Month: October 2003

Bangladesh tiger killers get hard time

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

DHAKA, Bangladesh –Five former Dhaka Zoo employees who
allegedly poisoned four Bengal tigers during a 1996 labor dispute
were on September 10, 2003 sentenced to serve 14 years in prison at
hard labor.
The Pakistan Daily Times heralded “The first-ever verdict on
the killing of animals in Bangladesh,” which from 1948 until 1971
was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of Pakistan by India.
Published from the capital of Bangladesh, the Dhaka Daily
Star did not call the case a first, but gave it prominent coverage
on a day when the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 al
Qaida terrorist attacks on the U.S. dominated the news.
Metropolitan Sessions Judge Habibur Rahman acquitted nine
co-defendants.
Rahman issued the stiff sentences to the remainder under the
Special Powers Act of 1974, pertaining to crimes allegedly committed
to destabilize the nation.
The tigers were allegedly poisoned between November 9 and 13,
1996, after zoo curator Ashraf Uddin transferred the defendants and
18 other staff members in a crackdown on corruption.
Invoking the Special Powers Act enabled Rahman to impose the
death penalty, but he was lenient, he said, because the “neglect
and indifference” of the prosecution had allowed the case to drag on
for seven years.

Ferrets for Schwarzenegger

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

“Ferret owners are rejoicing,” American Ferret Association
founder Freddie Ann Hoffman said of the October 7, 2003 election of
actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace recalled California Governor
Gray Davis.
Hoffman credited Schwarzenegger with helping to popularize
ferrets in his 1990 film Kindergarten Cop, while blasting Davis for
pledging to veto any bill to legalize the possession of ferrets that
might clear the state legislature.
Ferrets and many other non-native predators have been banned
in California for more than 70 years, initially as alleged threats
to the poultry industry.
The PawPAC political action committee was less enthusiastic
about Schwarzenegger.
“Like everyone else, we know nothing of Schwarzenegger’s
positions on animals,” said a pre-election PawPAC release. “Former
gubernatorial candidate Richard Riordan stated at a recent event that
his friend Arnold ‘loves his dogs.’ Schwarznegger has been endorsed
by the California Farm Bureau, an organization that regularly
opposes animal welfare legislation.”

Organization updates

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

NCDL becomes Dogs Trust

LONDON–The National Canine Defence League on October 9
renamed itself Dogs Trust. Founded in 1891 to oppose vivisection of
dogs, NCDL for most of the 20th century focused on providing
veterinary care to pets of the poor. Restructured in 1980, it is
now the British leader in rehoming dogs, and since 1996 has
cosponsored the International Companion Animal Welfare Conference,
partnering with the North Shore Animal League International division.

MSPCA kills Animals magazine

BOSTON–Promising to balance the Massachusetts SPCA budget in
2004, first-year president Larry Hawk in August 2003 terminated the
money-losing Animals magazine, and in September laid off 19
employees.

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Who killed activist Jane Tipson, and why?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

GROS ISLET, St. Lucia– Jane Tipson, 53, cofounder of the
St. Lucia Animal Protection Society, the Eastern Caribbean Coalition
for Environmental Awareness, and the Caribbean Animal Welfare e-mail
newsgroup, was fatally shot at close range at 1:20 a.m. on September
17 just yards from the gate of her home.
Tipson “was following her 50-year-old sister Barbara” in a
separate vehicle, reported the St. Lucia Star, “after they had
been trapping stray dogs and cats along the beach. Barbara had
arrived at their house when she heard a loud noise from the driveway.”
Mistaking the noise for a tire blowout, Barbara Tipson “drove back
to find her sister slumped over the wheel [of her vehicle], dead,
the result of a wound to the neck,” the Star continued.
“This case does not appear to be a robbery,” police
commissioner Ausbert Regis said, “because the person did the act and
left. We are still trying to determine a motive but at this time it
appears that the killing was targeted.”
Nicole McDonald and Chris-tine Larbey of the Star wrote that,
“Close friends of Jane Tipson (who prefer to remain anonymous) said
she had confided in them about receiving threatening phone calls over
the past few weeks. The police were not prepared to confirm the
death threats.

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Hindu nationalists hit animal sacrifice

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

NEW DELHI–“There is a great need to cleanse Hinduism” of
animal sacrifice, “and the time is now,” editorialized the October
2003 edition of The Organizer, the official publication of the
hardline Hindu nationalist volunteer corps Rashtriya Swayamsewak
Sangh.
The RSS is often described as the ideological arm of the
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Organizer strongly praised former actress Jayalitha
Jayaram, now chief minister of Tamil Nadu state, for ordering
police to halt animal sacrifices on August 28. After three men were
arrested the next day for sacrificing goats and hens at Madurai, no
more sacrifices were reported for a week.
Members of the People’s Art & Literary Association and
Revolutionary Students & Youth Front then defied Jayalitha (usually
called by just her first name) by staging sacrifices in Tirunelveli
and Tiruchirapalli. Police detained but did not charge the suspected
leaders.

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No happy endings likely in three-month sheep-at-sea saga

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

KUWAIT–The livestock ship Cormo Express was to sail back to
Australia on October 15 with 52,000 sheep who were refused entry into
Saudi Arabia on August 22 after some were found to have scabby mouth
disease.
The return voyage had been delayed for 24 hours by difficulty
in obtaining enough fodder to sustain the sheep en route to a planned
first stop for Australian veterinary inspection at the Cocos Islands,
also known as the Keeling Islands, about 1,500 miles west of
Australia proper.
Australian authorities had not yet decided what to do with
the sheep. More than 100 nations had reportedly refused them, even
as a gift that they were subsidized to take. Options included trying
to slaughter the sheep at sea, disposing of their remains via the
nine-story mincer used to dispose of animals who die individually in
transit; landing the sheep for slaughter on the Australian mainland,
probably at Albany; and repatriating the sheep alive to the Outback,
where they might still be killed and buried.

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Veggie novelist Coetzee wins Nobel Prize

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

STOCKHOLM–South African novelist and advocate of
vegetarianism J.M. Coetzee was on October 1 named winner of the 2003
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The award is to be presented in Stockholm on December 10 by
Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden. The date is the anniversary of the
death of Alfred Nobel, who endowed the Nobel Prizes with his profit
from inventing dynamite.
“Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and
controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of
apartheid,” wrote Jennifer Schuessler, deputy editor of the Ideas
section of the Boston Globe. But his most recent novel, Elizabeth
Costello, raises “another unsettled and unsettling question,”
Schuessler continued.
“By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid
conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and
skin, are we all complicit in a ‘crime of stupefying proportions’?
Those words are Costello’s, whose two lectures on animal rights
–‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the
Animals’– make up the longest section of the book. The
preoccupation is very much Coetzee’s own, and has moved increasingly
close to the moral center of his work.”

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