Chinese police shoot dead a lioness on Anhui highway

Agence France-Presse in Beijing

Wednesday 9 September 2015 11.21 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 9 September 201511.49 BST

A lioness found prowling along a motorway in China after apparently jumping from a moving lorry has been shot dead by police, according to reports.

How the protected animal came to be on the road in Anhui, eastern Chinese, was not clear, but the illegal raising of endangered species is not unusual in China.

Officers took more than 20 shots to kill the lioness after deciding it would take too long to get a tranquilliser gun, reported the anhuinews.com portal on Wednesday.

The animal was thought to have jumped out of a loosely bolted cage on a lorry, and was knocked down by another truck and injured, it said. It walked towards a service area, and highway staff used vehicles to set up a roadblock.

“Maybe because she was tired or saw there were too many cars, the lion stopped and laid down,” the report cited Zhang Shuke, one of the staff, as saying.

The standoff lasted half an hour before police arrived and decided to shoot the animal “to protect people’s lives”, the report said. No one had claimed the lioness, it added, with officials suspecting its owner feared punishment for unauthorised possession of the protected animal.

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Maine men accused in lobster crime face possible $190,000 fine

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A Maine lobsterman and his son pleaded not guilty on Monday to illegally possessing more than 400 protected egg-bearing female lobsters and face a possible $190,000 fine, authorities said.

Marine patrol officers discovered the lobsters, marked with a v-shaped notch in their tails or mutilated to remove the notch, during an inspection last year of a boat owned by Ricky Curtis, the state Department of Marine Resources said in a statement.

Maine requires lobstermen to notch the tails of egg-bearing female lobsters before returning them to the ocean as a conservation measure. The lobsters may then reproduce several more times.

"We consider this a very serious crime," Colonel Joseph Fessenden, Marine Patrol chief, said in the statement.

"The illegal taking of any lobsters negatively affects the resource and is a direct theft from those lobstermen who abide by the laws every day that they fish," Fessenden said.

Ricky Curtis, 48, and his son Todd Curtis, 29, entered a not guilty plea through the mail at Knox County District Court in Rockland, Maine, a court clerk said.

They face a fine of more than $190,000 if they are convicted of the crime, the statement from wildlife authorities said.

Their attorney, Philip Cohen, declined to comment on the charges.

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