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The two latest cases to make headlines involve 15-year-old Justina Pelletier, who was put in foster care even though her parents say all they did was follow doctor’s orders, and Jeremiah Oliver, a 5-year-old boy the department inexplicably lost track of.
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“Right now we don't know what happened to Jeremiah Oliver,” Linsky said. “We don't know if he is dead or alive."
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Gov. Deval Patrick noted that the social worker responsible for monitoring Jeremiah’s safety has been fired, as well as her immediate supervisor and a program manager. According to Patrick, the social worker had failed to conduct required visits, and her supervisor made false entries in the case file indicating that the visits had, in fact, been made.
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Patrick hopes for more answers from an independent review he commissioned by the Child Welfare League of America. Its findings are due in the coming weeks. In the meantime, he has called for increased funding to the DCF in 2015, money the DCF states it will use to enhance screening and investigations.
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"I think we have a great opportunity, ironically, by this terrible tragedy to rethink and to reinvigorate the department and I want to assure the public that that is what we intend to do," Patrick said.
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One lawmaker questioned whether simply increasing funding is enough to reform the agency charged with protecting the state’s most vulnerable citizens.
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"You have to ask yourself, is a shortage of resources responsible for the failure to communicate adequately, the failure to be accurate in reporting, falsifying documents, lying about specific situations?" Republican state Sen. Bruce Tarr asked.
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Jeremiah Oliver was first reported missing by his 7-year old sister, who told school officials that her mother’s boyfriend was abusing her and that she had not seen her little brother for months. The social worker handling Jeremiah’s case failed to complete routine home visits, last checking in on the child in May 2013. His mother, Elsa Oliver, is being charged with several counts, including reckless endangerment of a child, and is awaiting trial.
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Justina, who lives in Connecticut, was taken into custody by the DCF after her parents disagreed with a diagnosis and treatment plan suggested by doctors at the Boston Children’s Hospital. Her primary care doctor had diagnosed her with Mitochondrial Disease, a condition that affects cells throughout the body. But when the doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital told authorities her condition was partly psychologically induced, DCF took custody of the girl.
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The agency has been under fire for several years. In 2010, 23-month-old Kaydn Hancock was beaten to death by his mother, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is serving time. She had broken the boy’s arm just weeks before the fatal beating, and although DCF removed Kaydn from the home initially, he was returned less than a week later.
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"I was calling them, begging, pleading, crying, just anything because I was desperate for help,” Kaydn's maternal great-aunt, Andrea Rizzitano, told Fox News. “Not only did his mother rob him of his life, but DCF robbed him of his life because they put him back into a situation that he was in imminent danger."
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A spokesperson for the DCF told Fox News in an email that "the most recent child fatality report showed a decline in child fatalities."<|endoftext|>Were the residents of a Scottish hillside immoral squatters or hard-working farmers?
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By KATE RAVILIOUS
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July/August 2014
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It had to have been one of the most defeating days of Alexander Littlejohn’s life. After 40 years of living in a home he’d built by hand, the 85-year-old was unceremoniously carried out, still lying on his bed, as his family looked on. Local folklore tells of how he was made to watch as bailiffs removed all his furniture, smashed his walls, and burned his roof. It was Scotland, 1878. There was little compassion for landless peasants. The Littlejohns lived on the slopes of Bennachie, a prominent rounded hill in northeastern Scotland. Years before, Littlejohn had been lured to the hill—a patch of common land, where local people had traditional rights to use its resources to support themselves—because it offered a small opportunity to build a life of his own. But eventually local landowners decided to revoke the land’s common status and claim ownership. When the elderly Littlejohn became unable to pay the rent, he was evicted in front of his wailing grandchildren. Standing on the slopes of Bennachie today, next to the knee-high ruins of Littlejohn’s croft, it appears idyllic. Sunshine bathes the south-facing slopes, which offer splendid views of rolling hills and open skies. A freshwater spring gurgles behind the remains of the house, and a hillfort, built in the late Iron Age by the Celtic people known as the Picts, stands sentinel above. But it is a misleading picture. “Living up here would have been really harsh, particularly during the cold, snowy winters,” says Jeff Oliver, archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen. “The land is marginal and windswept and would have been covered in scrub and small trees at that time. Water runoff down the hillside was a huge issue. It was hardly an ideal place to set up a smallholding.” Despite these challenges, at its peak in the 1850s, the hillside supported a colony of some 70 settlers—10 families—who came from all over Scotland to try to make an independent living. Since the early eighteenth century Scotland had been undergoing what was known as “improvement.” Before then, landless peasants were able to support themselves by farming small plots of land as tenants of wealthy landowners. But those landowners were determined to bring Scotland into the modern age by transitioning from arable and mixed farming, which supported a large tenant population, to sheep farming, which was proving more profitable. History records brutal evictions and forced emigration of the surplus farmers as aristocratic landowners instituted an agricultural and social revolution. Many people who were cleared off their land emigrated to North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Among those who could not emigrate or chose to stay, some toiled on the new sheep farms. Others were tasked with farming marginal land in new “crofting townships.” And a large proportion became migrants, perpetually traveling around the country in search of work. They constructed temporary dwellings from turf and heather thatch and moved on when work dried up. Some of these migrants ended up at Bennachie, where they found a stability few others did. “It is one of the few sites that we are aware of where this pool of landless people could form a settled community. People arrived here from all over the north and east of Scotland,” explains Oliver. Unlike other landless folk, the Bennachie people settled down long enough to have left a mark. And a rare mark it is. Historically, there are no other colonies known in Scotland quite like this one. Seldom do such marginalized people leave much in the archaeological record. To some extent, the story of Bennachie is the story of marginalized people everywhere—an important story rarely preserved or told.
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The daily struggles of the Bennachie community were recorded in census records, diaries, and farm accounts, but these sources came from outside the community. “For the most part, the people who lived here provided very little in the way of written evidence about their own lives. By digging their homesteads we are beginning to give these people a voice and paint a more nuanced picture of rural life in Scotland at this time,” says Oliver, who is leading the Bennachie excavations. Beginning in 2011, Oliver and his team, which includes a local conservation society called the Bailies of Bennachie, carried out systematic test pitting across the site. During summer 2013 they carried out their first full-scale dig, opening trenches at two of the homes. One of these was “Shepherd’s Lodge”—the former residence of Alexander Littlejohn and his wife, Elisabeth. Littlejohn, a local, was one of the founders of the colony, but this did not protect him from the prejudices of nearby villagers, who viewed the entire colony with suspicion, as backward and uncivilized. A diary of a local man known only as “Johnny” describes a visit he made in 1841 to the house of one of the colonists, Willie Jamieson: “The interior of this humble and solitary habitation had a very gloomy appearance. Its furniture were remarkably scant and of the meanest description. The only window it had was on the skylight principle, a hole through the apex of the roof serving the combined purpose of window and lum [chimney]. Meeting with rather indifferent reception from these mountaineers we understood we were no altogether welcome guest.” Historian James Allan wrote an essay in 1927 that describes life on Bennachie as technologically behind the times. In the “Deeside Field,” he writes that their houses were similar to his father’s, stone clay with a thatched roof of broom and heather. He continues to say that the land was not drained with tiles, a more contemporary practice, but that this was done with ridges and furrows, which decreased the land’s productivity. Furthermore, he concludes that modern reaping machines were impossible to use on such an uneven surface. “Historical sources about the colony paint a picture of a society living on the edge: at best as ‘squatters’ of ‘limited intelligence’ scratching an existence from poor-quality agricultural soils. At worst, as licentious and morally reprehensible,” says Oliver. Indeed, Littlejohn’s third child, Elisabeth Littlejohn, is mentioned scornfully in the parish records on numerous occasions for her extramarital relationships and illegitimate children. A typical record from the Chapel of Garioch Kirk-Session Records from September 25, 1846, reads, “compeared Robert Minty, from Daviot and Elisabeth Littlejohn from Benochie...by which it appeared they were guilty of the sin of fornication and their decisions of absolution. The Session after deliberation on this case resolved to rebuke them and dismiss them from censure which was accordingly done.” Such behavior probably wasn’t unusual, but it might have been more remarked upon in parish records because of prejudices about the colony people. The mortal sins of the colonists have long since been washed from the soil, but a little digging has provided a wealth of information on other aspects of their lives, including the quality of their homes and farmsteads. Today all that remains of Shepherd’s Lodge are tumbledown stone walls. It appears to have been a long, thin building, consisting of a single-room dwelling (approximately 30 by 15 feet, possibly partitioned by curtains) and three adjoining enclosures (roughly 15 by 15 feet each), most likely animal sheds and a cart house. The fallen stone suggests that the house had gable ends and half-height stone walls, probably topped with turf and roofed with thatch. “The house, barns, and wall systems are well built and must have taken a huge number of person hours to construct,” says Aoilfie Gould, University of Aberdeen archaeologist and site director at Shepherd’s Lodge. A cart track runs in front of the house and a patchwork of small fields covers the slope below. A kitchen garden, known locally as a “kaleyard,” wraps around the back, resplendent today with wild-cherry trees, most likely descendants of ones planted by the Littlejohns.
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To the side of the house lies one of the best preserved, and most important, elements of Shepherd’s Lodge—the well. A carefully constructed stone alcove, three feet high and two feet across, is set into the hillside, with an arched roof to protect the well’s water from debris, as well as flagstones in front to prevent the ground from becoming a muddy mess. “It is much more than just a hole in the ground, and demonstrates good knowledge of hygiene and improvement-era ideas—something that these so called ‘mountain people’ were not supposed to know about,” says Gould. Artifacts have been thin on the ground, but the few that have been found speak of a family that appreciated craftsmanship, despite economic hardship. “We might expect them to have the ‘cheapest’ of everything, but that isn’t the case,” says Gould. The archaeologists found fragments of willow-pattern pottery, transfer-printed ware, and, perhaps most surprising of all, gilt-edged china. “Although they may not have been able to afford full sets, they still had one or two pieces of fancy tableware,” says Gould. Personal finds include a glazed clay marble, which was probably a toy of one of the Littlejohn children, and a broken clay pipestem with tooth marks in the end. “We can probably narrow it down to just one or two Littlejohns who might have smoked that pipe,” says Gould. Downhill from the house, a network of sturdy dry stone walls and deep ditches demarcate the fields and signify communal work. “The sheer level of work involved in making these agricultural improvements couldn’t have been carried out by the Shepherd’s Lodge residents alone—it must have been a community effort,” explains Gould. And details of the walls, such as buttress structures, carefully positioned so that hurdles could be attached to create sheep pens, reveal that the colonists were able farmers. Soil samples gathered from a nearby farmstead in 2012 confirm that they embraced then-modern ideas to maximize the productivity of the land. In an untended state, the slopes of Bennachie are not well suited for farming: A thin layer of topsoil above compact glacial till prevents good drainage. But on tended parts of the slope, the soil reveals the measures the colonists took to improve their fields. “We can see that they removed stones, constructed drainage ditches and subterranean field drains, plowed in glacial till to improve soil depth and drainage, and fertilized by adding domestic waste,” says Karen Milek, geoarchaeologist at the University of Aberdeen. “They must have invested a great deal of time and labor to build up their kaleyards and fields in this way.” Despite the fundamental poverty of the land, the Bennachie colonists appear to have, for a time, maintained a reasonable living. However, things went dramatically downhill during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of the triggers for the downturn was a controversial appropriation of the common land by wealthy local landowners in 1859, who wanted to rid themselves of the troublesome settlers, ensure their own claims to the land, and start making money by planting trees for lumber. “Suddenly all the colonists became tenants and either had to pay rent or be forced off,” explains Oliver. Often landlords wasted no time making the land profitable. “As soon as people were evicted, [the landowners] started to plant trees.” But occasionally a newly empty croft was rented again, as in the case of Hillside, home of either the Christies or Coopers, and one of the best plots on the hill.
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In 1860, new paying tenants moved into Hillside—John McDonald and his daughter Margaret, originally from Sutherland in the far north. “They were some of the last settlers to arrive at the colony, and most likely they would have heard about the colony by word of mouth,” says Oliver. Excavations at Hillside in 2013 revealed that the McDonalds may have been a cut above the other colonists. Inside the house, which measures 35 by 15 feet, Oliver and his colleagues uncovered a cobbled floor and a well-preserved hearth surrounded by flagstones. By contrast, Shepherd’s Lodge had a beaten-earth floor and only a small fireplace in a niche in the wall. Meanwhile, shards of thin Victorian glass were found in two places at Hillside, suggesting the croft had multiple windows—a luxury. And at the back of the croft it seems that the McDonalds constructed a rather sophisticated dump. A shallow dish-shaped area, 20 feet in diameter, is covered in tightly packed cobbles. Stones run around the outside and at one side there is a little ramp. “A lot of effort must have gone into making this beautiful midden, and someone was very proud of their handiwork,” says Oliver. Analysis of the midden is ongoing, but the assumption is that it was used as a place to heap animal manure and household waste to create fertilizer. “The fact that the midden is at the back of the house is very much in keeping with the improvement regime of the time, and shows that these guys had good knowledge about hygiene,” says Oliver. The McDonalds moved in and appear to have thrived just after the 1859 landgrab, the full economic and social impacts of which were not felt immediately because of events occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. “During the 1860s the American Civil War was raging and the United Kingdom was exporting large amounts of food to support the Confederacy in North America. As a result the U.K. economy was buoyant and laboring work on local estates would have been in plentiful supply,” says Oliver. For the Littlejohns, however, the 1860s saw the start of their run of bad luck. A harsh winter in 1860 meant that employment was hard, if not impossible, to come by. Then in 1862, Littlejohn’s daughter Sarah died of cervical cancer and her husband James fell into poor health and was unable to work. In 1863 Elisabeth (Littlejohn’s wife) died, and later that year James died too, leaving five orphans. Three of the children were admitted to industrial school and two were placed with the recently widowed Littlejohn. The pressure to pay rent to the new landlords and provide for his new dependents took its toll. Parish records show that Alexander frequently had to request “poor relief.” Despite all these setbacks, the Littlejohns continued to live on the hill until 1878. The McDonalds, though they were among the most prosperous families in the colony, also struggled. Parish records record that McDonald died of “exhaustion” and “gastric derangement” in 1870. “There were some very bad winters during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and once the American Civil War was over these people felt the impact of the massive economic downturn,” says Oliver. By the 1880s most of the crofts had been abandoned. The 1871 census shows McDonald’s daughter Margaret and her son John residing at Hillside, but after that the paper trail dries up. Excavations hint at their fate. Under the fallen gable ends of Hillside, Oliver and his colleagues found large quantities of crushed household items (many in fragments, but complete), including two large dairy bowls, a Rockingham teapot, and numerous pieces of decorated whiteware. In one corner they recovered iron pins, metal fittings, and pieces of textile—possibly the remnants of a storage trunk. “The impression is that the occupants left their possessions behind in a hurry, perhaps during a forced eviction, one that culminated in the rapid razing of the building, removing the possibility for the subsequent looting of the structure’s contents, or the reuse of the structure for any purpose,” says Oliver.<|endoftext|>American musician
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Kevin John Wasserman (born February 4, 1963),[1] best known by his stage name Noodles, is the lead guitarist and backing vocalist for The Offspring.[2]
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Biography [ edit ]
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Kevin John Wasserman was born in Los Angeles, California. Before joining The Offspring, Noodles played in a local band called Clowns of Death. He was allegedly in The Offspring because he was the only person old enough to provide alcohol for the rest of the members.[3] He earned the nickname "Noodles" for his frequent noodling (a technique of playing) on the guitar. At one of the band's earlier shows, he was stabbed in the shoulder by a skinhead.[4]
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During the band's early days, Noodles worked as a janitor at Earl Warren Elementary School in Garden Grove. Before Smash was released, he had been planning to quit the band, but the surprising success of "Come Out and Play" forced him to reconsider.[6]
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On their DVD release Huck It (2000), as part of a mock interview, Noodles claims to like the "finer things in life", such as red wine, classical music, cigarettes, and poetry. He occasionally goes snowmobiling and snowboarding.
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Due to a family matter,[7] Noodles was not part of The Offspring's summer 2017 tour with Sublime with Rome.[8] However, he rejoined the tour later in the year.
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Equipment [ edit ]
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Guitars [ edit ]
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Noodles generally plays Ibanez guitars, and he has three signature models, each of which is a Talman. One is the NDM1 (NDM1 means that it is the first model in the 'Noodles Model series', which is named after him), which has a duct tape finish.[9] Another is the NDM2, which has The Offspring's logo with glasses. His third signature guitar, the NDM3, has P90 pickups. His latest signature guitar is the NDM4. It also has P90 pickups and has a sunburst effect on it. He prefers DiMarzio Tone Zone pickups.[10]
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In the early days of The Offspring, he played a wider range of guitars, including Fender Telecasters, Ibanez Talmans and Gibson Les Pauls. He also owns other guitar models, such as Paul Reed Smith guitars, a Fender Stratocaster and other Fender models, Jackson guitars, and Gibson guitars. In an interview on The Offspring's Complete Music Video Collection, Noodles said that he gave his Stratocaster to one of the actors that appeared on the video for their 1994 single "Self Esteem".
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Amplifiers [ edit ]
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Noodles used VHT Pitbull amplifiers with 4x12 cabinets for most records. Since Splinter, these were mixed with VHT Classic Lead amplifiers.[11]
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References [ edit ]<|endoftext|>Google wants make modifying your smartphone as easy as rearranging Lego blocks.
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That’s the premise of Project Ara, a plan to make phones with parts that can be easily snapped on and off, allowing for an unprecedented level of customization. Google first unveiled the concept roughly two years ago. After a series of fits and starts, Google is now promising that consumers will be able to buy the first Ara phone sometime next year.
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The idea might sound far-fetched, but consider this: What if you could just replace your phone’s camera instead of paying hundreds to upgrade to an entirely new device? Or what if you were able to add more powerful speakers to your phone when watching a movie or listening to Spotify? Some parts will be off-limits for swapping — the processor, for instance. But Ara phones will still allow for intriguing possibilities.
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Read More: Project Ara: Inside Google’s bold gambit to make modular smartphones
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Google is opening up the Ara platform to outside developers and companies, meaning your phone could turn into a digital Swiss Army knife of sorts, as CNET explains. A diabetic could add a glucose sensor to his or her phone. An automaker could give you a module that works as a key for your new car. There is precedent here: Smartphone maker LG has already taken steps towards embracing a modular smartphone concept; owners of the LG G5 can swap out the bottom of the device and add a camera grip. (The phone, however, is getting mixed reviews.)
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There’s no guarantee the Project Ara concept will catch on. While diehard technology hobbyists take pleasure in their ability to customize equipment like desktop computers, most consumers are used to relatively few customization options (and therefore a simpler buying process) when it comes to their gadgets. Other companies have tried and failed to pull off the “modular phone” concept.
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But if Ara is a hit, it could change the way we buy our smartphones. Tech companies will have to rethink the way they manufacture and market their devices. Instead of advertising minor upgrades about once a year, they will need to put more emphasis on new core components that we can’t change. The value of a phone could be determined by the number of possible customization options, rather than aspects like its camera or design. That future looks more like the world of Windows PCs, which can be built with any number of mixed-and-matched components.
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But that’s a very large if. It’s unclear whether the average buyer is interested in this type of device. Every fall, shoppers line up outside Apple stores to snag the latest iPhone — which also happens to be the least customizable smartphone you can buy. For any given iPhone iteration, your can choose between two physical sizes, three storage sizes, and a small handful of color options. While some Android phones allow owners to swap out the battery or add extra storage space, Apple doesn’t enable any such tweaks. Consumers might embrace a new cornucopia of smartphone component options — or they might balk at an overly confusing list of possibilities. How they react to the concept will have a major influence on the phones of the future.
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Contact us at [email protected].<|endoftext|>Somewhere between stepping off the school bus and climbing into the go-kart, Sandra Ibrahim, 14, took off her pink hijab. She was on a trip to an indoor amusement park in New Rochelle, N.Y., with her Islamic weekend school, surrounded by other Muslim children, parents and teachers. She knew the adults would like her to keep the head scarf on. But there she was, zooming along the track, her dark brown ponytail swinging freely behind her.
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Sandra wants to wear the hijab when she is ready, because she wants to follow the guidelines of her religion. She thought she was ready in fifth grade, when her parents rewarded her with a Barbie video game and other prizes for each week she kept it on. But there was teasing and bullying, her family said. Students at her public school yanked it from her head at least twice. So she took it off. She tried again in the middle of sixth grade, and again in seventh. This year, in eighth grade, she had not even tried.
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Sandra lives in a religiously tolerant place, by almost any standard. New York is a cosmopolitan city, and her family’s home is in a heavily Arab enclave in Astoria, Queens, just a block away from the fragrant sweet shops, Middle Eastern restaurants and hookah cafes along Steinway Street. On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that New York would become the nation’s largest city to close public schools for the two most important Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, a move that officials hope will help increase tolerance in the schools. Still, Sandra’s life as a young Muslim has not been smooth.
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It is much the same for many of the dozens of young teenagers with whom she attends Islamic school each weekend at the Muslim American Society community center, on the top floor of a three-story office building on Steinway Street. Most of the children, like Sandra, attend public school during the week, and live in two worlds. The broader American culture confronts them with a drumbeat of news about Islamist terrorism, movies like “American Sniper” that depict Muslims as enemies, and video games in which the villains have beards and turbans. Then there are their families and religious institutions, where the Islam they learn, they say, stresses personal responsibility, being good and turning the other cheek. It is a religion that encourages praying, resisting temptations like gambling or having a girlfriend or boyfriend, and respecting family.<|endoftext|>From the company that brought you the utopian simplicity of “It’s a Small World” comes a place where mammals of all shapes, sizes and dietary preferences not only live in harmony, but also are encouraged to be whatever they want — a revisionist animal kingdom in which lions and lambs lay down the mayoral law together, and a cuddly-wuddly bunny can grow up to become the city’s top cop. Welcome to “Zootopia,” where differences of race and species serve no obstacle to either acceptance or achievement. It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
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Opening in several European countries weeks ahead of its March 4 domestic release, “Zootopia” is full of motormouthed characters and American culture in-jokes — no surprise, considering it was directed by Byron Howard, whose girl-power “Tangled” kicked off the recent Disney revival, and “The Simpsons” vet Rich Moore, who previously helmed “Wreck-It Ralph.” But that should pose little obstacle to its worldwide appeal, boosted by some of the most huggable Disney characters since “Lilo & Stitch.”
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More Reviews Film Review: ‘The Wandering Earth’ Off Broadway Review: 'Alice by Heart'
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While her 225 bunny brothers and sisters are content to stay on the farm, aspirational rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) shows an early aptitude for conflict management, stepping in when a schoolyard bully hassles her classmates. Not so surprisingly, the offender happens to be a fox, though Judy doesn’t give in to such species typing, insisting that jerks come in all shapes and sizes. So, too, do heroes, and despite the limitations of her tiny scale, Judy enlists in the Zootopia police academy, struggling at first before outwitting her larger rivals.
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Graduating at the top of her class, Judy packs her bags for a job in the big city — which is like a cross between one of those shiny 21st-century Dubai complexes featuring indoor skiing and surfing, and a new Disney theme-park adjunct, complete with climate-specific subdivisions like Tundratown and Sahara Square. “There’s far too much to take in here,” as the opening scene of “The Lion King” promises (a movie whose stunning African savannah was downright simplistic compared with the world “Zootopia” has to establish), and Howard and Moore struggle to make their introduction anywhere near as impressive, despite leaning heavily on an unremarkable “I want” song called “Try Everything,” performed by Gazelle (Shakira), the veld’s sveltest pop idol (well-meaning sample lyric: “I wanna try even though I could fail”).
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Doing justice to an elaborate new environment poses a familiar problem, slightly improved from last year’s “Tomorrowland,” in the sense that Judy (who probably should have grown up in town, like everyone else in Zootopia) takes a long train ride into the city, ogling the various districts as she passes. It’s a sequence worth studying a dozen times down the road just to catch all the tiny details, from the hippo-drying stations to the plastic hamster tubes, although it’s an awkward way to acquaint ourselves with the city.
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In theory, Zootopia’s residents have evolved past distinctions of predator and prey, which might explain the small matter of cartoon biology: Whether tiny mice or hulking rhinoceroses, all animals have front-facing eyes, upright postures and opposable thumbs — a throwback to the delightful character design featured in Disney’s “Robin Hood” (1973), which reimagined a human world populated entirely by animals, integrating characteristics of each species into the ways different creatures move.
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In progressive-minded Zootopia, a moose can co-anchor the evening news with a snow leopard without it turning into an episode of “When Animals Attack!” That said, even the most basic social interactions remain tense, as the city’s caste system matches animals to the roles that suit them best (the DMV is all-too-accurately staffed by slow-moving sloths, for example), while still adhering closely to the hierarchy of the food chain (with a few amusing exceptions, including a cameo by “Pinky and the Brain” actor Maurice LaMarche as a Don Corleone-like arctic shrew).
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