Trying to save the Florida Keys

March 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:

TALLAHASSEE––Florida governor Lawton
Chiles on January 28 approved a plan to restrict fishing and
keep large ships out of the 2,800-square-mile Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary, created by Congress in 1990 but
stalled in debate over management plans ever since. The
agreement to ban fishing in 19 specific sensitive areas completed
a pact that also includes restrictions on reckless boating,
protection of the sea grass beds that furnish habitat to
manatees, and the funding of research to find out why coral
around the Keys, forming the only living coral reef in the
Northern Hemisphere, is fast dying off.

CANADA’S NOT THE THIRD WORLD, EH?

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

VANCOUVER––Animal advocates in Canada often
liken the Canadian animal protection situation to that of the
Third World, noting scarce funding, weak laws, low public
awareness, and heavy government involvement in animal use
industries such as fur, sealing, and the production of Premarin,
based on pregnant mares’ urine.
Yet the Canadian humane dilemma is distinctly First
World, in that disagreements as to definitions of “humane” are
more often at issue than the basic idea that animals should be
treated humanely–– whatever that is.

A kinder, gentler seal hunt

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

by Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Since 1993, the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society has
tried to work with the Canadian
Department of Fisheries and Oceans
to create an industry using naturally
molted baby harp seal hairs.
After four years of
research, we have discovered and
demonstrated the following results:
1. Molting hairs from harp
seals can be brushed or plucked from
three-week-old seals without causing
injury or trauma to the animals. This
observation is backed up by Dr.
David Lavigne of the University of
Guelph––one of the world’s foremost
experts on harp seals.

Longlines and Gore

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

HONOLULU––If allegations
issued by former U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service special agent Carroll E. Cox stand
up, senior officials of the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service have for at least six years
buried evidence of illegal threats to endangered
species on a scale that if exposed
could rattle trade relations, the primacy of
the Nature Conservancy in Western Pacific
conservation projects, and even the office
of U.S. vice president Albert Gore.
If Cox is lying, he says, “I’m a
zero, and my career is over. I’ll never work
in the wildlife or law enforcement fields
again, or any other field where people care
if you’re telling the truth.”

CITES experts have a leak on Zimbabwean elephant ivory strategy

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

The possibility of resumed ivory trading has meanwhile
demonstrably stimulated poaching, say Clark and David
Barritt, African director of the International Fund for Animal
Welfare. Barritt recently visited the scene of the September
massacre of 250 elephants near the Congolese border with
Gabon. “The poachers told the local inhabitants, whom they
hired, that it was all right to kill the elephants,” Barritt
explained to Inigo Gimore of the London Times, “because next
year the trade in ivory is going to be resumed legally.”
Indeed, the trade never stopped. “The preliminary
report of the CITES Panel of Experts,” FoA president Priscilla
Feral wrote on December 6 to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
chief of management authority Kenneth Stansell, “claims that
there is evidence that Zimbabwe has been engaged in large volume
commercial export of raw, worked, and semi-worked
ivory to eight countries, including the United States. Other
countries identified as having imported commercial volumes of
elephant ivory from Zimbabwe are Japan, China, Thailand,
Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Africa.
FoA is alarmed,” Feral said, “especially in light of significant
U.S. assistance to Zimbabwe’s elephant conservation programs,
as well as in light of persistent Zimbabwean claims of being
able to exercise vigorous control over the ivory trade.”

SIRENIANS

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Fewer than 2,000 dugongs persist along the
Australian east coast and southern Great Barrier Reef, as
numbers have crashed from 50% to 80% in recent years,
partly due to storms and coastal development which have
devastated the sea grass that Australian dugongs depend on
for food, but to greater extent as the result of gillnetting,
which accounted for 15 of 30 recent dugong deaths at Great
Barrier Reef Marine Park, according to Helene Marsh of
James Cook University. Shark nets alone caught 654
dugongs off central Queensland in 1995, along with 651 dolphins
and 4,059 sea turtles. Only 45 dugongs, 31 dolphins,
and 1,420 turtles survived. Nine newly established protection
zones off Queensland may not help, warns North Queensland
Conservation Council coordinator Jeremy Tager. “The reality
is, there is no new protection from human threats to
dugnongs in these areas,” he said.” Gill netting, hunting,
coastal development, vessel traffic, and even the use of
explosives will continue in the proposed protection areas.”

Seals, sea otters, sea lions

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Junior home office minister Tom Sackville told
the British House of Commons on November 30 that grey
seals and common seals along the eastern coast of Britain
from New Haven, East Sussex to the Scots border will
receive another three years of protection from any form of
killing, injuring, or capturing, following the December 19
expiry of the latest in a series of three-year protective orders
first issued in 1988. An outbreak of a disease believed to be
closely related to canine distemper cut the eastern coast seal
population from 3,900 in early 1988 to 1,551 by 1991. Since
then, seal numbers are up to 2,758, but that’s still just 70% of
the count formerly sustained.

Whaling politics heat up

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

NEAH BAY, Washington––Easily winning the fall
band election––as anticipated––the pro-whaling faction of the
Makah tribe moved immediately to form a 20-member commission
to draft a whaling charter and management policy.
The Makah in June 1996 withdrew an application for
an International Whaling Commission “aboriginal subsistence”
quota of up to five grey whales, but the would-be whalers, led
by logger and fisher Dan Greene, has announced intent to get a
quota this year––and, some hint, to go whaling whether or not
the IWC approves.
Although the Makah have not been whaling in 72
years, Greene et al claim the 19th century treaty that established
the Neah Bay reservation also guaranteed them whaling
rights in perpetuity. The Bill Clinton administration supports
that interpretation.

CETACEANS

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Halfway through a two-year investigation of the
possible impact on marine mammals of the ATOC low-frequency
sound experiments, used to measure global warming,
University of California marine biologist Dan Costa says no
harm is apparent. “The animals are not abandoning the study
site,” explained Costa. “We’re finding whales and lots of dolphins
and lots of seals. The abundance has not changed, so
there’s no dramatic effect.”

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