Senate moves on Arctic refuge, bioterror

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

WASHINGTON D.C.–Post-September 11 concerns about
bio-security and U.S. dependence upon Middle Eastern oil boosted U.S.
Senate efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil
drilling, and to upgrade the investigative capabilities of the USDA,
including the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
U.S. President George Bush took office pledging to allow
drilling in the Arctic refuge, an issue split along party lines,
but his chances dwindled when Senator Jim Jeffords, of Vermont,
changed his affiliation from Republican to Democrat, giving
Democrats the Senate majority. The Republican-controlled House of
Representatives passed an enabling bill, however, in August.
Sensing that current events might have weakened Democratic
resolve, Repub-lican Senators tried twice in September to attach
enabling amendments to bills on defense funding and energy policy.
Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) pledged to filibuster against
any pro-Arctic refuge drilling bills that reached the floor.

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Animal control & sheltering

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

Pressured for a decade by the Animal Rights Coalition,
helped in recent months by visits from the SHARK “Tiger” video truck,
the Animal Humane Society in Golden Valley, Minnesota, is to
discontinue using two gas chambers to kill animals, and effective in
October 2001 will instead use injections of sodium pentobarbital,
board president Sharon Decker announced on August 28. Board member
Wayne Popham told Dan Wascoe Jr. of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that
he thought the pivotal protest tactic was publishing board members’
names, addresses, and telephone numbers in a July 10 ad placed by
ARC in the Lakeshore Weekly News, enabling readers to voice their
feelings. Handling about 20,000 animals per year, killing about
40%, AHS was among the largest nongovernmental shelters in the U.S.
still using gas. The switch to injections encouraged similar efforts
by activists trying to stop the use of gas at the city shelters in
St. Joseph, Missouri, and Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada.

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BlueVoicers, Sea Shepherds, MEDASSET defend marine life

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

Video crew assaulted in Japan

“Videotaping the capture of whales for broadcast on the
Internet,” BlueVoice.org executive director Hardy Jones, director
Larry Curtis, and Sakae Fujiwara of the Elsa Nature Conservancy, of
Tsukuba, Japan, reported that they were “threatened with knives” on
October 9-10 “by the fishers who killed more than 20 pilot whales,”
in a shallow bay near the village of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture,
Japan.

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BOOKS: The Parrot Who Owns Me

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
The Parrot Who Owns Me:
The Story of a Relationship
by Joanna Burger.
Villard Books (299 Park Ave., New York, NY 10171), 2001.
256 pages, hardcover. $23.95.

Animal People readers are sometimes accused of being
anthropomorphic–especially by people who pretend to take a
“scientific” view of animal life and intelligence.
Joanna Burger, however, is a world-class behavioral
ecologist, who serves on the National Academy of Sciences advisory
panel on endocrine-disrupting chemicals, yet in The Parrot Who Owns
Me unabash-edly blurs the distinction between human and birds.

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No medals–and no peace–for the beleaguered birds of Malta

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

MALTA–King George VI of Britain in 1942 awarded a cross for
bravery under fire to every resident of Malta who had survived more
than two years of intensive bombing by the Italian fascists and Nazis.
Before and after the aerial seige of Malta, the millions of
migratory birds who make brief rest-and-feeding stops there have
endured flak more intense than anything the bombers faced–because
unlike the British troops, who were isolated from any source of
resupply, Maltese hunters need not hoard ammunition.

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Buffalo War & El Caballo

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

The Buffalo War
by Matthew Testa & Bryan Cole
Independent TV Service
(51 Federal St., 1st Floor,
San Francisco, CA 94107), 2001.
PBS premiere on Nov. 1, 2001, 10 p.m.
60 minutes.

El Caballo:
The Wild Horses
of North America
by Doug Hawes-Davis
A Fund for Animals video produced by
High Plains Films (P.O. Box 6796, Missoula, MT 59807), 2001.
54 minutes. $25.00.

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Animal Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

Bjossa, 25, the last of a 30-year succession of orcas
displayed at the Vancouver Aquarium, captured near Iceland with her
longtime companion Finna in 1980, died on October 8 at Sea World San
Diego, her home since an April 2001 transfer to be with other orcas.
She had been the only orca in Vancouver since Finna died in November
1997. Already ill when moved, Bjossa took a turn for the worse in
August. She gave birth three times in Vancouver, but none of her
infants survived longer than 97 days. She was the first whale to die
at Sea World San Diego since March 1990.

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Human Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:

 

John C. Lilly, 86, died September 30 in Los Angeles. After
researching the physiology of high-altitude flight during World War
II, Lilly did investigations preliminary to space travel, inventing
the isolation tank in 1954 to simulate weightlessness. Seeking to
explore methods of communicating with aliens, Lilly founded the
Communi-cation Research Institute on St. Thomas to study dolphins as
aliens-surrogate, and became a frequent visitor to the Miami
Seaquarium, where he profoundly influenced apprentice trainer Rick
Feldman, known since 1970 as dolphin freedom advocate Ric O’Barry.
A chapter of O’Barry’s 1988 autobiography Behind The Dolphin Smile is
titled “The Lilly Factor.” At first awed by Lilly’s discoveries
about dolphin intelligence, O’Barry later developed deep misgivings
about his use of vivisection. After O’Barry began releasing
dolphins, they went different ways. Lilly wrote 19 books,
including Man and Dolphin and The Mind of the Dolphin, claimed he
could understand dolphin language while on LSD, and promoted the
notion of humans and cetaceans enjoying a spiritual bond. His work
inspired the films The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Altered States
(1980), and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).

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