Obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:
Perry Fina, 59, died on January 6, 2008 in New Milford,
Connecticut, after a long fight with cancer. A former U.S. Navy Seal
who served three tours in Vietnam, Fina upon leaving the Navy became
an animal behaviorist. He and his wife Linda operated Hearthstone
Kennels in New Milford for 29 years. North Shore Animal League
president John Stevenson hired Fina as an animal training consultant
in 1993. Fina joined North Shore fulltime in 1995 as director of
special adoptions, training animals as companions for disabled
people. He became director of operations in 1997, director of
corporate development in 2003, vice president of national shelter
outreach in 2006, and vice president of planned giving in 2007.
Recalled North Shore in a memorial statement, “Ever the gentleman,
Perry was renowned for his distinctive voice. At many League events,
his was the ‘Voice of God’ that magically filled the room. Perry
Fina devoted his energy, his mind, and above all his heart, to a
vision of a better world for companion animals.” Fina was also noted
for his deadpan sense of humor, and was especially remembered for
his leadership on September 11, 2001, when he saw the two hijacked
aircraft hit the World Trade Center on his way to work. Among the
last commuters to cross the Whitestone bridge before it was closed,
Fina bunked for the duration of the crisis at the North Shore
shelter, with other staff, who followed a disaster plan previously
practiced during severe snow storms. By sundown North Shore had a
mobile unit at Pier 40, near the World Trade Center, assisting the
rescue dogs and pets stranded in the area. Fina also supervised
distributing a temporary excess of donated food to other shelters
throughout the region.

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Dogs Deserve Better founder to be sentenced after Have A Heart for Chained Dogs Week

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

 

HOLIDAYSBURG, Pa.–Tammy Grimes, 43, who founded the
anti-chaining organization Dogs Deserve Better in 2002, will
celebrate Valentine’s Day 2008 by coordinating her 6th annual “Have A
Heart for Chained Dogs Week,” which annually delivers valentines and
treats to as many as 8,000 dogs who live their lives on chains.
Grimes will then be sentenced on February 22 for theft and receiving
stolen property.
Grimes on September 11, 2006 removed an elderly and
apparently painfully dying dog from the yard of Steve and Lori Arnold
of East Freedom, Pennsylvania, after the Central Pennsylvania SPCA
failed to respond to repeated calls about the dog from neighbor Kim
Eichner. Grimes took the dog to the office of Altoona veterinarian
Noureldin Hassane, who testified that he found the dog was in
extremis. Later Grimes took the dog from the clinic and placed him
in a foster home for the remainder of his life. He died on March 1,
2007.

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Editorial feature: What is the future of Islamic animal sacrifice?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:
Editorial feature

What is the future of Islamic animal sacrifice?

At each of the past two Eids, the Feast
of Sacrifice that culminates the Haj or Islamic
season of pilgrimage to Mecca, ANIMAL PEOPLE
publisher Kim Bartlett and son Wolf Clifton were
in cities where many Muslim people practice
animal sacrifice in honor of the occasion:
Mumbai, India and Luxor, Egypt.
Also in Egypt for the 2007 Eid was Animal
People, Inc. alternate board member Kristin
Stilt, an Islamic legal historian on the faculty
of Northwestern University law school in
Evanston, Illinois. Stilt had been in Jordan
the two days prior to the Eid, helping with an
Animals Australia investigation of the livestock
trade, but had returned to Cairo by the time the
Eid began. It was not her first Eid in the
Middle East.

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BOOKS: Listening to Cougar

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

Listening to Cougar
Edited by
Marc Bekoff & Cara Blessley Lowe
University Press of Colorado
(5589 Arapahoe Ave., Suite 206-C
Boulder, CO 80303), 2007.
200 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

The 20 contributors to Listening to Cougar among them look at
pumas in about every way imaginable, from perspectives including
those of predator protection activist Wendy Keefover-Ring, popular
nature writers Rick Bass, Ted Kerasote, and Barry Lopez,
primatologist Jane Goodall, a couple of mystics or would-be mystics,
and of course those of the editors, Cougar Fund cofounder Cara
Blessley Lowe and ethologist Marc Bekoff.

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BOOKS: Rat & Rats

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

Rat by Jonathan Burt
Reaktion Books Ltd. (33 Great Sutton St., London EC1M 3JU, U.K.), 2006.
189 pages, paperback. $19.95.

Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat
of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
Bloomsbury (175 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2004. 242
pages, hardcover. $23.95.

Immersing myself in Rat, by Jonathan Burt, and Rats, by
Robert Sullivan, during my flight to Egypt for the December 2007
Middle East Network on Animal Welfare conference, I sat a few
evenings later in front of the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx during a
bombastic sound and light show and contemplated the role of rats in
creating the spectacle before me.
No matter what the Pharoah Cheops and his successors thought
they were doing, no matter what their scribes wrote down, and no
matter what anyone believed about an afterlife, the Giza pyramids
and Sphinx are first and foremost monuments to a temporary conquest
of rats by the first civilization to entice help from cats. Read more

What did the Prophet Mohammed really say about dogs?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

What did the Prophet Mohammed really say about dogs?

Commentary by Merritt Clifton
CAIRO–Will the status of dogs rise in the Islamic world as
improved sanitation eliminates street dog habitat, the threat of
rabies recedes, and rising affluence enables more people to keep
pets?
Or, is prejudice against dogs so thoroughly built into
Muslim culture that the Middle East will remain the part of the
inhabited world with the fewest pet dogs per capita, despite having
the longest recorded history of keeping dogs?
Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Karachi, Tehran, Kuwait, and
Dubai all appear to have reached approximately the socio-demographic
transition point at which dog-keeping began exponential growth in the
U.S. and more recently China, and began more restrained growth in
western Europe.

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Veterinarian works under fire to help Baghdad residents keep pets alive

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

BAGHDAD– “People in Baghdad still want to look after animals
despite everything,” 26-year veterinarian Nameer Abdul Fatah told
Agence France-Presse in early January 2008.
“More Muslims keep dogs as pets than is generally believed,”
Fatah added. “There are many expensive dogs like Pekinese in the
city. People keep them inside at home, and don’t take them for
walks because of the danger” associated with life in a war zone.
Trained in small animal medicine in East Germany, Fatah,
46, often treats animals who have been injured in the sectarian
strife that has torn apart Baghdad since the 2003 U.S. invasion. He
acknowledged that “The windows of my car were blown out once, when I
was driving to examine a client’s dog, and another time I got bad
wounds in the leg from shrapnel. But I was never the target,” Fatah
stipulated.

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Rescuers try to stay alive in Lebanon

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

BERUIT–Beruit for the Ethical Treatment of Animals cofounder
Marguerite Shaarawi and shelter manager Jason Meir hoped at the
Middle East Network for Animal Welfare conference in December 2007
that Lebanon and their efforts might soon return to normalcy.
Subsequent disappointments including a January 15, 2008 car
bomb attack on a U.S. Embassy vehicle that killed three bystanders
and wounded 21 .
“There has been a drastic increase in bombings over the last
month,” BETA e-mailed to supporters. “Lebanon is without a
president since November, and elections have been delayed more than
ten times. This greatly affects us. Currently we are caring for
more than 350 dogs and cats. Bombings and insecurity make our work
difficult.”
[Contact BETA c/o <www.betalebanon.org>.]

Dogfights in Kabul

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

A panoramic New York Times photo of a Kabul dogfighting arena
believed to be the largest in Afghan-istan, published on December 8,
2007, showed 367 spectators, 30 dog handlers, and 12 dogs. Kabul
is a city of four million people. If 25% of Kabul dogfighting fans
were present, participation could be estimated as about four people
per 1,000, or 0.4% of the human population.

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