We’re not sure exactly what Smithers got into. This morning we found him laying on the ground, motionless, with his vomit having been flung all over the place. He then began to convulse wildly with seizures.

We took him to the vet, though we were pessimistic about their ability to do anything. Indeed the vet could not do anything about the problem; they were only able to administer drugs.

After the drugs wore off, after we had taken him home, he began to have the seizures again. We realized that nothing could be done, since his neurological hardware had obviously been fried, so we had to put him down.

Here is the last video we took of him tonight:

This is the sort of thing that happens to animals when they get into toxic substances that people carelessly dump into the environment.

The U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the best way to dispose of its life-eradicating trash is in the world’s oceans. They do all of this despite the fact that such dumping has a major effect on marine wildlife. No real surprises here, however, since they have repeatedly demonstrated that this is what the Army is good at, destroying life in whatever way is convenient.

Munitions Dumping at Sea

C R McClain | Deep Sea News

It is no secret that the U.S. military has used the ocean as trashcan for munitions in the past. Peter discussed at the Old DSN how federal lawmakers were pressing the US Army to reveal everything it knows about a massive international program to dump chemical weapons off homeland and foreign shores. “The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.” Brian pointed me to the Daily Press’s in depth coverage of this whole issue. Registration is free and only takes a minute or two and is extremely worthwhile. Included at the site are maps of disposal sites (downloadable as pdfs), stories, descriptions of items dumped including nerve and musturd gas, and rather depressing pictures some are below the fold (all from Daily Press). Read the rest of this entry »