H5N1 kills Thai zoo leopard; Beijing Zoo stops feeding live chickens to tigers

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BEIJING–The avian flu H5N1 killed an endangered clouded
leopard on January 27 at the Khao Khiew Zoo in Chonburi province,
Thailand, environment minister Prabat Panyachatraksa confirmed on
February 13, after two weeks of rumors. The leopard was fed mainly
chicken carcasses. A white tiger also became ill, but recovered.
The Khao Khiew Zoo and four other leading Thai zoos closed
their bird exhibits several days earlier, after 36 pheasants, pea
fowl, and Siamese firebacks died at a rare bird menagerie in Suphan
Buri province.
Pin Lyvun, director of the Phnom Tamao zoo in Cambodia,
told the Melbourne Age that 56 wild birds had died there as of
February 15, and that the zoo had killed 400 parakeets after some of
them died mysteriously. The zoo thereafter closed its bird exhibits.
The death of the clouded leopard was soon followed by menu
changes at the Beijing Zoo–not well-appreciated by the first
observers. “Gone are the lions and tigers’ live chicken dinners,”
lamented the Malaysia Star on February 11, in translation from the
China Daily. The big cats were switched to a more natural diet of
raw beef and mutton, the Malaysia Star and China Daily reported.
Western zoo experts have for more than a decade urged Chinese
counterparts to stop feeding live animals to carnivores. Chinese
zoo directors, however, have seen live feeding as a gate
attraction, contrary to lessons learned by most U.S. and European
animal exhibitors generations ago, and have defended the practice by
insisting that live feedings keep predators mentally fit.

Read more

Horse advocate Ewing testifies for slaughter

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois–Donna Ewing, 69,
founder of the Hooved Animal Humane Society in
1971 and the rival Hooved Animal Rescue &
Protection Society in 2001, recently testified
to an executive committee hearing of the Illinois
House of Representatives that horse slaughter for
meat should not be banned.
“Humane societies became involved with
wild horses and stopped ranchers from killing or
culling the wild horses, and the consequence has
been that animals have been kept in concentration
camps at tremendous expense… billions of
dollars, because the humane people said you
cannot kill our wild horses,” Ewing said. “They
need to be controlled to a certain degreeŠIf we
don’t have a place where these animals, the
unwanted horses, the old horses, the sick …
well, they can’t take the sick ones for human
consumption ŠThere’s going to be a glut on the
market. People will be turning their animals
loose and I will be finding dying, starving
horses more than I have been now.

Read more

Asian H5N1 pandemic rages on–worst ever factory farm disaster

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BANGKOK, BEIJING, JAKARTA–United
Nations Food & Agricultural Organization chief
Jacques Diouf on February 25 opened an emergency
meeting in Bangkok of experts from 23 nations
with a warning that the H5N1 avian flu pandemic
sweeping Southeast Asia in recent months is not
yet under control. Diouf urgently appealed for
economic help from other parts of the world.
Fear that H5N1 could quickly mutate into a
virulent human form was heightened on February 19
when Thai scientists confirmed that the disease
had killed 14 of 15 housecats kept by one family
who had seen one of the cats scavenging a dead
chicken. All of the cats fell ill, but one
recovered.
Further investigation determined,
however, that H5N1 had apparently not mutated
before killing the cats. In the avian form,
H5N1 kills about 70% of the humans it attacks,
but it apparently does not cross easily into
humans, and attacks mainly children, who have
had less time to develop a spectrum of immunities
to flu viruses.

Read more

WHO still worries about SARS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

GUANGZHOU, Guangdong– H5N1 pushed Sudden Acute Respiratory
Syndrome out of the news, but China and the World Health
Organization remain concerned that it could resurge.
The fourth and last known SARS case from a mid-December 2003
outbreak in Guangzhou was a 40-year-old medical doctor and hospital
director named Liu, who fell ill on January 7. Pronounced recovered
on January 18, he was confirmed as a SARS case on January 24. Liu
was believed to have become infected through his work.
The first known victim of the outbreak was 32-year-old TV
producer Luo Jian, a self-described “environmentalist who is against
the slaughter of living creatures.” Luo Jian fell ill on December
16 with the coronavirus found in civets, but swore he had never
eaten or handled a civet. Despite media reports that Luo Jian might
have been infected by wild mice or rats, the source of his case
remains unknown.
The second victim was waitress Zheng Ling, 20, who worked
in a Guangzhou restaurant that served civet meat.
The third was a 35-year-old man, of whom little has been disclosed.
Recalling the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which also began with
sporadic cases in Guangdong, and killed 916 people worldwide,
officials ordered the killing of about 10,000 captive masked palm
civets, tanukis (” raccoon dogs”), and hog badgers.

Read more

Editorial: Factory farming toll rises in Asia

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

“We are preparing to campaign against burying birds with
influenza alive,” Voice-4-Animals founder Changkil Park e-mailed
from Seoul, South Korea, as the winter avian flu pandemic peaked,
and frantic officials and poultry workers struggled to contain it by
killing all the birds believed to be at risk. “I hope animal people
will have some ideas for us about how animal advocates should view
the massive inhumane treatment of birds,” Changkil Park added,
seeming to speak for thousands whose feelings ranged from shock to
despair.
Finding any good in the often unspeakably cruel culling of
more than 100 million chickens and other birds is admittedly
difficult.
The World Bank has pledged to finance rebuilding the
Southeast Asian poultry industry, moreover, which will probably
mean even more intensive promotion of factory farm methods in the
very near future. If Southeast Asian egg producers adopt the routine
live maceration or burial of “spent” hens that has become standard in
U.S. agribusiness, described elsewhere in this edition, the World
Bank involvement may help to institutionalize some of the cruelty
that is now horrifying television news viewers throughout the world.

Read more

Pro-animal India pols shift alliances for election

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

NEW DELHI–Former Indian minister for animal welfare Maneka
Gandhi, serving in Parliament as an independent since 1996, on
February 16 joined the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with her son
Varun.
Varun Gandhi was reportedly expected to join Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the campaign trail preliminary to the April
national election. The Hindu quoted “a party leader” as anticipating
that Varun Gandhi would make his debut as a political candidate in
the next election, after gaining behind-the-scenes experience and
making some public speaking appearances on behalf of other candidates
this year.
Joining the BJP was rumored to be a precondition for Mrs.
Gandhi possibly being reappointed to head the animal welfare
ministry, which Mrs. Gandhi directed from 1998 until mid-2002. The
ministry has reportedly been troubled ever since by indifferent
leadership, but Mrs. Gandhi told ANIMAL PEOPLE that she was not
hopeful.
“I don’t think they will ever give me that ministry [again],”
Mrs. Gandhi said. “But we have two months before the April
elections. Let’s see.”

Read more

Human obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

Richard Charter, 53, of Johannesburg, South Africa, drowned
on February 1, 2004 while trying to rescue a white water rafting
companion who had fallen into the Orange River near Glen Lion, and
also drowned. “After a successful business and sporting career, in
which he captained the South African skydiving team, Charter set
about buying degraded farmland and rehabilitating it back to its
natural beauty. His most recent and ambitious project was Glen Lion
in the southern Kalahari,” recalled Chris Mercer of the Kalahari
Raptor Centre, “where Charter and his partner, entrepreneur Pat
Quirk, bought 26 contiguous farms to create a private nature reserve
of some 70,000 hectares (about 180,000 acres) to provide pristine
sanctuary for Kalahari wildlife and in particular, the desert lion
and black rhino. We hope Charter’s untimely death will not end the
Glen Lion project,” Mercer added, “because of the need for suitable
habitat into which rescued predators such as caracals, jackals and
hyenas can be released.”

Read more

Wildlife

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Nature Conservancy, often criticized for use of cruel
tactics in killing non-native species on its holdings, in early
February 2004 testified before the Hawaii House Water, Land Use,
and Ha-waiian Affairs Committee in favor of a bill to allow USDA
Wildlife Services to shoot feral animals from the air.

Uist Hedgehog Rescue is again trying to rescue hedgehogs from
the Western Isles off Scotland, quadrupling the bounty offered to
residents for safe captures ahead of a cull funded by Scottish
Natural Heritage. Scottish Natural Heritage considers hedgehogs to
be a non-native menace to birds’ nests. UHR saved 156 hedgehogs in
2003.

The 15-nation European Union on January 19 suspended imports
of grizzly bear trophies from British Columbia, six months after
warning the B.C. and Canadian governments that scientific review
indicates the present hunting rules are insufficient to protect
grizzlies from extirpation. The B.C. government estimates that
17,000 grizzlies live in the province, but other investigators
believe there are as few as 4,000. The EU ban is largely symbolic,
as only seven of 228 grizzlies killed by hunters in B.C. in 2003 were
killed by EU residents.

Letters [March 2004]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

Pit bull terriers

I agree that a ban on the breeding of pit bull terriers and
Rottweilers is unfortunately the right thing to do. I am currently
the owner of two American Staffordshire terriers and I have been
volunteering to rescue pit bulls and Rotties for a few years now. I
love the breeds and find them to be very loving companions. I have
had a pit or amstaff in my family for about 15 years.
However, I recognize that these days I am not the typical
pitbull owner. This is where your editorial “Bring Breeders of
high-risk dogs to heel” will fail to garner the needed support. In
giving statistics about the numbers of attacks involving these
breeds, your article implies that these are by nature bad dogs.
However, most owners of these breeds are fighting them, treating
them inhumanely, training and working with them to increase their
aggressive nature, or are just flat out irresponsible. You talk
about how the current attitude of the insurance industry is unfair to
other breeds, but you fail to recognize that this attitude is also
unfair to responsible owners of these maligned breeds.
For those who love these breeds, the real question is does
our opposition of a breed ban help or harm the dogs?

Read more

1 2 3