Abroad

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1998:

In Germany, “animals kept in shelters are
never killed as a result of pet overpopulation,” federal
animal shelter overseer Jorg Styrie recently
wrote to Diana Nolen, president of the STOP antipet-overpopulation
project in Mansfield, Ohio.
According to Styrie, unless an animal “is incurably ill
and suffers pain, it is forbidden to put animals to
sleep.” Adoption, surrender, vaccination, and neutering
fees at German shelters are all comparable to
those in the U.S., but pet abandonment brings a fine
of about $1,500, Styrie told Nolen.

Combatting a rat plague, which may cost
impoverished Vietnam $30 million in export earnings
due to damaged rice crops, Vietnamese prime minister
Phan Van Khai has reportedly closed restaurants
that serve cat, dog, and snake meat, and has forbidden
the export of cats, dogs, and snakes to China.
Humans killed more than 27 million rats during the
first two months of an ongoing rat-killing campaign,
stimulated by bounties on rat tails, but the Viet government
sees the diversion of human labor to ratkilling
as counterproductive, since animals––if not
eaten––could do the same job at less cost.
Several years after erroneously claiming
to have exterminated the feral cats of Macquarie
I s l a n d, 1,000 miles south of Tasmania, the
Australian National Heritage Fund is paying six
national park rangers £360,000––about $9,000 per
cat––to try again to kill an estimated 100 cats who
remain there, after the slaughter of approximately
2,200 cats over the past 20 years. Living in underground
warrens, on a diet of sea birds, the Macquarie
Island cats are reportedly mostly tabbies, with some
gingers, all less than half the size of the average
house cat. While the ANHF claims the cats must be
killed to protect bird species, the cats and seabirds
have coexisted in the harsh near-Antarctic environment
since sealers abandoned the cats’ ancestors there
circa 1810. Naturalists have blamed the cats for the
extinction of unique Macquarie parakeets and land
rails, and have called for the cats’ extirpation since at
least 1919.