BOOKS: Seal Wars

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Seal Wars: 25 years on the front lines with the harp seal by Paul Watson
Firefly Books (U.S.) Inc. (P.O. Box 1338,
Ellicot Station, Buffalo, NY 14205), 2003.
248 pages,
paperback. $16.95.

About the only good news for harp seals
off eastern Canada this year is that Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society founder Paul Watson,
Brigitte Bardot, and others of their old
defenders are still on the job.
Watson’s first crusades on behalf of
animals, as he recounts in Seal Wars, was
against sport fishing, during his New Brunswick
boyhood. Soon afterward his mother enrolled him
in The Kindness Club, founded by the late Aida
Flemming, still active under Jane Tarn. Not
long after that, Watson befriended a beaver
family, then avenged them after they were
trapped for fur, by becoming an avid trapbuster.
Watson became aware of sealing, and was
appalled by it, in 1960–at almost the same time
then-New Brunswick SPCA cruelty inspector Brian
Davies became aware of it. But the Watson family
moved to Toronto, and Paul Watson, after high
school, went to sea. While Davies founded the
New Brunswick SPCA Save The Seals Fund, which
eventually went independent and grew into the
Inter-national Fund for Animal Welfare, Watson
helped to found Greenpeace, and won renown for
derring-do against Russian whalers.

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.
Current indications are that without continuing replenishment from wandering pet cats, the fast-falling feral cat population would probably stabilize at a thinly distributed level resembling the norms for other small felines such as bobcats, lynx, and caracal.
The large suburban feral cat colonies seen in recent decades may be an anomaly made possible only by the extirpation of street dogs and the temporary absence of native predators capable of eating either rodents or cats. Only in high-rise communities like Hong Kong and inner cities ringed by miles of pavement, like the oldest part of Rome, are large cat colonies likely to persist–and then only if humans supply enough food to sustain them.

North America

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
It is business as usual again in the notorious live markets
of Guangzhau, China, capital of Guangdong province and also the
reputed global capital of eating dogs, cats, and wildlife.

Conservation group experts urged dog shooting in Ethiopia

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GOMA, Ethiopia–Why were free-roaming dogs shot in November 2003 in and around Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia? How much did the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme and Born Free Foundation have to do with it?

Why, after Homeless Animal Protection Society of Ethiopia cofounder Hana Kifle photographed a probable rabid wolf in August, was the EWCP vaccination program for pet dogs and working dogs, underway since 1996, not extended to homeless dogs?

Oral rabies vaccination of the Ethiopian wolves was reportedly approved by the Ethiopian government on November 7, apparently long after the EWCP first requested permission to use it.

But the dog-shooting continued.

“After we reported that the health problem occurred among the critically endangered wolves,” HAPS president Efrem Legesse told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “the vet team came to the area [weeks later] and decided to destroy all dogs. Without spending much time at all where the wolves are dying, they finally convinced the park warden that shooting is the only solution.

BOOKS: The Pawprints of History:

October 2, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

The Pawprints of History:
Dogs and the course of human events
by Stanley Coren
The Free Press (1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020), 2002. 322 pages. Hardcover, $26.

Documentation of dogs’ roles in the
course of human events rarely appears in school
history texts.
Stanley Coren establishes in The
Pawprints of History, however, that dogs have
been enormously influential, not only in helping
humans to survive in prehistoric times and
perhaps in shaping our social structure, but
also through interventions of various sorts in
political and military affairs.
For example, dogs saved the lives of
people of historical stature including Napoleon,
the Fifth Dalai Lama, and Alexander the Great.
Dogs also provided emotional support and
encouragement at critical times to Abraham
Lincoln, Isaac Newton and Mary Stuart, Queen of
Scots.

REVIEW: Cull of the Wild: The Truth Behind Trapping

October 2, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Cull of the Wild: The Truth Behind Trapping
Animal Protection Institute (POB 22505, Sacramento, CA 95822), 2003.
Video offered on each cassette in both 27-minute and 10-minute versions.
$10.00 each [$7.50 each for 10 or more copies.]

For 12 winters, 1977-1989, I was volunteer assistant to a
now deceased Quebec deputy game warden in a rural township whose
farmers had virtually all posted their land against trapping. I
combined my morning crosscountry runs with patrolling between 50 and
60 miles per week of woodlots, streams, and riverbanks, scouting
for illegal traplines. The region was rich in fox, coyote,
raccoon, muskrat, and sometimes beaver, and pelt prices were at
their 20th century peak. Thus the farms continually attracted
trappers, despite the posting signs. The trappers appeared to
consider their trap losses to my patrols a routine cost of doing
business.
Over the years I became familiar with standard trapping
methods and equipment–and found that the cruelty of trapping was
actually understated by animal rights literature. The late Animal
Welfare Institute founder Christine Stevens, for example, claimed
that cable snares are less cruel than leghold traps, having probably
never seen real-life cable snaring.

Obituaries

October 2, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Sonora Webster Carver, 99, died on September 21 in
Pleasantville, New Jersey, one day after her lifelong friend
Josephine K. DeAngelis, 92. Sonora Carver’s father-in-law, W.F.
Carver, started the diving horse act at the Steel Pier in Atlantic
City, with her husband Al as one of the riders, but the act
lastingly captured public interest only after Sonora Carver rode the
horse through the 40-foot plunge in 1924. DeAngelis and Sonora
Carver’s sister Arnette Webster French then joined the act, which
became a resident attraction at the Steel Pier in 1929. In 1931
Sonora Carver was blinded by detached retinas in a bad fall into the
water with a horse named Red Lips, but continued to ride the diving
horses for 10 more years. Her 1961 memoir A Girl & Five Brave Horses
inspired the 1991 Walt Disney Inc. film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.
The Carver act ended in 1978 when the original Steel Pier was closed.
A parallel act at the Lake Compounce Amusement Park in Bristol,
Connecticut, used a riderless horse. That act reportedly ended long
before the park itself closed, after 146 years, in 1991. A similar
riderless act started in 1977 at Magic Forest in Lake George, New
York, and is now the target of protests led by Equine Advocates.

Obituaries

Pet Friendly Inc. royalty claim halts Illinois “pet friendly” license plate plan to fund sterilization

October 2, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

SPRINGFIELD–Sales of “pet friendly” license plates to raise
funds for dog and cat sterilization remain suspended in Illinois due
to a claim of trademark infringement made by the rope toy maker Pet
Friendly Inc., and may be in “legal limbo” in several other states,
American SPCA Midwest representative Ledy VanKavage told ANIMAL
PEOPLE shortly before the October 2003 edition went to press.
Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White confirmed on August
26 that sales of the Illinois plates reading “I am pet friendly” were
halted after his office received a demand for $563,000 in
authorization fees and royalties from Pet Friendly Inc. vice
president Charles W. Weinacker Jr.
Pet Friendly Inc. claims to have about 80 employees and sales
of approximately $10 million per year.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records “show that the Alabama
company applied for three trademarks in 1995, but the applications
were abandoned,” wrote Dana Heupel of Copley News Service. “The
company applied for a combined trademark for clothing, pet toys,
and pet food in 1997. The mark was registered on January 8, 2002.”

Regulations regarding dog & cat freedom

October 2, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

Persuaded by testimony from Peaceable Kingdom founder Liz
Jones, plus about 20 other neuter/return practitioners, the
Pennsylvania Game Commission on October 8, 2003 voted unanimously to
drop a proposal to amend a regulation forbidding the “release of
house cats” so as to prohibit the release of any dogs or cats,
including ferals, “into the wild.” The amendment was pushed by the
American Bird Conservancy.

Palm Beach County, Florida, on August 19 adopted a bylaw to
prohibit tethering dogs outside from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., effective on
September 1 and subject to review in early 2004 by the county animal
control advisory board–which reportedly plans to recommend a total
ban on tethering.

Wichita, Kansas, in early September became at least the
28th U.S. municipality to restrict dog tethering, adopting a bylaw
that limits tethering to no more than one hour at a time.

« 1 … 251 252 253 254 255 … 648 »