Animal control & rescue notes

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

Five months after the California
cities of Cupertino, Campbell, Los Gatos,
Saratoga, and Monte Sereno contracted
with a Campbell animal hospital for pound
service, instead of the Humane Society of
Santa Clara Valley, about one resident in
five who finds a stray still takes it to the
wrong place. The errors may erode the sav-
ings the cities hoped to gain by the switch.
The Harbor Animal Shelter in
San Pedro, California, estimates that 75%
of the animals it has received this
year––three or four a day––were left by
Navy families being transferred due to the
closure of the Long Beach Naval Air
Station. A parallel situation has developed
at the Wuensdorf barracks in Germany,
closed in August. Russian troops going
home left circa 150 cats behind, now fed by
volunteer Wilhelm Schrader, whose fund-
ing comes mainly out of his own pocket.

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Book Reviews

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

Track of the Cat, by Nevada Barr. G.P.
Putnam’s Sons (200 Madison Ave., New York, NY
10016) 1993, 238 pages, $19.95 hardcover.
“When is a cougar not a cougar?” asks National Park
Service Ranger Anna Pigeon, the heroine of this mystery
novel. Anna discovers the corpse of fellow park ranger Sheila
Drury while on a routine expedition searching for signs of
mountain lions. Drury has apparently been killed by one of
the big cats, but there are inconsistencies, which only Anna
seems to recognize. The authorities order the inevitable hunt
for the killer cat, and a lactating female cougar is blamed and
sacrificed. Anna, a native New Yorker who is more at home
with the desert wildlife of the Texas outback than with people,
is outraged and begins to probe. The plot twists and turns,
and the suspense carries through the last page. A bonus for the
animal person is that the book, written by real-life park ranger
Nevada Barr, is totally “animal rights” while being blessedly
bereft of philosophizing.
––Kim Bartlett

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Alleged horse killers charged with murder

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

CHICAGO––Illinois and federal
authorities probing a scheme to kill race and show
horses for insurance money say they have cracked
a series of the most sensational unsolved crimes in
Chicago history. Richard Bailey, 62, described
as a gigolo who cheated lonely widows out of hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars, was charged July 27
in connection with the 1977 disappearance of
Helen Vorhees Brach, the Brach candy heiress
whose will founded the Brach Foundation, a
major source of funding for animal-related chari-
ties. August 12, stable owner Kenneth Hansen, a
Bailey associate, was charged with the October
1955 kidnap-rape-murders of Robert Peterson, 14,
and brothers John and Anton Schluessler, ages 13
and 11, whose deaths, some sociologists say,
changed the attitudes of America toward hitchhik-
ing and supervision of children, and reinforced
homophobia for a generation of parents.

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RODEO

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

California Assembly Bill 49x, to ban
horsetripping––a staple of charro rodeo at
deadline awaited only governor Pete Wilson’s
signature to become law. Calls of support for the
bill may be made to 916-445-2864.
The Animal Rights Foundation of
Florida asks that letters protesting Dr. Pepper’s
use of rodeo themes in ads be sent to John Clark,
Senior V.P. for Advertising, Dr. Pepper USA,
8144 Walnut Hill Lane, Dallas, TX 75231.
Members of In Defense of Animals
attempted a sit-in August 12 to protest a cattle
drive through the streets of Napa, California,
held to promote the Napa Town and Country Fair
rodeo. They were nearly trampled––along with
spectators––when the supposedly expert cowboys
lost control of the herd of 25 longhorn steers
about a block before reaching the demonstrators.

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Bernstein lays down LASPCA law

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

LOS ANGELES––Hired to
revamp the Los Angeles SPCA, executive
director Madeleine Bernstein is already
dodging backstabs from some of the board,
which in April pushed Bernstein’s prede-
cessor, Ed Cubrda, into retirement after 25
years. In July, American Humane
Association west coast office director Betty
Denny Smith quietly quit the board, after
11 years. Soon afterward at least one other
board member intimated to media that
Smith quit because of Bernstein’s policies,
which Smith denied, and issued other
charges about Bernstein’s activity that fact-
checking soon disproved.

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BOOKS: Pets and the meaning of life

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

Yes Virginia ...There IS A Pet
Heaven: Understanding Your Older
Dogs and Cats, by Corienne “Corky”
Jones. Pebbles Publishing (POB 1432,
Beaverton, OR 97075-1432), 1991, 144
pages, paper, $12.95 plus $2.00 postage.
Corienne Jones sums up her
approach to caring for older pets in mantra-
like fashion several times during the course of
her book:

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BOOKS: Seeking the truth of whales

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

The Year of the Whale, by Victor B. Sheffer.
Scribner, 1969. 244 pages, paperback, out of print.
Gone Whaling, by Douglas Hand. Simon &
Schuster (Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020), 1994. 223 pages,
$22.00 hardback.
Published 25 years apart, The Year of the Whale
and Gone Whaling came to ANIMAL PEOPLE, the former
at a library book sale and the latter for review, within 24
hours of one another. Victor Sheffer’s faintly fictionalized
account of the first year in the life of a sperm whale might be
remembered as the book that saved the whales, except that it
isn’t remembered at all despite the acclaim it received on pub-
lication, including the Burroughs Medal for the year’s best
book about natural history. Douglas Hand’s exploration of
the growing human fascination with orcas owes ancestry to
Sheffer’s work, even though the odds are good that Hand
hasn’t ever heard of Sheffer, much less read him. Though

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ANIMAL HEALTH

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

No face-branding halt yet despite what mass media reported
July 7 media reports that the USDA would no longer require face-branding of steers import-
ed from Mexico were incorrect. Such an announcement was expected, but was apparently delayed by
the White House to get input on the rules change from the National Cattlemen’s Association. The
USDA did amend the import rules for Mexican heifers, who now must be given a local anesthetic
prior to spaying, and are rump-branded. The steers are branded to help inspectors backtrack cattle car-
rying bovine tuberculosis; the heifers are spayed to prevent the transmission of brucellosis.

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What’s up in Montreal?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994:

MONTREAL––The Canadian
SPCA recently endured yet another of
many recent changes of management, as
a young dissident faction led by longtime
critic Alex Wolfe won control of the
board and moved it toward the distant
goal of becoming a no-kill––against bitter
union and veterinary opposition.
“Until now,” former board
member Anne Streeter wrote recently in
the Montreal Gazette, “the CSPCA has
been notoriously trigger-happy, putting
down close to 50,000 animals a year.
Now the CSPCA is accused of keeping
too many marginally healthy animals
alive. Critics say the place is overcrowd-
ed, dirty, underfunded and short-staffed.”

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