ANIMAL CARE AND CONTROL, RESCUE, AND ALTERNATIVES TO KILLING

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

Management
Indianapolis police lieutenant
John H. Walton on August 2 took over as
director of the city Animal Control Division.
Lieutenant Spencer Moore, director since
1993, was reassigned at his own request to
Youth Services. Public safety director Alan
Handt, M.D., said the shifts were “unrelated
to recent complaints” about shelter operations
aired in June by the Indianapolis Star News.
Walton, wrote Star News reporter Bonnie
Harris, “comes to his new position with no
animal control experience. Walton ran into
difficulties in 1995, when he was charged
with raping a female acquaintance. A jury
acquitted him in April 1996; however, the
Indianapolis Civilian Police Merit Board
found Walton had violated departmental rules
in connection with the incident. As a result,
he was suspended for two months and demoted
to sergeant,” winning promotion back to lieutenant
just before his reassignment.

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CVMA to fix 60,000 feral cats

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

ALAMEDA, California––Maddie’s Fund, the $200 million
foundation formed by PeopleSoft founders Dave and Cheryl Duffield to
promote no-kill animal control, on August 2 announced a grant of $3.2 million
to the California Veterinary Medical Association, “to spay or neuter
60,000 additional feral cats in California” above and beyond the number
altered in 1998.
“The first phase of the project begins today,” a joint release
issued by Maddie’s Fund and the CVMA stated. “The CVMA anticipates it
will complete all three phases by June 2002.”
Participating veterinarians are to receive $50 per surgery.
Administrative costs are estimated at $70,000 per year.
Feral cats are defined as those who “generally do not voluntarily
accept handling by humans, and are ‘feral, independent wildlife’ or ‘feral,
interdependent free-roaming/unowned,’” as described by longtime Cat
Fanciers Association board member Joan Miller in a 1993 article for the
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

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THEY CAN’T SAVE LIVES ON SUNSHINE

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

FLORIDA––Monroe County on July 8 turned
over management of the Key West and Marathon animal
shelters to the Florida Keys SPCA––and cut the county
animal control budget by 10%.
Despite the cut, Florida Keys SPCA president
Gwen Hawtof was reportedly optimistic that animal care
would improve and shelter killing decrease. The
Humane Animal Care Coalition has already made similar
progress after taking over the Key Largo shelter in
1998, HACC president Tom Garretson told M i a m i
Herald staff writer Hancy Klingener.
But even before the reported “worst parvovirus
outbreak in memory” hit Orange County Animal
Services in Orlando, it was a hard month for many
other Florida humane institutions.

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HSUS wrings hands over regulatory failure

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.––“In an
unfortunate decision for animals whose care
falls under the auspices of the USDA, the
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
has removed the requirement [in proposed
new Animal Welfare Act enforcement regula –
tions] that solid resting surfaces be provided
for all animals kept in commercial breeding
facilities,” lamented assistant editor Scott
Kirkwood in the July/August 1999 edition of
Animal Sheltering.
Animal Sheltering is a publication
of the Humane Society of the U.S. ––and
Kirkwood either didn’t know or just didn’t
mention the background to the failed proposed
requirement, detailed in the September
1995 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE.

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SEX, MONEY AND POWER IN HUMANE WORK: WOMEN EXECS ARE FEWER, PAID LESS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

BOSTON, PHILADELPHIA,
CULLOWHEE, N.C.––Ten years after
accusing the Massachusetts SPCA of genderbased
discrimination, Marjorie C. McMillan,
DVM, in July 1999 collected a $428,000 settlement:
$150,000 in back pay, plus interest.
Hired by the MSPCA as an animal
care technician while still a university undergraduate,
McMillan earned her veterinary
degree in 1974 and by 1989 was head of radiology
at Angell Memorial Hospital, the flagship
of the MSPCA chain of three animal hospitals
and eight regional shelters.

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Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules against “cruel and moronic” Hegins pigeon shoot

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

Bob Tobash, chief organizer of the Fred Coleman
Memorial Pigeon Shoot held each Labor Day since 1935 in
Hegins, Pennsylvania, on August 1 told James E. Wilkerson
of Harrisburg Morning Call that the 1999 shoot will go on as
scheduled––but if it does, the Pennsyvlania Supreme Court
unanimously ruled on July 22, Pennsylvania SPCA anti-cruelty
officers can stop it and arrest the participants.
The court did not rule on the legality of the shoot
itself, but affirmed the authority of the PSPCA to act against
cruelty anywhere in Pennsylvania, as authorized by the state
legislature in 1868. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court thus
overturned Schuykill County Common Pleas Court and state
Superior Court verdicts which held that PSPCA officer
Clayton Hulsizer was outside his jurisdiction when he sought
an injunction to stop the 1997 shoot.

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FIGHTING FOR FACTORY-FARMED HENS AND HOGS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

The German Supreme Court in
Karlsruhe ruled on July 6 that laws already on the
books require poultry farmers to give egg-laying
hens much more space than either the minimum set
by regulation in 1987 or the enlarged
minimum––about twice as big––which is to be phased
into effect by 2003 under a June directive from the
European Union. The EU directive would also end
battery caging entirely by 2012; the German verdict
says, in effect, “Do it now.” Wrote the judges, “It is
generally the case that no one may inflict pain, suffering,
or damage on an animal without good reason”––and,
by implication, they held the mere maintenance
of profitability to be not good reason.

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Scientists favor wider AWA

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

Psychologists Scott Plous of Wesleyan
University and Harold Herzog of Western Carolina
University reported in the June 1999 edition of the
trade journal Lab Animal that among 494 members
of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee
members who responded to survey questions about
the Animal Welfare Act circulated by Plous and
Herzog during the last third of 1998, no less than
97.6% favored the present level of protection––or
more––for primates, dogs, and cats.

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Signifying apes upstage Freedom Tour

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

ATLANTA––One could say the Georgia State University bonobo Panbanisha, 14, and the Zoo Atlanta orangutan Chantek, 20, made a monkey’s uncle of former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan during the last week in July––but Sullivan really did it to himself. Though Sullivan suggested that their kind should be vivisected, Panbanisha and Chantek meant him neither harm nor embarrassment.

Sullivan, now president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and a board member of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, tried to play the race card against the July 24-27 Primate Freedom Tour stop at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, on the Emory University campus.

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