HUMANE ENFORCEMENT

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

Reinforcing previous verdicts, the
Kentucky Court of Appeals on May 29 ruled that
cockfighting remains illegal in Kentucky despite the
1980 state assembly ratification of a bill that exempted
birds from the definition of animals protected by the
Kentucky anti-cruelty law. Then-Kentucky governor
John Y. Brown Jr. vetoed the 1980 bill, and the prevailing
legal interpretation remained that cockfighting
was illegal, until Montgomery County cockfight promoter
Marvin Watkins and four other individuals
argued in a lawsuit that the veto was invalid because
according to a deputy state senate clerk’s affidavit it was
issued a day too late. The Kentucky Court of Appeals
previously upheld the 1980 veto in 1994. At least three
major cockfighting arrests followed the 1994 verdict.

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Foreign

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

British armed forces minister John Reid on
June 12 suspended British participation in NATO exercises
which involve shooting sedated pigs to give
medics practice in treating gunshot wounds, pending
review of the value of the procedure, which is reportedly
often used in training U.S. combat surgeons.
Reid’s action came as the Home Office was
reportedly preparing to release statistics showing that
the number of animals used in British laboratories is up,
for the second year in a row. About 20% more animals
were used in genetic work in 1996 than in 1995, and
that trend is expected to continue, even as the numbers
used in conventional product safety testing continue a
long, slow drop.

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AV activism

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

Allegedly abusive animal experiments have
occasionally been halted by protest, professional
review, political intervention, and/or legal action, but
Radley Hirsch, founder and owner of San Francisco
Audio, may be the first supplier of research equipment
to delay or even stop an experiment by turning down a
customer. University of California at San Francisco
researchers Marshal Fong and Stephen Cheung want
to deafen six squirrel monkeys, then cut into their
brains to see the damage. Receiving the Fong/Cheung
order on February 11, Hirsch started to build a sound
system to their specifications, then balked upon discovering
what it was for. “It all comes back to you,”
Hirsch told Keay Davidson of the San Francisco
Examiner. “If you’re an evil person, bad things happen
to you. If you’re a good person, nice things happen.”

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Shocked, shocked to find some macaques hurt young!

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

ATLANTA––Thirty-five years of records
pertaining to the sooty mangeby and pigtail macaque
colonies at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research
Center show that about 5% of their newborns are abandoned
by their mothers, who tend to be the least experienced
mothers, while another 5% to 10% are actively
abused by mothers who range in age and tend to repeat
the abuse with successive offspring.
This parallels the rates of infant neglect and
child abuse in humans, and is reason, argued
researchers Dario Maestripieri and Kelly A. Carroll in
the May 1998 edition of Psychological Bulletin, that
the use of nonhuman primates in researching neglect
and abuse should be stepped up.

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Parakeet killer back in prison

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

ANCHORAGE––George William Adams,
38, alias William G. Adams and Skip Adams-Taylor,
on June 3 drew 40 months in prison from U.S. District
Judge James Singleton, in Anchorage, Alaska, for
being a felon in possession of a gun.
Convicted in 1980 of strangling a women he
met in a Washington D.C. disco and biting the head off
her parakeet because, he said, the bird’s chirping made
him nervous, Adams served 15 years, then skipped out
on parole, fled to Alaska, and became a clerk for the
Barrow office of the state Department of Corrections.
As part of his cover, apparently, he adopted a
guise as an animal rights activist––which led to his
arrest, wrote Lisa Demers of the Anchorage Daily
News, when “Barrow leaders complained to his bosses
that he may have used his state computer to protest an
Eskimo seal hunt.”

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VIVISECTORS IN SPACE

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

MOSCOW, CAPE CANAV
ERAL––Fifteen two-year-old
Oriental newts and 80 snails were
brought aboard the Russian space station
Mir on May 18, to resume neurological
studies of the effects of
weightlessness on anatomy that were
disrupted in February when eight
newts died during their return to earth
aboard a cargo shuttle.
The newts and snails are to
remain in orbit until August––if they
endure that long.
Similar work undertaken by
the 16-day, $99 million “Neurolab”
flight of the NASA space shuttle
Columbia during April and early May
brought mostly unplanned early
deaths of the specimens. The casualties
might have contributed to
NASA’s May 5 announcement that
the Neurolab would not fly a second
time in August, as had been tentatively
planned.

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WALT DISNEY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM & OTHER ZOOS

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

A unique aspect of Walt Disney’s Animal
Kingdom, opened on April 22 in Lake Buena Vista,
Florida, is that it has taken high-risk geriatric animals
from older facilities, enabling some animals who have
long endured bare steel and cement to end their lives in
more congenial habitat. This hasn’t pleased the Animal
Rights Foundation of Florida, however, which fought
construction of the Animal Kingdom, and has repeatedly
demanded USDA probes of animal deaths there.
Among the 31 deaths between September 1997 and the
official opening, two Asian clawed otters––rarely
attracted to vegetable matter––ate the poisonous seeds
of ornamental loquats; four cheetah cubs ingested
antifreeze, apparently at a previous facility; two West
African crowned cranes were hit by vehicles; nine
gazelles, kudu, and antelopes died from various causes,
including injuries inflicted on each other in contesting
territory; a dik-dik died in surgery; a rhino died from
having ingested an 18-inch stick before arrival; a rhino
died under anesthesia for a veterinary exam; an elderly
hippo died in transit; another hippo died of infections
10 days after arrival from Europe; and some normally
short-lived naked mole rats, chinchilla rabbits, and
guinea pigs died. The death rate, about 4% of the
1,000-animal collection per year, is well below both
wild and zoo norms.

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BOOKS: For Children

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

Crossing Paths:
Uncommon Encounters with
Animals in the Wild
by Craig Childs
Sasquatch Books (615 2nd Ave.,
Suite 260, Seattle, WA 98104), 1997.
Paperback, 256 pages. $14.95.

According to the publisher, Craig
Childs “camps in the back country at least
nine months of the year, usually living in
the back of his truck, out of a river vessel of
some sort, or from his backpack. He hasn’t
had a phone in seven years.”

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Wildlife management

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

Accused of mismanagement resulting in a $17 million budgetary shortfall a n d
more than 100 layoffs from a staff of 1,600, Bert Shanks, 58, resigned on June 13 as director
of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but will continue to collect his $96,000-ayear
salary until September 11. Shanks attributed the shortfall to erroneously expecting in July
1996 that fishing license sales would increase, even though a scarcity of fish had obliged cuts
in bag limits and fishing opportunities.
The Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Committee on June 1 approved a 1999 fiscal
year state Wildlife Department budget of $25.4 million, $1 million less than in 1998 due to
declining hunting and fishing license sales revenue.

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