As we mentioned last month, The Central Park Conservancy was fed up dealing with park vagrants given to scaring away visitors and dropping prodigious amounts of feces all over Olmstead & Vaux's urban jewel, so it hired a pack of dogs to chase the interlopers off. This is not as horrifying as it sounds, unless you are a huge fan of the Canada geese that have made Central Park their year-round home. The large honking birds are considered a pest by the conservancy because they scare away ducks and other birds, eat the park's well-tended grass, and excrete an average of a pound of feces a day. more ›

+ Delays are plaguing Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House. more ›

There are lunatics out there. Some jerk left a 2 pound ham in Central Park that a dog found and, being a 6 year old Labrador retriever, he ate the meat. Only for the dog's owner, Martha Redding, to throw away the meat and discover it was full of 3-inch pins. Milo the dog ate 31 pins, and his vet fed him three cans of dog food and induced vomiting to get rid of them. Luckily, the vomiting was successful and Milo is pin-free. The Central Park Conservancy emailed dog walkers to warn them about suspcicious packages. The ASPCA's Special Agent Joseph Pentangelo says they are investigating the matter: "It certainly is a crime. No reasonable person could commit an act like this and think it wouldn't be harmful to an animal... I've heard about chemical poisoning - people who are annoyed about cat colonies in their area or people getting tired about dogs urinating in front of their houses. I've never seen anything like this." Redding says that the incident "reminds me of all those thriller movies of serial killers who start by hurting animals."
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Gothamist enjoys a good game of "Duck...Duck...Goose!" every now and then, but we only really like Canada geese when they are flying in the air - because that means they are not on the ground, producing that really gross greenish grey poop. Central Park has a huge goose poop headache, as its goose population has grown from 30 to 300 over the past couple of years - and each goose can produce 1 to 3 pounds of poo a day. A day! Parks officials are worried that the goose waster will pollute lakes with their nitrogen-high poops - not to mention the usual worries of poop on walks. There are more geese staying in the mid-Atlantic region, instead of continuing South, because of global warming trends. Why didn't The Day After Tomorrow show the ill effects of big geese populations for scares? more ›

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