BOOKS: Monster of God

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Monster of God:
The man-eating predator in the
jungles of history and the mind
by David Quammen
W.W. Norton & Co. (500 5th Ave., New York, NY 10110), 2003.
384 pages, hardcover. $26.95.

Certain to be classified by most librarians as “natural
history,” Monster of God has already been mistaken by many reviewers
as a screed in defense of “sustainable use.”
Monster of God is actually a book mostly about faith,
exploring the influence of the human evolutionary role as prey upon
concepts of religion, and of the more recent human ascendance as a
top predator on our ideas about conservation.
David Quammen is profoundly skeptical that humans and
predators capable of eating us are capable of coexisting for longer
than another 150 years. He presents a strong circumstantial case
that the protohuman concept of God evolved as a psychological
response to swift and seemingly random predator strikes. Sacrifice,
Quammen suggests, began as appeasement of predators, and in some
remote places continues as such.
Others have written extensively about the emergence of
sacrifice as the ritual sustenance of a learned priestly class,
coinciding with the rise of animal husbandry, and have discussed
especially the role of religion in rationalizing slaughter. Without
taking much note of of this, Quammen explores the role of the
earliest monarchs in recorded history as lion-slayers, pointing out
that the dawn of civilization coincided with the emergence of humans
as quasi-apex predators, able at last to do with weapons what
natural predators do with tooth and claw.

Obituaries

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.
Gillas showed sufficient talent at ballet that in 1940 her
mother relocated to San Francisco to enable her to perform
professionally. Gillas danced primarily in the Spanish classical
style until the early 1950s, appearing in London and Paris as well
as throughout the U.S., also developing skill as a watercolorist.
A stenographer after her dancing career, Gillas may have
been among the first employees of the Humane Society of the U.S.,
formed in 1954, then worked for the National Audubon Society in New
York City, where in 1959 she founded International Defenders of
Animals. Relocating to Hialeah, Florida, in 1961, after a brief
marriage and divorce, Gillas merged her group into the Florida
League for Humane Progress and rented a dog breeding kennel and
grooming facility that she converted into an animal shelter.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Seal Wars

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Seal Wars: 25 years on the front lines with the harp seal by Paul Watson
Firefly Books (U.S.) Inc. (P.O. Box 1338,
Ellicot Station, Buffalo, NY 14205), 2003.
248 pages,
paperback. $16.95.

About the only good news for harp seals
off eastern Canada this year is that Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society founder Paul Watson,
Brigitte Bardot, and others of their old
defenders are still on the job.
Watson’s first crusades on behalf of
animals, as he recounts in Seal Wars, was
against sport fishing, during his New Brunswick
boyhood. Soon afterward his mother enrolled him
in The Kindness Club, founded by the late Aida
Flemming, still active under Jane Tarn. Not
long after that, Watson befriended a beaver
family, then avenged them after they were
trapped for fur, by becoming an avid trapbuster.
Watson became aware of sealing, and was
appalled by it, in 1960–at almost the same time
then-New Brunswick SPCA cruelty inspector Brian
Davies became aware of it. But the Watson family
moved to Toronto, and Paul Watson, after high
school, went to sea. While Davies founded the
New Brunswick SPCA Save The Seals Fund, which
eventually went independent and grew into the
Inter-national Fund for Animal Welfare, Watson
helped to found Greenpeace, and won renown for
derring-do against Russian whalers.

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

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.
Current indications are that without continuing replenishment from wandering pet cats, the fast-falling feral cat population would probably stabilize at a thinly distributed level resembling the norms for other small felines such as bobcats, lynx, and caracal.
The large suburban feral cat colonies seen in recent decades may be an anomaly made possible only by the extirpation of street dogs and the temporary absence of native predators capable of eating either rodents or cats. Only in high-rise communities like Hong Kong and inner cities ringed by miles of pavement, like the oldest part of Rome, are large cat colonies likely to persist–and then only if humans supply enough food to sustain them.

North America

Cat-eaters may get, spread SARS

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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
It is business as usual again in the notorious live markets
of Guangzhau, China, capital of Guangdong province and also the
reputed global capital of eating dogs, cats, and wildlife.

Conservation group experts urged dog shooting in Ethiopia

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GOMA, Ethiopia–Why were free-roaming dogs shot in November 2003 in and around Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia? How much did the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme and Born Free Foundation have to do with it?

Why, after Homeless Animal Protection Society of Ethiopia cofounder Hana Kifle photographed a probable rabid wolf in August, was the EWCP vaccination program for pet dogs and working dogs, underway since 1996, not extended to homeless dogs?

Oral rabies vaccination of the Ethiopian wolves was reportedly approved by the Ethiopian government on November 7, apparently long after the EWCP first requested permission to use it.

But the dog-shooting continued.

“After we reported that the health problem occurred among the critically endangered wolves,” HAPS president Efrem Legesse told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “the vet team came to the area [weeks later] and decided to destroy all dogs. Without spending much time at all where the wolves are dying, they finally convinced the park warden that shooting is the only solution.

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