Category: Wild Animals

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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Parrots, elephants, and crocodiles

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

JOHANNESBURG, HARARE, NAIROBI, DAR ES SALAAM––Already embarrassed by disclosure of a surge in ivory poaching associated with alleged wildlife department mismangement, the Zimbabwean government was rattled again in mid-January when the Zimbabwe Standard n e w s p a p e r disclosed that in November 1999 the Zimbabwe SPCA had asked the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to help the SPCA stop alleged smuggling of wild-caught African gray parrots by senior military officers.

The SPCA said the parrots were being hauled by the hundred via cargo aircraft chartered to fly troops and supplies to duty stations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. About 13,000 Zimbabwean soldiers are stationed in the Congo. “It is almost impossible for the SPCA to get into the air base because of military security,” the SPCA complained.

Zimbabwean military spokesperson Colonel Chancellor Diye claimed that no traffic in parrots was taking place.

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WILDLIFE IN THE CAPITOLS

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

Prairie dogs

WASHINGTON D.C. ––The Interior Department ruled on February 2 that black-tailed prairie dogs qualify for protection as a threatened species, as they now occupy less than 1% of their former range––but Interior also said it would not act soon to protect prairie dogs, calling scarcer species a higher priority.

Arizona, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming have all reportedly agreed to develop their own prairie dog protection plans.

The National Wildlife Federation, which petitioned for the threatened species designation, said it was pleased with the Interior Department action. However, NWF still has not answered repeated ANIMAL PEOPLE inquiries as to whether it has asked members of the 48 state hunting clubs for which NWF is national umbrella to refrain from participating in prairie dog shoots.

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Wolves

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

DENVER––The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on January 13 reversed a 1997 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William Downes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act by reintroducing 66 wolves to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 and 1996 as an “experimental, non-essential” population.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho affiliates held that the “experimental, non-essential” status illegally reduced protection of wild wolves already in the area, and that therefore the reintroduced wolves and their progeny should be removed.

The verdict enabled the Fish and Wildlife Service to proceed with the scheduled reintroduction of grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area northwest of Yellowstone. Five grizzlies a year would be released into the wilderness over a five-year span.

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Panel set to draft feral hit list

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Cruelty is of no concern to the Invasive Species Council, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signified on January 26, excluding humane representation from a 32-member Invasive Species Advisory Committee named to help direct the federal war on feral wildlife.

There was no room on ISAC, as the advisory committee is called, for anyone from any of the more than 10,000 U.S. organizations formed to prevent cruelty to animals, whose donor base includes one household in four, and may be larger than the constituency who elected President Bill Clinton.

But there was room for a representative from Monsanto––a leading maker of the pesticides used in ever-growing volume against alleged “invasive species,” and coincidentally a leader in creating and introducing new species via genetic engineering.

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Invasions created the Mara, Serengetti vista

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000

KEEKORAK, Kenya––The Masai Mara National Park in southwestern Kenya and the Serengetti National Park of northwestern Tanzania together offer one of the world’s great wildlife viewing venues, punctuated by the spring and fall migrations of the wildebeests, in herds of thousands.

Yet if the bioxenophobes who dominate the conservation establishment were philosophically consistent, the great wildlife parks would represent an ecological horror show: almost all of the charismatic megafauna whom the world beats paths to see were once invasive species.

Elephants would be especially reviled––as they are, by many botanists––because their habit of breaking down trees tends to keep the savannah from evolving back into the dry forest it apparently was once, before they came.

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Kindness: where east meets west

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

HONG KONG, BEIJING– – Beijing TV electrified China as the millennium changed with a rare western-style investigative expose of pet theft for the dog-andcat meat markets.

Foreign correspondents swiftly amplified the revealed atrocities. Yet, in a nation where man biting dog is scarcely news to anyone, most missed the breaking edge of the story.

“By fair means and foul, predatory traders are getting their hands on Russian dogs and packing them off by the busload across the border to China to supply a booming demand there,” wrote Baltimore Sun foreign staff reporter Will Englund from Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

“Thousands of animals have been taken out of Siberia,” Englund continued, “in a business that is ruthless, dishonest, and violent––and is breaking the hearts of Russia’s dog lovers. Local gangs buy some dogs and steal others.”

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In Kenya, the zoo that isn’t

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Nairobi Safari Walk manager Samuel M. Ngethe and naturalist Joyce Engoke are emphatic that the Kenya Wildlife Service animal orphanage between the KWS headquarters and Nairobi National Park is not a zoo.

The term “zoo” has bad connotations for KWS, associated with brutal wildlife captures and exports, and with colonial menageries. Some such menageries in other African nations have been stranded ever since in old-fashioned cement-and-steel cages. Others starved––or were eaten by starving people––during bloody civil wars.

Even as ANIMAL PEOPLE visited, Karl Amman of the Kenya-based Bushmeat Project and Sarah Scarth, from the Johannesburg office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, sought help for an effort to rescue more than 100 animals including 12 chimps from the Kinshasa National Zoo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Scarth told a November 18 press conference that about two-thirds of the Kinshasa collection had already starved or been killed during the Congolese fighting.

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Kenya Wildlife Service turns cor-

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Kenyan foreign minister Bonaya Godana announced on December 23 that Nairobi has been selected as host city for the permanent headquarters of the sixnation Task Force for Cooperative Enforcement Operations Directed at Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora.

The task force was created by the 1994 Lusaka Agreement. The choice of Nairobi as permanent host city amounts to an international vote of confidence in both the stability of Kenya and the capability and integrity of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

As KWS goes, so goes Kenya itself––an economic and historical lesson well known to KWS director Nehemiah Rotich.

Rotich succeeded to his office in July 1999, having previously been among the closest longtime observers and critics of KWS in his former position as founder and director of the East African Wildlife Society. Rotich had also served––twice––on the KWS board of trustees. His 1998 resignation in opposition to former KWS director David Western’s proposal to introduce trophy hunting was reportedly the beginning of the end of Western’s disastrous regime of nearly six years.

Soon thereafter, Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi replaced Western with previous KWS director Richard Leakey. But the second Leakey regime at KWS lasted only six months before arap Moi promoted Leakey to head the entire Kenyan civil service, and appointed Rotich, who never before worked in government, to succeed Leakey.

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