BOOKS: Baboons: Tales, Traits & Troubles

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Baboons: Tales, Traits & Troubles
by Attie Gerber
Lapa Publishers (380 Bosma St., Pretoria, South Africa), 2004.
360 pages, hard cover. 180.95 rand.

Attie Gerber, now a university instructor of video
production and digital photography, cofounded the popular South
African television program 50/50, which has covered ecological
matters for more than 20 years. Baboons: Tales, Traits & Troubles
combines superb photographs with commentary mixing information about
baboons with advice about wildlife photography.
Gerber explores the interaction of Afrikaans and British
settlers with baboons through mentions of baboons in early South
African literature. Hated by farmers for crop-raiding, but
respected for their intelligence, baboons were at times even put to
work. For example, the Cape Argus reported in 1884, a railway
signalman named Jumper lost both legs in an accident, and procured a
baboon he called Jack to assist him. Photographs show Jack operating
the signal levers at Jumper’s instruction.

BOOKS: No One Loved Gorillas More

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

No One Loved Gorillas More: Dian Fossey Letters from the Mist
by Camilla de la Bedoyere with photographs by Bob Campbell
National Geographic Society (1145 17th St. NW, Washington, DC
20036), 2005. 191 pages, illustrated. $30.00 hard cover.

World Atlas of Great Apes & Their Conservation
edited by Julian Caldecott & Lera Miles
University of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA
94704), 94704. 424 pages, illustrated. $45.00 hard cover.

A case could be made that if Dian Fossey had not authored
Gorillas In The Mist (1983), the World Atlas of Great Apes & Their
Conservation would not exist.
Even if Julian Caldecott and Lera Miles had managed to
compile the World Atlas of Great Apes, it probably would not have
been published in a volume with 150 color photos, 50 maps, and a
preface by United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. The heavily
footnoted text would be buried in obscure scholarly journals, not
piled on coffee tables.
Annan probably would never have written, “The great apes are
our kin. Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools,
politics, and medicine.”

U.S. Supreme Court endorses seizure of hoarded animals

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

WASHINGTON D.C., Philadelphia–The U.S.
Supreme Court in early December 2005 upheld the
right of humane societies and animal control
agencies to seize animals from alleged hoarders
and charge convicted hoarders for their care, by
refusing to hear the last appeal of Janet Jones,
55, of Hatfield, Pennsylvania.
Jones founded a local animal rescue
organization, Animal Orphans, in 1998,
operating out of her home. In September 2002 the
Montgomery County SPCA seized 96 cats, nine
dogs, several hamsters, rats, and mice, and a
turtle who were found on the premises in
allegedly negligent conditions. Charged in
December 2002 with 105 summary counts of cruelty,
Jones was in November 2003 ordered by the
Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas to pay
the SPCA $45,600 for the animals’ care during the
year while the case was pending, and to forfeit
the animals.
The sum was within $5,000 of the animal
care costs for 2002 declared on the Animal
Orphans Inc. filing of IRS Form 990. But Jones
appealed. After the Montgomery County Court of
Common Pleas convicted her a second time, the
Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld the conviction
in September 2004. The Pennsylvania Supreme
Court in June 2005 refused to hear the case.
Jones then took the case to the U.S. Supreme
Court.

BOOKS: Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers:
The Past & Future of Human-Animal Relationships
by Richard W. Bulliet
Columbia University Press (61 West 62nd St., New York, NY 10023), 2005.
256 pages, hardcover. $27.50.

“Let’s start with sex and blood,” opens
Richard W. Bulliet, hypothesizing that sex and
violence in screen entertainment today feeds a
human fascination that earlier was satisfied by
watching animal mating and barnyard slaughter.
“Carnal reality made fantasy
unnecessary,” Bulliet asserts. “Paradoxically,
postdomestic societies with high levels of
sex-and-blood pornography may exhibit a strong
and generalized abhorrence for real-life maiming,
killing, and sexual predation.”
By “post-domestic,” Bulliet means
societies in which most people no longer directly
participate in animal husbandry.

Reviews

BOOKS: Animals, Ethics & Christianity

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Animals, Ethics & Christianity
by Matthew Priebe
14069 S. Lincoln Way, Galt, CA 95632, 2005.
73 pages, paperback. $4.00.

This booklet consists of a 45-page essay–plus 28 pages of
footnotes–on the relationship between humankind and other life
forms, assessed not on the basis of rights, but from the perspective
of the Bible.
Priebe questions how a true Christian should treat the
animals over whom humans were given dominion. He argues, citing
Biblical passages, that we should treat animals in the same way that
God treats us. Priebe argues that kind and merciful dominion is
God’s dominion, whereas cruel exploitation, characterising current
human use of animals, is Satan’s dominion.

Reviews

New Legislation: Austria, New Jersey, Ohio

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Austria no longer allows biomedical research on chimpanzees,
gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and gibbons, effective on January
1, 2006, unless the studies are in the animals’ own interest. The
last apes actually used in experiments in Austria were retired by
Baxter Laboratories in 2002.

Less popular with animal advocates is a new Viennese
ordinance requiring that dogs born after January 1, 2006 must be
insured to a minimum liability of $864,000.

DNR seeks to keep wildlife rehab out of West Virginia

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

CHARLESTON, W.V.– West Virginia is the only U.S. state that
does not issue wildlife rehabilitation permits, and the state
Depart-ment of Natural Resources means to keep it that way, says
wildlife section chief Curtis Taylor.
The West Virginia 2006 legislative session convened on
January 11. Humane Society of the U.S. director of urban wildlife
programs John Hadidian and urban wildlife field director Laura Simon
have indicated that obtaining wildlife rehab authorization will be a
state HSUS priority.
The issue surfaced in October 2005 when a state police
officer investigating a complaint about shots fired on posted land
found about 60 caged raccoons on land belonging to rehabilitator
Patricia Hoffman-Butler, 47. The raccoons were seized, killed,
and examined for disease by DNR officials. Hoffman pleaded no
contest to illegal possession of wildlife on December 13, 2005, and
paid $173.50 in penalties.
West Virginia banned keeping raccoons after a coonhunting
club trucked as many as 2,000 raccoons north from a rabies-endemic
part of Florida in 1976, and released most of them before realizing
that some were rabid.

U.S. Supreme Court may step into factory-farmed chicken poop

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

The U.S. Supreme Court, recently reconstituted with two new
members including a new chief justice, may hear arguments on the
right of states to regulate agricultural pollution.
Arkansas attorney general Mike Beebe in November 2005 asked
the Supreme Court to throw out a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in
June 2005 by Oklahoma attorney general Drew Edmondson against eight
poultry firms with Arkansas operations that allegedly pollute the
Illinois River, upstream from Oklahoma. The eight, among them many
poultry industry leaders, include Cargill, Cobb-Vantress, Simmons
Foods, Peterson Farms, Tyson Foods, Willow Brook Foods, George’s,
and Cal-Maine Foods.

BOOKS: Bear & The Grizzly Maze

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Bear by Robert E. Bieder
Reaktion Books Ltd. (79 Farringdon Rd., London, EC1M 3JU, U.K.),
2005. 192 pages, paperback. $19.95.

The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans
Dutton (375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014), 2005.
275 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

Robert Bieder and Nick Jans explore the mythology of bears
from opposite angles but to common purpose in Bear, a global
overview, and The Grizzly Maze, an examination of the fatal
maulings of bear advocate Timothy Treadwell, 46, and his friend
Amie Huguenard, 37, by a brown bear on October 6, 2003, in Katmai
National Park, Alaska.
Bieder, a career scholar, starts with the evolution and
diversification of bears. Bear ancestors emerged in Europe and Asia
as long as 25 million years ago, but the forebears of today’s bears
appeared at about the same time that great apes evolved in Africa.
Conflict emerged between modern bears and early humans as
soon as population expansion brought them into overlapping habitat.
Bears, as carnivores who had developed the ability to eat
vegetation, and humans, as ancestral vegetarians who had learned to
scavenge and hunt, were direct competitors. Each killed and ate the
other, if able.

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