Month: July 1999

Who’s behind Tiger Haven?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Recent appeal mailings by Tiger Haven,
Inc., of Knoxville, Tennessee, have drawn an
unusually heavy volume of inquiries to ANIMAL
PEOPLE as to what we know of the organization.
Tiger Haven is a project of Joseph
Donovan Parker, 52, and his wife Mary Lynn
Parker, who claimed in a 1991 affidavit that they
began working with tigers as Knoxville Zoo volunteers
in February 1988. The facility is actually located
at Kingston, 35 miles west of Knoxville. The
Parkers and Tiger Haven now have 63 tigers, lions,
jaguars, and other large exotic cats, including about
20 obtained when the Jimmy Carter Zoo went out of
business in 1997. (The North Carolina facility had no
connection with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.)
Joseph Parker reportedly ran bingo games
in the Knoxville area for some years, until thenTennessee
attorney general Charles Burson ruled in
early 1989 that bingo is illegal under the state constitution.

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Sea Shepherds fight World Wildlife Fund

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Between vigils against Makah whaling in fall 1998 and spring 1999
aboard The Sirenian off Neah Bay, Washington, Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society international director Lisa Distefano spent part of the winter helping to
save sea birds after the wreck of the tanker Pallas near the Shallows nature
reserve off the coast of Germany. The Sea Shepherds mustered 60 volunteers,
who eventually rescued more than 1,000 birds, Distefano wrote in the first 1999
edition of The Sea Shepherd Log.
The hardest part of the job, Distefano said, was that “In Germany the
conservation ethic tends to be a hunter’s ethic. The park staff at the Shallows
reserve is steeped in the mentality that if an animal is injured, you kill it. The
reserve workers are basically hunters. They, like staff from Greenpeace and the
World Wildlife Fund, came to the scene with the belief that if a bird had any
contact with oil, the bird is beyond help and must be killed.

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Sitting on fat assets–– and grabbing more

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE reader Victoria
Windsor was the first of many who noted the intense
resemblance of the Massachusetts SPCA appeal
mailing of April 12 to the appeal format long used by
DELTA Rescue.
DELTA Rescue founder Leo Grillo said he
wouldn’t mind if the MSPCA, with $75 million in
assets, including $65 million in cash and securities,
also copied the DELTA Rescue approach to helping
animals. If the MSPCA committed even half as large
a share of its resources to low-cost and free neutering
and care-for-life sheltering as DELTA Rescue,
Massachusetts could be a no-kill state in six months.
But the MSPCA isn’t even the wealthiest
humane society in Boston with a long history of sitting
on its assets. The Town of Pembroke recently
revoked the tax-exempt status of a house and land
purchased by the Animal Rescue League, ostensibly
to build a shelter, but used instead to house the
League’s director of operations. That caused the
Quincy Patriot-Ledger to investigate what else the
Animal Rescue League was and wasn’t doing.

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RSPCA barely holds off hunters

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

LONDON––Struggling to retain control
of the Royal SPCA, the pro-animal rights board
faction led by Animal Revolution author Richard
Ryder kept off the June 26 annual meeting agenda a
proposed resolution by Countryside Alliance member
Ian Alexander which would have asked RSPCA
members to agree that it is “a matter of serious public
concern and detrimental to the interests of the
society, the growing influence within the society of
persons with extreme views of animal rights.”
The resolution would further have asked
the RSPCA membership to “cease expenditure upon
politically motivated lobbying and advertising,”
and would have invited the British Charity
Commissions to address the “growing evidence of
intrusion by animal rights activists into the society.”

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PETA, Paul, Jesus, and an arson charge

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

ATLANTA, DES MOINES,
KANSAS CITY, MISSOULA, TOPEK
A––Enlisting help from both Jesus and the
Beatles, People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals scored a string of media hits against
meat-eating and fishing in early summer.
Thirty-three years after the late John
Lennon provoked the biggest uproar of the
Beatles’ career by speculating, after a Beatles
concert outdrew church attendence, that the
group might have become more popular than
Jesus, Paul McCartney emerged from mourning
his late wife Linda to announce the first
airing of a 15-second anti-fishing TV commercial
that Linda made for PETA shortly before
her death. The commercial was broadcast on
NBC during National Fishing Week.

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Bullfeathers

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Upsetting 408 years of tradition
that bull-runners participate and spectators
attend runnings-of-the-bulls at their own risk,
a Madrid court ruled on June 30 that the town
of Belmonte de Tajo must pay $96,000 to a
man who was gored during a 1994 bull run,
and the town of Boadilla del Monte must pay
$10,000 to a 1992 goring victim.
French matador Denis Lore, 30,
is reportedly facing cruelty charges in Nimes,
France, brought by the French SPCA
because he advised amateur matadors in
April at an unauthorized private c o r r i d a,
during which four bulls were killed.

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CAMPAIGNS

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

The Schad Foundation and IFAW
on May 12 announced that they will donate
$200,000 for nonlethal bear control in northern
Ontario. Community bear control was formerly
done by 18 volunteer trappers associated
with North Bay Fur Harvesters Auction
I n c., who withdrew their services in April
after Ontario banned spring bear hunting.
Humane Society of Canada executive
director Michael O’Sullivan said on May
24 that HSC “is prepared to devote $1 million
to assist with the funding, expertise, and
delivery needed to incorporate” a dogbite prevention
curriculum “into mainstream public
education initiatives and school curricula in
every community across Canada,” providing
HSC is allowed to direct the campaign.
O’Sullivan also said he would ask each
province to match the HSC commitment.

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Making bucks out of bison

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

MILWAUKEE, WASHINGTON
D.C.––Former bison rancher and promoter
James O’Hearn, 60, drew a six-year
sentence on May 11 for fraud, illegally acting
as a stockbroker, forging client signatures,
and converting assets to personal use.
Claiming investments in bison
meat, hides, manure, and embryo transplants
would bring riches, O’Hearn allegedly
bilked 40 people of about $2.5 million.
“If I had the option of imposing a
longer sentence, I would,” said U.S. District
Judge Charles N. Clevert, likening O’Hearn
to bank robbers and drug dealers.
The USDA meanwhile outlined a
safer way to make money from bison.
Reported Associated Press, “Bison
ranching is growing so fast that there is no
longer a market for all the meat, processors
say. As a result, the USDA will buy $6 million
in surplus ground bison this year, one
quarter of the industry’s ground meat production.
The biggest beneficiary of the purchases
likely would be billionaire Ted Turner,
the industry’s largest producer and most
prominent proponent.”
Turner owns about 17,000 of the
estimated 250,000 bison in the U.S.

Shooting dogs as if it’s going out of style

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

PETERSON, N.J.; MEBANE,
N . C .––Firing three shots into a pit bull/
Labrador mix named Disciple, as the dog
mauled Terrance Tate, 4, police officer
Edwin Rodrieguez on June 9 accidentally hit
Tarik Beach, 12, in the left leg with a richochetting
bullet fragment.
Tate’s mother, Christchelle Tate,
indicated to the Hackensack Record that
Beach was the real hero, was already restraining
Disciple before Rodrieguez fired, and that
the gunplay menaced both boys more than the
dog did. Disciple survived all three shots, but
was euthanized later by a veterinarian.
Almost simultaneously, in Mebane,
North Carolina, police sergeant Terance
Caldwell, 33, fired three shots at an alleged
pack of stray dogs. One shot hit Little League
outfielder Nathaniel Tilley, 11, in the calf.
Tilley, not seriously injured, was standing at
the Mebane Arts and Community Center baseball
diamond drinking fountain, a quarter of a
mile away.

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