BOOKS: Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
by Lawrence Anthony, with Graham Spence
Thomas Dunne Books (c/o St. Martin’s Press, 175 5th Ave., New York,
NY 10010), 2007. 240 pages, paperback. $23.95.

At the same time that ANIMAL PEOPLE received a web link to a
video clip of U.S. troops stoning an injured dog in early 2007, we
received a link to another video clip showing lions being released
from cages to kill and eat several donkeys, as soldiers cheered.
“Three times per week the zoo keeper buys donkeys to feed the
starving lions,” the caption said.
This is not how Earth Organization founder Lawrence Anthony
taught the Baghdad Zoo staff to operate, after making his way there
from South Africa because he thought the zoo animals might need help
after the U.S. military invaded Baghdad in May 2003.

Obituaries

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Tamara Monti, 37, from Lake Como, Italy, employed as a
dolphin keeper at Oltremare Park in Riccone, was fatally stabbed on
February 4, 2007 by neighbor Alessandro Doto, 35, who lived with
his parents in the flat above Monti’s. Doto, arrested at the scene
with the knife in his hand, claimed he was driven mad by the barking
of Monti’s two dogs while she was at work. Monti had worked
exceptionally long hours since September 2005, raising a grampus
dolphin named Mary G who was rescued with her mother from a June 2005
stranding. The mother died, but Mary G survived. Mary G refused to
eat after Monti’s death, however, and was in dire condition as of
February 20.

Obituaries

Animal obits

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Sled dogs Jewel, 5, running for Yuka Honda, Melville, 5,
running for Brent Sass, and Hope, 6, running for Kelly Griffin,
died between February 11 and February 21 in the 1,000-mile Yukon
Quest, the first dogs to die in the race since 2002. Jewel
reportedly choked on her own vomit during a team runaway when Honda
stopped to untangle several dogs just past the Braeburn rest point,
and her snow anchors failed to hold the team. The causes of death of
the others were unclear. All three were older than most racing
huskies. Read more

Obituaries

BOOKS: Kinship With The Wolf

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Kinship With The Wolf
by Tanja Askani
Park Street Press (One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767), 2006.
144 pages, paperback. $19.95

The text accompanying this collection of superb portrait
photographs of wolves describes the social lives and behavior of a
family of wolves living in captivity at the Luneburger Heide Wildlife
Reserve in Germany. Author Tanja Askani gives an absorbing account
of the emotional lives of wolves, and of their complex social
structures and rituals.
Askani mentions that some wolves take an instinctive dislike
to a particular person for no apparent reason, and gives a
fascinating description of how wolf family life can give leadership
lessons to business executives. She includes a particularly
interesting chapter on the status of wolves in Europe, reviewing the
current wolf population estimates and conservation initiatives in
each nation of the European Union. Outside the EU, wolves continue
to be viciously persecuted in Norway and Russia. Even within the EU,
where wolves are nominally protected, the protections are often not
enforced.

BOOKS: Cats Of Africa

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Cats Of Africa by Luke Hunter
Photography by Gerald Hinde
Johns Hopkins U. Press (2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore,
MD 21218), 2006. 176 pages, hardcover. $39.95.

As well as the well-known lion, leopard,
and cheetah, and the less familiar but still
reasonably common caracal, serval and African
wildcat, Africa hosts the golden cat, jungle
cat, sand cat, and blackfooted cat. Cats of
Africa author Luke Hunter, a Wildlife
Conservation Society carnivore specialist,
covers them all–but his volume is not to be
confused with the distnguished Cats of Africa by
Anthony Hall-Martin and Paul Boseman, published
in 1998, now out of print.
We were surprised to read that “none of
the big cats purr.” This has been alleged by
others, but we have personal experience that
cheetahs purr, a loud deep purr sounding much
like a small motorbike. Lion expert Paul Hart,
of the Drakenstein Lion Park near Cape Town,
South Africa, advises that lionesses in heat
express themselves by what could be described as
purring.

BOOKS: Hollywood Hoofbeats: Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Hollywood Hoofbeats:
Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen
by Petrine Day Mitchum
with Audrey Pavia
BowTie Press (3 Burroughs, Irvine, CA 92618), 2006. 205 pages,
hardcover. $39.95.

Coffee-table books don’t come more lucidly written or
thoroughly researched than Hollywood Hoofbeats, a definitive history
of horse use in American film making, with frequent emphasis on
humane issues.
Horses were still basic transportation when the film industry
started, but began to be displaced by automobiles coincidental with
the early growth of Hollywood. Film makers took advantage of an
abundance of cheap cast-off horses for a time, treating them as
expendible commodities.

BOOKS: Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus
by Michael Tobias & Jane Morrison
Council Oak Books (2105 E. 15th Street, Suite B,
Tulsa, OK 74104), 2006. 213 pages, hard
cover. $19.95.

“This book has emerged out of our
responses to donkeys: donkeys as a species and
donkeys as individuals,” write co-authors
Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison, longtime
partners in producing books and films about
nature and animals, and in directing the
California-based Dancing Star Found-ation
wildlife sanctuary.
“The book grazes, feeding on a landscape
both real and historical, imagined, desired and
underfoot, inspired by a creature that has,
strangely, embedded itself into the very fabric
of philosophy, religion, art, the environment,
human history, as well as in our hearts,”
Tobias and Morrison continue. “Donkeys did not
bray for this attention, but their own subtle
beauty and gentleness have attracted our kind,
while their utility has brought them loads of
woe.”

Reviews

BOOKS: Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching
by Michael Greger, M.D.
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York, NY 10003),
2006. 465 pages, hardcover. $30.00.

Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, by Humane Society of
the U.S. director of public health & animal agriculture Michael
Greger, M.D., is at once a meticulously researched timely warning
about the potential threat to humanity from the H5N1 influzenza
virus, and a book that will not be read and heeded by nearly enough
people–even after a strain of H5N1 apparently jumped from factory
farms in Hungary into the facilities of the British turkey producer
Bernard Matthews in February 2007, underscoring most of Greger’s
major points.

Bringing birds back to Iraq

March 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
BAGHDAD–Rediscovering and restoring the bird life of Iraq is
an obsession for ornithologists who remember the nation as the
crossing of flight paths for migratory species coming and going from
all parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The Mesopotamian marshlands, twice the size of the Florida
Everglades, were reputedly the richest birding habitat in the world
before dictator Saddam Hussein drained 90% in 1991 to try to flush
out rebels against his rule.
About 40% of the marshlands have been reflooded and restored
since 2003. All 150 bird species known to have lived there in 1979
have been seen in recent winter-and-summer surveys, Birdlife
International adviser Richard Porter told BBC News in January 2007.
That leaves many of the 237 species native to the rest of
Iraq still largely unaccounted for, between habitat loss and decades
of unrestrained shooting.

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