BOOKS: Hawk’s Rest

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hawk’s Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone by Gary Ferguson
National Geographic Adventure Press (1145 17th St., N.W.,
Washington, DC 20036), 2003. 240 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Hawk’s Rest is not about birds, but the joys and trials of
living in wilderness. Here on nine million acres deep in Yellowstone
National Park, granite turrets rise 2,000 feet into the air, giant
boulders tumble into deep gorges, and ice forms endless lakes.
Yellowstone Lake, covering 136 square miles, can switch in minutes
from calm to waves thrashing five to six feet high. According to
park historian Lee Whittlesy, no body of water in the park and
perhaps in all of the U.S. is more dangerous. The water averages 45
degrees Fahrenheit, which gives swimmers about 20 minutes before
they must get ashore.

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Animal obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Kin, 36, the last wild crested ibis to hatch in Japan, on
October 10 hurled herself headfirst into a door at the Sado Crested
Ibis Preservation Center, 190 miles northwest of Tokyo, and died of
a brain hemorrhage. Removed from the wild in 1968 for captive
breeding, Kin never produced offspring, and had been the last
wild-hatched crested ibis in Japan since her mate Midori died in
1995. Hunted to the verge of extinction, crested ibises won legal
protection in 1934. In 1999 the Sado Center received a pair of
crested ibises as a gift from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
The Chinese crested ibises have now fledged 21 offspring, some of
whom are to be reintroduced to the wild in 2007.

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Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Virginia Gillas, 82, died on October 5 in Hermitage,
Missouri, after an 8-year battle with lung cancer. Born in Orange,
New Jersey, raised in Kansas City, Gillas was daughter of Catherine
Basett Cornwell, R.N., longtime president of the Dade County Branch
of the Florida League for Humane Progress.
Gillas herself began helping animals at about age 12, she
told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1995, recalling that she first saw animal
hoarding about five years later, when she met a girl her own age who
had accumulated an impossible number of cats.

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Roadkills of cats fall 90% in 10 years –are feral cats on their way out?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:
BALTIMORE, SALT LAKE CITY, MENTOR (Ohio)–Is the U.S.
outdoor cat population down 90% since 1992?
The feral cat population might be.
Roadkills of cats appear to have fallen 90% in 10 years,
after apparently rising sixfold while the pet cat population nearly
doubled during the 1980s.
An eightfold surge in the population of feral cats, mostly
descended from abandoned and free-roaming pets, probably accounted
for about two-thirds of the roadkill increase during the 1980s, but
the trend is now completely reversed.

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Cat-eaters may get, spread SARS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GUANGZHOU–Laboratory studies of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome directed by virologist Albert D.M.E. Osterhaus of the
Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, published in the October 30
edition of the British journal Nature, demonstrate that cats and
ferrets could potentially carry the disease from filthy live markets
to humans.
Osterhaus said his experimental goal was simply to find out
if either cats or ferrets could be used as a laboratory model for
SARS. His findings imply, however, that cats raised for human
consumption may become a SARS vector–especially if the cats are
caged at live markets near whatever as yet unidentified wildlife
species is the primary SARS vector.

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BOOKS: Hunt Club Management Guide

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hunt Club Management Guide
by J. Wayne Fears
Stoeger Publ. (17603 Indian Head Hwy, Suite 200, Accokeek, MD
20607), 2003. 144 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Deer Diary
by Thomas Lee Boles
Xlibris Corp. (<Orders@Xlibris.com>), 2002. 286 pages, paperback, $18.69.

J. Wayne Fears, involved in leasing land for hunt clubs for
more than 20 years, gives the impression that he lives to kill deer.
Thomas Lee Boles, a vegetarian animal rights activist, has
handreared orphaned deer and befriended deer both in captivity and in
the wild.

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Editorial: Sheltering is pointless until the need is reduced

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

“We live in a deeply depressed, impoverished, remote and
backward corner of the far side of hell,” someone laments to us
almost every day. “We have never had low-cost or free pet
sterilization and vaccination, let alone a neuter/return program for
feral cats and street dogs. People poison or shoot dogs and cats
with impunity. The dogcatcher sells dog meat, dog leather, cat
pelts, and live animals for use in laboratories. Millions of
animals are in urgent need. Please help us fund a shelter to house
100 of them.”
Such pleas are heartrending, but under such circumstances,
either operating or funding a shelter is pointless, mindless, and
likely to only rearrange the misery in that particular part of hell’s
overcrowded and starving half acre.
No humane society anywhere should even think about starting a
shelter until and unless it receives a gift or bequest of the land
and money needed to build and run the shelter without diverting
resources from sterilization, vaccination, and public education.
Later, if sterilization, vaccination, and public education
are successful, starting the right kinds of shelter at the right
times might represent worthwhile expansions of the mission. But
until the numbers of homeless dogs and cats are markedly reduced, and
until the public shows increased sympathy and tolerance toward them,
putting funds into shelter work makes less sense than using money as
cat litter.

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Rehabilitating Asian bears

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

CHENGDU, AGRA–The Giant Panda Breeding
and Research Center and the China Bear Rescue
Center stand just miles apart, on opposite sides
of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan state in
southwestern China.
The Wildlife SOS Agra Bear Rescue Centre
is 1,500 miles away, on the far side of the
Himalayas, 10 miles from the Taj Mahal, within
the Sur Sarovar Sanctuary, near Agra, India.
The giant pandas, red pandas, and
Asiatic black bears of two subspecies whom the
three sanctuaries host were all caught in the
crossfire of late 20th century Marxist class
struggle, but that was just the latest of their
species’ misfortunes.
Each are descended from some of the first
bears to lose habitat to humans.
Products of parallel evolution, bears
and large primates, including humans, developed
to fill approximately the same ecological niches.
Bears came from the carnivore family,
emerging in the northern hemisphere only slightly
earlier than the first raccoon-sized advanced
primates emerged in northeastern Africa.
Most bears and the most widely
distributed large primates developed omnivorous
diets. The biggest bears evolved limited
bipedalism and relatively small, little used
tails; some of the largest primates became fully
bipedal and shed their tails. Primates developed
opposable thumbs. So did the raccoon branch of
the bear/raccoon line.

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Letters [Nov 2003]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Kitten in Beijing

I want to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your October cover
feature, “Four shelters serve Beijing.” The vignette at the end
about your son holding a kitten on a Beijing street and attracting
attention was very sweet. Wolf was using his act of holding that
little life to send messages to those who came around him. Wasn’t
that the most beautiful scene on the streets of Beijing?
–Peter Li
Houston, Texas
<LiPj@uhd.edu>

Ukrainian animals get newspaper

We are glad to inform you that our Centre is starting a
monthly newspaper on animal rights called Time to Protect Animals.
This will be the first such publication in the Ukraine and the former
Soviet Union. The project will be realized with financial support
from the World Society for the Protection of Animals. The pilot
edition of 5,000 copies will be distributed during the first week of
November 2003. The famous Ukrainian newspaper Vremja (Time), which
publishes 80,000 copies three times a week, is asking their readers
who would like to receive a free copy, and those who ask will get
our newspaper.

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