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St. Petersburg G8 Summit meet brings war against street dogs

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

ST. PETERSBURG–Tight security
precautions for the G8 Summit to be held in St.
Petersburg, Russia, July 15-17, include
“exterminating street animals with utmost
cruelty,” Baltic Care of Animals members Elena
Bobrova, Marina Ermakova, Svetlana Los, and
Tatiana Goritcheva alleged in a June 2 joint
statement relayed to western media by North Kent
Animal Welfare founder Mark Johnson, of Britain.
The BCA members’ joint statement echoed
and amplified exposés by St. Petersburg
journalists Yelena Andreyeva and Galina
Stolyarova, published on December 2, 2005 by
the St. Petersburg Times and on May 5, 2006 by
PetersburgCity.

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Animal advocacy rumbles to life in the Islamic world

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

BALI–“Humane Society Inter-national disaster response
assessment teams have been on the ground in Yogyakarta, Bentul, and
Klaten,” in Java, Indonesia, “since May 28, one day after the 5.9
magnitude earthquake struck,” HSI Asia consultant Dawn Peacock
e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on May 31.
“Today,” Peacock added, “HSI sent a vet to join the already
tired assessment team, and we are making a plan based on the
information we get back. The most likely needs so far are food,
water and basic first aid and shelter for stray or lost animals.
“Preliminary assessments have found that there is a need to
help animals who have survived the earthquake and are left without
guardians to provide adequate food and water,” Peacock continued.

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Humane success makes market for mixed-breed pups

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

 

TACOMA–Why did the Humane Society of
Tacoma & Pierce County fire one 15-year employee
on May 25, and suspend another without pay for
three days, for mistakenly euthanizing five
Labrador-mix puppies?
Why did Joseph P. “Jo Jo the Dog Man”
O’Neill, 70, die alone of a heart attack on
June 22, 2005 aboard a train in Poland, after
40-odd years of rounding up surplus puppies in
rural Ohio for sale in New Jersey?
Why are puppies suddenly the hottest
animal commodity crossing the Mexican border,
supplanting the traffic in parrots?
After a decade of rumors about an
impending puppy shortage, mostly disregarded by
animal advocates as breeder propaganda, the U.S.
and western Europe are experiencing a puppie
scarcity so severe that even some young dogs
considered utterly unadoptable just a few years
ago are quickly finding homes.

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Obituaries

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Elora Petrasek, 6, remembered by acquaintances as a very
gentle child who loved animals, was fatally mauled by a bear on
April 13 in Cherokee National Forest, near Benton, Tennessee. The
bear also bit her brother Luke Cenkus, 2, puncturing his skull,
and mauled their mother, Susan Cenkus, 45. The attack, 10 miles
from the nearest highway, occurred as adults tried to drive the bear
off of a hiking trail. A bear in the vicinity was later shot by
rangers, but was not positively identified as the killer. Petrasek
was the 56th person verifiably killed by a black bear in North
America within the past 100 years, according to Lynn Rogers of the
North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota, and only the second
person killed by a bear in the Great Smokies. The first was Glenda
Ann Bradley, 50, of Cosby, Tennessee, who was killed in an
un-witnessed attack in May 2000 near Gaitlinburg.

Richard Meza, 52, was fatally shot by an unknown assailant
at about 11 p.m. on April 8, 2006, while feeding a feral cat colony
he attended near Anaheim and Walnut Avenues in Long Beach,
California. No motive was evident; Meza was not robbed. A 30-year
lineman and repairman for GTE and Verizon, Meza and his wife of 24
years, LoAnn, 48, planned to retire in June 2006 to a home they
were building in Virginia. LoAnn, who was losing her sight,
received a cornea transplant from her late husband.

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Alfred the Great

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Alfred the Great, 17, named for his political wisdom, was
euthanized due to incurable suffering from conditions of age on March
30, 2005.
While removing a poacher’s snares set for fox or coyote from
an abandoned junkyard near Brigham, Quebec, in December 1988, at
twilight, in a blizzard, ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt Clifton found
hints that a kitten had been used as live bait but escaped. Amid the
snow, in the gathering dark, among countless hiding places, the
kitten could not be found.
“I reluctantly hiked home,” Clifton recalls, “and was just
shaking the snow off my coat in the woodshed, when my landlady,
Lorna Kemp, came out and pointed to a tiny gray-and-white kitten
stumbling up the road behind me, looking like a moving snowball.

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BOOKS: Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
by Jonathan Balcombe
Palgrave/MacMillan (175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2006.
256 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

Balcombe writes, “When animals are stereotyped, the public
is done a disservice. Reinforcing the myth, we perpetuate a
one-dimensional perception of the animal kingdom….It is only when
we get close to animals, and examine them with open minds, that we
are likely to glimpse the being within. Natural history writing is
strewn with incidents in which writers are moved to awe by the
intelligence, sensitivity and awareness of animals they have lived
with.”
Balcombe points out many aspects of pleasure-seeking animal
behavior. As all vertebrates have a nervous system very much the
same as ours, it is reasonable to assume that all are alive to both
pain and pleasure, contrary to the derision that greeted authors who
suggested this in earlier times. As Balcombe points out, “In the
face of these discoveries, the position that pleasurable states are
the sole domain of the human species is narrow and anthropocentric.
To deny animals conscious experiences is to deny that they plan,
desire, anticipate, tease, grieve, enjoy, tolerate, and gauge.
It is to reject that they make decisions.”

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BOOKS: Cesar’s Way

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier
Harmony Books ( 231 Broad St., Nevada City, CA 95959), 2006.
304 pages, hard cover. $24.95.

Dog behaviorist Cesar Millan’s weekly show The Dog Whisperer
airs on the National Geographic Channel. His Dog Psychology Center
in Los Angeles, California, enjoys a celebrity clientele. His book
Cesar’s Way is about dogs, but is also the autobiography of a poor
Mexican who came to America as an illegal immigrant.
We have had family dogs all our lives, yet only after
reading Millan’s book did we realize how many mistakes we made in
training and understanding them. If we were to get another dog, it
would only be after anxious consideration of our responsibilities:
Would we commit ourselves to taking the dog for a long, tiring walk
for at least an hour every morning, and another half hour every
evening? Every day?
Millan believes that when one understands the evolutionary
needs of dogs, one realizes that draining off energy by hard
exercise is essential to their health.

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BOOKS: Animal Instinct

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Animal Instinct by Dorothy B. Hayes
Universe (2021 Pine Lake Rd., Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512), 2005.
234 pages, paperback. $15.95.

Animal Instinct author Dorothy B. Hayes was formerly known as
Dot Hayes, longtime staff writer and public relations director for
Friends of Animals. Earlier, Hayes covered animal issues for
several Connecticut newspapers.
Animal Instinct is an autobiographical novel describing just
over a year in the life of an advocacy group staff writer named
Eleanor Aquitane Green.
Structurally and thematically, Animal Instinct is a “working
girl story,” about coping with the pressures of a high-stress job
under a demanding and often capricious boss, in an all-female
environment where the rules of hierarchy are much more flexible–and
therefore treacherous–than in the male-dominated news business.
There is history in Animal Instinct, as characters inform
Green of background in summaries that are generally accurate in gist,
off by up to 10 years in detail–but the mistakes are not more
egregious than those made in the several formal histories that Hayes
lists as sources.

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BOOKS: Listen

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Listen
by Stephanie S. Tolan
Harper Collins Publishers
(1350 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10019), 2006.
197 pages, paperback. $15.99.

Charley, 12, is trying to come to terms with the death of
her mother in a car accident that leaves Charley herself struggling
to learn to walk again. Compounding her sense of isolation is the
desertion of her best friend.
While exercising her damaged leg in the woods near her home,
Charley finds a feral dog. Not knowing why, she feels an intense
need to tame this dog, take him home, and care for him. Because
she has never had a dog before, her father tries to talk her into
getting a puppy. But Charley only connects to this particular
animal, whom she names Coyote, spending weeks trying to get close
to him.

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