Witch doctors tell Swiss voters what to say: “Ooh-ee ooh ah ah!”

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

GENEVA, JOHANNESBURG,
WINDHOEK, LONDON, ATLANTA– –
Swiss voters on June 7 rejected a proposed
moratorium on research involving genetically
modified animals by a 2-to-1 margin.
Swiss referendums have historically
favored animals. The very first, held more
than 100 years ago, banned the slaughter of
livestock without prestunning. However,
Swiss-based multinational drug firms reportedly
spent more than $35 million to defeat the
proposed genetic research moratorium. The
coalition of 50 animal protection groups who
backed the measure spent only $1.3 million.
Swiss citizens may have relatively
little concern about the outcomes of genetic
research, but in Eehama-Omulunga, Angola,
sensational reports of transgenic experiments
fed rumors that goats kept by Mateus Shihelp
and Ricardina Otto have given birth––twice
since March––to creatures with goat-like bodies
but human heads. Neither survived.

BULLFIGHTING & RODEO

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

CHARC on June 1 disclosed 30
hours of the most intensely revealing undercover
video of bullfighting ever produced,
obtained during a three-month close-focus surveillance
of a variety of corridas in Mexico.
Included are the intentionally prolonged torture-killings
of 27 bulls, systematic torment of
bulls before they are ever released into the
ring, children crying as their parents compel
them to watch, wounded bulls who repeatedly
turn away from opportunities to gore and trample
clumsy matadors, and prominent backdrops
advertising Pepsi-Cola and Kentucky
Fried Chicken––apparently the biggest sponsors
of Mexican bullfighting. Many of the
downed Mexican victims are plainly still alive
and conscious when their ears are hacked off
to present to their killers. CHARC undertook
the bullfighting surveillance in hopes of dissuading
U.S. television executives who see

Saving frogs saves rupees

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

AHMADABAD, RAJASTHAN,
INDIA–– Gulabchand Kataria, minister of
education for Rajasthan state, India, in late
May banned frog dissection in sub-university
level exercises, saving about 100 million
frogs a year––and the cost of obtaining them.
Some rural frog-collectors may
lose seasonal livelihoods, but the business of
providing frogs for laboratory use is now
largely centralized, dominated by a relative
handful of factory-style growers who employ
relatively few people.
Kataria acted in response, he said,
to petitioning from members of Mahjanam,
an anti-violence group founded in 1994 by
retired businessman Phoolchand Gandhi.

WILDLIFE TRAFFICKING

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

BROWNSVILLE , Texas– – T h e
U.S. Customs Service and Fish and Wildlife
Service on May 29 wrapped up Operation
Jungle Trade, a three-year undercover sting,
with the arrests of 37 alleged wildlife traffickers
in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, and
Missouri, issuance of warrants against several
others, and simultaneous press conferences
at the Gladys Porter Zoo in
Brownsville and the San Antonio Zoo.
The sting apprehended 654 animals
in all, including 635 tropical birds, among
whom were macaws, yellow-headed Amazon
parrots, Mexican red-headed parrots,
conures, and toucans.
Among the mammals were 14 spider
monkeys, a kinkajou, a Mexican lynx,
and a puma.

Liability

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

Carolyn Pollock, widowed
when Bill Pollock, DVM, of
Kingsville, Texas, died on October
30, 1991 after suffering for two weeks
from the herpes B virus, was on May
19 awarded $515,000 in settlement of
a lawsuit alleging that the Texas
Primate Center insufficiently warned
Bill Pollock of the risks of working
with macaques and inadequately
responded when he fell ill. Her juvenile
daughter, Elizabeth Grace
Pollock, born on January 1, 1992,
received $26,780 in trust, The Texas
Primate Center supplies nonhuman primates
to research institutions. Codefendants
included Spohn Health
System Inc., Spohn Kleberg
Hospital, Hazleton Laboratories,
Metpath Inc., and Corning Lab
Services, as well as four individuals.

HUMANE ENFORCEMENT

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.

Foreign

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.

AV activism

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.”

Shocked, shocked to find some macaques hurt young!

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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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