Author: Archivist

BUCHAREST ANIMAL SHELTERS FLOODED

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

BUCHAREST–Four times the average rainfall for the entire
month of September hit Bucharest, Romania, in only 72 hours on
September 20-22, flooding animal shelters including the Asociatia
Natura and Fundatia Daisy Hope, featured in the June 2004 edition of
ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Also flooded was the Fundatia Speranta, one of only four
shelters, three of them in Romania, that ever received a zero on
the 100-point ANIMAL PEOPLE scoring scale [“How ANIMAL PEOPLE
evaluates shelters,” June 2004.] “I have four areas under a half meter of water,” Daisy Hope founder
Aura Maratas e-mailed on September 20. “I lifted the cages up on
pallets. I have no place to move them, and have nowhere to drain
the water. We could not find a pump. They are all gone from the
shops, and everyone needs a pump.”
Daisy Hope did not lose any dogs to high water during the
three-day ordeal, but a worker quit after suffering a severe bite
from a frightened dog.

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Feral exterminations

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

Scottish Natural Heritage, trying to extirpate feral
hedgehogs from the Uist Islands off the west coast of Scotland since
2003, announced in March 2005 that it would augment trapping and
killing them by lethal injection and gas with training dogs to flush
them out to be shotgunned. Scottish Natural Heritage had killed
about 500 hedgehogs, going into the fall 2005 campaign, while Uist
Hedgehog Rescue has live-captured and relocated to the mainland circa
600. Scottish Nature Heritage withdrew the dogs-and-shotguns scheme
on September 20. “These healthy animals simply do not need to be
killed,” responded Uist Hedgehog Rescue. “Hedgehogs on the mainland
are actually in decline.”

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Carriage horse rescues in the old city

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

A week after the New Orleans levies broke, the Lamar-Dixon
Expo Center and 4-H Center in Gonzales, 45 miles north, held more
then 220 horses and mules, many of them evacuated from carriage
stables.
Equine and Bovine Magazine managing editor Rebecca Gimenez
reported rescuing 63 horses from three feet of water that filled two
barns in Kenner, near the New Orleans airport, but the most
dramatic equine rescue was of 22 horses and mules kept by Mid-City
Carriages. Stranded for a week after the city flooded, the animals
were attended by stable hands Darnell Stewart, Fabien Redmund, and
Lucien Mitchell Jr., who volunteered to stay with them. The three
men led the horses and mules to high ground at Leimann Park, slept
in shifts to fend off would-be horse thieves, and at last assisted
in evacuating them all on September 7.
One horse died earlier at the Mid-City Carriages stable, and
two others died later while receiving emergency care at Louisiana
State University.

South China kills dogs to send a message

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

GUANGZHOU–The Guangdong provincial government seized the
2005 National Day weekend, the first in October, to send messages
to both pet keepers and Beijing.
The message for pet keepers was that the rising popularity of
pet dogs will not be allowed to jeopardize the dog meat industry,
either by spreading rabies, the pretext used for killing pet dogs in
the streets, or by building a human constituency for treating dogs
kindly.
“The Guangzhou campaign follows similar crackdowns in
Shanghai and other cities across the mainland, as dog attacks and
rabies cases increase and more urban dwellers keep pets,” noted
Simon Parry of the South China Morning Post. But Parry failed to
note that the dogs most at risk from rabies are so-called “meat
dogs,” raised in close confinement and not required to be vaccinated.
The Guangdong message for Beijing was that even as the
central government strives to build a more animal-friendly image in
advance of the 2008 Olympic Games, in the part of China where dogs,
cats, and wildlife are relatively rarely eaten, the Cantonese
southern and coastal regions are quite capable of spoiling the effort.

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Panic drives avian flu response– dogs blamed, but never had disease

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

BUCHAREST, ISTANBUL– Fears that the H5N1 avian flu virus
had spread to Romania “may be wrong,” the London Daily Mail reported
on October 10.
A suspected outbreak in Turkey was likewise unconfirmed.
Amid rising public panic, the veterinary authorities of both
Turkey and Romania nonetheless ordered the immediate slaughter of
tens of thousands of domestic fowl to keep the presumed outbreak from
spreading.
“In western Turkey, military police set up roadblocks at the
entrance to a village near Balikesir,” reported C. Onur Ant of
Associated Press. “A two-mile radius was quarantined as
veterinarians and other officials began destroying poultry at two
turkey farms. Other fowl–including pigeons–and stray dogs in the
village would also be killed as a precaution, said Nihat Pakdil,
undersecretary of Turkey’s Agriculture Ministry.”
Pakdil did not explain why dogs would be targeted, since
there is no record of dogs ever contracting or carrying H5N1, but a
new national humane law making neuter/return rather than killing dogs
the official prescribed method of animal control has been widely
defied on the pretext of disease control. The most recent of many
dog massacres reported since the new law took effect in mid-2005 was
discovered in Aliaga, Izmir, on October 6, where 24 dead dogs were
found in a wooded public park.

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New Orleans pet evacuation crisis brings hope of rescue mandate

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

WASHINGTON D.C., NEW ORLEANS–U.S. Representatives
Chris-topher Shays (R-Connecticut) and Tom Lantos (D-California),
co-chairing the Congressional Friends of Animals caucus, on
September 22, 2005 introduced legislation that would require the
Federal Emergency Management Agency to withhold grant funding from
communities that fail to develop pet evacuation and transport
standards.
U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) indicated that
there will also be Senate attention to animal rescue in disasters.
“It is heartbreaking to hear of families forced to leave pets
behind as they followed instructions to evacuate or were being
rescued,” Lieberman said. “As the ranking member of the Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, I have joined the chair,
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), in calling for an investigation of
this immense failure in the government’s response to the Hurricane
Katrina tragedy.”
Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) said he had lobbied the White
House to “name someone to take charge of dealing with animals left
behind by people fleeing the storms, as well as countless strays,”
wrote Benjamin Grove of the Las Vegas Sun.

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How individual disaster relief workers can claim a deduction

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

GUILFORD, Ct.–After consulting with the Internal Revenue
Service about how individual rescuers could make their Hurricane
Katrina/Rita rescue expenses tax-deductible, Connecticut Council for
Humane Education/National Institute for Animal Advocacy founder Julie
Lewin distributed to rescuers a three-point plan:
1) Talk to me about volunteering on behalf of CCHE/NIFAA. We
must speak in advance of your trip.
2) Donate to CCHE the amount you expect the trip to cost you
and get a tax deduction for it, thus significantly lowering the net
cost to you.
3) Mail all legitimate receipts to CCHE, which will
reimburse you up to the amount you donated.

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Wildlife Services toll soars

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

WASHINGTON D.C.–USDA Wildlife Services, the official hit
men for the Cabinet-directed Invasive Species Council, in 2004
killed one million more animals than in 2003, according to data
released on September 9, 2005.
“Wildlife Services killed more than five animals per minute,”
observed Wendy Keefover-Ring of the Colorado predator advocacy group
Sinapu to Associated Press Writer Libby Quaid.
The Wildlife Services toll came to 2.7 million lives,
including 2.3 million starlings, 10,735 Canada geese, and 3,263
double-crested cormorants.
Other targeted species were killed at rates that have been
more-or-less normal in recent years. Among them were 75,674 coyotes,
31,286 beavers, and 3,907 foxes, whose killing by paid government
trappers belied fur industry claims that wild pelt demand is strong.
Wildlife Services also klled 397 black bears, mostly suspected of
raiding homes or otherwise menacing humans, plus 359 pumas and 191
wolves, chiefly suspected of killing livestock.
Additional bird victims included 143 feral or free-ranging
chickens and 72 wild turkeys, apparently just for being alleged
neighborhood nuisances.

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News from the Islamic world war zones

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2005:

The World Wildlife Fund, which usually supports trophy
hunting as a conservation strategy, is opposing a scheme advanced by
Mumtaz Malik, chief conservator of Northwestern Frontier Province,
Pakistan, to introduce trophy hunting for leopards. Officially,
about 40 snow leopards survive in Pakistan, but hunters and herders
claim there are 150-250. Two were shot in June after one snow
leopard allegedly killed six women in two weeks by pouncing down on
them from trees as they gathered firewood near Abbottabad. Malik
claims to have saved markhor mountain goats, a prey species for snow
leopards, by introducing markhor trophy hunting.

Thirty-five small herds totaling 155 markor, a mountain goat
standing six feet tall at the shoulder, have recently been
rediscovered near the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, India, from
Pakistan. “As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian
side,” reported Justin Huggler, Delhi correspondent for The
Independent, “but by 1997 they had been poached to near extinction,”
as troops and guerillas often turned their guns from fighting over
the boundary to profiteering on the sale of the markors’ spectacular
spiral horns.

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