Month: October 2003

Dog butcher jailed

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BAGUIO CITY, The Philippines– Municipal trial court judge
Tomas Tolete on October 6 sentenced convicted dog butcher Enrique
Palaque, 51, of San Pedro, to serve six months in prison.
Reported Agence France-Press, “Palaque was arrested while en
route to another court hearing, where he is a defendant in a similar
case. A lower court in Manila earlier fined Palaque $54 for a
similar offense,” according to regional police superintendent Marvin
Bolabola.
The Philippines banned dog slaughter in 1996, but the law
was rarely enforced before late 2002, after Baguio City journalist
Freddie Farres and the anti-corruption group Linis Gobyerno made the
non-enforcement a public issue.

Letters [Oct 2003]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Chimp rescue

Thank you for “Chimp sanctuaries save
evidence of human origin,” in your July/August
edition.
The last sentence, explaining that Bala
Amarasekaran and the Tacugama Chimp Sanctuary
survived in Liberia because the sanctuary was
“viewed as an authentically valuable community
institution,” is the crunch: without local
backing, we are wasting our time.
With this in mind we in Gambia are
becoming more and more involved in peripheral
work which might seem to have no bearing on the
chimp project. For example, we now operate a
small medical clinic. We provide assistance with
schooling, including financial aid for the
students and for maintaining the school building
with volunteer staff. Currently there are only
two teachers for 300+ kids. We also help to look
after draft animals (for which purpose the
Gambian Horse & Donkey Trust is now up and
running). We are emphasizing the entrepreneurial
opportunities arising from a visitor camp,
including for suppliers of fresh food from local
sources.

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Dog and cat eaters hide behind foreign media gullibility

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Dog and cat eaters hide behind foreign media gullibility
by Sunnan Kum

I recently received some photographs of dogs at a Korean
market, courageously taken by Mark Lloyd of the London Daily Mail.
I have seen so many photographs of abused animals before
these that I already felt wearied, and thought I had virtually no
more capacity for sadness.
Once again I saw the eyes of the caged dogs, their faces
full of sadness, fear and loneliness. Yet I also saw hope from the
same eyes: hope that someone may one day bring them home and love
them.
I told myself that these dogs were by now already at peace
and had finally found the release they so deserved. I tried to
console myself with this belief, but whenever I thought of their
loving, trusting eyes, I dissolved into tears. I felt that their
images were somehow urging me to do more for other animals still
living.

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The apartheid legacy in wildlife conservation

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

The apartheid legacy in wildlife conservation
by Chris Mercer, co-director, Kalahari Raptor Centre

Twelve years after Nelson Mandela walked to freedom, South
Africa is still struggling to overcome the crippling legacy of
apartheid in environmental affairs.
Affirmative action appointments are intended to transform and
democratize nature conservation, but the awaited transformation is
slow in coming–and one of the most unfortunate aspects of the delay
is that some of our most ruthless people are meanwhile exporting the
canned hunting industry, which is a legacy of apartheid, throughout
Africa.
Desperately poor nations are too often seduced by the promise
of the money to be made from hunting, demonstrated by some of the
same South African entrepreneurs whose involvement in gun-running and
ivory and rhino horn poaching helped to uphold the apartheid regime
by destabilizing much of the black-ruled portion of the continent.
The apartheid regime instituted three goals for wildlife
management, each directly contributing to the growth and
profitability of the hunting industry, to the detriment of almost
everyone else. These goals were:

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Animals in China: from the “four pests” to two signs of hope

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Animals in China: from the “four pests” to two signs of hope
by Peter Li

In February 2002, a college student in Sichuan province
microwaved a four-week old puppy, reportedly in retaliation against
his wayward girlfriend.
Five zoo bears were at the same time viciously assaulted with
sulfuric acid at a zoo in Beijing. The perpetrator, Liu Haiyang,
was a student at Tsinghua University, whose alumni include President
Hu Jintao, former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, and Chairman of China’s
legislature Wu Bangguo.
The public was outraged in each instance, but found solace
in the belief that these were isolated cases.
The subsequent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
awakened China to the cruel reality of wildlife exploitation across
the country–and put the acts of deranged individuals into the
uncomfortable context of being not far different from business as
usual at live markets and in the traditional medicine trade.
Wildlife has been used in China for human benefit for more
than two thousand years. Because wildlife use is part of the Chinese
culture, it has been widely viewed as politically untouchable.

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Navy agrees to restrict use of SURTASS-LFA sonar

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

SAN FRANCISCO–U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth D. Laporte was at
press time for the October 2003 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE expected to
ratify an agreement by the U.S. Navy that will restrict peacetime
use of Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System-Low Frequency Active
(SURTASS-LFA) to protect whales.
Settling a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense
Council and the Humane Society of the U.S., the pact follows a
permanent injunction issued by Laporte on August 26 against any use
of the new sonar system within a 14-million-square-mile area,
constituting 40% of the Pacific Ocean.
“Under the injunction,” said Washington Post staff writer
Marc Kaufman, “the Navy can use the new sonar–which emits
low-frequency sound waves that travel for hundreds of miles–only
off the eastern seaboard of Asia, an area of about 1.5 million
square miles. Both sides said they could not discuss the reasons for
that exception. The agreement prohibits the use of SURTASS-LFA
within 30 to 60 miles of the coastlines of the approved area,

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Horse farmers lose PMU contracts

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BRANDON, Manitoba–Five hundred representatives of the 409
farms that produce pregnant mare’s urine for use by Wyeth Organics on
October 10, 2003 were notified in person at the Keystone Center in
Brandon that the PMU industry may be just about finished.
A third of them were told during the following
weekend–Thanksgiving weekend in Canada–that their services will no
longer be required. Leaving 30 seasonal jobs unfilled due to
plummeting demand for PMU products, Wyeth plans to buy only half as
much PMU as last year.
PMU sales fell after publication of a series of studies
during the past year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health which
documented that hormonal therapy harms menopausal women’s health more
than it helps. Sales had already contracted somewhat under boycott
pressure from animal rights groups. The boycotts began about five
months after ANIMAL PEOPLE in April 2003 exposed the close
confinement of the PMU-producing mares and the sale to slaughter of
most of their foals. The ANIMAL PEOPLE report was based on
investigative findings by Canadian Farm Animal Trust founder Tom
Hughes.

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SARS kills cat program

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

SINGAPORE–SARS seems to have killed the Singapore Stray Cat
Rehabilitation Scheme.
Sponsored by the Agrifood & Veterinary Authority, the Stray
Cat Rehabilitation Scheme has sterilized more than 3,000 homeless
cats since 1998, but a four-month review of the project determined
that barely 10,000 of the estimated 70,000 to 80,000 homeless cats in
Singapore have been sterilized, between public and private efforts.
AVA chief Ngiam Tong Tau said on October 8 that “All but one
of the 16 town councils [in Singapore] wanted the scheme stopped,
and the holdout was halfhearted in support,” wrote Sharmilpal Kaur
of the Straits Times.
“The program was reappraised in the wake of fear that cats
might spread SARS,” Kaur continued. “Though tests found no such
link, culling was stepped up because of a push to clean up public
areas.”

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SARS spread from live markets, but when?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BEIJING–Blood tests indicate that about 1% of the children
in 17 provinces of China were exposed to Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome before the outbreaks of 2002-2003 that hit 24 of the 31
provinces.
Evidently passing from animals sold in filthy live markets to
humans working in food preparation, and then spreading from human to
human, SARS eventually killed 916 people in 32 nations, with about
650 of the deaths occurring in mainland China and Hong Kong.
The blood study was conducted by the Beijing Military Zone
Air Force Logistics Sanitation Unit, using samples taken from
healthy children before SARS appeared.
In a parallel study, the Beijing Capitol Pediatrics Research
Institute found that among 77 children hospitalized for various
reasons in 2001, 42% had antibodies to SARS. Among 92 children
hospitalized during the SARS outbreak, 40% had the antibodies–but
none had SARS symptoms.
Both studies indicate that the coronavirus responsible for
SARS was already widely distributed among the human population–at
least among children–well before it turned deadly. The findings may
explain why relatively few children developed the deadly strain of
SARS, but confounds the mystery of how SARS originated, since
children are also less likely than adults to consume wildlife
products.

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