Trying to survive the fighting in Lebanon

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

BERUIT–The young Lebanese humane movement is struggling to
avoid becoming a collateral casualty of the July 12 Israeli invasion
of Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah militia members, who raided
Israel earlier in the day.
“I just came back from two weeks in Lebanon, and by chance
left just two hours before the airport was destroyed,” Kenya-based
wildlife trafficking investigator Jason Mier e-mailed to ANIMAL
PEOPLE.
Mier has worked closely since January 2006 with Beirut for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals to arrange rescues of illegally
obtained and exhibited nonhuman primates.
“I am speaking to BETA twice a day by phone,” Mier said.
“Even when the bombs were falling near [BETA cofounder] Joelle Kanaan’s house the other night she was still on the phone to
me worrying what could be done for the primates,” testified Graham
Garen of the Cefn-Yr-Erw Primate Rescue Sanctuary in Wales.

Middle East

Who will inherit the animal rights movement?

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Shouting through a bullhorn on the steps of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City throughout the summer of
1976, competing for attention with the U.S. Bicentennial celebration
and the near-bankruptcy of New York itself, the late Henry Spira
embarrassed the American Museum of Natural History into cancelling a
series of cruel sexuality experiments on brain-damaged cats. Never
before had anti-vivisection activists stopped research that was
already funded and underway.
Inspired by philosopher Peter Singer, who wrote much of his
1974 opus Animal Liberation as Spira’s house guest, Spira had
already researched the 3,000-year recorded history of animal
advocacy. Spira found that he could not identify any specific time,
place, or issue that marked a definitive defeat for the cause of
animals in the court of U.S. public opinion. Spira could not find
record of any elected leader speaking in favor of animal suffering,
as opposed to abstract and sanitized defenses of hunting, trapping,
animal agriculture, and animal research that almost always included
paens to sportsmanship, good husbandry, and not “sacrificing”
animals unnecessarily.

Tactics

Letters [July/Aug 2006]

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Ocean “curtains of death” may return

In July 2006 the National Marine Fisheries Service announced
intent to issue an Exempted Fishing Permit as early as August 15 for
the cruel and destructive practice of drift net fishing in protected
areas along the U.S. Pacific coast. They may also again permit
longlining. This will result in sea turtles, marine mammals, birds
and other species becoming entangled and drowned.
Drift nets are often referred to as “curtains of death.”
This form of fishing was banned on the high seas by the United
Nations in 1991, and was closed in areas along the U.S Pacific coast
in 2001.
In west coast areas that were still open to drift gill
netting, the toll on marine species since 2002 has included at least
64 dolphins, whales, seals and sea lions.
Industrial longline fishing also kills marine species in huge
numbers. Fishing vessels can deploy thousands of baited hooks on
hundreds of lines that can total up to 60 miles long. This
non-selective technique is estimated to snare 40,000 sea turtles,
30,000 seabirds, and millions of sharks worldwide each year. Due to
the devastating impact of longline fishing, it was banned along the
entire U.S. West Coast in 2004.

Letters

Namibian seal hunt

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

The 2006 Namibian sealing season opened on July 1, with a
quota of 85,000 pups, 20,000 more than in 2005, and 7,000 bulls.
Adult females are exempted, to keep the seal breeding population up.
Just a fraction of the size of the annual Atlantic Canadian
seal hunt, the Namibian hunt has attracted little public attention
and protest–and even less since South Africa ended sealing in 1990.
As Namibia and South Africa share the same seal population, a common
misperception was that all sealing had ended along the Atlantic coast
of Africa. In fact, the Namibian sealing quota was doubled to
60,000 after 2000, when according to the Namibian government as many
as 300,000 seals starved due to depleted fisheries. Overfishing and
climatic change due to global warming appeared to be the major causes
of the seal deaths, but Namibia claimed the seals had overpopulated
their habitat. Current reports indicate, however, that the
Namibian seal population has never recovered to more than 75% of the
size it was in 1993, the recent recorded peak year.

China tries to rewrite the prescription for tigers

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

HONG KONG–Trying to reshape world opinion about tiger
conservation, in hopes of reopening legal commerce in tiger parts,
the State Forestry Administration of China during the second week of
June 2006 hosted visits to two major tiger farms by four outside
“experts.”
Three of them soon extensively praised Chinese tiger programs
in published statements.
Free market economic advocate Baron Mitra, who directs the
Liberty Institute in Delhi, India, in a guest column for India
Today unfavorably compared tbe faltering Indian effort to conserve
wild tigers with the Chinese proliferation of tigers in captivity.

BOOKS: Hurt Go Happy

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

Hurt Go Happy by Ginny Rorby

Tom Doherty Associates (175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2006.
267 pages, hardcover. $17.95

“I called all over trying to find a place, but there are
hundreds of chimps in need of a place to go, and they were especially
uninterested in a chimp who can’t be housed with other chimps.”
This is the age-old problem of keeping baby “wild” animals as
pets: what to do when they grow older and stronger, and can no
longer live with humans in their homes.
Hurt Go Happy is the story of such a chimp. Although
fiction, the novel is based on the true story of an ill-fated chimp
named Lucy, who was raised as a human child in Oklahoma, as part of
a language experiment. Rehabilitated and returned to the wild in
1977, as one of Gambia-based sanctuarian Janis Carter’s early
projects, Lucy was killed by poachers in 1987.

Thai zoo deals with Kenya and Australia put on hold

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

BANGKOK, MELBOURNE, NAIROBI–Two controversial
international zoo transactions involving Chiang Mai Night Safari Zoo
in Thailand may yet proceed, but as of mid-July 2006 were both on
hold.
Fast-tracked by the national governments of Thailand,
Australia, and Kenya, both animal exchanges were derailed by rising
public skepticism about the humaneness of keeping wildlife in
captivity.
Activist pressure in each case eventually exposed alleged
self-interested dealing by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and
Chiang Mai Night Safari Zoo director Plodprasop Suraswadi, who
previously served as both fisheries minister and wildlife minister,
but lost both positions amid allegations of facilitating wildlife
trafficking.
Both Thaksin and Plodprasop were sued on June 7, 2006 by the
Love Chiang Mai network, for allegedly improperly creating the Night
Safari Zoo in a national park.

Norwegian buyer declares whaling moratorium after IWC ban holds

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

OSLO, ST. KITTS, TOKYO– The Norwegian fish wholesaling
firm Norges Rafisklag on July 7, 2006 asked whalers to stop killing
whales because there is insufficient market for whale meat to warrant
more whaling this year.
“We don’t have buyers for more whales than those already
shot. Therefore we are sending out a message to halt the hunt,”
Norges Rafisklag spokesperson Hermod Larsen told NRK, the Norwegian
national broadcasting company.
Larsen is the Norges Rafisklag regional director for Lofoten,
the hub of the Norwegian whaling industry. Norges Rafisklag is the
only major buyer of whale carcasses.
“It’s not possible now, for those who don’t have their own
[storage] facilities, to shoot more whales for the time being,”
Larsen added.

Foie gras vector for H5N1?

July 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

WASHINGTON D.C.– The U.S. Department of Agriculture on June
29, 2006 released a draft summary of a $91 million battle plan to
combat any U.S. outbreaks of a “highly pathogenic avian influenza,”
such as the H5N1 strain that has killed more than 130 people
worldwide since 1996.
The plan discusses migratory bird surveillance, the
bird-breeding industry, poultry dealers, live-bird markets,
auctions and slaughterhouses, but appears to make no specific
reference to foie gras farming, a $25 million a year branch of
poultry production with just three major U.S. producers, whose farms
are concentrated in upstate New York and northern California.
The odds that H5N1 or any other deadly influenza might hit
the U.S. through foie gras farming may be incalculably low–but if
H5N1 begins killing human poultry workers in Europe, as it has since
2003 in Southeast Asia, experts suspect the lethal crossover might
begin on the sprawling foie gras farms of southwestern France and
parts of Hungary.

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