SEALS, DOLPHINS, AND WHALES

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

 

The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans on May 9 extended the Atlantic Canada offshore seal hunt until the end of May. Between low pelt prices and poor ice conditions, sealers had killed only 86,000 seals out of quotas of 275,000 harp seals and 10,000 hooded seals.

The Vancouver Public Aquarium announced on April 26 that it will cease exhibiting orcas. Opened in 1956, the aquarium in 1967 became first in the world to keep an orca. The last resident orca, Bjossa, 23, is to be transferred to Sea World, which has 20 orcas among four facilities, each offering many times as much tank space. Bjossa has lived at the Vancouver Aquarium since 1980. Finna, her longtime male companion, died in 1997, and the aquarium staff was unable to find a replacement.

Read more

Veggie bust

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

The Winnipeg Vegetarian Association on May 14 solicited donations toward the cost of a bronze bust of vegetarian advocate Howard Lyman. Sculpted by K a t h y Lazzareschi, of Oroville, California, the bust is to be presented to Lyman at the W o r l d Vegetarian Congress in Toronto this July.

A few days earlier, the A n i m a l Rights 2000 conference hosted in Washington D.C. by the Farm Animal Reform Movement is to induct five people whose identities are undisclosed into a newly created “Animal Rights Hall of Fame.”

Of more pragmatic interest, the Sabina Fund, named by FARM founder Alex Hershaft in honor of his late mother, is offering grants of $500-$2,000 “for grassroots projects promoting a plant-based diet and exposing the devastating impacts of animal agriculture.” Hershaft said that the next Sabina Fund application deadline will be November 15, adding that “FARM welcomes applications from groups outside the USA.” Application forms and further details are online at .

Meanwhile, instead of endorsing a meatless diet, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies has reportedly endorsed a national meat labeling program based on the “Freedom Food” program managed by the Royal SPCA of Britain. “The certification reassures consumers that the meat they purchase is from an animal raised in the most humane and ethical manner possible,” wrote Gina Tell of the Calgary Herald.

MACHO SPORTSMEN

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

 

The Ohio Division of Wildlife has lifted a three-year-old rule limiting access to the Milan Wildlife Area to hunters, fishers, and trappers. “The Division of Wildlife closed the woods to discourage sexual activity by people, mostly homosexuals, who took the wildlife area’s Lover’s Lane address literally,” wrote Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Michael Sangiacomo.

British hunting writer G e o f f r e y Allen, 45, of Worcestershire, was imprisoned for four years in February on charges of buggery, indecent assault, and gross indecency against two 13-year-old boys, according to H o w l , the magazine of the Britishbased Hunt Saboteurs Association.

H o w l also reports that, “Tory finance spokesman Glyn Davies,” a defender of fox hunting, “was stopped by police driving a load of sheep,” wearing only boots, undershorts, and a jacket. “Refusing the stereotype of Welsh farmer + Tory politician = sheepshagger,” H o w l c o n t i n u e d , “Mr. Davies explained he had fallen in manure, so had to take his clothes off.”

People Energetically Teasing Abusers

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

As encore to its brief “Got beer?” c a m p a i g n parodying the National Dairy Council’s “Got milk?” ads, PETA placed a parody ad asking “Got zits?” in the May 31 edition of the student newspaper at Central High School in Brookfield, Illinois. The ad argued milk can aggravate acne. High school papers in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California, and Vermont refused the ad, said PETA campaign coordinator Bruce Friedrich.

Irritating cowpokes too, PETA asked Wyoming governor Jim Geringer to remove from the state’s license plates the bucking rodeo horse which has been the state symbol since 1936.

Read more

25% of top U.S. charities say they get something for nothing

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

 

WASHINGTON D.C.––More than 25% of the U.S. charities which collectively rake in more than 90% of all donated dollars are declaring expeditures of zero on fundraising, revealed the Chronicle of Philanthropy in a May 18 cover feature.

A Chronicle of Philanthropy analysis of Internal Revenue Service data for tax year 1996 “found that more than one fourth of the 4,889 nonprofit organizations that received $500,000 or more in gifts from private sources reported spending nothing on fundraising,” the authors stated. Their findings were affirmed by the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.

Examining IRS Form 990 filings from tax years 1997 and 1998, the Urban Institute found that between 25% and 35% of charities with at least $500,000 in contributions from private sources declared that they had spent nothing on fundraising.

Read more

PREDATORS’ MEAT AND USDA POISON

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Opposing environmental priorities as well as the long-running conflict between wildlife advocates and ranchers are again on the line in Congress.

Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Charles Bass (R-New Hampshire) announced in mid-May that they would seek an ammendment to the Agriculture Appropriations bill for fiscal 2001 which would cap the USDA Wildlife Services budget at $28.7 million.

This would eliminate subsidized predator control for ranchers, consisting chiefly of killing coyotes, but would not interfere with killing wildlife under contract from other government agencies––for instance, to protect airports, endangered species, and golf greens on public land.

DeFazio and Bass sought a cut of $10 million from the Wildlife Services budget in 1998, when their bill was approved on first reading, 229-193. The vote was reversed the next day, however, after a night of frantic lobbying by Wildlife Services senior staff and representatives of the livestock industry. It stood little chance of passage by the U.S. Senate in any event, where members friendly to western ranchers chair all the key committees it would have to clear.

Read more

Endangered “invasives” killed

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

CAPE TOWN, MELBOURNE––With rare Himalayan tahrs and grey-headed flying fox bats already under fire at Table Mountain and being trapped and killed in Fern Gully of the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Domestic Animal Rescue Association of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Victorian Scientific Advisory Committee in Melbourne, Australia, were seeking last-ditch means of pursuing injunctions to stop the killing as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.

Each massacre raised the issue of an endangered species in native habitat being seen as invasive elsewhere, despite showing no hint of expanding beyond a narrow range.

Descended from two escaped zoo specimens, the tahrs thrived on Table Mountain after native klipspringers were poached out. They proved so much better at evading human hunters that though the herd, once up to 600, has been reduced to between 70 and 100, they have eluded extermination by Cape Nature Conservation since 1976. CNC believes it must kill all the tahrs before it can successfully reintroduce klipspringers–– who reportedly have already been reintroduced unsuccessfully several times.

Read more

INVASIVES IF HUMANIACS HAD THEIR WAY

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – The 32-member Invasive Species Advisory Committee appointed in January 2000 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt may have excluded humane representatives because Invasive Species Council members Babbitt, Commerce Secretary William Daley, and Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman feared that concern for preventing animal suffering might interfere with their mandate to kill all ferals.

Prevailing belief among mainstream conservation biologists and wildlife managers is that if socalled “humaniacs” had their way, the whole of North American would be overrun by even more feral species than it has now in no time.

But a look at actual species introductions tells a different story. Most would never have come if hunting, meat-eating, animalfighting, vivisection, and other cruel practices had been adequately proscribed by public policy.

Read more

Feds find out that force-feeding white phosphorous to mute swans kills them

Leave a comment

LAUREL, Md. – – “ T h i s has been proclaimed the year that mute swans will be eliminated from North America,” warns swan defender Kathryn Burton of Old Lyme, Connecticut. “A directive to get rid of all mutes on federal property came from the Interior Department in 1997,” endorsed by many state wildlife agencies as well, “with the goal being total eradication in 2000,” Burton adds.

Eradicating mute swans could become a symbolic first victory for the Invasive Species Council, created by executive order of President Bill Clinton in early February 1999 with a mandate to destroy all wild animals and plants not native to the U.S.

Mute swans are easy targets because they are few, are large, are conspicuous, remain together as pairs even when one partner is gravely wounded, and are hated by wildlife managers who blame them for 13 years of failures to re-establish huntable populations of native trumpeter swans.

Read more

1 … 420 421 422 423 424 … 720