PETA, Romero court updates

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

The Nevada Supreme Court has
withdrawn their January 27, 1994 reversal
of the $4.2 million libel verdict won by
orangutan trainer Bobby Berosini in August
1990 against PETA, PETA director of inves-
tigations Jeanne Rouch, the Performing
Animal Welfare Society, PAWS executive
director Pat Derby, and dancer Ottavio
Gesmundo. An FBI probe of alleged conflicts
of interest in other Nevada cases found that
8th Judicial District Judge Jack Lehman is an
advisor to the Animal Foundation of Nevada,
a Las Vegas low-cost neutering organization.
Lehman was appointed by Governor Bob
Miller to serve on the three-judge panel that
heard the PETA appeal of the Berosini ver-
dict, after Chief Justice Robert Rose with-
drew and two other justices were occupied

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GROWLS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Wilderness Society president Jon
Roush, who makes $125,000 a year, in
February and March sold $140,000 worth
of old growth timber from an 80-acre tract on
his 763-acre Montana ranch, bordering the
Bitteroot National Forest. “The area he cut,”
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
reported in The Nation of April 24, “is less
than two miles from a national wilderness area
and well within the boundaries of the
Salmon/Selway Ecosystem ––the largest com-
plex of wild land in the Lower 48 and home to
elk, black bears, mountain lions, and grey
wolves.” Roush in 1983 successfully sued the
U.S. Forest Service, contending that logging
and roadbuilding would irrevocably harm the
watershed. The roads built then were used to
remove the logs from his own land.

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People

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Esther Mechler, founder of the
low-cost neutering referral service Spay/USA
and the Focus on Animals video library, has
won the first annual Geraldine R. Dodge
Humane Ethics in Action Award, a prize of
$10,000 to be used as the winner sees fit.
Begun in 1990, Spay/USA made circa 1,500
referrals a year through 1993; taken over by
the North Shore Animal League in mid-1993
and now run as part of the NSAL-affiliated
Pet Savers Foundation, it made 8,640 refer-
rals, resulting in 14,002 neutering opera-
tions, during the first three months of 1995.
Dennis White, former head of the
American Humane Association animal pro-
tection division, has left, after 19 years, for
undisclosed personal reasons.

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Fund tries to save bison, mountain goats

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, the Fund
for Animals was scrambling to prevent the shooting of
from 80 to 150 bison who had wandered from Yellowstone
National Park into the Gallatin National Forest, north of
West Yellowstone, Montana. Montana state veterinarian
Clarence Siroky said state wardens would try to chase the
bison back into Yellowstone with helicopters, but would
shoot them to prevent the spread of brucellosis, a disease
causing stillbirths in cattle, if that tactic failed. Although
there is no evidence that bison can transmit brucellosis to
other species of cattle under natural conditions, and only a
small portion of the Yellowstone herd is believed to be
infected, Montana officials shot 420 bison who left the
park during the winter.

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Agriculture

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Twelve activists were arrested and
two hurt at Brightlingsea, England, on
April 18, as they failed to halt the export of
1,200 sheep to Belgium, following an April 12
ruling by the High Court that local authorities
had no right to ban live animal exports. The
ruling undid export bans won through a winter
of protest at all major British cattle ports.
Australia’s effort to resume sheep
sales to Saudi Arabia after a four-year hiatus
hit a snag on May 8 when Saudi inspectors
diverted the first cargo of 75,000 sheep to

Jordan because they didn’t think the sheep
were healthy enough to be unloaded at Jeddah.
A second ship carrying 30,000 sheep changed
destinations voluntarily. Australia sold up to
3.5 million sheep a year to Saudi Arabia before
1991, when the frequent arrival of diseased
sheep caused the Saudis to cut off the trade.

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The Cult of Animal Celebrity by Captain Paul Watson

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Within the animal protection movement, there are
two types of animals: those with individual names and those
without. The movement is accordingly split between advo-
cates for animals with names, and advocates for all the rest.
Free Keiko, free Lolita, free Corky, free Hondo.
These are wonderful and appealing ideals––but not all captive
cetaceans can or should be freed. Not all facilities holding
marine animals are the enemy. And the huge sums raised to
free a few individuals could be more positively directed
toward ending the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of
nameless whales, dolphins, and seals on the world’s oceans.
The amount of money raised for the cause of freeing
marine mammals with names may exceed $45 million a year,
from the thousands raised to aid local seals and dolphins in
distress to the $14 million estimated cost of someday, maybe,
freeing Keiko, the orca star of the film Free Willy!

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Editorial: Low-status primates & chicken-manure

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

In hindsight, the Oklahoma City bombing seems predictable, as a reversion of
low-status males to a form of basic animal behavior observed to varying degree among most
primates, as well as some canine, feline, avian, and fish societies:
Excluded from mating opportunities and other currency of the animal world, the
low-status males form a parallel troop of their own at the fringe of the tribe. Within that all-
male troop, obsessed by status, the low-ranking males establish and defend a superficially
rigid but fragile hierarchy of their own. Eventually, emboldened by numbers, they risk
raids on the main tribe, killing the offspring of low-status females who are not well-defend-
ed by the males of dominant and secondary rank. The vulnerability of the young is indeed
often how the low-status males determine which females may be accessible to them,
through a mating strategy amounting to psychologically coerced rape, if not overt rape.
The equation of often only momentary vulnerability with lower status is indicative
of the low-status males’ frequent inability to read more subtle social cues, which in turn
often explains why they are low-status males to begin with. Certainly there is no reason to
believe the victims in Oklahoma City were of lower status in our society in any respect
except in the eyes of their attackers, to whom their vulnerability to a truckload of refined
chicken manure signified expendability in the pursuit of power. Note that Henry Kissinger,
another enthusiastic bomber at the zenith of his own influence, once defined power as the
ultimate aphrodisiac. The only other indication of lesser status one could assign to the
Oklahoma City victims, with a certain sensitive reluctance, would be the need of many for
government-sponsored workplace daycare, since upper-rank families in our society enjoy
the luxury of being able to provide their children with in-home care. It is worth pointing out
in this regard that the daycare provided in the blast-shattered Alfred P. Murrah building was
considered to be of an elite quality, as workplace daycare goes.

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NGOs ask IWC to boost whale-watching, not whaling

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

DUBLIN, Ireland––There’s scant
chance the International Whaling
Commission will revise its 47-year-old char-
ter at the annual meeting commencing May
29, to formally promote regulated whale-
watching rather than regulating whaling, but
Cetacean Society International president
emeritus Robbins Barstow thought he might
as well ask.
With the Southern Oceans Whale
Sanctuary approved a year ago and little like-
lihood the technical obstacles to approving
quotas for renewed commercial whaling will
be cleared away, non-governmental organiza-
tions are in a position to seek further goals.
Japan and Norway, the only IWC member
nations with an expressed yen to go whaling,
have a choice of either playing by IWC rules
or pulling out and risking repercussions––
probably more with consumers than with gov-
ernments, but at a time when trade relations
for both are a bit shakier than a year ago. The
strength of the Japanese currency and the
Norwegian rejection of membership in the
European Community both work against their
ability to export, and both nations are
embroiled in international conflicts over fish-
ing rights, as well, worth far more to their
economies than whaling.

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CAN FEDS MAKE A CASE? Bombing compounds enforcement crisis

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Bracing for attack from budget-slashers and deregulators
in Congress, federal animal protection law enforcement took a deadly hit of a different kind
on April 19. Seven of the 167 people killed by the truck bomb that devasted the Alfred P.
Murrah building in Oklahoma City were USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
staffers, including Richard Cummins, 56, senior investigator assigned to the Midwest Stolen
Dog Task Force and a 30-year veteran of the department, who left behind a wife, two daugh-
ters, and a son. Three more APHIS staffers were seriously hurt. Two escaped with only
minor injuries, after being marooned on the seventh floor of the shaky ruins for most of the
day. Three staffers were out of the office when the bomb went off.
Having only 75 inspectors to cover more than 8,000 federally licensed facilities,
APHIS in a split second lost 10% of its staff––and also suffered extensive loss of case files.
As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, 26 days after the blast, APHIS officials in
Washington D.C. were still trying to piece together and reasign the Oklahoma City work-
load––and were still putting together strategy, as well, for the upcoming battle over the 1995

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