Month: January 2003

Croatian actor slams fur

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

ZAGREB, Croatia-Born in Sibenik, Croatia, actor Goran
Visnjic posed with his dog for anti-fur billboards posted in Zagreb
and Split on January 3 by Animal Friends Croatia and PETA.
“Civilization is advancing but some people are going
backward,” said Visnjic of fur-wearers. Visnjic has played the
immigrant doctor “Luka Kovac” on the NBC drama ER since 1999.
PETA spokesperson Michael McGraw described the billboard
campaign as the first PETA anti-fur effort in eastern Europe, but
two PETA staffers and a volunteer from the Russian office of
Greenpeace stripped in 1991 for a brief anti-fur protest in Moscow.
Like other nude anti-fur protests outside the U.S., including a
first-ever nude protest in Beijing in October 2002, that effort may
have attracted more attention in U.S. and British media than where it
occurred.

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Attempt to save fighting cattle comes to grief

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

MOSCOW-2003 opened miserably for sisters Lena and Tanja
Marou-eva, who had to tell fellow members of People for
Animals/Russia and their supporters abroad that their August 2001
success in banning bullfights from Moscow had nonetheless ended with
the deaths of all 30 of the imported fighting bulls and cows they
struggled for two years to save.
In the end, they managed to bring just one of the cattle
into sanctuary care. Received in November, while ANMAL PEOPLE was
in Moscow, she was named Dinara, after the late ANIMAL PEOPLE
office cat Dennis the Menace, whose memorial appeared in the
November 2002 edition. A specially built paddock for Dinara was
nearly done when she succumbed to suspected poisoning.

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LETTERS [Jan/Feb 2003]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

Underfunded herp rescue

We noted that in the list of animal organizations’ income and
expenses in your December 2002 edition, there was not one reptile or
turtle group among them. No reptile sanctuaries make enough money to
even have to file IRS Form 990. This is a sad commentary on the
survival of the oldest living creatures in the world. Turtles, at
200 million years old, have outlived the dinosaurs. Yet wild turtles
may be lucky to see 2012. In the past 50 years, the cruel pet trade,
collectors, hunters and others have tremendously reduced the numbers
of some of God’s gentlest creatures.
We feel as if wealthy donors, including grant-giving
entities like the foundation arms of the National Wildlife Federation
and the Nature Conservancy and pet chain charities, have
deliberately snubbed reptile rescue organizations like American
Tortoise Rescue, perhaps in part because we represent coldblooded
animals without fur.
We have pumped thousands of dollars of our own money into the
rescue since 1990 and are determined to keep it going. But we would
also welcome donations from the big groups you listed, especially the
ones that have had the nerve to ask us to take abandoned turtles and
tortoises, yet have neglected to assist us with any financial
support.

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Editorial: Fighting the fur-clad spectre of Attila the Hun

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

The importance of fur-wearing, apart
from the lives of up to 40 million animals killed
for fur each year, is that after meat-eating it
is the most visibly conspicuous public symbol of
attitudes toward animals. Mass media and the
general public began to view animal advocacy as
an authentic socially transformative force after
fur garments abruptly vanished from the streets
of much of the U.S. and Europe in 1988-1989-and
perceive the cause as waning if they see more
fur, whether or not fur is actually the focus of
much active campaigning.
Today more fur is visible, and that should be cause for worry.
U.S. retail fur sales fell from a high of
$1.85 billion in 1987-1988 to $950 million in
1991-1992. In 2000 and 2001, sales recovered to
$1.69 billion, then dipped to $1.53 billion.
Adjusted for inflation, the real increase from
the low point to the recent high was barely 20%,
and the trend is apparently again downward, but
perhaps mostly because of two years of economic
recession.

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Outraged researchers oust Maneka Gandhi from Indian lab supervision

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

NEW DELHI–“I am exhausted by this year,”
Maneka Gandhi e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on New
Year’s Eve. “I lost three jobs, two of my
oldest dogs, both 17, and all the elections in
my constituency. The only thing that I kept this
year was my temper, but I would be happy to lose
that as well! The only thing I gained was
weight.”
Technically Mrs. Gandhi lost the first of
the three jobs in November 2001, when Prime
Minister of India A.P. Vajpayee reassigned her
from Minister of Culture to Minister of
Statistics, after she clashed with the Korean
ambassador over his allegedly eating dogs.

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Immunocontraception comes of age

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

BILLINGS, RENO, WHITEHORSE–Immunocontraceptives for dogs,
cats, and deer are still not quite here yet, but widespread
applications and planned deployments involving bears, elephants,
wolves, and wild horses indicate that immunocontraception of
wildlife may at last be close to losing the qualifying adjective
“experimental”– at least in the species that are easiest to inject
and keep track of.
New Jersey Department of Environ-mental Protection
commissioner Bradley Campbell announced in November 2002 that his
agency hopes to test immunocontraceptives to control bears this
spring. The New Jersey bear population has increased from an
estimated 100 in 1970, when the state last opened a bear hunting
season, to as many as 2,500 according to much disputed official
figures. An attempt to resume bear hunting in 2000 was quashed by
adverse public opinion.

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High-energy post-Soviet activists do everything but raise money

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

MOSCOW, KIEV, KHARKOV-A sociologist or political scientist
probably could not design a better comparative experiment in starting
an animal advocacy movement than is now underway in Moscow, the
largest city in Russia, and Kiev and Kharkov, the two largest
cities in the Ukraine.
Russia and the Ukraine are neighbors, the most prominent
remnants of the former Soviet Union, sharing parallel history,
ethnicity, and standards of living, and post-Soviet birth rates
that are among the seven lowest in the world, but have active
rivalries dating back more than 1,000 years.
Their ancient kings conquered each other, their forced
alliances held Napoleon and Hitler at bay, and they are now racing
into economic development and social/political westernization at a
breakneck pace.

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How to read the data

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2003:

Who gets the money?  addenda

The data below updates and supplements the 13th annual ANIMAL
PEOPLE “Who gets the money?” report on the budgets,  assets,  and
salaries paid by the major U.S. animal-related charities,  plus
miscellaneous local activist groups,  humane societies,  and some
prominent organizations abroad,  published in our December 2002
edition.
Foreign data is stated in U.S. dollars at average 2001 exchange rates.
Most charities are identified in the second column by
apparent focus:  A for advocacy,  C for conservation of habitat via
acquisition,  E for education,  H for support of hunting (either for
“wildlife management” or recreation),  L for litigation,  N for
neutering,  P for publication,  R for animal rights,  S for
shelter/sanctuary maintenance,  V for focus on vivisection,  and W
for animal welfare.

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McCartney, wrestlers slam WWF

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

LONDON, U.K.; HARTFORD, Connecticut–Rock star Sir Paul
McCartney opened 2003 by joining an global tag-team of critics of the
World Wildlife Fund.
“I was appalled to learn from PETA that the U.S. office of
the WWF has been a driving force behind the design and development of
one of the largest animal testing programmes in international
history,” McCartney wrote to WWF director general Claude Martin,
accusing WWF of “pressurizing the U.S. Congress to require the
testing of chemicals for hormone-disrupting effects.”
McCartney referred to the High Production Volume Challenge
testing program begun in 2000 by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency. The program seeks to fill gaps in the U.S. registry data on
about 25,000 chemical products that were labeled “safe” before
various neurotoxic and ecotoxic effects were suspected, and before
methods were developed to detect them. The program resulted from 31
years of legal work by the Environmental Defense Fund, but is
endorsed by WWF and most other major environmental organizations.

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