Day: November 1, 1997

Yellowstone wolves leghold-trapped

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

HELENA, Montana––A little publicized aspect of
the Yellowstone region wolf reintroduction is that although
tranquilizer darts and net guns are also used in captures and
recaptures, the wolves involved may be repeatedly legholdtrapped,
with potentially tragic consequences.
Many of the initial breeding wolves were first
leghold-trapped in Alberta for outfitting with radio collars a
year or more before they were recaptured, sometimes again by
leghold trapping, for relocation to Yellowstone and central
Idaho. Then they may have been leghold-trapped on further
occasions, for maintenance of their radio collars, removal
from proximity to livestock, and checks of reproductive status.
Offspring are also routinely leghold-trapped to be fitted with
radio collars, if they can’t be caught by other means.

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Ranchers want taxpayers to keep them in clover

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt has asked President
Bill Clinton to veto a “grazing reform” bill that
House Agriculture Committee chair Bob Smith
(R-Oregon) sent to the House on September
24––if it clears Congress.
Wilderness Society lobbyist Fran
Hunt said the Smith bill “would lock in a new
subsidized grazing fee for livestock operators
on public lands, “ at about a third the federal
cost of land maintenance; “enact new hurdles
that would make it even more difficult for the
Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management
to protect and restore public rangeland”;
“limit public participation in federal decisionmaking”;
“hamper the ability of concerned
groups and individuals to appeal unsound federal
grazing decisions”; and “undercut the
multiple use management and conservation of
the National Grasslands by removing them
from the National Forest system.”

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Fishy business whirling

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

High-profile U.S. and Canadian efforts to restore endangered western
salmon runs have their counterpart in a restoration of native trout to
Yellowstone, announced in January 1997 by Yellowstone National Park
superintendent Mike Finley.
Like the salmon restoration, the trout restoration is driven by concern
for declining biodiversity––but unlike the salmon projects, is not associated
with actual scarcity of fish. The problem gripping the Pacific Northwest
is that the combination of heavy fishing, dam-building, and silted spawning
streams caused by logging not only annihilated salmon runs, but also built
industries whose very existence conflicts with the recovery of salmon, even as
fishing also depends upon having abundant salmon of the more coveted subspecies
[the less coveted pink salmon seem to be thriving by the absence of
their bigger kin].

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Wild equines win new safeguards

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

RENO––The Bureau of
Land Management on October 15
settled a lawsuit filed in June by the
Fund for Animals and Animal
Protection Institute by agreeing to
require wild horses and burro adoptors
to pledge that they have no
intention of selling the animal either
for slaughter or for rodeo bucking
stock; to require slaughterhouses to
keep all paperwork on BLM-freezebranded
equines, and to require
slaughterhouses to notify the BLM
immediately of the receipt of any
such animals; to bar wild horse and
burro adoptions through power of
attorney; and to bar individuals from
adopting more than four wild equines
during a one-year period.

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HUNTING, BRAINS, SAFETY, AND SPORTSMANSHIP

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Joseph Berger, M.D., neurology
department chair at the University of Kentucky,
and behavioral neurologist Eric Weisman, M.D.,
also of Kentucky, rattled squirrel hunters in
August with a letter to The Lancet, the journal of
the British Medical Society, warning that all 11
patients they have treated for Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease in the past four years ate squirrel brains.
Berger and Weisman postulated that
eating squirrel brains might be an avenue of
transmission for the rare brain disease––a degenerative,
irreversible, always fatal malady apparently
related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or “mad cow disease,” also resembling
kuru, found among human cannibals.
As hunting season began, brains of any
kind often seemed scarce. Near Chibougamou,
Quebec, a 61-year-old hunter killed an 81-yearold
blueberry picker on August 29, mistaking
him for a bear. Their names were not released.

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LETTERS [Nov 1997]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Greece
Thank you for sending your wonderful paper.
It’s nice to read that animal welfare issues are being
tackled globally!
As chief executive of the Greek Animal
Welfare Fund, based in the United Kingdom, I am
very involved in locating where exotic animals are kept
within Greece, seeing how they are kept, and if necessary,
doing what we can to help.
Early this year we moved 11 apes and two
crowned cranes from the Athens zoo. Last weekend I
managed to get the last monkey out of Iraklion, in
Crete. We have four more monkeys lined up to go,
from the National Gardens in Athens, a bar in Voula,
and a wildlife center in Aegina. We have been very
lucky to gain the support of the AAP Foundation in
Amsterdam [a world-acclaimed primate facility], and
to date all the apes have gone there. After a short quarantine
for tests and treatment, they have been introduced
into family groups. We hope they will eventually
be relocated into an approved venue together.

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Editorial: Living in the House That Jack Built

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Sometimes it seems as if we live in the House That Jack Built, taking telephone
calls several times a day from the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
Narrated as a variety of songs and children’s stories, both “House” and “Old
Lady” go pretty much the same way: one creature is sent to chase another, dog after cat
after mouse and so forth, creating ecological and social chaos.
That’s just about exactly what happened here on Whidbey Island this year.
Gardeners, irate that rabbits ate their crops, released housecats into their yards in hopes the
cats would kill the rabbits. Birdwatchers became irate that the cats ate birds, too, after
depleting small mammals. Already, the gardeners were irate again, complaining now
about deer and raccoons. Commuters objected that the occasional presence of deer on the
roads kept them from driving like bats out of hell after dark. Bats caused a panic, too,
when some people tried to attract them to eat mosquitoes, whom they accused of being
potential carriers of equine encephalitis. The bats were said to be potentially rabid. Then
people who let their housecats and small dogs wander, to have a “natural” life, joined
with hunters in raising a howl against coyotes, who followed nature in locally solving the
alleged rabbit, cat, roving dog, and deer problems.

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Seals, whales, ESA and the Willys

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

MONACO, TORONTO, WASHINGTON
D.C. ––Close to losing 25 years of
activist gains through back door politics, the
International Fund for Animal Welfare and
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rallied
opposition to sealing off Atlantic Canada and
whaling in any form as ANIMAL PEOPLE
went to press, while Defenders of Wildlife
used the Internet to assemble resistance to an
Endangered Species Act rewrite apparently
favored by both the Bill Clinton/Albert Gore
administration and the Republican majorities
in the House and Senate.
IFAW sent out an eight-millionpiece
mailing asking members and sympathizers
to call or write Canadian authorities to
remind them that seal slaughter is as offensive
now as in 1984, when three decades of
campaigning finally brought a 12-year suspension
of the offshore phase of the killing.

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Orangs in the smoke

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

JAKARTA, Indonesia– – Unidenti-
fied creatures and species long believed extinct
are among the beasts fleeing forest fires that
have ravaged an estimated 4.2 million acres of
Sumatra, Borneo, and Java since mid-July.
Scientific enthusiasm over possible
discoveries and rediscoveries of species is
sobered by the certainty that much and perhaps
all of the rare animals’ habitat may be lost.
“Burning fields and forests is an
annual occurence in Indonesia,” Pat Bell of the
Ottawa Citizen reported on October 8. “But
this year plantations and forestry firms
increased the number of fires in an apparent
attempt to clear as much as they could before
the government was able to enforce a ban,”
which was imposed after fires in 1982-1983 and
1994 destroyed 15.8 million acres of forest.
Environmental law enforcement is
traditionally lax in Indonesia, recently rated the
most corrupt nation among 46 assessed by the
public interest group Transparency International.
In 1994, for instance, after the Forest
Ministry fined two timber firms a combined
total of more than $2 million, and denied
extensions of 43 logging leases, President
Suharto ordered the ministry to make an interest-free
loan of $185 million to the aircraft
maker Industri Pesawat Terbang Negara. The
money was diverted from a reforestation fund.

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