Viagra helps to save endangered animals

[Why Syzygy]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/viagra-helps-to-save-endangered-animals-604618.html
Viagra helps to save endangered animals
By Steve Connor, Science Editor

The anti-impotence drug Viagra has become an unexpected hero in the fight against the hunting of endangered animals for traditional Chinese medicine.

The global success of Viagra since it went on sale in 1998 has led to a decline in the trade of animal parts for their supposedly anti-impotence properties, scientists have found.

Viagra is cheaper than many traditional animal-parts remedies – such as dried seahorses or crushed rhino horn – and it visibly works whereas the natural cures do not.

Research shows that the trade in the velvet covering of reindeer antlers fell by 72 per cent from 1997 to 1998. This was the sharpest annual drop in nearly 30 years.

Meanwhile, sales of the penises of Canadian hooded and harp seals – also valued as impotence treatments – fell by half between 1996 and 1998, according to Frank von Hippel, a biologist at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.
~snip

http://www.alternet.org/story/67663/dick_cheney%27s_sadistic_passion_for_shooting_tame_animals/
Dick Cheney's Sadistic Passion for Shooting Tame Animals
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2007.

When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can barely walk or fly -- or see, thanks to the goggles. They don't know how to forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to "fly" enough to be shot.

Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals, which offer no resistance, is like having sex with a blow-up doll.

But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the 10 percent decline in hunters seen in the United States since the late '90s -- from 14 million to about 12.5 million -- coincides exactly with the debut of impotence drugs like Viagra.
~snip