Editorial: Building shelters won’t build a no-kill nation

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

On pages 12 and 13 of this edition, the Duffield Family Foundation, now doing
business as Maddie’s Fund, answers the question weighing most heavily on the minds of
ANIMAL PEOPLE readers since October 1998, when we announced that PeopleSoft
founders Dave and Cheryl Duffield had committed the entire $200 million assets of their
foundation to making the U.S. a no-kill nation, and had hired Richard Avanzino to direct the
effort, beginning at his retirement after 24 years as president of the San Francisco SPCA.
The $200 million question, bluntly put, is “How do we get on the gravy train?”
The answer, summarized, is “Build a railroad.”
As the ad explains, Maddie’s Fund wants to see animal care and control organizations
for harmonious partnerships, to reach the no-kill destination on a specified timetable.
Get there early and you might get a bonus––but crash like Casey Jones, cannonballing along
in disregard of others stalled on the tracks, and you won’t even get a ticket to ride.

Pigs blamed for Malaysian crisis

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

KUALA LUMPUR––The ongoing
Asian fiscal crisis, global pork price collapse,
and panic in Malaysia over lethal disease outbreaks
might matter least to the pigs taking
the brunt of the human terror. Come good
times or bad for humans, pigs get killed.
As March ended, nearly 3,000
Malaysian troops shot or gassed pigs in ditches,
in districts where as many as 900 farmers
allegedly left the animals to starve or roam.
Eleven thousand villagers were
evacuated before the shooting began.
One million pigs were to be killed
by April 1, but the massacre reportedly
progessed at a fraction of the intended speed
due to pigs putting up frantic resistance.

Seals save life, need help

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

ST. JOHN’S––Charlene Camburn,
30, of Cleethorpe’s, England, is one fish
processer who has only good words for seals.
Watching the colony of 400 grey
seals at the Donna’s Nook nature reserve on
February 1, Camburn became stranded by high
tide on a sand bar off the Lincolnshire coast,
along with her boyfriend, Chris Tomlinson,
36, and their son Brogan, seven. As night fell,
they decided Camburn, the strongest swimmer,
should strike for the mainland to seek help––but
the current swept her into the bitterly cold, fogshrouded
North Sea.
“I kept going under toward the end.
It seemed much easier to die than stay alive,”
Camburn told Steve Dennis of the London
Mirror. “I thought Chris and Brogan had died.
But I could feel the seals going under my feet.
They nudged my legs and feet and kept diving
beside me, and I kept bobbing back up.

Can mercenary management stop poaching in Africa?

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

GENEVA, HARARE, JOHANNESBURG,
NAIROBI––The Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species on February 10 authorized Namibia and
Zimbabwe to sell 34 metric tons of stockpiled elephant tusk
ivory to Japan, as agreed by CITES members at the June 1997
CITES triennial meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe.
CITES withheld permission for Botswana to sell up
to 25 metric tons of ivory, pending improvement of security
arrangements including protection of wild elephants from
poachers, but the government of Botswana was optimistic,
according to the Pan-African News Service, that it too would
soon get the go-ahead.
Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana hope to collect
from $100,000 to $200,000 a ton for the ivory, which is used in
Japan for making ceremonial signature seals. Such seals are
customarily used in finalizing contracts.

OBITUARIES

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Margaret Hodgson Gurd, nearly
90, a former longtime member of the
Canadian SPCA board of directors, died on
March 22 in Montreal. No one could
remember when the blunt-spoken Gurd
wasn’t intensely active in humane
work––rescuing animals, badgering politicians
and media, handling communications
for half a dozen organizations and committees
at a time. Gurd was already a veteran
campaigner when she took on the Atlantic
Canada seal hunt in January 1967, and old
enough even then that she recalled
International Foundation for Animal Welfare
founder Brian Davies and Care For The
Wild founder Bill Jordan as “bright and
energetic young men,” whose arrival in the
cause she found invigorating. In the earlyto-middle
1980s Gurd sent news tips and
rosters of contacts in weekly two-page letters
to ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt
Clifton, who was then a rural Quebec newspaper
reporter, and aggressively lobbied his
editors to make space for investigative articles
on animal issues.

Obituaries

ANIMAL OBITUARIES

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Si Tanang, a baby dugong found
snagged in a prawn net on January 25 off
Sabeh, Malaysia, by fisher Atan Husin, 51,
and his son Roslan, 25, was discovered dead
by their friend Zahid Mohamed less than 48
hours after Atan released her on March 8,
under escalating pressure from the World
Wildlife Fund. The Malaysian government initially
told Atan he could keep and raise Si
Tanang, or sell her to an aquarium, but backtracked
as WWF turned up the heat. Atan and
family fed the baby dugong sea grass pulverized
in a blender, and she was reportedly
healthy when released. The Malaysian government
refused to allow Atan to bury her as a
deceased member of his family. Four dead
adult dugongs were later found floating in the
same vicinity, one of whom may have been Si
Tanang’s mother. The incident kindled new
interest in dugongs, believed to have been
extinct in Sabeh waters since 1974. All
Malaysia seemed to rejoice when on March 25
an aerial survey found three live dugongs
swimming off Pulau Nenas.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Spoken in Whispers

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Spoken in Whispers:
The Autobiography of a
Horse Whisperer
by Nicci Mackay
Fireside Books (c/o Simon & Schuster,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New
York, NY 10020), 1998.
190 pages. Paperback, $11.00.

After the success of Nicholas
Evans’ The Horse Whisperer, followed by
Robert Redford’s spin on this best-selling
novel, it’s no surprise that others have
jumped on the bandwagon. Use of the term
“whisperer” virtually guarantees a best-seller––as
Monty Roberts recognized in quickly
adding a gold seal to the cover of his book,
The Man Who Listens to Horses, proclaiming
himself “A Real Horse Whisperer.”

BOOKS: Making That Animal-Wonderful World A Reality, Not A Dream

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

Making That Animal-Wonderful World A Reality, Not A Dream
Distributed c/o Belton P. Mouras (222 California Loop, Sacramento, CA 95823), 1998. 25 pages, illustrated. No price listed.

“Don’t judge a book by the cover,”
the saying goes, but another saying holds that
“A picture is worth 1,000 words,” and the 14-
year-old cover photo, in the case of M a k i n g
That Animal-Wonderful World A Reality, Not
A Dream, tells a perhaps indicative story that
isn’t in the book.
In the foreground, right, Animal
Protection Institute, United Animal Nations,
and Summit for the Animals founder Belton P.
Mouras poses for a photographer who is also
in the foreground, at left. Mouras holds an
unidentifiable animal.
Between Mouras and the photographer,
in the background, are three women.
At left, National Alliance for Animals founder
Syndee Brinkman holds another unidentifiable
animal. At right, a woman we don’t recognize
looks admiringly over Mouras’ shoulder.
At center, frowning in silent commentary,
is Kim Bartlett, then a Houston
humane volunteer, now publisher of A N IMAL
PEOPLE.

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