Quick Takes: Pass the pachyderms

IN A PART PROMISE, part threat, the president of Botswana told German tabloid Bild he’d like to send 20,000 elephants to live in Germany. A diplomatic row started when Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi took offense after Germany’s environment minister Steffi Lemke suggested new measures to curtail the importation of elephant trophies from Botswana due to poaching concerns. The African nation has 130,000 African elephants—more than any other country—and depends on trophy hunting to thin the herd, thereby mitigating property damage and tramplings. Now Masisi wants to give Germany about 15 percent of the nation’s elephants so Germans can “live together with the animals in the way you are trying to tell us to.” Masisi says he would “not take no for an answer.”

Losing their groove

Not too fast, not too slow. That’s the way government officials want music played in Chechnya from now on. The Moscow Times reported in April the culture ministry moved to ban songs faster than 116 beats per minute and slower than 80 beats per minute from playing in the predominantly Muslim republic of Russia. Depending on how the beats are counted, that would outlaw Western music like Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” (too fast) and the Eagles’ “Desperado” (too slow)—which may be Culture Minister Musa Dadayev’s goal: “Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible.”

Goat souvenirs

​​Visit a remote Italian island, get a goat. That’s the promise officials are making to potential tourists to Alicudi, a small and sparsely populated island north of Sicily that has several times as many goats as people. On April 4, island Mayor Riccardo Gullo said visitors could take as many goats as they desired off the island provided they paid a small fee and secured a boat to remove the livestock. Gullo said the goat population has swelled to unsustainable numbers but authorities were unwilling to cull them.

Doggy discrimination

There’s no accounting for dogs in the carpool lanes of Ontario. On April 5, Ontario Provincial Police in Canada issued a fine to a motorist who had claimed his rear-seat Rover qualified him to use the high occupancy vehicle lanes on Highway 417 in Ottawa. According to police, the driver and the dog were the car’s only inhabitants. “As cute as this pup is, animals don’t count as an extra ‘person’ when driving in the HOV lane,” an OPP spokesman said on social media.

Robot on the runway

Officials in Alaska have a new method for chasing wildlife away from airport runways: a robotic dog named Aurora. In March, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities released a video of what it called its newest hire, a robot about the size of a Labrador retriever that can be camouflaged as a coyote or fox. According to officials, the robot will be responsible for disrupting flocks of birds and other animals at Fairbanks International Airport beginning this fall. If successful, Aurora will keep migratory birds that stop over at the airport from staying and as a result lessen the chance of a mishap with a plane.

Water jitters

Keep your mouth shut and stay in the boat. That’s the advice for rowers plying their craft on the Thames River in the London area. A March 27 environmental report revealed twice as much raw ­sewage spilled into the Thames last year than in 2022. That’s bad news for rowers from Oxford and Cambridge who compete on the river. Cambridge won the annual race between the two schools on March 30, but Oxford team officials complained that an outbreak of E. coli—possibly from the tainted water—left the Oxford rowers at partial strength. “It would be a lot nicer if there wasn’t as much poo in the water,” Oxford rower Leonard Jenkins told the BBC.

South Korea’s onion index

Election officials in South Korea warned citizens to leave their onions at home when going to the polls for the nation’s April 10 legislative elections. According to officials with the National Election Commission, brandishing spring onions while waiting in line may constitute illegal electioneering. That’s because opposition party leaders have made the humble vegetable the emblem of the nation’s trouble with inflation after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol visited a supermarket in March and said spring onion prices were reasonable—even as the cost of living soars. According to the election commission, voters who bring the greens to the voting booth will have to leave them outside.