Category: Hunting & Fishing

Kenya, India fight to save elephants

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2000:

NAIROBI––The U.S. and Britain in mid-March remained noncommittal as to whether they would support motions to restore the full global ban on ivory sales at the 11th triennial meeting of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The motions are to be introduced by Kenya, hosting the April 10-20 meeting, and India.

Lobbying for the restored ban in Washington D.C. and London in early March, Kenya Wildlife Service director Nehemiah Rotich pointed toward an explosive worldwide rise in elephant poaching since 1997, when CITES allowed Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia to sell ivory seized from poachers and/or taken from elephants culled as “surplus” or for alleged crop-raiding.

Rotich and former KWS chief Richard Leakey, now heading the entire Kenya civil servie, believe the U.S. and Britain may favor applications by Tanzania and South Africa to join Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia in further ivory sales. Japan is the major buyer.

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Congo war kills apes

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2000:

At least three eastern lowland gorillas were killed in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Congo, during January 2000, reports the Primate Conservation and Welfare Society. This brought the gorilla toll within the par k to 151 within b arely two years, leaving no more than 90 survivors.

The total wild eastern lowland gorilla population is under 17,000––all of them in the Congo, no w center of the biggest war in African history.

The Georgia-based Gorilla Haven sanctuary charged that the Rwandan Patriotic Army and the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie aided the poaching, which has also virtually wiped out the Kahuzi-Biega elephants, by disarming the park rangers. The Gorilla Haven sources were apparently Germans who are assisting civilian refugees.

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Coyote killers

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

Seven members of the Paul and Lee-Ann Wright family, of Crawford, Colorado, whose dog was killed in March 1999 by a cyanide-firing M-44 “coyote-getter” placed on their property without their knowledge by a then-USDA Wildlife Services contract trapper, on February 2 filed a U.S. District Court suit seeking $150,000 in damages from Wildlife Services; an injunction to keep Wildlife Services off their land; and an order that Wildlife Services trappers must comply with Environmental Protection Agency rules restricting the use of poison.

A Colorado Department of Agriculture investigation found earlier that the trapper broke numerous safety rules.

The Wright case was filed just under a month after USDA Wildlife Services agents removed seven M-44s from a Christmas tree farm near Estancia, Oregon, where a cyanide bait placed by Wildlife Services trapper Mark Lytle on January 6 killed a four-year-old German shepherd named Bud. Bud had roamed only 100 yards from owner Dixie Tippett’s back door.

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Hunters, trappers hate democracy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

PHOENIX, DENVER, BOSTON, PORTLAND (Ore.)––Hunters and trappers rejoiced on February 4, after the Arizona House of Representatives passed a bill which would require citizen initiatives pertaining to wildlife to win a two-thirds majority in order to pass, while on the same day the Governor’s Regulatory Review Council struck down a September 1999 Arizona Game and Fish Commission ban on wildlife killing contests.

Hunters and trappers in 1998 secured passage of both a Utah state constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority on wildlife-related initiatives and a Michigan state constitutional amendment denying citizens any direct voice in changing wildlife management policy. So-called “hunters’ bills of rights” have also been adopted as amendments to the Minnesota and Alabama state constitutions.

The Arizona hunting and trapping lobby sees keeping activists from protecting wildlife by initiative as an essential first step toward reversing the 1994 Arizona leghold trap ban, which drew 58% voter support.

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Youth for Conservation desnares Tsavo

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Youth for Conservation, with the motto “Wildlife Our Heritage,” describes itself as an association of “post-school young persons regardless of race, creed, or gender who abound in conservation interest and wish to perpetuate it.”

Care For The Wild managing director Chris Jordan describes it as “A group of young lawyers, teachers, accountants, and programmers who are too well qualified and not well enough connected to find places right now in the Kenyan economy, who are too much attached to their love of the Kenyan environment to want to leave it and seek their fortune elsewhere. Many of them got their education abroad, and came back,” Jordan emphasizes. “These young people are the future of the nation. Rather than stagnate and wait for the economy to need them, they pitched in and put their talents to work.”

Jordan averes that the YfC members are some of the most dedicated people he’s met in conservation anywhere. For facilities they have only a closet-sized office at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust animal orphanage. Material assets consist of a second-or-third-hand computer, and a newly received grant of $1,000 from the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

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Hunting for the truth of animal and land deals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

BEIJING, NAIROBI––A pending application to sell tigers and a black leopard to a Chinese zoo which has fed live animals to carnivores, filed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by International Animal Exchange Inc., has in common with a dubious land deal involving the William Holden Wildlife Foundation in Kenya that in each case a Hunt brother, from Ferndale, Michigan, allegedly signed key documents.

And the brothers, longtime business partners, have often before been accused of sleazy dealings.

R. Brian Hunt applied on behalf of IAE to send the tigers and leopard to the Beijing Badaling Wild Animal Park, one of several major Chinese zoos named in ongoing international campaigns against live feeding.

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Saving Whales

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

ROME––Italy, France, and Monaco on November 25, 1999 jointly declared their Mediterranean territorial waters to be a whale sanctuary. All cetaceans are protected within the sanctuary, which extends from the Giens peninsula in France to the north of Sardinia and the south Tuscany coast in Italy.

Among the beneficiaries are about 2,000 fin whales plus 25,000 to 45,000 striped dolphins.

The Mediterranean whale sanctuary was created, after 10 years of negotiation, 40 days after the legislature of the German state of Schleswig Holstein voted to establish a whale sanctuary around the islands of Sylt and Amrum, within the Waddan Sea National Park. The Sylt-Amrum area is considered an important porpoise breeding habitat.

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Did She Read It?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

“Deer hunting kills birds,” an ANIMAL PEOPLE cover feature pointed out in March 1997, citing the loss of forest nesting habitat caused by deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania. ANIMAL PEOPLE explained that the Pennsylvania Game Commission annually sets hunting quotas to target bucks but spare does, to achieve rapid herd growth, and noted that the National Audubon Society, quick to blame cats for vanishing songbirds, had never fingered hunters’ demands for plentiful deer.

Pennsylvania Audubon Society executive director Cindy Dunn, however, sounded as if she’d read the article in a recent address to a deer management symposium in Media, Pennsylvania. Accusing Game Commission members of “getting their opinions from barroom biology,” Dunn blasted deer management policies favoring hunters who “would like to see a lot of deer in a short time,” and called hunting no solution to the loss of nesting habitat because, “You can shoot a lot of bucks without having any impact upon deer herd size.”

Sealers fight new Russian humane law

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

MOSCOW––Russian president Boris Yeltzin, 68, who resigned on New Year’s Day, apparently left to his successor Valdimir Putin, 47, the fate of a 22-page animal protection act approved 273-1 on December 1 by the State Duma (parliament).

Jen Tracy of the St. Petersburg Times reported on December 28 that the governors of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had appealed to Yeltzin to veto the bill because it would have prohibited sealing.

The anti-sealing clause was apparently included in the bill mainly to protect the small Nerpa seal of landlocked Lake Baikal. Hunters have killed 5,000 to 6,000 Nerpa seals per year since 1992, and the seals are reportedly in a steep population decline.

Little is known of Putin’s views about animals. His wife and two daughters keep a pet poodle.

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