN YEARS in FEDERAL PRISON sentence.

The passage of HR 5566 in the USA was necessary for the mental hygiene of the Nation, and a safer Country.

Teenagers are downloading these crush videos via countless pornography web pages, sharing them with peer-to-peer software. Our society has become very unstable with a bad economy and young people are getting increasingly fascinated with animal cruelty - is one very short step toward actually doing the physical act,  to take out their anger because animals simply are helpless and can't talk or fight back.  The American Psychiatric Association and FBI profiling has linked animal cruelty to deviant and Anti Social Personality and Conduct Disorder. This also means a new generation of serial killers, violent criminals, psychopaths - and even people joining national terrorist organizations like Al-Quida due to the anti-social personality and Conduct disorders these torture videos exposed to young people produces. These videos are REAL and not Hollywood produced-these are genuine torture SNUFF movies:  Very sick and disturbing when people download these snuff movies as a means of getting their unnatural fetish titillation. Don't we have a right to a safer Kingdom? That's why we need a law like USA's HR 5566 to be proposed and pass: PUBLIC SAFETY.

“One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it," Margaret Meade, Anthropologist.

Passing a law like HR 5566  in the United Kingdom is a common sense intervention to reduce crimes of violence and serial killing, therefore is cost saving. With each psychopathic killing it costs the government  countless sums of money to investigate, and even more to house the violent.

If the UK is worried about the paltry costs of this law (USA has estimated the cost of this law to be virtually nothing)  - imagine how EXPENSIVE it will be to hunt down and prosecute and house serial killers who was recruited via these horrific videos. Remember FBI and leading criminologists agree: It ALL starts with a fascination with animal cruelty and snuffing them. And people, including children,  die horrifically from the hands of such serial killers.  Looking at such videos becomes real life. These kittens/puppies are readily available free everywhere. Eventually these violent individuals will tire of torturing little kittens and other small animals and graduate to children to get their kicks--Fact! 

Once HR5566 was signed to law pornography sites in USA voluntarily took down these animal crush torture videos for obvious reasons.

Thank you for your time.

PS-USA made exemptions as follows: " Exempts from the application of this Act: (1) any visual depiction of customary and normal veterinary or agricultural husbandry practices, the slaughter of animals for food, or hunting, trapping, or fishing; and (2) good faith distribution of an animal crush video to a law enforcement agency or a third party for the sole purpose of determining if referral to a law enforcement agency is appropriate." 

HR5566 signed to law may be viewed here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/webreturn/?url=http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.5566:

Respectfully submitted, 

NESSIENEWS (Caveat Lector)






  • Is this finally PROOF that Nessie exists? Swedish monster-spotter finds intriguing shape in the waters of Loch Ness - without leaving his flat in Stockholm
  • Bjarne Sjöstrand decided to search the internet after reading about Nessie
  • He was in his flat in Stockholm, 800 miles from Loch Ness in Scotland
  • He then spotted a long, thin eel-like object in the water on Google images
  • Entered the intriguing picture in a competition and won £2,000
  • Latest in a series of possible Nessie sightings in the last few years
Read on...

ANDREW MAY: Words from the Wild Frontier



News and stories from the remoter fringes of the CFZ blogosphere...

From Nick Redfern's World of Whatever:
From CFZ-USA:

THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN HAS HIS HAT ON. HIP HIP HIP HOORAY

The Gonzo Daily - Tuesday 13th January
www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/about.html
 
I have a butterfly conundrum. The large tortoiseshell (Nymphalis polychloros) which has a range across Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia. It is quite similar in appearance to the better known small tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) which is one of the best loved of British butterflies, but it is actually far closer related to the Camberwell Beauty (Nymphalis antiopa) an extremely rare visitor to our shores which the late L Hugh Newman suggested that often arrived in Britain accidentally in shipments of wood from Scandinavia. The Small tortoiseshell was very close to extinction in the UK a couple of years ago, although I am glad  to say that it had made a fine recovery. let us hope that it continues. This decline was initially blamed on the predations of a parasitic fly Sturmia bella, but when more work was carried out it appears that this was not the primary reason for the small tortoiseshell's decline. However, something remarkably similar happened about a century ago when the population of Nymphalis polychloros which, until then, had been a reasonably well distributed and fairly common species across large swathed of the United Kingdom crashed, for reasons that remain obscure.  If you examine the contemporary reports of people like P.B.W.Allan it appears that the species made something of a recovery in the 1930s but crashed again in the following decade, and was largely considered to be extirpated from the UK by the 1950s, even though it was not declared to be extinct until the 1980s.i remember reading within the past four or five years that a naturalist at either a National Trust or Natural England property in south Devon was claiming that large tortoiseshells had bred there. But I am damned if I can find it! Does anyone have a link for this, or did I completely dream it?
 
 
The Gonzo Weekly #112
www.gonzoweekly.com
 
Joe Cocker, Osibisa, Rocket Scientists, Erik Norlander, Beatrles, Robert Plant, Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, Yes, Hawkwind, and Daevid Allen fans had better look out!
 
The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#112) will soon be available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/. It has Rocket Scientists on the front cover, and an interview with the band inside, Jon lookls at the legendary unreleased Beatles music, we send Pete from Sendelica to a desert island, critique the new Robert Plant biography, and there are shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the titular submarine dwellers are still lost at sea, whilst Xtul are still causing havoc in the forest. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and manatees looking for booze (OK, nothing to do with alcoholic sirenians, but I got carried away with things that rhymed with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
 
Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:
 
Issue 111 (Mice on Stilts cover)
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2015/01/gonzo-weekly-111.html
Issue 109/10 (Yusuf/Stevie Wonder cover)
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2014/12/gonzo-weekly-10910.html
Issue 108 (Merrell Fankhauser cover)
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2014/12/gonzo-weekly-108.html
Issue 107 (Ant-Bee cover)
 

All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power chaps, we have to share it!
 
You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/
 

* The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...
 
* The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/…/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit
 
* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!
 

* Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 55 who - together with an infantile orange cat named after a song by Frank Zappa puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish, and sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the infantile orange cat?

FORTEAN BIRDS NEWS FROM THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES

What has Corinna's column of Fortean bird news got to do with cryptozoology?

Well, everything, actually!

In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that whereas the study of out-of-place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot or lake monsters, it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean zoologist to be interested in.


NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Tuesday

ON THIS DAY IN 1854 - Anthony Faas of Philadelphia, PA, was granted the first U.S. patent for the accordion. He made improvements to the keyboard and enhanced the sound. 

  • New species of marine reptile identified from Skye...
  • These Sleepy Lizards (Shingleback lizard )Are Waki...
  • Lowcountry turtle sanctuary (Turtle Survival Allia...
  • Tasmanians asked if they want devil as state emble...
  • Chaos after dogs and huntsmen stray onto busy dual...

  • Swedish court stops hotly-contested wolf hunt

  • AND TO WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK... (Music that may have some relevance to items also on this page, or may just reflect my mood on the day)