Euthanasia

Carol, an Asian elephant who gained national acclaim by appearing on the "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," has been euthanized by veterinarians at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park, zoo officials announced Tuesday. The 40-year-old elephant had been suffering from a painful degenerative joint disease. Zoo officials say they tried for years to help Carol with therapy, a specialized diet and exercise. They also installed a padded floor in the elephant barn.

Despite the efforts of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, legislation to allow terminally ill people to hasten their deaths was shelved Thursday for lack of support. Certain they didn't have the votes to pass it, the bill's authors in effect killed it, at least until January, by not bringing it up for a vote on the Assembly floor. Nunez, a Los Angeles Democrat, co-wrote the bill, to the consternation of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other Catholic leaders.

To save the northern spotted owl, federal authorities have listed the bird under the Endangered Species Act, set aside 7 million acres of forest for owl habitat, and imposed stiff fines on those who harm the chocolate-colored football-sized raptors. But the spotted owl population is still in deep peril nearly 15 years after President Clinton brokered a compact to protect its old-growth habitat.

For nearly a decade, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, waged a defiant campaign to help other people kill themselves. But as he prepares to leave prison Friday after serving more than eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence in the death of a Michigan man, there's still only one state that allows physician-assisted suicide: Oregon. Some expect that Kevorkian's release could spur another round of efforts, if only to block moves to enact new laws.

Confined to a rusty wheelchair and unable to control her muscles below her neck, Li Yan seemed destined for nothing more than a short life of pain and hopelessness. Instead, the 29-year-old with muscular dystrophy has been catapulted into the center of an ethical debate. Li, fearing that her disease eventually will leave her in a helpless state, used her blog in March to ask the National People's Congress to legalize her right to die.

Australia's Defense Department said it wanted to hire professional shooters to kill more than 3,000 kangaroos on the fringes of the capital, noting that their growing population was eating through the grassy habitats of endangered species. Animal rights activists decried the proposal. The department said the 6,500 kangaroos at two sites outside Canberra were destroying the habitat of the grassland earless dragon, striped legless lizard and golden sun moth.

In the iconography of cuteness, few things hold greater heart-melting sway than kittens. Hallmark, the world's largest greeting card company, owns 1,230 images of kittens and has put at least some of them on 894 products in the past decade. Corbis, a leading stock photography source, offers more than 1,400 images of kittens online for licensing. And ratemykitten.com proclaims it has posted 117,179 photos of people's kittens.

You can't strip all the emotion from the argument over assisted suicide. But cooling the coarse rhetoric could lead to a more rational and substantive debate. The kind of coarse rhetoric I'm referring to was Cardinal Roger M. Mahony's charge last week that Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) is part of the "culture of death." That's church lingo and, with any luck, it won't infiltrate the public policy dialogue.

A court in Perigueux, France, convicted a doctor in the poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient and gave him a one-year suspended sentence. Laurence Tramois was found guilty in the Aug. 25, 2003, death of Paulette Druais in the nearby town of Saint-Astier. Chantal Chanel, a nurse who delivered the fatal dose of potassium prescribed by the doctor, was acquitted. Last week, 2,000 doctors and other medical personnel signed a petition urging the decriminalization of euthanasia.

Ed Boks says he runs the Los Angeles city department that "most people love to hate." Taking over as general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services a little more than a year ago, he became the fourth person in four years to oversee the care of thousands of animals in city shelters. The turnover rate alone illustrates the political pressure that historically hangs over the department as it manages the population of unwanted pets whose treatment people care about deeply -- even radically.