BOOKS: The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
by David Baron
W. W. Norton & Company (500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110),
2004. 277 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

This amazing book explains how wild pumas near Boulder,
Colorado came to view humans as prey. The intriguing story,
however, is only the frame that David Baron uses to painstakingly
piece together a gigantic puzzle.
When a puma killed Boulder high school student Scott
Lancaster in 1991, “everyone knew” that healthy pumas did not view
people as prey–but Lancaster’s killer proved to be both wild and
healthy. Baron explains the factors that caused this dramatic change
in puma behavior.
When wild animals came to town in the Old West, they were
shot. If they survived, they learned to avoid people.
Baron relates many sad stories about the wholesale slaughter
of predators in the United States as humans increased in population,
moved out into the wildernesss, and altered the natural landscape.
Baron tells us that author Michael Johnson labeled newcomers
to western cities “New Westers.” “Old Westers believe the West was
won. New Westers are concerned with how it was lost–or will be.”
New Westers passed laws to prevent or limit killing predators.

Rocket science failure may endanger Sriharikota animal welfare program

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

CHENNAI–A February 23 rocket fuel explosion at the Dhawan
Space Center on Sriharikota Island killed six people and threw into
chaos not only the operations of the Indian Space Research
Organization but also an ambitious draft plan by Visakha SPCA founder
Pradeep Kumar Nath to revamp the spaceport animal control program.
The explosion came three days after Nath returned home to
Visakhapatnam, 140 miles north, after a site visit.
“I was there to analyze the stray animal problems faced by
the 3,400 engineers and scientists and their families who live and
work on Sriharikota Island,” Nathtold ANIMAL PEOPLE. “The Space
Center invited us after their controller came to the Visakha SPCA to
see our activities, after trying other ways to reduce their stray
dogs, monkeys, and cattle. He was unhappy,” Nath said, “with how
dogs are killed, and monkeys also, and wanted to implement the
animal welfare laws. He took the first train to Visakhaptnam after
learning from my brother’s wife about our work.”
Nath had already heard, he said, about massive
dog-poisoning at Sriharikota, and “about the terrible way the
monkeys would be caught in a bunch and hauled alive in a small gunny
bag. Recently 35 were stuffed into one bag and all of them died due
to suffocation.”

Asia

Court Calendar

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

First Amendment

Officials of the Granite School District in Taylorsville,
Utah agreed on February 3 to pay $82,000 to Utah Legal Clinic
attorneys Brian Bernard and James Harris Jr., in settlement of a
January 2004 ruling by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Salt Lake
City that the school district violated the civil rights of PETA
members by calling police to break up a 1999 demonstration in front
of Eisenhower Junior High School. The PETA members organized the
demonstration after the school hung a banner promoting the McDonald’s
restaurant chain from a flagpole.

Boston Superior Court Judge Janet L. Sanders on February 20
dismissed 39 charges filed against 12 activists, ages 18-26, who
protested in August 2002 outside the home of a Marsh USA insurance
executive because Marsh at the time held policies with Huntingdon
Life Sciences. The activists were charged with extortion,
threatening, stalking, and conspiracy. Most of the alleged acts,
Sanders ruled, consisted of constitutionally protected acts of free
speech.

Australia escapes H5N1–officially

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MELBOURNE–Australia has avoided H5N1 and other avian flu
outbreaks, so far, but has had some recent scares.
“Our rescue team did a big broiler chicken rescue in
January,” Patty Mark of Animal Liberation Victoria told ANIMAL
PEOPLE. “We got 55 birds out,” 40 of them later euthanized due to
illness and injury, “and there were masses of dead bodies in the
shed,” Mark recounted. “All the dead birds we witnessed were
unusual. We thought this guy was just a bad operator and failed to
collect them daily, as some were very rotten. One TV station
grabbed an exclusive on the story,” Mark said, “then sat on it for
two weeks when avian flu hit [in Southeast Asia] and then dropped it.”
Most of the Animal Liberation Victoria rescuers were older
than typical H5N1 victims, who tend to be under 20.
However, said Mark, “Seven out of nine of us on that rescue
had the usual sore throat, sinus problems, and sore eyes
afterward,” from the filthy air they breathe inside poultry barns.

Hog/dog rodeo like porn, says prosecutor

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

COFFEYVILLE, Alabama–The legality of so-called “hog/dog
rodeo” in Alabama will be tested soon as result of arrests made on
February 21, 2004 by Clarke County Sheriff Jack Day.
Hog/dog rodeo, practiced chiefly in the rural South,
consists of setting pit bull terriers against purportedly feral pigs
in an enclosed arena. The dog who corners and holds a pig fastest is
the winner.
Hog/dog rodeo was openly promoted in both Alabama and Florida
until May 1994, when then-Florida attorney general Mike Butterworth
ruled in response to videos of dogs mauling pigs at a site in Hardee
County that the practice violates the state anti-cruelty law.
That left Alabama, where the most prominent hog/dog venue
of several openly operating is reputedly that of H&H Kennels owner
Johnny Hayes, near Coffeyville.
Coffeyville police chief Frankie Crawford and Clarke County
Democrat editor Jim Cox had both repeatedly denounced hog/dog rodeo
and drunken parking lot violence that often went with it, but to no
avail until a February 12, 2004 investigative report by Mike Rush of
NBC-12 in Mobile.
Shown video similar to the footage that ended open hog/dog
rodeo in Florida, Clarke County District Attorney Bobby Keahey told
Rush that he had never prosecuted Hayes and others involved because
Sheriff Day had never arrested them.

American Humane regroups as Humane Farm Animal Care takes lead on farm care

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

ENGLEWOOD, Colorado– American Humane on
February 10, 2004 announced the hiring of former
American Red Cross interim chief executive
officer Marie Belew Wheatley as president and CEO.
“At the Red Cross, Wheatley served as a
national disaster response officer,” wrote
American Humane public information manager Anna
Gonce. “Wheatley worked with many volunteer
organizations, including American Humane, to
care for animals affected by disasters.”
Ten days after introducing Wheatley,
American Humane announced receipt of a grant of
$50,000 from the U.S. Department of Education
Fund for the Improvement of Education. Secured
by Colorado U.S. Senators Wayne Allard and Ben
Nighthorse Campbell, the money will be used “to
expand existing educational programs that help
students and communities learn to prepare for and
care for animals during disasters,” Gonce said.
The Wheatley hiring followed extensive
restructuring at American Humane that included
the separate resignations in June 2003 of former
president and CEO Tim O’Brien and former Film &
TV Unit chief Karen Goschen, after the earlier
departure of Free Farmed program founder Adele
Douglass.

Where wolves, bears and people live together

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

“People and wolves can live together,” says Carpathian Large
Carnivore Project director Christoph Promberger. “What we have found
is that carnivores can cope extremely well with people.”
Promberger has spent the past 10 years studying large
carnivores in the southern Carpathian mountains and teaching
livestock herders and beekeepers to use nonlethal techniques to
control predation. Since 1995 Promberger and the CLCP have also
introduced eco-tourism to a region which previously economically
benefited from wildlife only through hunting by the Communist ruling
elite–and not benefiting much, at that.
Promberger is now building the Carpathian Large Carnivore
Center, to further establish the idea that the Piatra Craiului
National Park region in the southern Carpathians can become to Europe
what the Yellowstone National Park region is to the U.S.–both a
critical wildlife habitat and the chief economic engine in an area
with few non-extractive industries.
The Carpathian mountains are home to one third of Europe’s
large carnivores west of Russia. There are 3,500 wolves in Romania,
a nation the size of Michigan. This is almost as many wolves as
exist in the entire U.S. There are 5,500 brown bears, nearly five
times as many as there are of their cousins, the grizzlies, in the
U.S. Lower 48. Lynx are seen as often in the southern Carpathians as
anywhere.

Animal Obits

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

Stumpy, age 40+, an 80-ton pregnant North Atlantic right
whale, familiar to New England Aquarium, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute, and Center for Coastal Studies researchers since 1975,
was found dead from a ship strike off Virginia in early February.
Wrote Cape Cod Times staff writer Emily C. Dooley, “From 1975
through 2002 there were 292 documented cases of ships striking large
whales across the globe. Of these, 38 strikes involved North
Atlantic right whales, according to the Large Whale ship Strike
Database compiled by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric
Administration.” North Atlantic right whales are the rarest of the
great whales, with only about 325 surviving.

Wolf #42, alpha female of the Druid Peak Pack in Yellowstone
National Park, was found dead on February 3 atop Specimen Ridge
after a fight with Mollie’s Pack, also called the Crystal Creek
Pack. #42 became the Druid Peak Pack alpha after killing her
tyrannical sister, #40, who may have earlier killed one of #42’s
first litters. Her more benign sister, #41, left the Druid Peak
Pack in 1998 to become founding alpha female of the Sunlight Basin
Pack. Suffering from mange and a broken foot, #41 and another wolf
recently left the pack. Seen feeding on a freshly killed calf on
private land on February 6, #41 was shot by a U.S. Fish & Wildlife
Service agent on February 15. #42 and #41 were the last of the 31
wolves brought to Yellowstone as part of the 1995-1996 species
reintroduction.

Obituaries

Maine lab bootlegged avian flu virus; ex-execs charged

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BANGOR–The avian flu virus involved was H9N2, not the H5N1
strain now rampaging through Southeast Asia, nor one of the other
deadly H5 or H7 strains.
Still, an avian flu virus smuggling scheme recently exposed
in connection with the multi-count prosecution of three former Maine
Biological Laboratories executives has scared biological security
experts worldwide.
Former MBL chief financial officer Dennis H. Guerrette, 40,
of Brunswick, and former MBL vice president for production Thomas C.
Swieczkowski, 47, of Pittston, pleaded innocent on January 5 to
conspiracy, serving as accessories after the fact to biological
smuggling, and three counts each of mail fraud. Each mail fraud
count carries a penalty of as much as 20 years in prison and a fine
of up to $50,000.
The third ex-MBL executive, Marjorie Evans (whose age was
not stated) was charged with making false statements to investigators
and violating the Virus-Serum-Toxin Act.
Former MBL lab technicians Walter Gogan, 63, and Peggy
Lancaster, 47, in November 2003 pleaded guilty to related charges.
Gogan admitted being an accessory after the fact, which could carry
a sentence of up to 30 months in prison. Lancaster admitted to
ordering staff to falsely label vaccines, carrying a possible
penalty of one year in prison.

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