Ethiopian animal advocates lose jobs for exposing dog shooting

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

ADDIS ABABA–Homeless Animal Protection Society of Ethiopia
cofounders Efrem Legese and Hana Kifle were on January 23, 2004
suspended from their jobs at Bale Mountains National Park without
pay, and as of February 23 imminently anticipated termination
notices from Oromiya Rural Land and Natural Resource Authority
director Siraaj Bakkalii Shaffee.
Their apparent offense, not spelled out in their letters of
notification of suspension, is that they shared information with
ANIMAL PEOPLE and Radio Ethiopia about the delayed and tactically
inept response of the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Organization
and Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme to an ongoing rabies
outbreak at the park, as detailed in the November and December 2003
editions of ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Dinsho town council chair Tessema Hailu, agitating to have
homeless dogs in the Dinsho region killed, precipitated the
suspensions and probable firings of Legese and Kifle by writing to
Siraaj Bakkalii Shaffee that they had “performed activities which can
affect the fundraising process of the EWCP,” Legese told ANIMAL
PEOPLE.

Africa

Honolulu Zoo to keep orangutan

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

HONOLULU–368 days after Orangutan Foundation Inter-national
announced that it would “build a state-of-the-art orangutan sanctuary
at Kualoa Ranch in Oahu, Hawaii, for Rusti,” 24, brought to
Hawaii from the defunct Scotch Plains Zoo in New Jersey in 1997, OFI
founder Birute Galdikas announced a new plan.
Now Rusti is to occupy a 4,000-square-foot exhibit built
around a tall banyan tree near the tortoises at the Honolulu Zoo–the
same zoo that evicted him last year to replace his old habitat with a
lorikeet exhibit, after housing him for six years under what was to
have been only a temporary arrangement until OFI could develop a
sanctuary. OFI is to remain Rusti’s legal custodian.
Pamela Davis and Cathy Goeggel of Animal Rights Hawaii
expressed skepticism that the latest OFI strategy will advance any
farther than the last several.
“It would be lovely to have Rusti stay,” Goegel told ANIMAL
PEOPLE, “if a suitable enclosure can be built. OFI’s track record
makes me wonder if this will happen. $200,000 doesn’t buy much these
days,” she added, noting that the Honolulu Zoo chimp exhibit “cost
over $1 million.”
Both Davis and Goeggel pointed out that the Honolulu city
council was not consulted about the new plan, although the zoo is
city property, and that many legal and political obstacles may lie
ahead.

North America

Activist “trespassers” fined $1.00 each

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MUNCIE, Indiana–Apologizing to Ball State University
professor Abel Alves and artist Carol Blakney, his wife, Judge
Wayne Lennington of the Delaware Circuit Court in Muncie, Indiana on
February 24, 2004 fined them each $1.00 for trespassing and released
them without further conditions.
A jury earlier convicted Alves and Blakney of trespassing,
for briefly viewing the Seldom Rest hog farm from a roadside in
October 2002.
“Lennington said he couldn’t call the jury’s decision to
convict ‘despicable.’ But he indicated that is how he felt,” wrote
Seth Stabaugh of the Muncie Star Press.
“Several months before being accused of trespassing,”
Stabaugh explained, “Blakney filed a complaint against Seldom Rest
with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. IDEM accused
[owner] Kaye Whitehead of housing pigs in an unpermitted structure,”
and of allowing manure to pollute a creek. Whitehead corrected the
alleged violations, but is believed to have pursued the trespassing
charges in retaliation.
Whitehead chairs the Delaware County Farm Bureau and the
Delaware County Republican Party. Prosecutor Judy Calhoun is
daughter of a Randolph County farmer and cousin of a Randolph County
Farm Bureau official, Stabaugh wrote.

True Grizz: Glimpses of Fernie, Stahr, Easy, Dakota, and Other Real Bears in the Modern World

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

True Grizz:
Glimpses of Fernie, Stahr, Easy, Dakota,
and Other Real Bears in the Modern World
by Douglas H. Chadwick
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St.,
San Francisco, CA 94105), 2003.
176 pages, hardcover. $24.95

Meet the bears: Fernie with her two cubs swim the Hungry
Horse Reservoir looking for food. Stahr opens a door to a screen
porch and, surrounded by 50-pound bags of dog food, naps on the
couch. Dakota hangs out on a street corner in Whitefish, Montana so
often she is named for it.
A few years ago these grizzlies would have been killed. No
questions. No second chances. Douglas Chadwick in True Grizz tells
how Montana is now trying to save the bears with creative and
innovative new methods.
Long gone is the era when grizzlies roamed from Kansas to the
California coast, finding plenty to eat on the way: elk, bison,
mule deer. Males may have weighed close to 1,000 pounds and females
600.
By l975 an estimated 99% percent of the grizzlies in the
Lower 48 had been killed. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the
remaining bears would barely have covered a used car lot. Because
the public demanded that these fabled giants should survive,
grizzlies were among the first species added to the U.S. endangered
list. There were then 750 to 1,000 bears left in the U.S. outside of
Alaska. Today there are 1,000 to 1,300.

15-year-old puts bill to ban circuses on the ballot in a longtime Ringling stronghold

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

DENVER–Denver voters on August 10 will
be asked to approve an initiative to ban circus
performances, placed on the ballot through
petitioning by Heather Herman, 15, and Youth
Opposed to Animal Acts, a group she founded.
Herman is challenging Feld Entertainment,
owners of the Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey
Circus, in a Ringling stronghold.
“The Ringling circus has performed in
Denver since 1919,” noted Cindy Brovsky of
Associated Press, “The city’s Barnum
neighborhood is named after circus founder P.T.
Barnum, who bought 760 acres in 1882 as a winter
respite for his showŠCity officials estimate the
circus’ annual two-week stint pumps $8 million
into the local economy.”
Herman will be working against ruthless
as well as influential and affluent opposition.
PETA in a lawsuit filed in May 2001 and refilled
after amendments in 2002 alleged that Ringling
and Feld Entertainment hired the private security
firm Richlin Consultants to infiltrate and
disrupt PETA from 1989 until 1992.

BOOKS: The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
by David Baron
W. W. Norton & Company (500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110),
2004. 277 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

This amazing book explains how wild pumas near Boulder,
Colorado came to view humans as prey. The intriguing story,
however, is only the frame that David Baron uses to painstakingly
piece together a gigantic puzzle.
When a puma killed Boulder high school student Scott
Lancaster in 1991, “everyone knew” that healthy pumas did not view
people as prey–but Lancaster’s killer proved to be both wild and
healthy. Baron explains the factors that caused this dramatic change
in puma behavior.
When wild animals came to town in the Old West, they were
shot. If they survived, they learned to avoid people.
Baron relates many sad stories about the wholesale slaughter
of predators in the United States as humans increased in population,
moved out into the wildernesss, and altered the natural landscape.
Baron tells us that author Michael Johnson labeled newcomers
to western cities “New Westers.” “Old Westers believe the West was
won. New Westers are concerned with how it was lost–or will be.”
New Westers passed laws to prevent or limit killing predators.

Rocket science failure may endanger Sriharikota animal welfare program

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

CHENNAI–A February 23 rocket fuel explosion at the Dhawan
Space Center on Sriharikota Island killed six people and threw into
chaos not only the operations of the Indian Space Research
Organization but also an ambitious draft plan by Visakha SPCA founder
Pradeep Kumar Nath to revamp the spaceport animal control program.
The explosion came three days after Nath returned home to
Visakhapatnam, 140 miles north, after a site visit.
“I was there to analyze the stray animal problems faced by
the 3,400 engineers and scientists and their families who live and
work on Sriharikota Island,” Nathtold ANIMAL PEOPLE. “The Space
Center invited us after their controller came to the Visakha SPCA to
see our activities, after trying other ways to reduce their stray
dogs, monkeys, and cattle. He was unhappy,” Nath said, “with how
dogs are killed, and monkeys also, and wanted to implement the
animal welfare laws. He took the first train to Visakhaptnam after
learning from my brother’s wife about our work.”
Nath had already heard, he said, about massive
dog-poisoning at Sriharikota, and “about the terrible way the
monkeys would be caught in a bunch and hauled alive in a small gunny
bag. Recently 35 were stuffed into one bag and all of them died due
to suffocation.”

Asia

Court Calendar

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

First Amendment

Officials of the Granite School District in Taylorsville,
Utah agreed on February 3 to pay $82,000 to Utah Legal Clinic
attorneys Brian Bernard and James Harris Jr., in settlement of a
January 2004 ruling by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Salt Lake
City that the school district violated the civil rights of PETA
members by calling police to break up a 1999 demonstration in front
of Eisenhower Junior High School. The PETA members organized the
demonstration after the school hung a banner promoting the McDonald’s
restaurant chain from a flagpole.

Boston Superior Court Judge Janet L. Sanders on February 20
dismissed 39 charges filed against 12 activists, ages 18-26, who
protested in August 2002 outside the home of a Marsh USA insurance
executive because Marsh at the time held policies with Huntingdon
Life Sciences. The activists were charged with extortion,
threatening, stalking, and conspiracy. Most of the alleged acts,
Sanders ruled, consisted of constitutionally protected acts of free
speech.

Australia escapes H5N1–officially

March 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MELBOURNE–Australia has avoided H5N1 and other avian flu
outbreaks, so far, but has had some recent scares.
“Our rescue team did a big broiler chicken rescue in
January,” Patty Mark of Animal Liberation Victoria told ANIMAL
PEOPLE. “We got 55 birds out,” 40 of them later euthanized due to
illness and injury, “and there were masses of dead bodies in the
shed,” Mark recounted. “All the dead birds we witnessed were
unusual. We thought this guy was just a bad operator and failed to
collect them daily, as some were very rotten. One TV station
grabbed an exclusive on the story,” Mark said, “then sat on it for
two weeks when avian flu hit [in Southeast Asia] and then dropped it.”
Most of the Animal Liberation Victoria rescuers were older
than typical H5N1 victims, who tend to be under 20.
However, said Mark, “Seven out of nine of us on that rescue
had the usual sore throat, sinus problems, and sore eyes
afterward,” from the filthy air they breathe inside poultry barns.

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