Beijing Public Security Bureau opens shelter to public

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

BEIJING–The Beijing Public Security Bureau has opened the
city animal control shelter to the public and has begun adopting out
dogs for the first time, Association for Small Animal Protection
founder Betty Zhao e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on November 6, 2003.
The PSB has also begun accepting volunteer help. Zhao
recently mobilized 18 volunteers [above] to groom dogs for adoption
display. As dogs are still relatively scarce in Beijing, Zhao
anticipated that all of the groomed dogs would soon find homes.
Most dogs picked up in recent months are believed to have
been pets who were dumped at large during the SARS panic, often by
terrified neighbors rather than by the animals’ caretakers.
Until now, there was little way for Beijing residents to
reclaim lost dogs. Most dogs found at large were simply killed.
The PSB policy changes coincide with moving into a new building.
“The cages are decorated with cartoons [to welcome human
visitors], with a bowl for water and a bowl for food inside each
cage,” Zhao said. “It is easy for the staff to do clean-up. But
the dogs still have to stay in a cage. We have recommended that they
should establish a place for the dogs to run.”

Flood, fires, deadly hailstorm hit animal refuges around the Pacific rim

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Three weeks of fires threatening shelters, sanctuaries, and
sensitive wildlife habitat around the Pacific Rim were followed on
the night of November 2 by flash flooding that all but obliterated
Bukit Lawang, Indonesia.
“Bukit Lawang is the site of the original Sumatran orangutan
rehabilitation centre, established in the early 1970s by PanEco
Foundation president Regina Frey and her colleague Monica Borner,”
the Sumatran Orangutan Society e-mailed to International Primate
Protection League founder Shirley McGreal. “The village had
developed into a thriving resort.” “The Bohorok river
began to rise slowly,” SOS described, based on survivor accounts,
but “around 10.00 p.m. came a deluge bearing hundreds of fallen
trees. The town was located directly in the path of the surge as it
hit a bend and thrust over the Bohorok banks at full force.
Together, the water and timber pummeled the village for about three
hours.”
Wrote Suzanne Plunkett of Associated Press, “The death toll
hit 112 on November 6 as authorities promised to punish illegal
loggers held responsible for the disaster. At least 135 other people
are reported missing and feared dead.”

Badger culls spread bovine tuberculosis

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

LONDON–Ben Bradshaw, Parliamentary under secretary for the
British Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on
November 4 halted five years of reactively killing badgers near
bovine tuberculosis outbreaks because culls at 20 locations produced
a consistent 27% rise in the number of bovine TB cases compared to
the numbers detected at outbreak sites where badgers are not culled.
The $40 million trial cost the lives of 8,000 badgers. Known
to become infected by bovine TB, badgers are blamed by farmers for
spreading it, but the data shows that they spread it less if they
are not hunted.
Two parallel tests continue. One, the control experiment,
involves taking no action against badgers. The other is “proactive
culling,” in which the badger population is eradicated as completely
as possible before bovine TB appears.
Beginning in 1998, each test method was applied uniformly
within a 38-square-mile area. The experiment was not due to end
until 2006, but trial steering group leader John Bourne told news
media that the results from reactive culling were so bad that
continuing to do it was no longer appropriate.

Raptor rescue in Beijing & the Kalahari

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

BEIJING, China; KATHU, South Africa– Eagles, like feral
cats, are potentially fierce yet are sometimes tamed. More
accurately, they may choose to tame themselves. Many are curious
enough about humans to dwell as close to human habitation as they are
allowed, and are appreciative enough of gentle care, especially
when sick or injured, to permit judicious handling.
Though most eagles could quickly shred human flesh, even
through protective gloves, they seldom do. Some seem to consciously
decide to do no harm.
The Beijing Raptor Center has two highly gregarious resident
golden eagles, closely related to the golden eagles of North
America, and one resident steppe eagle. Too imprinted upon humans to
be released, the eagles remain in custody while Scops owls and eagle
owls, Amur and peregrine falcons, kestrels, and sometimes a buzzard
come and go.
The Kalahari Raptor Centre has black eagles, snake eagles,
and crested eagles. Some of them are also too imprinted to release.
The eagles of the Beijing and Kalahari raptor centers look as
strikingly different as everything else about the two rehabilitation
facilities. The premise of the Beijing Raptor Center is that humans
and wildlife can and must co-exist. The premise of the Kalahari
Raptor Centre is that wildlife does best in the absence of humans,
to whatever extent that can be accomplished.

BOOKS: Hunt Club Management Guide & Deer Diary

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.
Each outlines his perspectives on hunting at about equal
length, allowing for the difference in page size between their
books. Except that Fears writes to perpetuate hunting on property
secured by covenant against the “antis,” while Boles writes against
recreationally killing anything, they appear to be more in agreement
than opposition.
Almost every page of Hunt Club Management Guide tersely
details obnoxious attitudes and behavior among hunters that Fears has
personally witnessed and detests. Without wasting adjectives, Fears
makes plain that in his view, hunters themselves rather than “antis”
are their own worst enemies, chiefly because of inconsiderate and
unsportsmanlike conduct.

BOOKS: Hawk’s Rest

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hawk’s Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone by Gary Ferguson
National Geographic Adventure Press (1145 17th St., N.W.,
Washington, DC 20036), 2003. 240 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Hawk’s Rest is not about birds, but the joys and trials of
living in wilderness. Here on nine million acres deep in Yellowstone
National Park, granite turrets rise 2,000 feet into the air, giant
boulders tumble into deep gorges, and ice forms endless lakes.
Yellowstone Lake, covering 136 square miles, can switch in minutes
from calm to waves thrashing five to six feet high. According to
park historian Lee Whittlesy, no body of water in the park and
perhaps in all of the U.S. is more dangerous. The water averages 45
degrees Fahrenheit, which gives swimmers about 20 minutes before
they must get ashore.
The weather in Yellowstone varies from sweat-drenched summers
in the Thorofare district to year-round squalls and blizzards in the
Beartooth Mountains.
Since the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, Yellowstone has
had all of the species known to have lived there within recorded
history, making it the largest intact ecosystem in the temperate
world.

Animal obituaries

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Kin, 36, the last wild crested ibis to hatch in Japan, on
October 10 hurled herself headfirst into a door at the Sado Crested
Ibis Preservation Center, 190 miles northwest of Tokyo, and died of
a brain hemorrhage. Removed from the wild in 1968 for captive
breeding, Kin never produced offspring, and had been the last
wild-hatched crested ibis in Japan since her mate Midori died in
1995. Hunted to the verge of extinction, crested ibises won legal
protection in 1934. In 1999 the Sado Center received a pair of
crested ibises as a gift from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
The Chinese crested ibises have now fledged 21 offspring, some of
whom are to be reintroduced to the wild in 2007.

Tammy, 53, one of three elephants deemed surplus by the
Milwaukee County Zoo and housed under allegedly abusive conditions by
the Hawthorne Corporation until a 1994 transfer to the Performing
Animal Welfare Society, died in September at the PAWS sanctuary in
Galt, California.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Monster of God

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Monster of God:
The man-eating predator in the
jungles of history and the mind
by David Quammen
W.W. Norton & Co. (500 5th Ave., New York, NY 10110), 2003.
384 pages, hardcover. $26.95.

Certain to be classified by most librarians as “natural
history,” Monster of God has already been mistaken by many reviewers
as a screed in defense of “sustainable use.”
Monster of God is actually a book mostly about faith,
exploring the influence of the human evolutionary role as prey upon
concepts of religion, and of the more recent human ascendance as a
top predator on our ideas about conservation.
David Quammen is profoundly skeptical that humans and
predators capable of eating us are capable of coexisting for longer
than another 150 years. He presents a strong circumstantial case
that the protohuman concept of God evolved as a psychological
response to swift and seemingly random predator strikes. Sacrifice,
Quammen suggests, began as appeasement of predators, and in some
remote places continues as such.
Others have written extensively about the emergence of
sacrifice as the ritual sustenance of a learned priestly class,
coinciding with the rise of animal husbandry, and have discussed
especially the role of religion in rationalizing slaughter. Without
taking much note of of this, Quammen explores the role of the
earliest monarchs in recorded history as lion-slayers, pointing out
that the dawn of civilization coincided with the emergence of humans
as quasi-apex predators, able at last to do with weapons what
natural predators do with tooth and claw.

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.
Gillas showed sufficient talent at ballet that in 1940 her
mother relocated to San Francisco to enable her to perform
professionally. Gillas danced primarily in the Spanish classical
style until the early 1950s, appearing in London and Paris as well
as throughout the U.S., also developing skill as a watercolorist.
A stenographer after her dancing career, Gillas may have
been among the first employees of the Humane Society of the U.S.,
formed in 1954, then worked for the National Audubon Society in New
York City, where in 1959 she founded International Defenders of
Animals. Relocating to Hialeah, Florida, in 1961, after a brief
marriage and divorce, Gillas merged her group into the Florida
League for Humane Progress and rented a dog breeding kennel and
grooming facility that she converted into an animal shelter.

Obituaries

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