Category: Europe

Merry old England

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

The Royal SPCA in April honored Josie Russell, 12, sole survivor of a hammer assault several years ago that killed her mother and sister, for keeping a five-day vigil over three sheep who were trapped on a ledge at a slate quarry last October near her home in Caernarfon, North Wales. Russell and her friend H a z e l M c W h i r t e r spotted the sheep, and her father Shaun Russell was eventually persuaded to call the RSPCA. Rescuing the sheep from the 100- foot-high ledge in slings took about five hours.

The pro-foxhunting Countryside A l l i a n c e embarrassed the Royal SPCA in early May by hiring away former RSPCA London branch development officer Angela Egan––who reportedly brought with her memos purportedly from senior RSPCA executives, ordering her to delay processing membership applications from people who also belong to the Countryside Alliance and/or Countryside Welfare for Animals Group. The Royal SPCA has been fighting attempted hostile takeovers led by foxhunters for about four years.

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Cerebral stuff from U.K.

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Internet anti-pornography filtering software used by U.S. schools and libraries is reportedly steering “hits” away from , the wildlife diary site of British artist Richard Bell, because his topics include blue tits, a pair of great tits, and “a magnificent cock pheasant.” All are birdspecies names which are at least as well-known worldwide as the other uses of the words, known mainly to Americans.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has discontinued the BBC Vegetarian Good Food magazine, founded in 1992. The magazine reportedly surged in popularity when the 1996 bovine spongiform encephalopathy panic brought a rapid decline of beef consumption, but lost circulation and advertising in recent years when many hasty converts to vegetarianism returned to their

British fight for bird habitat

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

LONDON––English Nature, entrusted with protecting endangered species in England, has hung hundreds of hawk silhouettes over 80 third-floor windows at its headquarters, hoping to deter smaller birds from swooping into the “trees” they see reflected in the glass.

Protected species including firecrests, robins, blue tits, blackbirds, kingfishers, and a pallas’s warbler had all recently been killed there. The pallas’s warbler, native to Siberia, was a species so rare it had never previously been seen by any of the 250-member English Nature staff.

“It’s not the shape that matters,” spokesperson Sue Ellis told Jonathan Theobald and Paul Brown of The Guardian. “It has more to do with breaking up the reflective surface. The building is going to look very odd, but it will give the public some idea of what we are trying to do. One of the messages we’d like to send out is the need for better-designed buildings.”

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WHAT SORT OF DIET MAKES PEOPLE GO BLIND?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

BOSTON, PARIS, WASHINGTON D.C.––A single atypical case of a nutritionally deficient French vegan suffering blindness hit the newswires and radio talk shows bigtime on March 23, when described by three Paris doctors in a letter published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

For a week the report of the blind vegan upstaged news of contaminated meat recalls and scientific findings about the risks of eating meat.

Normalcy returned in April, as National Cancer Institute researchers warned the annual conference of the American Association for Cancer Research that a study of 900 women, including 300 with breast cancer, suggests that those who eat large amounts of charred and grilled meat had twice the risk of developing breast cancer as those who seldom or rarely eat charred or grilled meat.

“Normalcy,” over the past 40 years, is that the medical news about meat-eating is overwhelmingly bad. It appears prominently in The New York Times. But hometown newspapers, heavily dependent upon supermarket advertising, typically bury the information. And most Americans go right on eating as before, on average.

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Would Charles rather go naked than quit hunting?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

LONDON––Prince Charles of Britain has reportedly contributed a recipe for artichoke mousse to a cookbook to be published by the Beaufort Hunt.

“The book, called In The Buff, will also contain pictures of hunt members in a state of undress,” said The Daily Telegraph.

The display of support for fox hunting was disclosed on April 8, one day after the death in Parliament of private member Ken Livingstone’s bill to ban fox hunting meant that yet another year will pass before Prime Minister Tony Blair moves––if he ever does––to fulfill a 1996 pledge to implement such a ban.

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The rite stuff

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2000:

VATICAN CITY, PRETORIA, BANGALORE, PARIS, SINGAPORE, ISTANBUL––Pope John Paul II on March 12 asked forgiveness from God for the sins of Roman Catholics through the ages, mentioning offenses against Jews, ethnic minorities, women, and children.

The Roman Catholic Church has persecuted animals too, in all the same ways, and in many of the same places and times. But the closest the Pope came to mentioning animals in his prayer was a brief allusion to “those who abuse the promise of biotechnology.”

The Pope did not say whether this included the researchers of Cattletech Ltd., a British firm which has injected hormones from the urine of menopausal Italian nuns into milk cows in order to increase the frequency with which they produce multiple transplantable embryos. The idea is to produce more super-producing cows, faster, to replace the four million cattle Britain has killed in the national effort to stop the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease).

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New South Wales to set world precedent by vaccinating instead of killing farm disease hosts

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2000:

LONDON, U.K.; SYDNEY, Australia––Marksmen with silencer-equipped rifles on March 3 killed the entire 215-member rhesus macaque colony at the Wobern Safari Park in central England.

The massacre came at management request and expense, after health officials found that the macaques carried simian herpes B virus––harmless to the colony, but potentially lethal to humans.

It was business as usual to veterinary and agricultural public health specialists.

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BACK IN THE (FORMER) USSR

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

MOSCOW, WASHINGTON D.C.– – Kremlin-watchers wondered, when former KGB chief Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltzin as president of Russia, if Putin could develop the political skills of democracy.

They need not have worried. Putin showed on his third day in office that he can craft an image of standing for one thing while doing the other just as well as any American counterpart.

Putin on January 5 vetoed an animal protection bill which had cleared the Russian parliament 273-1, but was opposed by sealers because it would have prohibited seal-killing in order to save the diminutive and fast-vanishing Nerpa seal of landlocked Lake Baikal.

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Care For The Wild grows into the mission

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

RUSPER, West Sussex, U.K. ––It would be hard to be more active in international wildlife protection than Care For The Wild on a comparable budget––or to be more obscure, even with offices in seven nations on four continents.

None of the Care For The Wild expenditure of $1.3 million a year goes for show, or for office comfort. The headquarters in retired veterinarian and chairperson William Jordan’s former animal hospital can barely be seen from the street. Most of the staff occupy a converted stable. William Jordan himself and other executives share closet-sized rooms in the downstairs of his Tudor house.

Care For The Wild is perhaps the biggest employer near the crossroads of Rusper, a village whose other landmarks are a medieval church and two 400-yearold pubs. But Rusper, on the outer edge of the London sprawl, isn’t really near anywhere. It is still rural enough, in fact, that abundant rabbits might be prey for a feral leopard or puma repeatedly seen in the neighborhood.

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