Editorial: Them bones, them bones

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Twenty-four years ago, toward the end of an active scientific career that spanned
half a century, the late Konrad Lorenz was honored with the Nobel Prize for Physiology
and Medicine, in recognition of his development of the science of ethology.
Ethology is studying how animals work, including humans, by studying behavior.
Lorenz formed important theories about human marriage and parenting, later affirmed
by direct observation of human subjects, through studying greylag geese. Ethology encompasses
social science, including sociology and psychology, and physical science, from
anatomy to zoology, but most essentially, ethology applies ecological principles to the
study of individual species. Unlke the disciplines of science developed by taking things
apart, which attempt to segregate, categorize, and define, ethology recognizes that living
beings act and evolve in continuous response to ever-changing conditions. Instead of asking,
“What is this part?”, the ethologist asks “How does this action relate to the whole?”
That to understand animals we should study them in their totality doesn’t sound as
if it should have taken a Nobel Prize winner to realize, yet before Lorenz, most investigations
of natural history were, as he put it, exercises in necrology, the study of death.

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BOOKS: Cats Are Not Peas

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Cats Are Not Peas: A CALICO HISTORY OF GENETICS
by Laura Gould
Copernicus (c/o Springer-Verlag, 175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010), 1996.
228 pages, hardback, $22.00.

Are there male calico cats, despite
old wives’ tales to the contrary? Why do cats
seem to randomly differ from their presumed
parents? Why do even black cats often bear
dim tabby stripes, at least as kittens?
Laura Gould answers these questions
and many more as she tries to trace the
genetic circumstances that resulted in her
George, a rare male calico cat, who swaggers
through the pages with her, destroying
any air of academic exclusiity.

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RELIGION & ANIMALS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Brigitte Bardot, 62, renowned as a film
star but working fulltime for more than twice as long
in animal protection, went to trial on December 18
for allegedly inciting ethnic bias by attacking amateur
sheep slaughter by Moslem immigrants to France in
commemoration of Eid al-Adha, the holiday marking
the end of the month in which pilgrimages are made
to Mecca. Chief defense witness is expected to be
Leila El Fourgi, president of the Tunisia SPA.
“Perhaps the spirit of God that breathed
forth life into the Earth was a lower animal,”
Cardinal John O’Connor told the devout in a
November 24 sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in
New York City, following up on Pope John Paul II’s
October declaration that the theory of evolution is
“more than just a hypothesis.” Both the Pope and the
Cardinal stopped short, however, of suggesting that
animals share with humans the dimensions of a soul.

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Tales from the cryptozoologists

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Louisiana State University researcher
Bruce Whitney in the November edition of The
Wilson Bulletin, an ornithological journal,
announced the identification of a previously
unknown bird species, the pink-legged graveteiro,
an acrobatic insectivore first noticed in November
1994. Unlike other birds found recently in Brazil,
the pink-legged graveteiro turned up not in the
Amazon rainforest, but rather in the treetops above
a major highway. As the pink-legged graveteiro
normally doesn’t descend to the ground and apparently
dwells only over cocoa plantations, a disturbed
if rich habitat, it had escaped notice despite
apparently dwelling in close proximity to humans
for as long as 300 years. European settlers brought
cocoa to Brazil in 1746. Whitney and collegues
counted 131 of the birds’ nests, found at 53 different
sites. The pink-legged graveteiro belongs to
the 230-odd-member ovenbird family, a group
who build domed nests of hardened clay and saliva.
Thai biologist Paiboon Naiyaner in late
November announced his discovery of a previously
unidentified “elegant mountain crab.” The tiny
nocturnal freshwater crab is colored brown, blue,
white, red, and purple.
Ireland is the only member of the
European Union which has not yet ratified the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species, but that may soon be rectified, under
E.U. pressure, with the adoption of a long-awaited
Irish endangered species law. The E.U. has also
asked Britain, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and
Italy to expedite their pace of identifying critical
habitat for endangered species.
Zoologist Mike Tyler, of Adelaide
U n i v e r s i t y, told the Australia/New Zealand
Academy of Science on October 3 that heroic
efforts to save endangered species may be misguided
until the full inventory of species is known. “I
don’t think that we can make any rational decisions
or value judgements about what should be kept and
what shouldn’t until the cataloguing process is a
good deal farther along,” Tyler argued. Tyler and
colleagues have identified 38 new frog species in
northwestern Australia since 1974, but estimate
that at the present pace, fully cataloguing
Australian wildlife could take 1,000 more years.
The staff of the Field Museum in
Chicago may lead the world in discovering previously
unidentified mammal species, led by Philip
Hershkovitz, 87, who is credited with finding 75
species over the past half century in South
America––including one in Brazil just four years
ago. Among Hershkovitz’ discoveries are primates,
marsupials, rodents, and a tapir.
Lawrence Heany has found 13 new species since
finding his first, a yellow-spotted Philippine bat,
in 1981. Bruce Patterson claimed a shrew opossum
in Ecuador, Ronald Pine identified a sucker-footed
bat in Peru, and Bill Stanley and Julian Kerbis discovered
new shrew species in Africa. Mammal
discoveries typically lead to finding unique insect
parasites, as well. The Field team estimates that
while about 1.4 million species of plants, animals,
and microorganisms are now formally known to
science, from 10 million to 100 million remain to
be identified. Large species turn up these days
only in the most remote parts of Asia, the thickest
rainforest, or the ocean depths––but of the 459
mammal species discovered between the 1982 and
1992 editions of Mammal Species of the World,
says Patterson, about two-thirds were found in
museums and DNA laboratories, often by more
closely inspecting specimens collected decades or
even centuries ago. The down side of finding new
animals, says Heany, is that they “are often on the
verge of extinction just as they are discovered.”
Canadian environment Minister
Sergio Marchi on November 1 introduced a proposed
national endangered species act, in hopes of
having it in place by spring––which would require
balancing competing provincial interests and opposition
from resource-based industries, including
hunting, fishing, mining, and trapping. Canadian
species are now protected––if at all––one by one,
province by province. Federal protection is extended
only to species on the CITES Appendixes I and
II, or covered by treaty with the United States.
As initially tabled, the Marchi bill provides fines
of up to $1 million plus five years imprisonment
for killing, capturing, or selling threatened
species, yet does not even try to designate or protect
critical habitat, as that would be generally
taken as encroaching on a provincial prerogative.
The Species Survival
Commission of the World Conservation
U n i o n, which began the first global
endangered species list in 1960 with a
card file on 34 animals, in October published
a new edition of its now authoritative
Red List, using new criteria for
assessing endangerment, supplied by
more than 7,000 scientists––and reported
that 1,096 mammals and 1,108 birds are
either threatened or endangered, about
25% of the known mammal species and
11% of the known bird species. The complete
Red List also includes 253 reptiles
(20%), 124 amphibians (25%), 734 fish
(34%), and 1,891 invertebrates, with the
cautionary note that the status of most of
the animals in these taxonomic groups has
not been thoroughly studied. The actual
rate of endangerment may therefore be
either higher or lower. Indonesia, with
128 threatened mammal species, and
India and China, with 75 each, have the
most mammals at risk, while Indonesia,
Brazil, and China have the most birds at
risk: 104, 103, and 90. Often particular
members of a taxonomic group are in desperate
trouble while others are thriving.
Of the primates, for instance, about half
are on the Red List, but humans are obviously
abundant, and of the 18 species of
hooved mammals, 11 are at risk but
domestic cattle and horses are thriving. In
addition, some of the taxonomic groups
with the most species at risk are as a
whole quite healthy––but happen to be
exceptionally diverse, e.g. rodents,
including 330 species at risk; bats, with
231 species at risk; and shrews and
moles, with 152 species at risk. The
World Conservation Union was formerly
known as the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature.

A change in attitude by Frank W. Dobbs

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Several rather exciting recent
events indicate that the scientific community
is beginning to take the problems
of animal experimentation, both
ethical and scientific, more seriously.
The first was the 1995 publication
by the Medical Research
Modernization Committee of a collection
of papers called Aping Science,
critiquing the use of living primates in
experiments aimed at improving human
health. The MRMC is an organization
that publishes articles concerning various
kinds of medical progress, but in
particular critiques investigations of socalled
animal models and their role in
learning about the cure and prevention
of human disease.

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DIET & HEALTH

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Health research
Fears that drinking cow’s milk
can trigger juvenile diabetes in genetically
susceptible children rekindled in October after
Dr. Paul Pozzilli of the Department of
Diabetes and Metabolism at St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital in London and colleagues at
the University of Rome explained in The
Lancet , the journal of the British Medical
Association, how certain proteins in cow’s
milk can stimulate an immature human
immune system to produce antibodies that
then attack similar proteins in the victim’s
own pancreatic cells. European Commissionsponsored
research showed in June that bottlefed
babies are twice as likely as breast-fed
babies to get diabetes. Jill Norris of the
University of Colorado Health Science Center
in Denver, argued in the August 27 edition of
the Journal of the American Medical
Association that the previous research was
weak––but Hans-Michael Dosch, M.D., of
the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto,
who drew attention to a possible link between
cow’s milk and diabetes in 1992, argues that
the association is now “as strong as the association
between cigarette smoking and cancer.”

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Critics go for broke against cruel research

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1996:

BOULDER, Colorado––Now under funding
review by the National Institutes of Health, University of
Colorado biomedical researcher Mark Laudenslager’s $3 million
study of “Behavioral and Physiological Consequences of
Loss” in 120 young macaques went virtually unnoticed for
almost 12 years. But the terms “maternal deprivation,” and
“AIDS” suggest that the Laudenslager study may never be
obscure again.
Explains Laudenslager, “What we’re trying to
determine is, all things being equal, why is one person at a
greater risk from AIDS than another? Why does one HIVpositive
person die after six months, as opposed to one who’s
living 15 years later?” His hypothesis is that maternal deprivation
may inhibit full development of the immune system,
making the affected children more vulnerable to AIDS and
other diseases later in life.

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Attack of the gene splicers wins hearts and minds

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1996:

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.––With 80
Britons a day dying from lack of human hearts,
lungs, livers, and kidneys suitable for transplant,
Imutran Ltd. had no trouble finding 25
seriously ill volunteers in September to participate
in the first trial of organs grown in genetically
engineered pigs specifically for transplant
into humans. Subject to approval by
seven different governmental bureaus, the
experimental xenographs will be conducted at
the earliest opportunity.
Immunologist David White and
transplant surgeon John Wallwork told media
that the Imutran approach is, as London
Sunday Times medical correspondent Lois
Rogers put it, “to trick the human immune
system into tolerating animal organs. The system
is naturally programmed to mount a massive
attack to kill implanted foreign tissue
within minutes. Organs from the pigs specially
bred by the company have the same protective
proteins on their surfaces as tissue within
the human body––a mechanism designed to
stop the body from attacking itself.”

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Tales from the Cryptozoologists

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1996:

Hym Ebedes of the Onderstepoort
Veterinary Institute near Pretoria, South
Africa, on July 13 reported his discovery of
Barbary lions––a species believed to have
been extinct––at an obscure zoo in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, where their pride has apparently
lived since 1974. Descendants of the
mascots of former Ethiopian emperor Haile
Selassie, who styled himself The Lion of
Judah, the 11 males have long black manes
that sweep under their bellies. The females
resemble other African lions. “Over the past
35 years I have seen hundreds of wild lions,”
Ebedes said, “but I have never seen anything
so majestic and magnificent. The sight of a
black-maned lion pacing around his cage had
an indescribable spine-chilling effect on me.

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