RELIGION & ANIMALS

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.

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.”

Whale-watching

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

University of Queensland PhD. candidate Ilze
Brieze reported in late October, after a year of study, that the
dolphins of Moreton Bay, off Brisbane, Australia, and at the
Australian Sea World are behaviorally unaffected by human
contact, even though the bottlenose dolphins at Sea World
appear to enjoy swimming with humans and being hand-fed.
Studies by other researchers have indicated that the wild dolphins
who interact with humans at Monkey Mia in western
Australia may have become excessively dependent upon handfeeding,
and that one result is dolphin mothers who so fixate
on humans that they neglect their infants. Studying the same
Moreton Bay dolphin population as Brieze, Mark Orams of
Massey University joined her in warning that even when there
are not obvious ill effects from contact, wild dolphins should

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.”

Young wants to boogie on ESA

January 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Renewing efforts
to gut the Endangered Species Act, House of
Representatives Resource Committee chair Don
Young (R-Alaska) “will want to move an ESA bill
‘as early as possible’ in the 105th Congress because
the issue would be ‘too politicized’ in 1998,” Roger
Featherstone of Defenders of Wildlife advised in the
November 28 edition of GreenLines, an online daily
newsletter, quoting an unnamed Republican aide.
“On the Senate side,” Featherstone continued, “the
ESA is ‘absolutely a top priority’ for Senator Dirk
Kempthorne of the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction.”
Kempthorne also offered attempts to dismantle
the ESA in the 104th Congress.

BOOKS: The Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates & The Great Apes: Our Face in Nature’s Mirror

December 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

The Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates
by Noel Rowe
Foreword by Jane Goodall. Introduction by Russell Mittermeier.
Pogonias Press (163 Town Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937-5000), 1996.
263 pages, paperback, $64.95 including postage from publisher.

The Great Apes: Our Face in Nature’s Mirror
by Michael Leach
Blandford, c/o Sterling Publishing Co. (387 Park Ave. South, New York, NY
10016-8810), 1996.
160 pages, paperback, $29.95.

Don’t judge these two books by
their covers. At a glance, The Pictorial
Guide to the Living Primates, with a lifesized
chimpanzee face on the cover, and The Great
A p e s, with a lifesized orangutan, would
appear to be head-to-head competitors in the
Christmas coffee-table book market––and
indeed they might be, but in each case the
physical format is misleading, their content
doesn’t even overlap to any noteworthy
degree, and if you’re trying to choose
between the two, choose both.

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