A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
House Jack built
Your November 1997 editorial,
“Living in the house that Jack built,” is a
masterpiece. I’ve circulated copies to a
variety of people. Your description of the
wildlife problems on Whidbey Island
made me laugh, something that never
happens when I read other animal protection
publications, and a welcome relief
from anger, frustration, and tears.
––Linn Pulis
Gardiner, Maine
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
Each annual update of our December “Who gets the money?” feature brings a
blizzard of letters. Consisting mainly of statistics, with explanatory margin notes, “Who
gets the money?” could look rather dull––just a straightforward factual statement of the
budgets, assets, program versus overhead spending balance, and top salaries paid by the
100-odd most prominent animal and habitat protection charities.
Our readers, however, not only peruse the fine print, but beg for more.
“Percentages of money utilized for the stated goals is important,” wrote Delores
Hughes, of Santa Cruz, California, “but even more important is the question, ‘Are they
accomplishing anything worthwhile?’”
Elaborated Joan Winburn Hymas, of Cathedral City, California, “Is there any
way of determining how much good organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and the
Humane Society of the U.S. are doing?”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
MONTREAL, MONTPELIER,
PORTLAND––First came the ice, and then
came the government.
A warming trend possibly resulting
from either the El Nino effect off the Pacific
coast or global warming in general ironically
froze much of the northeast in January,
killing thousands of animals. Between the
disaster and regulatory changes soon to take
effect, animal agriculture might never be the
same in southern Quebec, eastern Ontario,
upstate New York, and upper New England.
The crisis began early on January 7
when a heavy snow storm changed to rain.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
BOSTON––Geneticists James Robl
of the University of Massachusetts and Steven
Stice of Advanced Cell Technology Inc. told
the International Embryo Transfer Society on
January 20 that they’d managed to clone some
prime Texas bull––the first bull ever cloned by
their method, believed to be the most efficient
of the three methods now experimentally tried.
Robl and Stice said the two offspring,
George and Charlie, represented in
Robl’s words, “a significant step” toward turning
genetically modified dairy cattle into walking
drug factories, who synthesize medicines in
their milk. But both cloned offspring are male.
Acknowledging that inconvenience, Robl and
Stice said they had several pregnant cows carrying
female cloned fetuses. The fetuses were
genetically altered to produce cows who eventually
should produce milk containing human
serum albumin, an important protein used in
maintaining hospital emergency blood supplies.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
SAN FRANCISCO––Hidden cameras have
caught live animal vendors at Asian-style markets
countless times in atrocities––not just in San Francisco,
where the markets are a heated public issue, but in virtually
every U.S. and Canadian city with a Chinatown.
The alleged offenses only begin with selling
the animals alive to assure buyers that the meat is fresh.
Reported the San Francisco SPCA to the California Fish
and Game Commission on January 23, 1998, “Frogs
are typically piled in large containers or confined in
wire cages without food or water. We have seen containers
we estimated held over 100 frogs, piled several
layers deep. Injured, bloodied, and dead frogs, some
with their sides split open, were plainly visible. We
have also witnessed turtles having their shells sliced
from their bodies while fully alive and being hacked and
pounded repeatedly with dull knives before being
decapitated. At one market, our investigator found a
turtle still moving with its carapace cut open and its
internal organs displayed in full view of shoppers.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
Cats For Dummies
by Gina Spadafori
and Paul D. Pion
IDG Books Worldwide
(919 E. Hillsdale Blvd., Suite 400,
Foster City, CA 94404), 1997.
360 pages, paperback, $19.99.
“Care killed a cat,” Shakespeare
warns us in Much Ado About Nothing. The
best way to avoid that dire fate is to learn
proper cat care, and an excellent starting
place would be this latest entry in the For
Dummies series.
The 22 chapters of this user-friendly
textbook should be required reading for
would-be cat companions. A veterinarian,
Paul D. Pion, has joined syndicated pet care
columnist Gina Spadafori, the author of
Dogs For Dummies, to educate the curious
about the pleasures and problems inherent in
caring for a cat. For example, what you
might assume to be the opening section––
”Choosing Your Feline Companion”––does
not appear until Chapter Four, following a
cat-alogue of sensible advice about the kind
of cat to choose. My favorite section, however,
lists the top ten cat myths, including
“Cats need to drink milk,” and systematically
debunks every one of them.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
Greyhound Tales: True Stories of Rescue, Compassion & Love
Edited by Nora Star
c/o Nora Star (9728 Tenaya Way, Kelseyville, CA 95451), 1997. 128 pages, paperback, $15.95.
Only 10 years ago many humane
societies considered themselves successful in
fighting the ills of the greyhound racing industry
if they even got breeders and trainers to
bring culls in for death by needle, instead of
just shooting or clubbing them. The greyhound
industry reputedly killed as many as
50,000 dogs a year, mostly young and healthy
but too slow to win races. National organizations
from time to time attacked the use of rabbits
and other small animals in live lure training,
but as a whole, gambling on greyhounds
was considered too big and too dangerous a
business to tackle head-on.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
Dog Adoption
by Joan Hustace Walker
ICS Books, Inc. (1370 East 86th Place,
Merrillville, IN 46410), 1997.
130 pages, $12.95, paperback.
Subtitled “A guide to choosing the
perfect ‘pre-owned’ dog,” Dog Adoption
champions the adoptability of the rescued or
shelter dog as pretext to author Joan Hustace
Walker’s apparent main interest: promoting
greyhound adoption––and greyhound racing.
Not even the industry’s own well-paid public
relations people as easily dismiss decades of
eyewitness-and-media-documented greyhound
abuse as, in Walker’s own words,
“fiction, false rumors and hogwash.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:
RENO––Bureau of Land
Management director Patrick A. Shea on
February 9 told the newly convened
nine-member Wild Horse and Burro
Advisory Board that while he would
“Oppose the wholesale slaughter” of wild
equines, he would accept a recommendation,
if the board makes it, that unadoptable
horses should be euthanized.
BLM Wild Horse Program head
Tom Pagacnik explained that horses over
age 9 are rarely placed because they resist
gentling, yet might live to age 40 on a
refuge––at cost of about $900 per year.
A three-member fact-finding
panel told the board that some wild horses
lose 200-300 pounds from transport stress
as they are hauled around the U.S. to
adoption events where they repeatedly go
unclaimed––but the BLM has no way to
identify such so-called “frequent flyers.”