GROWLS
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:
Wilderness Society president Jon
Roush, who makes $125,000 a year, in
February and March sold $140,000 worth
of old growth timber from an 80-acre tract on
his 763-acre Montana ranch, bordering the
Bitteroot National Forest. “The area he cut,”
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
reported in The Nation of April 24, “is less
than two miles from a national wilderness area
and well within the boundaries of the
Salmon/Selway Ecosystem ––the largest com-
plex of wild land in the Lower 48 and home to
elk, black bears, mountain lions, and grey
wolves.” Roush in 1983 successfully sued the
U.S. Forest Service, contending that logging
and roadbuilding would irrevocably harm the
watershed. The roads built then were used to
remove the logs from his own land.
The Sierra Club, Audubon
Society, American Rivers, and Natural
Resources Defense Council on April 28 told
Congress that replacing dollar bills with cop-
per coins, as proposed by Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-
AZ) “would be a clear loss to the environ-
ment” because it might encourage strip-min-
ing. “The paper used for currency is made
from cotten and linen and contains no wood
products,” they added, omitting that copper is
among the most commonly recycled metals
and that the pesticides used to grow cotton
may do more harm to wildlife than the entire
mining industry.
Under fire for accepting late
amendments to the 1994 California downed
animal bill that in effect codified the status
quo, Farm Sanctuary executive director Gene
Bauston wrote in a recent open letter defend-
ing compromise to get bills passed that,
“Even the horse tripping bill recently enacted
in California,” to bar certain inhumane events
from charro rodeo, “was amended to exempt
tripping horses for identification purposes.”
California Equine Council president Cathleen
Doyle has demanded an apology. “The origi-
nal language of our bill,” she wrote, “was
drafted by the sponsors to read, ‘does not
apply to the lawful laying down of a horse for
medical or identification purposes.’ We did
not accept industry amendments or compro-
mise the bill.”
On April 12, a week before the
Oklahoma City bombing brought a wide-
spread crackdown on similar postings, the
Victoria Freenet online service expelled the
North American Animal Liberation Front
Support Group, of Victoria, British
Columbia, Canada, for posting an article on
how to make incendiary devices.
