Funding the War on Roadkills

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

BOZEMAN, Montana–The $59.6 billion U.S. Department of
Transportation appropriation signed by President George W. Bush in
December 2001 included $500,000 for an anti-roadkill project under
study by the Western Transportation Institute, a program of the
College of Engineering at Montana State University in Bozeman.
That aspect of the bill appears to have been reported only by
Bob Anez, of Associated Press, who promptly interviewed WTI
research engineer Pat McGowan.

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From drunk hunters to a Republican who wants to ban elephants: State Legislative roundup, 2002

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Hunting
Frustrated that North Carolina law forbids hunting on state
land while under the influence of alcohol, but not on private
property, the Orange County commissioners sent a message to the
statehouse on January 15 by passing their own anti-drunk hunting
ordinance, and asked the three biggest cities within the
county–Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough–to do the same.
Neighboring Caswell County passed a similar ordinance in 2001.
Hunters typically get whatever they want from state
legislatures, however, due to the disproportionate influence of
rural representatives with long tenures as committee chairs, and
2002 started out the usual way, when the Maine legislature on
January 6 ratified a plan by the Department of Inland Fisheries and
Wildlife to expand coyote snaring in order to increase the deer herd.
Maine legislators solicited the plan in late 2001 after
hunters in several areas complained that coyotes were killing more
deer than the hunters were–although many of the deer coyotes kill
have previously been wounded by hunters who failed to dispatch them,
have been hit by cars, or are debilitated by starvation after an
over-abundant herd consumes all the accessible browse too early in
the winter.

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BOOKS: Wild Health

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Wild Health:
How Animals Keep Themselves Well
and What We Can Learn From Them
by Cindy Engel
Houghton Mifflin (215 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10003), 2002.
288 pages, paperback. $24.00.

Vegetarian activists and antivivisectionists often point out
the incomprehensible extent to which biomedical researchers have
overlooked the influence of diet on human health–and thus have
expended millions of animal lives in search of cures for ailments
which could be avoided by simply avoiding animal flesh and byproducts.
Though diet has received much more medical attention during
the past 30 years than in the preceding several centuries, human
physicians still tend to ignore Hippocrates’ admonition to, “Leave
your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal your patient with
food.”

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BOOKS: Saving Emily

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Saving Emily
by Nicholas Read
Prometheus Books (59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228), 2001.
150 pages, paperback. $14.00.

The two timeless themes of rural literature might be
summarized as, “Country lad (lass) goes to the big city and becomes
corrupted/resists temptation,” and “Displaced city lad (lass) comes
out to the country to discover what is true and real.”
The former theme was the staple of medieval morality plays,
structured the plots of the first English novels, underscored The
Beverly Hillbillies, and remains the predominant theme of
country-western music.

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BOOKS: Voices From The Garden

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Voices From the Garden: Stories of Becoming A Vegetarian
edited by Sharon & Daniel Towns
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, #201, New York, NY 10003),
October 2001. 176 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Are you curious about other folks “going veggie” stories?
The first-person accounts in Voices From the Garden come for the most
part from ordinary people who have in common doing one thing that
mainstream America might consider extraordinary: they eat a vegan or
vegetarian diet. They range in age from teenagers to veterans of
sixty years without meat. They recount what it is like to challenge
the status quo-past and present. Among them are also a handful of
well-known people, including the former cattle rancher and
vegetarian advocate Howard Lyman, PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk,
and Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism.

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Animal obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Sirius, 4, the yellow Labrador bomb-sniffing dog of Port
Authority police officer David Lim, was found on January 23 in the
rubble of the World Trade Center. Sirius’ remains received the same
ceremonious removal as those of human police and firefighters. Lim
left Sirius in the basement kennel of Tower II on September 11 while
he climbed to the 44th floor to assist with the evacuation. He was
carrying a woman down from the fifth floor when the building
collapsed, but was rescued after six hours in the flaming debris.
Lim is now training a new bomb-sniffing dog, a black Lab named Sprig.

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Human obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Phil Caidin, 77, died of cancer on February 17 in New York
City. An air gunner in World War II, Caidin worked in sales for
many years at Gimbels, but discovered his true calling as “The
Birdman of Central Park,” as the National Enquirer called him, when
in 1957 his first bird, a white albino parakeet, flew out an open
window into Riverside Park. During the next 40 years Caidin rescued
more than 100 parakeets, “dozens” of lovebirds, and seven parrots
who were at large in New York City parks, along with a Peking duck
and countless dogs and cats. The duck made headlines in 1983, as
Caidin waded into freezing ponds in midwinter day after day to feed
and befriend him. A 23-day pursuit of a 20-inch-tall conure and a
yellow-headed Amazon parrot made The New York Times in 1994.

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