Petfinder.com sold

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2006:
Maureen Smith, chief executive of the Animal Planet cable
television channel, on November 2, 2006 announced that her company,
Discovery Communications Inc., is paying “about $35 million” to
purchase the adoption web site Petfinder.com and pet training video
firm PetsIncredible. Petfinder.com and PetsIncredible will become
part of the Animal Planet cable business unit.
The deal was disclosed just as Animal Planet caught flak from
Canned-Lion.com, founded by ANIMAL PEOPLE book and screen reviewers
Chris Mercer and Bev Pervan, of Cape Town, South Africa. Animal
Planet recently aired a documentary called White Lions: King of
Kings. The documentary, said Mercer, “presented Marius Prinsloo,
a notorious canned lion breeder in South Africa, as a paragon of
conservation working to preserve the white lion gene. The South
African canned lion industry is one of the cruelest industries in the
world,” Mercer alleged. “The South African environment minister,
himself a former hunter, has publicly described the canned hunting
fraternity as ‘environmental thugs.’ How could Animal Planet stoop
to whitewashing this industry, and present canned hunting as
conservation?”