Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Elora Petrasek, 6, remembered by acquaintances as a very
gentle child who loved animals, was fatally mauled by a bear on
April 13 in Cherokee National Forest, near Benton, Tennessee. The
bear also bit her brother Luke Cenkus, 2, puncturing his skull,
and mauled their mother, Susan Cenkus, 45. The attack, 10 miles
from the nearest highway, occurred as adults tried to drive the bear
off of a hiking trail. A bear in the vicinity was later shot by
rangers, but was not positively identified as the killer. Petrasek
was the 56th person verifiably killed by a black bear in North
America within the past 100 years, according to Lynn Rogers of the
North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota, and only the second
person killed by a bear in the Great Smokies. The first was Glenda
Ann Bradley, 50, of Cosby, Tennessee, who was killed in an
un-witnessed attack in May 2000 near Gaitlinburg.

Richard Meza, 52, was fatally shot by an unknown assailant
at about 11 p.m. on April 8, 2006, while feeding a feral cat colony
he attended near Anaheim and Walnut Avenues in Long Beach,
California. No motive was evident; Meza was not robbed. A 30-year
lineman and repairman for GTE and Verizon, Meza and his wife of 24
years, LoAnn, 48, planned to retire in June 2006 to a home they
were building in Virginia. LoAnn, who was losing her sight,
received a cornea transplant from her late husband.

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Alfred the Great

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Alfred the Great, 17, named for his political wisdom, was
euthanized due to incurable suffering from conditions of age on March
30, 2005.
While removing a poacher’s snares set for fox or coyote from
an abandoned junkyard near Brigham, Quebec, in December 1988, at
twilight, in a blizzard, ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt Clifton found
hints that a kitten had been used as live bait but escaped. Amid the
snow, in the gathering dark, among countless hiding places, the
kitten could not be found.
“I reluctantly hiked home,” Clifton recalls, “and was just
shaking the snow off my coat in the woodshed, when my landlady,
Lorna Kemp, came out and pointed to a tiny gray-and-white kitten
stumbling up the road behind me, looking like a moving snowball.

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BOOKS: Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
by Jonathan Balcombe
Palgrave/MacMillan (175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2006.
256 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

Balcombe writes, “When animals are stereotyped, the public
is done a disservice. Reinforcing the myth, we perpetuate a
one-dimensional perception of the animal kingdom….It is only when
we get close to animals, and examine them with open minds, that we
are likely to glimpse the being within. Natural history writing is
strewn with incidents in which writers are moved to awe by the
intelligence, sensitivity and awareness of animals they have lived
with.”
Balcombe points out many aspects of pleasure-seeking animal
behavior. As all vertebrates have a nervous system very much the
same as ours, it is reasonable to assume that all are alive to both
pain and pleasure, contrary to the derision that greeted authors who
suggested this in earlier times. As Balcombe points out, “In the
face of these discoveries, the position that pleasurable states are
the sole domain of the human species is narrow and anthropocentric.
To deny animals conscious experiences is to deny that they plan,
desire, anticipate, tease, grieve, enjoy, tolerate, and gauge.
It is to reject that they make decisions.”

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BOOKS: Cesar’s Way

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier
Harmony Books ( 231 Broad St., Nevada City, CA 95959), 2006.
304 pages, hard cover. $24.95.

Dog behaviorist Cesar Millan’s weekly show The Dog Whisperer
airs on the National Geographic Channel. His Dog Psychology Center
in Los Angeles, California, enjoys a celebrity clientele. His book
Cesar’s Way is about dogs, but is also the autobiography of a poor
Mexican who came to America as an illegal immigrant.
We have had family dogs all our lives, yet only after
reading Millan’s book did we realize how many mistakes we made in
training and understanding them. If we were to get another dog, it
would only be after anxious consideration of our responsibilities:
Would we commit ourselves to taking the dog for a long, tiring walk
for at least an hour every morning, and another half hour every
evening? Every day?
Millan believes that when one understands the evolutionary
needs of dogs, one realizes that draining off energy by hard
exercise is essential to their health.

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BOOKS: Animal Instinct

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Animal Instinct by Dorothy B. Hayes
Universe (2021 Pine Lake Rd., Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512), 2005.
234 pages, paperback. $15.95.

Animal Instinct author Dorothy B. Hayes was formerly known as
Dot Hayes, longtime staff writer and public relations director for
Friends of Animals. Earlier, Hayes covered animal issues for
several Connecticut newspapers.
Animal Instinct is an autobiographical novel describing just
over a year in the life of an advocacy group staff writer named
Eleanor Aquitane Green.
Structurally and thematically, Animal Instinct is a “working
girl story,” about coping with the pressures of a high-stress job
under a demanding and often capricious boss, in an all-female
environment where the rules of hierarchy are much more flexible–and
therefore treacherous–than in the male-dominated news business.
There is history in Animal Instinct, as characters inform
Green of background in summaries that are generally accurate in gist,
off by up to 10 years in detail–but the mistakes are not more
egregious than those made in the several formal histories that Hayes
lists as sources.

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BOOKS: Listen

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Listen
by Stephanie S. Tolan
Harper Collins Publishers
(1350 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10019), 2006.
197 pages, paperback. $15.99.

Charley, 12, is trying to come to terms with the death of
her mother in a car accident that leaves Charley herself struggling
to learn to walk again. Compounding her sense of isolation is the
desertion of her best friend.
While exercising her damaged leg in the woods near her home,
Charley finds a feral dog. Not knowing why, she feels an intense
need to tame this dog, take him home, and care for him. Because
she has never had a dog before, her father tries to talk her into
getting a puppy. But Charley only connects to this particular
animal, whom she names Coyote, spending weeks trying to get close
to him.

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India tries, but cannot find a humane way to kill poultry to stamp out H5N1

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

JALGAON, India–Veterinarian Abdul Kalim Khan died of
jaundice, not the H5N1 avian influenza, Maharashtra state animal
husbandry commissioner Bijay Kumar told media on April 24, 2006.
Khan fell ill soon after helping to kill nearly 200,000 chickens in
the Jalgaon area to contain an H5N1 outbreak, Kumar explained, but
his illness had a different origin.
Through May 2, 2006, India had not yet had any of the 113
reported human H5N1 fatalities worldwide, but at least seven poultry
farmers committed suicide after losing their flocks and/or customers.
Indian poultry sales were reportedly down 40% to 60%, after
averaging 17% growth in recent years. India has the world’s sixth
largest poultry industry, with about 500 million birds on farms at
any given time.

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Hong Kong seeks to end live markets & pig farming

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Hong Kong–Citing H5N1 prevention as an urgent pretext, the
Hong Kong Health, Welfare, & Food Bureau in February 2006 asked the
Legislative Council to ban live poultry sales by 2009, a goal the
bureau has pursued since 1997.
Under a permit buy-back plan introduced in 2004, 272 of 814
live chicken vendors and 30 of 200 Hong Kong chicken growers have
gone out of business, the bureau said.
The Hong Kong government is also trying to buy out and close
all 265 local pig farms, which raise 330,000 pigs per year,
producing 520 metric tons of waste per day. Pigs have in the past
been an intermediary host for avian flus that spread to humans.
However, the Legislative Council panel on Food Safety and
Environmental hygiene on April 11 rejected the Health, Welfare, and
Food Bureau’s plan to require all poultry sold in Hong Kong to be
slaughtered at a central plant to be built in the New Territories,
the semi-rural district between the mainland and the cities of
Kowloon and Hong Kong. The plan was also voted down by the North
District Council–because incoming poultry might bring in H5N1.

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Risk of cats giving H5N1 to humans is small, says Euro Centre for Disease Prevention & Control

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

ROTTERDAM, STOCKHOLM, LONDON– “Cats could fuel bird flu
pandemic,” headlined the April 5 edition of The Times of London,
sparking similar headlines worldwide–but the risk is small,
responded the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in
Stockholm, Sweden, after reviewing the evidence.
“A distinction needs to be made,” reminded the European
Centre, “between species which can occasionally be infected by a
particular influenza, but who rarely transmit it,” such as cats,
“and those species in which it seems that the viruses are better
adapted and transmitted,” such as birds.
Cats were first known to be vulnerable to H5N1, the European
Centre response continued, in December 2003, “when a few leopards
and tigers died in a zoo in Thailand after being fed infected
poultry.” Later came “a much larger H5N1 outbreak in zoo tigers,
also in Thailand, who had been fed chicken carcasses. Over 140
tigers died or were euthanised. There was convincing evidence of
tiger to tiger transmission.

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