LETTERS [March 1995]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

In Africa
Please be advised that the
city of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, is
not the first in Africa to have enact-
ed a law to address pet overpopula-
tion. Though the amount of fines
levied for allowing bitches in heat to
roam vary from one municipality to
another, such bylaws are in place
and have been for many years in
South Africa. The National Council
of SPCAs has in addition submitted
proposals to the Government to
address the population of domestic
pets. Educational programs on this
issue have been carried out by the
SPCA movement in South Africa
for nearly 20 years.
––Barbara Nash
Administrator/PRO
National Council of SPCAs
Southdale
Republic. of South Africa

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Editorials: Doing wolves no favors

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

Experts estimate the world wolf population never exceeded 500,000. Humans
have had wolves outnumbered and on the run since Neanderthal times. Those who couldn’t
be killed were pushed into the most inhospitable corners of the globe––for if there’s one
thing a human hunter can’t stand, it’s the idea that something else might kill his game, his
livestock, perhaps even his family if he fails to “keep the wolf from the door.”
If there’s another thing hunters hate about wolves, it’s the reminder wolves con-
vey that predatory skills and a strict dominance hierarchy do not equate with fitness for sur-
vival in the human-made world. Most fears about wolves are unfounded––North American
wolves have never eaten people––but to your average hunter no other animal so symbolizes
male inadequacy. The men with guns are now more frightened than ever. In Alaska, gov-
ernor Tony Knowles on February 4 made permanent his December 3 suspension of prede-
cessor Walter Hickel’s campaign to kill wolves in order to make more moose and caribou
available to human hunters in the region southwest of Fairbanks. In Yellowstone, the like-
lihood that wolves will soon thin out an estimated 60,000 elk, 30,000 deer, and 4,000
bison, after a 60-year absence, deals a political blow to the hope of the hunting lobby that
they might open the National Parks to hunting––the only federal lands that now exclude
hunting, and therefore the last refuge of many beasts with trophy-sized horns.

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CANADA REVIVES SEAL MASSACRE: Sex organs sold to aphrodisiac trade

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland––
Deflecting Atlantic provincial wrath, the
Canadian government preceded the February
3 admission that northern cod have been
fished to commercial extinction by declaring a
bounty on seals and opening a “recreational”
seal hunt. The quota of 194,000––186,000
harp seals plus 8,000 hooded seals––is close
to the toll during the years before the offshore
clubbing of infant harp seals was halted under
international protest in 1985.
Sealers won’t have to leave shore to
club, shoot, and hack baby seals and their
mothers this year. For the first time since
1982, there is no ice in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, forcing harp seals and hooded
seals ashore to whelp.

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BOOKS: The Pet Professional’s Comparative Reference Guide To Premium Dry Dog Food

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

The Pet Professional’s Comparative Reference Guide To Premium
Dry Dog Food, by Howard D. Coffman. PigDog Press (427-3 Amherst St.,
Suite 331, Nashua, NH 03063-1258), 1994. Looseleaf. $54 includes shipping.
If you want a shopping cart hand-
book to tell you what to feed your pet, The
Pet Professional’s Comparative Reference
Guide To Premium Dry Dog Food may not
serve your purpose: Howard D. Coffman
avoids value judgements. If you have a pro-
fessional interest in dog nutrition, however,
you may find it indispensible. For instance, it
tells which leading dog food derives most of
its fat content from sunflower oil rather than
the ingredients that provide its name and fla-
vor. It tells which brands include the contro-
versial preservative ethoxyquin. It provides
the Association of American Feed Control
Officials’ definitions of every common dog
food ingredient. It makes assessing offal con-
tent possible––and it refutes the rumor that
certain brands of kibble popular with most
dogs are really just pelletized cat poop.

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BOOKS: White Eye

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

White Eye, by Blanche D’Alpuget. Simon & Schuster (1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10020), 1994. 254 pages, hardcover. $22.00 U.S.,
$28.50 Canadian.
Seldom have I found a murder
mystery as satisfying as Blanche
D’Alpuget’s White Eye––not only first-rate
suspense, but educational to boot. A grant
from the Literary Arts Board of the
Australia Council allowed the author to
spend two years researching international
wildlife trafficking, genetic engineering,
wild bird rehabilitation, and biomedical
research on primates—among other sub-
jects. Judging from D’Alpuget’s portrayal
of the illicit wildlife trade and primate
research, about which I’m relatively well
versed, she seems to have mastered the
topics. Her description of raptor rehabilita-
tion and release, about which I knew little,
is fascinating. Passages dealing with genet-
ic engineering, which heretofore has left
me totally confused, actually brought me a
glimmer of understanding.

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BOOKS: The War Against The Greens

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

The War Against The Greens, by David Helvarg. Sierra Club
Books (100 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA 94104), 1994. 502 pages,
hardback, $25.00.
David Helvarg brought to The War
Against The Greens a background as a war
correspondent in Northern Ireland and
Central America. It serves him well as he
explains how unwitting followers of Che
Guevarra organize in logged-out U.S.
forests, revering not Karl Marx but Ronald
Reagan. Their hatred of “greenies” and
“yuppies” is a paradigm of class struggle,
pitting themselves as workers against bour-
geois “preservationists,” yet they remain as
blind to their own manipulation by rich for-
eign interests as the Marxists of decades past
were to manipulation by Moscow.
The War Against The Greens lives
up to the cover promise that it will expose,
“The ‘wise use’ movement, the new right,
and anti-environmental violence,” docu-
menting a staggering number of attacks––far
more, for instance, than the mere 313 inci-
dents, more than half of them petty vandal-
ism, that the FBI attributes to animal rights
activists over the past 15 years. Many of the
anti-green attacks also go well beyond any
deed of “animal rights terrorists” in degree
of violence toward human beings. Yet
except for the apparent murder of Karen
Silkwood as she tried to expose radiation
hazards at the Kerr-McGree uranium pro-
cessing plant in Oklahoma, anti-green
attacks have rarely drawn media attention.
For example, though I interviewed Vermont
and New Hampshire Earth First!ers Jeff
Elliot, Jamie Sayen, and Michael Vernon
several times between mid-1989 and mid-
1991, following up on stories that made the
regional news wires, I was previously
unaware that all three were burnt out of their
homes by arson during the same interval.
Strangely, Helvarg ignores vio-
lence against animal rights activists––and
takes no note of the Fran Trutt case, perhaps
the best-documented example of an alleged
corporate act of false provocation in many
years. In November 1988, Trutt was arrest-
ed while placing a pipe bomb in the U.S.
Surgical Corporation parking lot. A long-
time target of protest over use of dogs in
demonstrations of surgical staples, U.S.
Surgical publicized the deed as an act of
“animal rights terrorism,” but Trutt turned
out to have only peripheral involvement with
animal rights; was given the money to buy
the bomb and driven to the site by Marc
Mead, an undercover agent for a private
security firm employed by U.S. Surgical;
and was actively encouraged in the plot
since the preceding April by Marylou
Sapone, another agent of the same firm.
Earlier, Sapone had tried unsuccessfully to
interest a variety of other animal lovers,
anarchists, Earth First!ers, and just plain
nuts in bombing U.S. Surgical.
Helvarg’s omission of this and
other animal-related cases is ultimately as
disturbing as his recitation of attacks on peo-
ple addressing land use conflicts and toxic
waste disposal. It seems to signify that the
wise-users have convinced mainstream envi-
ronmentalists to disassociate themselves
from animal people even when animal peo-
ple take the heat for environmentalist goals
and tactics, as in many conflicts involving
endangered species.
“To date the Wise Use / Property
Rights backlash has been a bracing if dan-
gerous reminder to environmentalists that
power concedes nothing without a demand,”
Helvarg concludes. “Only in the cynical
argot of Washington where ‘perception is
realtiy’ could a corporate-sponsored envi-
ronmental backlash successfully sell itself as
a populist movement. Despite an intimidat-
ing combination of local thugs and national
phone/fax guerillas, the anti-enviros lack
the broad middle, either ideologically or in
terms of real numbers.”
Yet since The War Against The
G r e e n s appeared, the anti-enviros at least
think they’ve captured Congress. Helvarg
may be right that the public will ultimately
reject Wise Use, but now it’s open season
on the Endangered Species Act. One hopes
the enviros won’t consider it as expendible
as they apparently consider the animal pro-
tection movement.

Cats not guilty

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:
A year-long study of feline predation
commissioned by the Petcare Information
Advisory Service, an Australian pet industry
front, found that from April 1993 to April
1994, the owners of 1,550 cats were able to
verify the killings of only 4.76 animals per cat.
Only 2% of the cats killed Australian native
mammals; 7% killed native birds; 17% killed
native reptiles and amphibians; and 41% killed
only introduced species, mostly mice, rats,
and rabbits. Of the cats in the sample, 40%
were kept in at night; 94% were neutered.
The study refutes the 1988 findings of Dr.
David Paton of Adelaide University, who
reported after a study of 700 cats that they
killed an average of 32 small animals per year
apiece. Paton responded to the new data by
asserting that perhaps Australian cats are
runnng out of native widlife to kill.

OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

Naturalist Gerald Durrell, 70, a
longtime resident of St. Helier, France, died
January 30 in London of complications after a
liver transplant. Younger brother of the late
novelist Lawrence Durrell, Gerald was actu-
ally the more prolific author, producing 37
titles including many best-sellers, from T h e
Overloaded Ark (1952) to The Aye-Aye And I
(1993). My Family And Other Animals
(1956), a memoir of his boyhood on the
Greek island of Corfu, influenced a genera-
tion of young readers including the editor of
ANIMAL PEOPLE, who got a copy as a
birthday gift at age 8 and read it to tatters.
Born in Jamshedpur, India, Durrell’s first
word was reputedly “zoo.” He joined the
Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, England––

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REVIEWS: Cats of Practical Books

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:

The Definitive Anthology of Distinguished Feline Verse: Immortal Poems by the Cats of
the Major Poets, by Henry Beard. Villard Books (201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022), 1994.
96 pages, illustrated. $12.95.
That Henry Beard! The author of French for
Cats, a mini-masterpiece that every cat-lover surely knows
well, Beard has just outdone himself, and everyone else,
and undone anyone who attempts to read his latest aloud
without cracking up. He has rollicked through the classic
poems of the English language with the abandon, the non-
chalance, the grace and distinction turned to a sort of dig-
nified whoopee of the sedatest of cats romping through a
catnip field. Beard would have us believe the poems in
Poetry For Cats were written by the cats of major men and
women of letters. Perhaps. I mean, purrhaps. In that
case, however, the poets purloined the styles of their pets.
Surely.

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