Obituaries

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Virginia Gillas, 82, died on October 5 in Hermitage,
Missouri, after an 8-year battle with lung cancer. Born in Orange,
New Jersey, raised in Kansas City, Gillas was daughter of Catherine
Basett Cornwell, R.N., longtime president of the Dade County Branch
of the Florida League for Humane Progress.
Gillas herself began helping animals at about age 12, she
told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1995, recalling that she first saw animal
hoarding about five years later, when she met a girl her own age who
had accumulated an impossible number of cats.

Obituaries

Roadkills of cats fall 90% in 10 years –are feral cats on their way out?

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:
BALTIMORE, SALT LAKE CITY, MENTOR (Ohio)–Is the U.S.
outdoor cat population down 90% since 1992?
The feral cat population might be.
Roadkills of cats appear to have fallen 90% in 10 years,
after apparently rising sixfold while the pet cat population nearly
doubled during the 1980s.
An eightfold surge in the population of feral cats, mostly
descended from abandoned and free-roaming pets, probably accounted
for about two-thirds of the roadkill increase during the 1980s, but
the trend is now completely reversed.

Cat-eaters may get, spread SARS

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GUANGZHOU–Laboratory studies of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome directed by virologist Albert D.M.E. Osterhaus of the
Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, published in the October 30
edition of the British journal Nature, demonstrate that cats and
ferrets could potentially carry the disease from filthy live markets
to humans.
Osterhaus said his experimental goal was simply to find out
if either cats or ferrets could be used as a laboratory model for
SARS. His findings imply, however, that cats raised for human
consumption may become a SARS vector–especially if the cats are
caged at live markets near whatever as yet unidentified wildlife
species is the primary SARS vector.

BOOKS: Hunt Club Management Guide

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hunt Club Management Guide
by J. Wayne Fears
Stoeger Publ. (17603 Indian Head Hwy, Suite 200, Accokeek, MD
20607), 2003. 144 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Deer Diary
by Thomas Lee Boles
Xlibris Corp. (<Orders@Xlibris.com>), 2002. 286 pages, paperback, $18.69.

J. Wayne Fears, involved in leasing land for hunt clubs for
more than 20 years, gives the impression that he lives to kill deer.
Thomas Lee Boles, a vegetarian animal rights activist, has
handreared orphaned deer and befriended deer both in captivity and in
the wild.

Editorial: Sheltering is pointless until the need is reduced

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

“We live in a deeply depressed, impoverished, remote and
backward corner of the far side of hell,” someone laments to us
almost every day. “We have never had low-cost or free pet
sterilization and vaccination, let alone a neuter/return program for
feral cats and street dogs. People poison or shoot dogs and cats
with impunity. The dogcatcher sells dog meat, dog leather, cat
pelts, and live animals for use in laboratories. Millions of
animals are in urgent need. Please help us fund a shelter to house
100 of them.”
Such pleas are heartrending, but under such circumstances,
either operating or funding a shelter is pointless, mindless, and
likely to only rearrange the misery in that particular part of hell’s
overcrowded and starving half acre.
No humane society anywhere should even think about starting a
shelter until and unless it receives a gift or bequest of the land
and money needed to build and run the shelter without diverting
resources from sterilization, vaccination, and public education.
Later, if sterilization, vaccination, and public education
are successful, starting the right kinds of shelter at the right
times might represent worthwhile expansions of the mission. But
until the numbers of homeless dogs and cats are markedly reduced, and
until the public shows increased sympathy and tolerance toward them,
putting funds into shelter work makes less sense than using money as
cat litter.

Rehabilitating Asian bears

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

CHENGDU, AGRA–The Giant Panda Breeding
and Research Center and the China Bear Rescue
Center stand just miles apart, on opposite sides
of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan state in
southwestern China.
The Wildlife SOS Agra Bear Rescue Centre
is 1,500 miles away, on the far side of the
Himalayas, 10 miles from the Taj Mahal, within
the Sur Sarovar Sanctuary, near Agra, India.
The giant pandas, red pandas, and
Asiatic black bears of two subspecies whom the
three sanctuaries host were all caught in the
crossfire of late 20th century Marxist class
struggle, but that was just the latest of their
species’ misfortunes.
Each are descended from some of the first
bears to lose habitat to humans.
Products of parallel evolution, bears
and large primates, including humans, developed
to fill approximately the same ecological niches.
Bears came from the carnivore family,
emerging in the northern hemisphere only slightly
earlier than the first raccoon-sized advanced
primates emerged in northeastern Africa.
Most bears and the most widely
distributed large primates developed omnivorous
diets. The biggest bears evolved limited
bipedalism and relatively small, little used
tails; some of the largest primates became fully
bipedal and shed their tails. Primates developed
opposable thumbs. So did the raccoon branch of
the bear/raccoon line.

Letters [Nov 2003]

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Kitten in Beijing

I want to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your October cover
feature, “Four shelters serve Beijing.” The vignette at the end
about your son holding a kitten on a Beijing street and attracting
attention was very sweet. Wolf was using his act of holding that
little life to send messages to those who came around him. Wasn’t
that the most beautiful scene on the streets of Beijing?
–Peter Li
Houston, Texas
<LiPj@uhd.edu>

Ukrainian animals get newspaper

We are glad to inform you that our Centre is starting a
monthly newspaper on animal rights called Time to Protect Animals.
This will be the first such publication in the Ukraine and the former
Soviet Union. The project will be realized with financial support
from the World Society for the Protection of Animals. The pilot
edition of 5,000 copies will be distributed during the first week of
November 2003. The famous Ukrainian newspaper Vremja (Time), which
publishes 80,000 copies three times a week, is asking their readers
who would like to receive a free copy, and those who ask will get
our newspaper.

Letters

Dog-eating and my culture

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Dog-eating and my culture by Bing A. Dawang

Just before World Animal Day, which coincides with the feast
of St. Francis d’Assisi, the patron saint of animals, a local
newpaper defended the dog meat trade in the Philippines, in
particular in Baguio City and the Cordilleras, by claiming that dog
eating is a part of the Igorot indigenous culture.
As a full-blooded Igorot, I take offense.
The newspaper quoted Isikias Isican, said to be curator of
the St. Louis University museum, as saying that there is a clear
cultural basis for butchering dogs because they were “butchered by
Igorot tribes before going to war, or to cure certain afflictions.”
Isican generalized that dog-eating is a part of Igorot
tradition by recalling that in 1904 a few Igorot men and women were
displayed at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (“world’s fair”) in
St. Louis, Missouri. Described as as heathen pagans, they
butchered a dog as part of the show.
In the same article Hanzen Binay, formerly defense counsel
for several dog meat traders and now a Benguet prosecutor,
questioned the wisdom of the Philippine Animal Welfare Act.
Objecting that the law was supported by British animal advocates,
Binay asked rhetorically why Britain does not respect the Igorot
culture.

Study confirms: corruption kills wildlife

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

NAIROBI–Corruption kills wild-life, confirms data published
in the November 6, 2003 edition of the British scientific journal
Nature.
The findings were based on a comparison of elephant and rhino
populations with the national “Corruption Perception Indexes”
produced by the watchdog group Transparency International during the
years 1987-1994.
The findings support the arguments of Youth for Conservation,
the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and the Nairobi office of
the International Fund for Animal Welfare, in their continuing
effort to maintain the 1977 Kenyan national ban on sport hunting.
Yet study authors Robert J. Smith, R.D.J. Muir, M.J.
Walpole, Andrew Balmford and Nigel Leader-Williams paradoxically
concluded with an implied endorsement of “sustainable use,” such as
hunting, to fund conservation. This was probably because the study
made no effort to trace the relationship between legal hunting and
corruption.
Wildlife policy changes proposed in both the U.S. and
Kenya–backed by much of the same money–threaten to replace the
principle of protecting rare species with the notion that even
endangered wildlife should “pay for itself” by being hunted or
captured for sale.

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