Angst over beta-agonists in meat

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

 

BANGKOK, KUALA LUM-PUR,
HONG KONG––A Thai FDA crackdown on
the use of beta-agonist stimulants in pork production
sounded like late response to old news
when announced in June 1999.
It wasn’t. Hong Kong is a key market
for Thai pork, and six Hong Kong residents
were ill from ingesting beta-agonist
residues with pork offal.
In 1998 Hong Kong banned the sale
of pig offal for four months after 17 people
suffered beta-agonist poisoning.
Beta-agonist traces were found then
in nine out of 14 pigs’ lungs originating from
four farms in Hong Kong and two farms in
Guangdong, on the Chinese mainland. Thai
pork was apparently free of beta-agonists––
and that’s how Bangkok wants to keep it.

Read more

Let me tell you about the bats and the birds and the beetles and the turds…

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

LONDON––Trying to bring a rare
bird called the clough back to Cornwall, the
National Trust on advice of English Nature in
1996 banned the use of avermectin-class vermicides,
including Ivermectin, in cattle who
graze NT pastures. Residues from the wormkillers
were believed to be inhibiting the reproduction
of dung beetles, the clough’s chief
food source. About 100 farms were affected.
There are still no cloughs in Cornwall
––but the rare greater horseshoe bat has become
more numerous within the 100-farm area than
anywhere else in England, and the even scarcer
hornet robber fly has appeared as well.
Even with the Cornwall bat boom,
there are still fewer than 4,000 greater horseshoe
bats in Britain, among just a handful of
colonies. English Nature and The Bat
Conservation Trust hope to persuade other
farmers to forgo the use of avermectins.
“And I thought the new highly efficient
parasiticides only eradicated parasitologists,”
said World Health Organization epidemiologist
Martin Hugh-Jones.

Smithsonian ducks

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.––PETA scored a rare victory
over the foie gras industry on August 23 when the
Smithsonian Institution cancelled a scheduled September 21
book-signing party for Michael Ginor, owner of Hudson
Valley Foie Gras, whose volume Foie Gras…A Passion was
to be published by Wylie Inc. in mid-September.
The cancellation, heavily covered by both The New
York Times and The Washington Post, brought unprecedented
public attention to how foie gras is made: by either pouring
grain or pumping a pureed mash directly into the stomachs of
restrained ducks and geese, through a plastic or metal tube
thrust down their throats. The force-feeding causes the ducks
and geese to rapidly develop abnormally fat-laden livers.
After the birds are killed, their livers are blended into a paste.

Read more

Wildlife trafficking busts in China bring record seizures

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

HONG KONG––Banning imports of turtles for
meat after verotoxin-producing e – c o l i bacteria turned up in a
cargo of live freshwater turtles brought from Thailand via
Hong Kong, officials in Shenzhen, China proved they meant
business on September 8, seizing 6.6 metric tons of live Thai
softshelled turtles from a Hong Kong-registered fishing boat
off Sha Chau.
The turtles reportedly would have brought about
$400,000 if delivered to market. Vessel master Kwan Lamwa,
31, and a 28-year-old crew member were arrested.
Just a year ago the Sha Chau bust would have been
the biggest ever made by Chinese authorities. In 1999,
though, it wasn’t even the biggest of the summer.

Read more

Wildlife Report

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

Bird habitat
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service credits killing
thousands of nest-parasitizing cowbirds since 1991 with bringing
the least Bell’s vireo up from just 268 known pairs in 1991
to more than 2,000 in 1999. “Just as important,” explained Los
Angeles Times reporter Gary Polakovic, “the vireo’s comeback
may prove that habitat along streams in Southern
California is recovering––a critical indicator of environmental
health in a state that has lost 97% of its riparian woodlands,
more than any other.” As Illinois Natural History Survey
scientist Scott Robinson observed in 1995, after examining the
relationship between vanishing songbirds and cowbirds,
“Small nature preserves, which work fine for preserving plants,
don’t work for migratory birds,” whose nesting sites become
vulnerable to cowbirds when deforestation removes their cover.
“The [British] Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds are completely barking,” Game Conservancy Trust
head of grouse research David Baines recently told Daily
Telegraph environment editor Charles Clover, because after
five years of intensively killing crows and foxes to protect a
rare grouse called the capercaillie, the RSPB has experimented
since 1995 with not killing predators. The capercaillie population
is down from 2,200 in 1995 to about 1,000. But the RSPB
says the main reasons for the drop have been bad weather at
nesting season and, wrote Clover, “the death of up to a third of
its capercallie by flying into deer fences put up to allow the
regeneration of native pines.”

Read more

How we helped save some coyotes

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

LOS ANGELES––By order of
the Los Angeles Animal Services Commission,
the city Department of Animal
Services on September 8 retrieved traps
that were loaned just before Labor Day
to two residents of Northridge and
Woodland Hills in the San Fernando
Valley to help them kill coyotes.
The residents were to set and
monitor the traps, but were to call
Animal Services to dispatch any coyotes
they caught.
The trap loans reversed Animal
Services Commission policy in effect
since 1993. Scare stories about why the
loans were made revived old phobias
about coyotes that “Coyote Lady” Lila
Brooks and others have fought for more
than 30 years.

Read more

ANIMAL CONTROL & SHELTERING

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

Pet registration and microchipping,
required throughout Taiwan since September 1,
is expected to markedly increase returns to owners
by pounds and reduce running-at-large. Stricter
regulation of shelters is meanwhile expected to
diminish the cruelty for which Taiwanese pounds
became notorious in recent years through campaigns
led by the International Alliance for
Taiwan Dogs, Animal Protection of Taiwan,
Life Conservationist Association, and Asians for
Humans, Animals, and Nature. A survey commissioned
by the Council of Agriculture Bureau
of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and
Quarantine reported on August 30 that the number
of stray dogs in Taiwan has fallen from 1.3 to 1.4
million in 1995 to about 600,000 now, while the
number of dogs kept at home as pets has surged
from circa 350,000 then to more than two million.

Read more

Trouble in the Balkans––and Asia Minor

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

LONDON–– Two border collies
named Kelly and Gemma symbolize to the
British public the frustration of trying to
help animals––and humans––in the
Balkans and Asia Minor.
Kelly and Gemma are trained
sniffing dogs, thoroughly vaccinated,
who were dispatched to Izmit, Turkey, by
the Gloucester-based disaster response
group Rapid U.K. after the August 17 predawn
earthquake that fatally buried as
many as 45,000 Turks in the rubble of
their collapsed homes.
Kelly and Gemma saved at least
six human lives. But because rabies
occurs in Turkey, they were locked into
quarantine immediately upon their return
home, their vaccination records not withstanding
bureaucratic constipation.

Read more

WHO’S FIXING PET OVERPOPULATION?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

The following table lists the number of
dogs and cats killed per thousand humans in
North American cities, counties, and states
where complete recent counts are available.
Immense regional differences are readily
apparent, with the lowest ratios clustered in
the Northeast and the highest in the South,
except around Washington D.C.
The low Northeastern and Washington
D.C. area figures would appear to be associated
with high urban populations, apartment living
and resultant low pet ownership rates; cold winters,
the D.C. area excepted, which depress the
survival rate of late-born feral kittens and also
suppress estrus in dogs and cats, decreasing the
frequency with which they bear litters; a relatively
strong humane infrastructure to encourage neutering;

Read more

1 2 3 4