Month: January 1999

Fur shorts (& folks who might wear them)

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

FAVORING RABIES
Interviewed in July 1998 b y
Paul Overeiner of the Jackson (Michigan)
Citizen-Patriot, Michigan State
University chief wildlife biologist J o e
Johnson called a proposal to use the oral
anti-rabies vaccine Raboral to keep rabies
out of the Ohio raccoon population
“Obscene,” because “what you’d get is a
raccoon immune from rabies. I assume
rabies is a natural population control for
them,” Johnson added.
The mid-Atlantic raccoon rabies
pandemic, now threatening eastern Ohio,
began in 1976, when a West Virginia
coonhunting club tried to rebuild the local
population by releasing 3,500 raccoons
who were live-trapped in a part of Florida
where rabies had been endemic for 40
years. Hunters and trappers killed more
than 500,000 raccoons a year during the
next 10 years without slowing the spread
of rabies northward––but Raboral has contained
it wherever used.

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ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel
on December 31, 1998 rejected a suit filed by
the Mountain States Legal Foundation,
Colorado Cattlemen’s Association,
Colorado Woolgrowers, and Colorado
Outfitters Association, which sought to keep
the Colorado Division of Wildlife from reintroducing
lynx by contending that the state is
improperly managing a federal species recovery
program. Mountain States Legal
Foundation attorney William Pendley said he
would take the case on to the 10th Circuit
Court of Appeals, and would seek an emergency
injunction against any lynx releases
while the matter remains in litigation.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
continues to tout the so-called “no surprises”
Multiple Species Conservation Program his
office negotiated in 1994 with San Diego
developers as a model for endangered species
conservation on privately owned habitat, but
the California Native Plant Society, San
Diego Audubon Society, and San Diego
Herpetological Society in a December 27
lawsuit claim the Multiple Species
Conservation Program is not adequately protecting
habitat. They cite as case in point the
recent bulldozing of a wetland which included
about 60 vernal pools, home to endangered
San Diego fairy shrimp.

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LETTERS [Jan/Feb 1999]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

Cyprus zoo feeds hunt
Thanks for sending us ANIMAL PEOPLE.
You might think much of it is irrelevant to Cyprus, but
often articles about other countries are of value.
One of our ongoing campaigns focuses on the
Limassol Zoo. We won commitments to stop importing
large exotics, stop breeding, and enrich cages–– but
soon afterward, the leopard was pregnant, more mixed
Asiatic-African lion cubs were born, the substrate was
removed from cages, and kangaroos were to be
imported from Australia. (We got that stopped).
The latest was that eight lion cubs were sent
off to “freedom,” the zoo told us, in South Africa.
Who, I thought, would pay to transport and
feed eight tame lions born to tame parents? They could
never be released. They were of no use for conservation
purposes, being hybrids.

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Editorial: How to help animals in China

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE has received many heartfelt appeals for a boycott of all goods
from China and/or all tourism to China, in response to the recent Humane Society of the U.S.
disclosures pertaining to the use of dog and cat fur by some Chinese garment makers, whose
customers include U.S. retailers.
The dog and cat fur traffic was overdue for exposure, HSUS is to be commended
for doing it, and expressions of outrage are also in order.
But a broad boycott of China would be unfair, ineffective, and self-defeating. The
dog and cat fur traffic is not uniquely Chinese; neither is China the largest supplier. The
largest supplier, our files indicate, is Russia, along with other nations formerly belonging to
the USSR, where animals killed by city pounds have been pelted and the pelts sold since
Czarist times. As ANIMAL PEOPLE has reported, the killing and pelting is often done by
prisoners. The proceeds underwrite both the animal control agencies, such as they are, and
the prisons. Neither have ever approached internationally accepted humane standards.

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Newfoundland asks to kill 2 million seals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

OTTAWA––With Canadian fisheries
minister David Anderson imminently
expected to announce the 1999 seal-killing
quota, Newfoundland fisheries minister John
Efford on January 5 recommended a “onetime
cull” of two million harp seals and grey
seals––almost half the total population, by
government estimates.
Should Anderson prove unwilling
to authorize such a slaughter, Effords said he
would favor increasing the annual sealing
quota to 400,000––68% more than were
legally killed in either 1997 or 1998.
Known for his furious assertions
that seals rather than overfishing are responsible
for the economically catastrophic depletion
of Atlantic Canadian cod, mackerel,
salmon, and skates, Efford buttressed his
recommendation with a 32-page report
authored by former Canadian Department of
Fisheries and Oceans head research scientist
George Winters.

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Even scavengers reject pelts

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

NORTH BAY, Ontario; WASHINGTON
D.C.––Fur industry bravado about
making a comeback was cut short on December
14 at the North Bay Fur Harvesters auction in
North Bay, Ontario. The first major North
American pelt sale of the year offered the pelts
of 167,107 wild animals––but sold just 23%, a
record poor showing.
A day preceding public disclosure
that the Humane Society of the U.S. had caught
the Burlington Coat Factory chain selling garments
trimmed with dog fur, none of the
world’s major fur buyers felt confident enough
about the longterm prospects of the industry to
scoop up pelts that almost couldn’t be given
away, and warehouse them in speculation.
Even when fur sales were in free fall
during the late 1980s and early 1990s, North
Bay auctions usually sold 95%-100% of often
much larger consignments.

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