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A Rogue British Committee Incited A Pet Genocide To Prepare For The Blitz
Trying to keep track of all the World War II tragedies is as impossible trying to keep track of all the blown-off fingers buried in the sands of Normandy beach. With so many steaming heaps of misery, no wonder some were bound to get lost in the shuffle. Like how Britain started the war with a bang, a whimper, and mass pet graves.
To ensure the wellbeing of every British subject, no matter how many legs, the British government created the National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee in 1939. NARPAC was tasked with protecting precious pets and advising owners on how to best care for them in the event of war, when everyone would be busy fighting Nazis, sifting through rubble, or starving. What the government didn't anticipate was that NARPAC would take the rogue A.I. approach to public pet safety: If you love something, put a bullet in its head.
On August 26, 1939, on the eve of war, NARPAC released a pamphlet titled Advice to Animal Owners, which was read out on the BBC and republished in all major papers. In it, NARPAC warned big-city pet owners to evacuate their pooches to the countryside. And if they couldn't, that it "really is kindest to have them destroyed." Included in the pamphlet was an ad for the CASH bolt gun, which the government committee touted as providing "the speediest, most reliable means of destroying any animal, including horses, cats and all sizes of dogs."
Wikimedia Commons/National ArchivesAnd looters, if push comes to shove.
The advice was met with disapproval from vets, animal organizations and most of the actual British government. But the damage had already been done. With the threat of bombing and starvation looming over their heads, plenty of panicking pet owners were pushed over the edge, and animal hospitals were flooded with demands for euthanasia. In total, some estimate that in a single week, over 750,000 British pets were put down, with their corpse piles piling up all over London.
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China Is Building A 3,000-Mile-Long Green Wall To Keep The Desert From Invading
If you want to solve a problem like China, the steps are simple. First, figure out which direction the problem is coming from. Second, construct a giant-ass wall between you and your problem. There is no third step. This is how dynasties upon dynasties of Chinese rulers took care of their northern issue, i.e. the invasion of Mongolian raiders as numerous as grains of sand in the Gobi Desert. Though today, it's the grains of sand that they're most worried about.
As a result of having more and more people and fewer and fewer trees (those two matters may be related) the encroachment of arid land is a serious global concern. Desertification, (not to be confused with dessertification -- putting sprinkles on every meal) affects over a quarter billion people and one solution has been to put all those people to use in afforestation, or mass tree planting, to correct the issue. And while many green belts are being constructed all over the world, none is as ambitious as China's Communist Party's Three-North Shelter Forest Program, better known as the Green Great Wall, the barrier that keeps the blasted Mongolian desert at bay.