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My grandmother used to love to collect animal statues. She had a selection of animal garden statues that was the envy of her neighborhood. It was a pretty settled and older area that she lived in, and so naturally gardening was a high-priority for most of the residents. Practically every week it seemed she would go out looking for a new animal statue and, although she rarely bought one, when she did you could be sure that it would be a good one.

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A ban on bird imports to Puerto Rico has forced the cancellation of more than 100 cockfights, dealing a blow to a lucrative industry in the U.S. territory. <br> <br> Puerto Rico halted all bird imports Thursday after a rare outbreak of avian flu in nearby Dominican Republic, where authorities killed more than 100 chickens, including fighting roosters that tested positive for the lethal virus. <br> <br> Cockfighting has been outlawed in 49 U.S. states, and Louisiana - the pastime’s last refuge on the U.S. mainland - has approved legislation to make it a crime beginning in August.  But in Puerto Rico, the sport is still legal and remains big business

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PetSmart Inc. has suspended bird sales at 775 stores in 46 states and pulled the animals from store displays.  The move came after the Phoenix-based pet retailer (Nasdaq: PETM - News) found an unusually high number of cases of psittacosis, a bacterial disease found in birds that can be spread to humans

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China has reported an outbreak in poultry of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in its far west Xinjiang region, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.  The first bird flu outbreak in the country since September came about a month after the virus killed a 24-year-old man in the eastern province of Jiangsu. <p> A total of 4,850 poultry have died of the disease in Turpan city in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region since December 29, prompting authorities there to cull another 29,383 birds, Xinhua said.  The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory confirmed the virus as a subtype of the H5N1 strain on Thursday, it said, without specifying which kinds of poultry were infected.  “At present, the epidemic has been brought under effective control,” Xinhua said.  With the world’s biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of farmers raising birds in their backyards, China is seen as crucial in the global fight against bird flu.