PREDATORS’ MEAT AND USDA POISON

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Opposing environmental priorities as well as the long-running conflict between wildlife advocates and ranchers are again on the line in Congress.

Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Charles Bass (R-New Hampshire) announced in mid-May that they would seek an ammendment to the Agriculture Appropriations bill for fiscal 2001 which would cap the USDA Wildlife Services budget at $28.7 million.

This would eliminate subsidized predator control for ranchers, consisting chiefly of killing coyotes, but would not interfere with killing wildlife under contract from other government agencies––for instance, to protect airports, endangered species, and golf greens on public land.

DeFazio and Bass sought a cut of $10 million from the Wildlife Services budget in 1998, when their bill was approved on first reading, 229-193. The vote was reversed the next day, however, after a night of frantic lobbying by Wildlife Services senior staff and representatives of the livestock industry. It stood little chance of passage by the U.S. Senate in any event, where members friendly to western ranchers chair all the key committees it would have to clear.

Endangered “invasives” killed

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

CAPE TOWN, MELBOURNE––With rare Himalayan tahrs and grey-headed flying fox bats already under fire at Table Mountain and being trapped and killed in Fern Gully of the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Domestic Animal Rescue Association of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Victorian Scientific Advisory Committee in Melbourne, Australia, were seeking last-ditch means of pursuing injunctions to stop the killing as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.

Each massacre raised the issue of an endangered species in native habitat being seen as invasive elsewhere, despite showing no hint of expanding beyond a narrow range.

Descended from two escaped zoo specimens, the tahrs thrived on Table Mountain after native klipspringers were poached out. They proved so much better at evading human hunters that though the herd, once up to 600, has been reduced to between 70 and 100, they have eluded extermination by Cape Nature Conservation since 1976. CNC believes it must kill all the tahrs before it can successfully reintroduce klipspringers–– who reportedly have already been reintroduced unsuccessfully several times.

INVASIVES IF HUMANIACS HAD THEIR WAY

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – The 32-member Invasive Species Advisory Committee appointed in January 2000 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt may have excluded humane representatives because Invasive Species Council members Babbitt, Commerce Secretary William Daley, and Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman feared that concern for preventing animal suffering might interfere with their mandate to kill all ferals.

Prevailing belief among mainstream conservation biologists and wildlife managers is that if socalled “humaniacs” had their way, the whole of North American would be overrun by even more feral species than it has now in no time.

But a look at actual species introductions tells a different story. Most would never have come if hunting, meat-eating, animalfighting, vivisection, and other cruel practices had been adequately proscribed by public policy.

Feds find out that force-feeding white phosphorous to mute swans kills them

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

LAUREL, Md. – – “ T h i s has been proclaimed the year that mute swans will be eliminated from North America,” warns swan defender Kathryn Burton of Old Lyme, Connecticut. “A directive to get rid of all mutes on federal property came from the Interior Department in 1997,” endorsed by many state wildlife agencies as well, “with the goal being total eradication in 2000,” Burton adds.

Eradicating mute swans could become a symbolic first victory for the Invasive Species Council, created by executive order of President Bill Clinton in early February 1999 with a mandate to destroy all wild animals and plants not native to the U.S.

Mute swans are easy targets because they are few, are large, are conspicuous, remain together as pairs even when one partner is gravely wounded, and are hated by wildlife managers who blame them for 13 years of failures to re-establish huntable populations of native trumpeter swans.

NZ DOC vs. rainbow lorikeets

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

AUCKLAND, N.Z.; SAN FRANCISCO; MIAMI––The New Zealand Department of Conservation has budgeted $245,000 toward all-out eradication of feral rainbow lorikeets, including $18,000 for the use of alpha chlorolase poison, but the brightly colored Australian birds have an influential defender in Rex Gilliland, 61.

A life member of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a leading member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, Gilliland is no reflexive friend of ferals. His curriculum vitae states that he “previously assisted the DoC by eradicating the Norway rat from Saddle Island in the Hauraki Gulf at his own expense.”

Also to assist the survival of indigenous New Zealand birds, Gilliland has for many years sponsored kaka exhibition and research at the Auckland Zoo, and planted more than 400 trees to help the birds and other wildlife of Tiri Tiri Island.

Fixing the street dog problem in Costa Rica by Herb Morrison

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

ALAJUELA, Costa Rica––Dawn and Sid Scott, immigrants to Costa Rica from Chicago, have seen the tough side of Guanacaste from ground level, traveling the poorly maintained roads of this northwestern province to round up dogs for veterinary care at frequent intervals since mid-1998. They have sterilized more than 225 dogs at their own expense, paying about $20 U.S. per surgery.

Most dogs they meet belong to human families but live outside. Though Costa Rica has had no canine rabies since 1987, dogs commonly suffer from mange, internal parasites, and distemper. National veterinary licensing board member Gerardo Vicente, DVM, estimates that only about a third of the half million dogs in Costa Rica are given proper medical care. Most receive food but little else.

LETTERS [June 2000]

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

Zimbabwe crisis

The Wet Nose Animal Rescue Centre has formed a fund to help the Zimbabwe National SPCA in their fight against cruelty to animals left on the farms of fleeing white farmers. So-called freedom fighters are reportedly invading these farms, hacking dogs with pangas and cutting meat from live animals who are left to die slowly.

Vicious beatings of dogs were broadcast by ETV and CNN on April 21. We offer these updates on those dogs’ condition, furnished by Meryl Harrison of the Zimbabwe National SPCA:

Letters

Editorial: Small primates on a limb

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

“Culture,” says the National Geographic Desk Reference, “provides the identity that links members of one society together and can also divide those members from other cultures.” In other words, culture is the learned behavior that separates the sheep from the goats, and also determines in which order the sheep and goats march. Culture could be defined as a collective term for the variety of social, economic, and political methods that humans use to form and maintain what we would recognize in other species as a dominance hierarchy.

Culturally entrenched cruelties resist abolition because the evolution of culture itself is often driven by the motives underlying the cruelty, so much so that the whole cultural selfidentification of some societies becomes preoccupied with establishing who may abuse whom. The more basic the society, meaning the most absorbed in constant struggle for both personal and collective survival, the more likely it is to be organized around “might makes right,” like a tribe of chimpanzees––and the more likely the culture of the society will consist chiefly of activities meant to remind members of their rank. The hazing practiced by social clubs and athletic teams serves such a purpose, for example, and is seldom far removed from cruelty because it is central to a culture whose whole purpose is defining the dominance of the incrowd or the winners, and excluding others from the exhalted inner circle.

Golf: Facing nature with a club

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

SEAL BEACH, AUBURN, SANTA BARBARA, California; LAKEWOOD, Colorado––Already poisoning cottontail rabbits at the Leisure World golf course in Seal Beach, the exterminating firm California Agri-Control in early May asked the Seal Beach Police Department for permission to shoot rabbits as well. Seal Beach police chief Mike Sellers on May 9 refused to waive the city policy against firing guns within city limits––which meant that the poisoning would continue.

In Defense of Animals offered to relocate the rabbits to a privately owned 40-acre site near Lake Elsinore, without much hope that the offer would be accepted.

“In 1992, an offer to relocate rabbits” from Leisure World “was rejected by the California Department of Fish and Game,” IDA representative Bill Dyer said. “Yet for $40,000, the cost of building one green” claimed by Leisure World, “all of the rabbits could be trapped, sterilized, and released.”

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