WHO GETS THE MONEY? addenda – late filings

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

The financial data below pertains to animal issue-related charities whose IRS Form 990 filings came too late to abstract in our 10th annual “Who Gets The Money?” charts, published in December 1999.

Each charity is identified by apparent focus: A for advocacy, E for education, S for sheltering.

Charities often declare to the IRS a balance of program vs. fundraising and maintenance expense (overhead) which differs from the balance as it would be stated under National Charities Information Bureau guidelines. The % column states each charity’s overhead costs as declared; the ADJ column states those costs as they would appear if the NCIB guidelines were followed. The NCIB recommends that overhead costs should not be more than 40% of total spending.

Maneka meets the elephant

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Udhagamandalam, India––Fed up with recurring allegations by the U.S.-based India Project for Animals and Nature that an elephant IPAN calls Loki is being abused, despite the findings of five different teams of investigators over a year’s time that he is not, Indian minster of state for social justice and empowerment Maneka Gandhi and federal director of animal welfare Dilip Singh visited the elephant in person at the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu state on December 30.

According to the December 31 edition of The Hindu, the largest newspaper in India, Maneka inspected the elephant, fed him sugar cane, pronounced his condition and care good, called the IPAN allegations a “non-issue,” and warned Indian media and animal protection donors about foreign advocacy groups that might make sensational claims for fundraising purposes.

Saving Whales

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

ROME––Italy, France, and Monaco on November 25, 1999 jointly declared their Mediterranean territorial waters to be a whale sanctuary. All cetaceans are protected within the sanctuary, which extends from the Giens peninsula in France to the north of Sardinia and the south Tuscany coast in Italy.

Among the beneficiaries are about 2,000 fin whales plus 25,000 to 45,000 striped dolphins.

The Mediterranean whale sanctuary was created, after 10 years of negotiation, 40 days after the legislature of the German state of Schleswig Holstein voted to establish a whale sanctuary around the islands of Sylt and Amrum, within the Waddan Sea National Park. The Sylt-Amrum area is considered an important porpoise breeding habitat.

PETsMART dumps British subsidiary

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Phoenix––Describing a 92-store British subsidiary, Pet City, as “an asset that has not met our performance expectations,” PETsMART president Philip L. Francis on December 15 announced that it had been sold––at a substantial loss––to the British firm Pets At Home.

The deal was reportedly already in negotiation when the British TV program Weekend Watchdog on December 3 interviewed four former PETsMART/Pet City employees who described senior staff bludgeoning unsold hamsters and rabbits at stores in Fife, East Anglia, and Surrey.

PETsMART marketing director Simon Blower responded to the content of the broadcast a day before it actually aired by setting up “an external advisory panel, made up of independent consultants, veterinarians, and educators” to do a “comprehensive review” of Pet City animal care.

“We are absolutely determined to make whatever changes may be necessary to get things right in all our stores,” Blower said.

Did She Read It?

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

“Deer hunting kills birds,” an ANIMAL PEOPLE cover feature pointed out in March 1997, citing the loss of forest nesting habitat caused by deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania. ANIMAL PEOPLE explained that the Pennsylvania Game Commission annually sets hunting quotas to target bucks but spare does, to achieve rapid herd growth, and noted that the National Audubon Society, quick to blame cats for vanishing songbirds, had never fingered hunters’ demands for plentiful deer.

Pennsylvania Audubon Society executive director Cindy Dunn, however, sounded as if she’d read the article in a recent address to a deer management symposium in Media, Pennsylvania. Accusing Game Commission members of “getting their opinions from barroom biology,” Dunn blasted deer management policies favoring hunters who “would like to see a lot of deer in a short time,” and called hunting no solution to the loss of nesting habitat because, “You can shoot a lot of bucks without having any impact upon deer herd size.”

Sealers fight new Russian humane law

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

MOSCOW––Russian president Boris Yeltzin, 68, who resigned on New Year’s Day, apparently left to his successor Valdimir Putin, 47, the fate of a 22-page animal protection act approved 273-1 on December 1 by the State Duma (parliament).

Jen Tracy of the St. Petersburg Times reported on December 28 that the governors of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had appealed to Yeltzin to veto the bill because it would have prohibited sealing.

The anti-sealing clause was apparently included in the bill mainly to protect the small Nerpa seal of landlocked Lake Baikal. Hunters have killed 5,000 to 6,000 Nerpa seals per year since 1992, and the seals are reportedly in a steep population decline.

Little is known of Putin’s views about animals. His wife and two daughters keep a pet poodle.

Chimp refuge in Ghana hits bumps

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Friends of Animals literature describing disease experiments to which ex-laboratory chimpanzees may have been subjected apparently backfired in December 1999 against FoA plans to relocate chimps from U.S. labs to a newly created sanctuary in Ghana.

FoA has been developing the sanctuary on Konklobi, a 163-acre island in Lake Volta, for approximately three years, in cooperation with the Ghana Department of Wildlife and with advisory supervision from Primarily Primates president Wally Swett. The Konklobi project director, Gerald A. Punguse, retired from his former post as chief wildlife officer in Ghana in November 1998.

The next step was to be actually obtaining chimps and delivering them to Ghana, to live out the rest of their lives in semi-wild habitat.

South Korea delays any action on dog meat bills

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

SEOUL––The South Korean National Assembly subcommittee for agriculture on December 10 dropped until after the next general election any further consideration of competing bills which would either officially classify dogs as livestock saleable for human consumption or fully ban eating dog meat.

An Agriculture Ministry spokesperson reportedly told media that, “It is difficult to decide” which bill the ministry should support, “because half of the Korean people agree that dogs may be eaten and the other half do not. If the government allows dog meat trade and regulates dog meat sanitation, many foreigners will boycott Korea and World Cup 2002,” the international soccer championship which is to be cohosted by South Korea and Japan.

The Agriculture Ministry reportedly blamed the Health Ministry for failing to enforce the existing law, adopted before the 1988 Winter Olympics, thereby allowing dog meat consumption to rise from circa two million dogs per year in 1988 to about three million per year now.

Dogs are commonly eaten by older men of Han Chinese ethnicity, especially, throughout Asia. Cats are more often eaten by older women. Dog and cat fur exports to the U.S. from China and northern Thailand, recently exposed by the Humane Society of the U.S. and World Society for the Protection of Animals, are a largely a byproduct of eating dogs and cats––which practices are abhored by the Buddhist majority in Thailand, but are allowed under a policy of ethnic tolerance.

Korean dog-and-cat-eating customs are particularly cruel, by intent, because of a prevailing belief that the remains taste better and impart superior medicinal qualities if saturated in adrenalin during a slow death in pain and fear. Dogs are slowly hanged, flogged, and dehaired by blowtorch while still alive; cats’ bones are broken with a hammer before they are boiled alive.

[Petitions against Korean dog-and-cat-eating are distributed by the International Association for Korean Animals on behalf of the Korea Animal Protection Society c/o POB 20600, Oakland, CA 94620; >>ifkaps@msn.com<<.]

Canadians hunt the last seal

January 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

ST. JOHN, GRISE FJORD––The Inuk of Grise Fjord, Nunavet, formerly part of the Northwest Territories of Canada, marked the New Year with a “Last Seal of the Millennium” hunting contest on the ice off Ellesmere Island.

The unrestrained viciousness of Atlantic Canadian seal massacres meanwhile may get worse, as the Supreme Court of Newfoundland ruled 2-1 on December 14, 1999 that sealing is a provincial jurisdiction and that the Canadian federal government therefore had no right to charge 101 sealers with illegally killing whitecoats and bluebacks during the 1996 hunt.

The verdict, which the Crown had 60 days to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, could leave all authority over the hunt in Newfoundland waters with provincial fisheries minister John Effords. Effords vocally favors killing at least half of the Atlantic Canadian seal population, in hopes that killing seals will bring back cod.

« 1 2 3 4 »