Israeli foie gras ban now is in force

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

JERUSALEM–“Foie gras production has ended in Israel,”
Israeli activist Adela Gertner affirmed on July 13, 2006.
“Suspected delinquents are being investigated. Otherwise, producers
are obeying the law.”
ANIMAL PEOPLE had asked Gertner to find out if Israeli foie
gras producers were at last complying with court rulings against
force-feeding. Most recently, the Israeli High Court of Justice
ruled on February 22, 2006 that force-feeding geese was to end by
April 15, 2006, “while expressing harsh criticism against the
state for not enforcing” an earlier ruling that force-feeding was to
have ended in March 2005, attorney Keren Klar told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Klar represented Let the Animals Live and Anonymous for Animal Rights.

Roaster ducks go without water

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

LONDON–Cruel as the foie gras industry
is, ducks on French foie gras farms live under
more natural conditions than most ducks raised
for meat.
“Farmed ducks endure worse conditions
than battery hens,” bannered The Independent,
of London, above a July 6 exposé of the roaster
duck industry by Sanjida O’Connell.
Both wild and domestic ducks who are
given their choice of habitat spend about 80% of
their time in water, but “Most of the 18 million
ducks reared for meat in Britain have no access
to water,” O’Connell reported. The same is true
of most of the 26 million ducks raised for
slaughter in the U.S., and actually of most
ducks raised for slaughter almost everywhere
except southern Asia-where governments are trying
to abolish rice paddy duck-rearing to stop the
spread of avian flus.

Foie gras is banned by Chicago council, but subsidized by New York governor

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

ALBANY, N.Y.–While other jurisdictions are moving to end
the foie gras industry, the tax-supported Empire State Development
Corporation in late May 2006 authorized a grant of $420,000 to help
Hudson Valley Foie Gras increase production by about 10% per year
over the next three years.
Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which accounts for about half of
all U.S. foie gras production, would be raising about 325,000 birds
per year at the end of the planned $1 million expansion. The
expansion would add 10 jobs to the present staff of 150.
The Empire State Development Corporation is “a public
authority that answers to Governor George Pataki, but not the
Legislature,” explained Syracuse Post-Standard staff writer Michelle
Breidenbach. The corporation “will borrow $140,000 for the project
and use cash from the state’s general fund for the remaining
$280,000.”

Trying to survive the fighting in Lebanon

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

BERUIT–The young Lebanese humane movement is struggling to
avoid becoming a collateral casualty of the July 12 Israeli invasion
of Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah militia members, who raided
Israel earlier in the day.
“I just came back from two weeks in Lebanon, and by chance
left just two hours before the airport was destroyed,” Kenya-based
wildlife trafficking investigator Jason Mier e-mailed to ANIMAL
PEOPLE.
Mier has worked closely since January 2006 with Beirut for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals to arrange rescues of illegally
obtained and exhibited nonhuman primates.
“I am speaking to BETA twice a day by phone,” Mier said.
“Even when the bombs were falling near [BETA cofounder] Joelle Kanaan’s house the other night she was still on the phone to
me worrying what could be done for the primates,” testified Graham
Garen of the Cefn-Yr-Erw Primate Rescue Sanctuary in Wales.

Middle East

Who will inherit the animal rights movement?

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Shouting through a bullhorn on the steps of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City throughout the summer of
1976, competing for attention with the U.S. Bicentennial celebration
and the near-bankruptcy of New York itself, the late Henry Spira
embarrassed the American Museum of Natural History into cancelling a
series of cruel sexuality experiments on brain-damaged cats. Never
before had anti-vivisection activists stopped research that was
already funded and underway.
Inspired by philosopher Peter Singer, who wrote much of his
1974 opus Animal Liberation as Spira’s house guest, Spira had
already researched the 3,000-year recorded history of animal
advocacy. Spira found that he could not identify any specific time,
place, or issue that marked a definitive defeat for the cause of
animals in the court of U.S. public opinion. Spira could not find
record of any elected leader speaking in favor of animal suffering,
as opposed to abstract and sanitized defenses of hunting, trapping,
animal agriculture, and animal research that almost always included
paens to sportsmanship, good husbandry, and not “sacrificing”
animals unnecessarily.

Tactics

Letters [July/Aug 2006]

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Ocean “curtains of death” may return

In July 2006 the National Marine Fisheries Service announced
intent to issue an Exempted Fishing Permit as early as August 15 for
the cruel and destructive practice of drift net fishing in protected
areas along the U.S. Pacific coast. They may also again permit
longlining. This will result in sea turtles, marine mammals, birds
and other species becoming entangled and drowned.
Drift nets are often referred to as “curtains of death.”
This form of fishing was banned on the high seas by the United
Nations in 1991, and was closed in areas along the U.S Pacific coast
in 2001.
In west coast areas that were still open to drift gill
netting, the toll on marine species since 2002 has included at least
64 dolphins, whales, seals and sea lions.
Industrial longline fishing also kills marine species in huge
numbers. Fishing vessels can deploy thousands of baited hooks on
hundreds of lines that can total up to 60 miles long. This
non-selective technique is estimated to snare 40,000 sea turtles,
30,000 seabirds, and millions of sharks worldwide each year. Due to
the devastating impact of longline fishing, it was banned along the
entire U.S. West Coast in 2004.

Letters

Namibian seal hunt

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

The 2006 Namibian sealing season opened on July 1, with a
quota of 85,000 pups, 20,000 more than in 2005, and 7,000 bulls.
Adult females are exempted, to keep the seal breeding population up.
Just a fraction of the size of the annual Atlantic Canadian
seal hunt, the Namibian hunt has attracted little public attention
and protest–and even less since South Africa ended sealing in 1990.
As Namibia and South Africa share the same seal population, a common
misperception was that all sealing had ended along the Atlantic coast
of Africa. In fact, the Namibian sealing quota was doubled to
60,000 after 2000, when according to the Namibian government as many
as 300,000 seals starved due to depleted fisheries. Overfishing and
climatic change due to global warming appeared to be the major causes
of the seal deaths, but Namibia claimed the seals had overpopulated
their habitat. Current reports indicate, however, that the
Namibian seal population has never recovered to more than 75% of the
size it was in 1993, the recent recorded peak year.

China tries to rewrite the prescription for tigers

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

HONG KONG–Trying to reshape world opinion about tiger
conservation, in hopes of reopening legal commerce in tiger parts,
the State Forestry Administration of China during the second week of
June 2006 hosted visits to two major tiger farms by four outside
“experts.”
Three of them soon extensively praised Chinese tiger programs
in published statements.
Free market economic advocate Baron Mitra, who directs the
Liberty Institute in Delhi, India, in a guest column for India
Today unfavorably compared tbe faltering Indian effort to conserve
wild tigers with the Chinese proliferation of tigers in captivity.

BOOKS: Hurt Go Happy

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby

Tom Doherty Associates (175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2006.
267 pages, hardcover. $17.95

“I called all over trying to find a place, but there are
hundreds of chimps in need of a place to go, and they were especially
uninterested in a chimp who can’t be housed with other chimps.”
This is the age-old problem of keeping baby “wild” animals as
pets: what to do when they grow older and stronger, and can no
longer live with humans in their homes.
Hurt Go Happy is the story of such a chimp. Although
fiction, the novel is based on the true story of an ill-fated chimp
named Lucy, who was raised as a human child in Oklahoma, as part of
a language experiment. Rehabilitated and returned to the wild in
1977, as one of Gambia-based sanctuarian Janis Carter’s early
projects, Lucy was killed by poachers in 1987.

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