Canadian sealers kill at record speed

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

MONTREAL–Authorized by Ottawa to kill 350,000 harp seals in
2004, Atlantic Canadian offshore sealers killed so aggressively that
the Department of Fisheries & Oceans on April 14 closed the
large-vessel hunt only 48 hours after it started, suspecting that
the large-vessel quota of 246,900 had already been reached.
Again this year, as in each of the past five years,
International Fund for Animal Welfare observers led by Newfoundland
native Rebecca Aldworth obtained extensive video of sealers skinning
seal pups who were still thrashing and dragging live seals on hooks.
Again this year DFO denied that the writhing seals were still alive.
Sealers and DFO spokespersons boasted of rising global demand
for seal pelts, reportedly wholesaling at about $50 Canadian apiece.
But the evidence was ambiguous–and $50 in Canadian money has only
about half the buying power today that it had more than 20 years ago,
when seal pelt prices last were in that range.
“The landed value of last year’s seal hunt accounted for less
than one tenth of 1% of Newfoundland economy, nowhere near the
figures claimed by the sealing industry,” IFAW president Fred
O’Regan wrote to The New York Times. “Lasting solutions to the
economic challenges facing Atlantic Canada require more than
subsidizing the slaughter of nearly a million seals in the next three
years.”

Neuter/return works for Alaskan wolves

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

FAIRBANKS–Animal advocates who sterilize and release feral
cats and street dogs had the right prescription for wolf predation
control all along, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists are
discovering.
Clamoring to shoot and trap wolves to reduce predatory pressure on
the depleted Fortymile caribou herd, the Alaska DFG in 1997
grudgingly agreed to sterilize the alpha pairs in 15 wolf packs under
pressure led by Friends of Animals.
“The idea was that the sterilized pairs would defend their
territories against other packs, which they have done quite
successfully,” wrote Fairbanks Daily News-Miner staff writer Tim
Mowry on March 28.
As with feral cats and street dogs, sterile wolves hunt much
less than animals with young to feed. Therefore the caribou herd
would increase.
DFG biologists performed the sterilizations amid prophecies by
hunters and politicians that the experiment would neither work nor
shut up the opponents of wolf-culling, and therefore should never
have been started.

BOOKS: Disposable Dogs

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Disposable Dogs by Steve Swanbeck
White Swan Publishing
(1 Green Hill Road, Chester, NJ 07930), 2004.
197 pages, paperback. $11.95.

“The old blind German shepherd with tumors all over her body
sat alone in the shelter and waited. The chances of Bralie being
adopted was as remote as her vision,” begins Steve Swanbeck,
describing how the dog was about to be euthanized when she was
rescued by Noah’s Bark Pet Rescue.
After months of loving care and expensive veterinary help,
Bralie recovered to the point that she could be taken to a pet
adoption fair at a nearby town. “Dad, its Bralie!” said a little
boy, and the dog went crazy, howling and whining and wagging her
tail. She was reunited with her family.
The father explained how fireworks had frightened Bralie,
who leaped the garden fence and got lost. They visited their local
shelter without success and had eventually given up hope of ever
seeing Bralie again.
Bralie’s story is typical of the 70 true short stories–make that
truncated stories–in this little book. These could make wonderful
bedtime tales for children.
–Chris Mercer & Beverley Pervan

Cattle evacuated from U.S. coastal islands

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Huge cattle rescues are not unheard of in the U.S.–just rare.
A recent example was the November 2003 evacuation of 106 bison from
Santa Catalina Island, led by In Defense of Ani-mals southern
California director Bill Dyer.
Another evacuation, initially described by some sources as a
rescue, removed at least 38 cattle from Chirikof Island, Alaska.
Subsequent investigation revealed that even if live removal could be
made to work, the motivation behind the attempt was to sell the
cattle for slaughter.
In both instances the cattle were moved from both Santa
Catalina and Chirkoff in response to conservationist pressure to have
the feral herds shot, in order to restore wildlife habitat to a
semblance of pre-settlement conditions. The Catalina Island
Conservancy controls 88% of Santa Catalina, while Chirikoff Island
is under control of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
The Catalina bison were descended from a herd of 14
introduced to the island in 1924 during the filming of the 1926 film
The Vanishing American. The herd was later supplemented and built up
as part of a commercial beef ranch operated by chewing gum magnate
William Wrigley Jr.

Animal Obituaries

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Purr Box Jr., 17, tiger tabby cat of Mary Wilkinson of
Stamford, Connecticut, died on May 1. A portrait of Purr Box Jr.
appeared on page 1 of the March 10, 2004 edition of The Wall Street
Journal, beneath the headline “Purr Box goes to communion at St.
Francis Episcopal.”

Kathy, 34, the oldest female beluga whale in captivity,
was euthanized on April 9, 2004 at the New York Aquarium due to
incurable illness. Born in the Churchill River in northern Manitoba,
Kathi came to the aquarium in 1974. She gave birth twice, in 1981
and 1991. Both infants lived longer, at the time, than any others
born in captivity. Her 1991 calf, Casey, survived to age eight.

Yoda, a genetically modified dwarf mouse, died in his cage
on April 22 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, at age four
years and 12 days, the oldest lab mouse on record. He was a third
smaller than the average mouse, with heightened sensitivity toward
cold because of limited ability to hold his own body heat.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Dog Is My Co-Pilot

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Dog Is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship
from the editors of The Bark. Crown Publishing Group (299 Park Ave.,
New York, NY 10171), 2003. 304 pages. Hardcover, $ 25.00.

The Bark magazine began as an eight-page newsletter in 1997,
aimed at persuading the civic authorities in Berkeley, California to
legalise exercising dogs off-leash at a local park.
Through this campaign the founders, Claudia Kawczynka and
Cameron Woo, discovered the emergence of a new dog culture in
America, and set out to explore it.
Kawczynka and Woo in Dog Is My Co-Pilot present essays,
articles and short stories about dogs and dog people by 42 different
contributors. The content is grouped into four sections, entitled
“Beginnings,” “Pack,” “Lessons,” and “Passages,” but the breadth
of vision and style of writing makes the distinctions arbitrary and
unnecessary. Philosophy is too broad to be shoe-horned into
compartments, and some of these writings are as philosophical as Zen.
Among the more memorable passages may be a discussion of the
common allegation that childless people who are crazy about their
dogs (or cats) are sublimating their desire for children. Responds
Ann Patchett, author of four novels including The Patron Saint of
Liars, “I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what
they really wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren’t other
people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.”

BOOKS: Enslaved by Ducks

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte * Algonquin Books (127 Kingston Dr.
#105, Chapel Hill, NC 27514). 308 pages. Hardcover, $23.95.

Freelance writer Bob Tarte some years ago left the city and
moved with his wife Linda to a property in rural Mitchigan. Linda
started acquiring birds and Tarte found himself constructing cages
and doing all the menial work that went into caring for them.
When Tarte finally realized that he no longer had a life of
his own and that he had become a slave to a demanding avian family,
he wrote Enslaved by Ducks. Full of humorous anecdotes about the
interaction of various species of pet and farm birds with each other,
and with the Tartes, Enslaved by Ducks is a mine of information for
people who look after parrots and other birds. Years of patient
caring and literally painful learning have made Bob and Linda animal
behaviorists par excellence, graduates cum laude from the school of
hard knocks.
Enslaved by Ducks is much more than a mere recital of events.
The Tartes display an admirable ability to learn from experience,
and to achieve a better understanding of the psychology of their
birds and other animals. Their kindness and genuine empathy for
their various unusual pets encroaches deep into Bob Tarte’s limited
leisure time and causes him to suffer anxiety attacks. Linda Tarte
suffers a painful back strain that eventually compels her to sleep on
the floor.

BOOKS: Mammals of North America

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Mammals of North America
by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers
and Kenn Kaufman
Kaufman Focus Guides (c/o Houghton Mifflin, 215
Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10003), 2004. 352
pages. Flex binding. $22.00.

Reviewers inevitably liken Mammals of
North America editor Kenn Kaufman to the late
Roger Tory Peterson–with reason.
Peterson, editor and chief illustrator
of more than 50 field guides, was introduced to
birding in 1924, at age 11, by a Junior Audubon
Club. The members were taught to shoot birds and
study their corpses. Horrified, Peterson saved
his earnings as a newspaper boy to buy a camera,
at a time when shutter speeds were believed to be
too slow to capture clear images of birds on the
wing, and soon became the first distinguished
bird photographer, hand-tinting his prints
because color film had not yet been invented.
Peterson produced his first Field Guide to the
Birds in 1934.

Baby seals & bull calves bear the cruel weight of idolatry

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

The 350,000 baby harp seals who were clubbed or shot and
often skinned alive on the ice floes off eastern Canada this spring
had more in common with the thousands of bull calves who were
abandoned at temples in India during the same weeks than just being
days-old mammals subjected to unconscionable mistreatment.
Unlike the much smaller numbers of seals who were killed off
Russia, Norway, and Finland, and unlike the somewhat smaller
numbers of bull calves who were shoved into veal crates here in the
U.S., Canadian harp seal pups and Indian surplus bull calves are
victims not only of human economic exploitation, but also of their
roles as icons and idols.
The words “icon” and “idol” have a common origin in the
ancient Greek word that means “image.” Yet they mean such different
things–and have for so long–that two of the Judaic Ten
Commandments, about setting no other God before the One God and not
worshipping graven images, sternly address the difference.
An icon is a physical image representative of a holy concept,
usually but not always depicting a person who is believed to have
exemplified the concept in the conduct of his or her life. Icons may
also depict animals, abstract symbols, supernatural beings, or
deities. A icon may be venerated for being symbolic of the holy
concept, but to venerate it for its own sake is considered idolatry,
and therefore wrong in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths,
as well as in some branches of other major religions.

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