Guest column: New approach needed in foreign outreach by Pat Kyriacou

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

It has been interesting to watch ANIMAL PEOPLE expand your international focus, analysing what you find, questioning the status quo, speaking out against the animal welfare establishment when necessary.

I too have been observing some of the large animal welfare organisations as they expand their activities abroad. Here in Cyprus, in the southeast Mediterranean, primarily British organisations have become involved. This is probably because Cyprus is a former British colony. Cyprus hosts millions of British tourists, plus thousands of resident British retirees, who often contact large British organisations when they are concerned about animal abuse.

It is interesting to contrast the approaches taken to animal advocacy in developing countries by ANIMAL PEOPLE and some of these large British organisations.

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Fighting fur on the air

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

NEW YORK – – U . S . retail fur sales soared 30% 1999, says the Fur Information Council.

Receipts for the year rose to $1.57 billion––the most since 1988, when sales peaked at $1.85 billion. Adjusting for inflation, however, 1999 sales came to only 60% of the 1988 figure.

Other economic indicators hint that the retail surge may have resulted chiefly from heavy discounting to dump a fur glut caused by the 1998 devaluation of the Russian ruble, which brought the collapse of Russian demand for imported pelts.

Illinois wild fur exports to Russia, for instance, fell from $3 million worth in the winter of 1996-1997 to just $1 million worth in 1998-1999.

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PETsMART dumps British subsidiary

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Phoenix––Describing a 92-store British subsidiary, Pet City, as “an asset that has not met our performance expectations,” PETsMART president Philip L. Francis on December 15 announced that it had been sold––at a substantial loss––to the British firm Pets At Home.

The deal was reportedly already in negotiation when the British TV program Weekend Watchdog on December 3 interviewed four former PETsMART/Pet City employees who described senior staff bludgeoning unsold hamsters and rabbits at stores in Fife, East Anglia, and Surrey.

PETsMART marketing director Simon Blower responded to the content of the broadcast a day before it actually aired by setting up “an external advisory panel, made up of independent consultants, veterinarians, and educators” to do a “comprehensive review” of Pet City animal care.

“We are absolutely determined to make whatever changes may be necessary to get things right in all our stores,” Blower said.

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Editorial: Pepsi Gets the Point

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

The statement Pepsi-Cola gave to Garo Alexanian of the Companion Animal Network in late November 1999 was terse, to the point, and just what Steve Hindi of SHARK had demanded from Pepsi since June 1998:

“Pepsi-Cola Company does not sponsor or support bullfighting, nor do we endorse any kind of animal cruelty. Our Mexico City office has told us that Pepsi advertising is in the process of being removed from arenas in Mexico. And in the next few weeks, we will be sending officials from Pepsi headquarters to verify their progress.”

Hindi and SHARK are already verifying Pepsi progress. They verified first that Pepsi signs were removed from the Puebla bull ring, where Hindi took much of his graphic undercover video footage of bulls being tortured in front of Pepsi logos. Vendors in Pepsi aprons are still prominent, selling drinks of all sorts in Pepsi cups, but the signs––visible in every televised bullfight––have disappeared.

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Victories over vivisection

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Now mainly of symbolic importance, a victory sought by animal defenders since 1948 came quietly in early December when University of Minnesota Duluth School of Medicine dean Rick Ziegler, M.D., announced that his institution would no longer use dogs and cats from the Duluth Animal Shelter.

Associate professor of physiology Edwin Haller, M.D., told Bob Linneman of the Duluth News-Tribune that using animals of unknown genetic and medical history is no longer cost-effective. The university had used only two dogs in 1999. Use of shelter animals had fallen every year since 1993.

Pound seizure appeared to be ending where it began, when 52 years ago the Minnesota legislature rushed through the first of many state laws requiring animal shelters to allow laboratories to “adopt” dogs and cats for use in testing, teaching, and experimentation. Debate over compliance split the American Humane Association and American SPCA, leading to the formation of the Animal Welfare Institute (1952) and Humane Society of the U.S. (1954) as breakaway would-be rivals.

Pound seizure made dogcatching for resale to labs a growth industry, documented and exposed first in Minnesota by the late Lucille Aaron Moses. Also in Minnesota, seven years later, Aaron Moses and a Life magazine reporter photographed the 1966 expose of the then booming stolen dog traffic that led to the passage later that year of the forerunner to today’s Animal Welfare Act.

As the animal rights movement emerged, demand for random source dogs and cats declined. Thirteen states repealed pound seizure laws modeled on the Minnesota statute between 1978 and 1987. Minnesota, the first state where pound seizure was practiced, was also among the last.

American Anti-Vivisection Society executive director Tina Nelson on December 24 celebrated an equally quiet victory that may nonetheless prevent more animal suffering than any other single achievement of AAVS, founded in 1881.

“Responding to two years of legal battles,” Nelson explained, “the National Institutes of Health has announced that federally funded researchers will be directed to shift to in vitro methods of producing monoclonal antibodies except in limited circumstances. This policy change has the potential to save up to one million animals every year.”

An earlier AAVS release explained that “Monoclonal antibodies are used in essentially every field of human and veterinary research, and in diagnosing and treating many cancers, bacterial and viral infections, and other ailments.”

Commented John McArdle, director of the AAVS subsidiary Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, “U.S. researchers are finally joining their European colleagues in ending one of the most painful and unnecessary procedures routinely carried out on laboratory animals.”

Britain and many European nations either phased out or completely banned monoclonal antibody production in live animals some years ago.

The AAVS victory came ten weeks after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ended a five-month series of protests at appearances by vice president and presidential candidate Albert Gore, following distribution of a letter from the Environmental Protection Agency to 900 companies which are to participate in the High Production Volume chemical safety testing program announced by Gore on Earth Day 1998.

The HPV program as originally structured might have used as many as 1.3 million animals to test about 2,800 widely used industrial chemicals.

The EPA letter amended the HPV protocol by stipulating that animal testing should not be done if validated non-animal alternative tests are available; LD50 tests which were requested for some chemicals will not be done for two years, while a non-animal test is studied as a possible replacement; the Department of Health and Human Services is to spend $4.5 million and the EPA $500,000 to develop non-animal tests; the EPA will accept data from international chemical safety databases which it previously overlooked; the EPA will accept data on genetic toxicity generated by a non-animal test; tests that would have used up to 300 birds each were scrapped; and other changes of approach will be used to minimize animal use.

PETA estimated that the amendments to the HPV protocol would save about 800,000 animals.

Overseas, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection on November 1 announced that it had “successfully challenged the U.K. government on the issue of licenses to perform the LD50 test.” This meant, the BUAV continued, that the Home Office is “planning to review or amend all licenses issued after September 1998,” when European Union research restrictions were adopted into British law, “and to further review all licenses for skin corrosivity and photo-irritation tests. This is in effect an LD50 [ a n d Draize skin irritancy test] b a n , ” BUAV said, “as the government has admitted that issuing further licenses would contravene the law.”

But Sunday Times p o l i t ical editor Michael Prescott proved to be misinformed when he opened his December 12 column by declaring that the British government “is to stop scientific experiments on puppies and dogs.”

Corrected the Home Office, “The Breeding and Sale of Dogs (Welfare) Act 1999, which received Royal Assent in July and will come into force in the New Year, will tighten controls over commercial breeding establishments supplying dogs for the pet trade. Establishments breeding animals for laboratory use will be exempt from this law.”

Another potential disappointment came from Israel on December 12, where minister of education Yossi Sarid proclaimed a ban on animal experiments in schools. Similar bans have been proclaimed before without ever being enforced.

What 35 bus-riding activists did and didn’t do on their summer vacation

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The 1999
Primate Freedom Tour ended quietly on
September 4, in cold rain resulting from
Hurricane Dennis. About 200 people attended a
rally, and three activists were arrested for
unfurling a banner from scaffolding set up by a
repair crew at the Washington Monument.
Starting from the Washington
Regional Primate Research Center in Seattle on
June 1, the Freedom Tour won more media
attention to primates in laboratories than any
other event or campaign since 1985, when the
Animal Welfare Act was amended to require
labs to provide for the “psychological wellbeing”
of dogs and primates.

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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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PETA makes animal testing Albert Gore’s albatross

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

 

WASHINGTON D.C.––People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals served
notice in July that Vice President Albert
Gore’s support of the Environmental
Protection Agency’s High Production Volume
Challenge chemical safety testing program will
be an issue in the 2000 presidential campaign––whether
he likes it or not.
In early July, PETA opened an
office in Manchester, New Hampshire, the
city where the most voters will cast ballots in
the first 2000 primary election. Covering the
windows with posters linking Gore to animal
testing, PETA was accused of violating the
office lease by property manager Patrick
Vatalaro, who had the posters removed.

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CAMPAIGNS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

The Schad Foundation and IFAW
on May 12 announced that they will donate
$200,000 for nonlethal bear control in northern
Ontario. Community bear control was formerly
done by 18 volunteer trappers associated
with North Bay Fur Harvesters Auction
I n c., who withdrew their services in April
after Ontario banned spring bear hunting.
Humane Society of Canada executive
director Michael O’Sullivan said on May
24 that HSC “is prepared to devote $1 million
to assist with the funding, expertise, and
delivery needed to incorporate” a dogbite prevention
curriculum “into mainstream public
education initiatives and school curricula in
every community across Canada,” providing
HSC is allowed to direct the campaign.
O’Sullivan also said he would ask each
province to match the HSC commitment.

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