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No happy endings likely in three-month sheep-at-sea saga

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

KUWAIT–The livestock ship Cormo Express was to sail back to
Australia on October 15 with 52,000 sheep who were refused entry into
Saudi Arabia on August 22 after some were found to have scabby mouth
disease.
The return voyage had been delayed for 24 hours by difficulty
in obtaining enough fodder to sustain the sheep en route to a planned
first stop for Australian veterinary inspection at the Cocos Islands,
also known as the Keeling Islands, about 1,500 miles west of
Australia proper.
Australian authorities had not yet decided what to do with
the sheep. More than 100 nations had reportedly refused them, even
as a gift that they were subsidized to take. Options included trying
to slaughter the sheep at sea, disposing of their remains via the
nine-story mincer used to dispose of animals who die individually in
transit; landing the sheep for slaughter on the Australian mainland,
probably at Albany; and repatriating the sheep alive to the Outback,
where they might still be killed and buried.

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Veggie novelist Coetzee wins Nobel Prize

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

STOCKHOLM–South African novelist and advocate of
vegetarianism J.M. Coetzee was on October 1 named winner of the 2003
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The award is to be presented in Stockholm on December 10 by
Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden. The date is the anniversary of the
death of Alfred Nobel, who endowed the Nobel Prizes with his profit
from inventing dynamite.
“Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and
controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of
apartheid,” wrote Jennifer Schuessler, deputy editor of the Ideas
section of the Boston Globe. But his most recent novel, Elizabeth
Costello, raises “another unsettled and unsettling question,”
Schuessler continued.
“By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid
conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and
skin, are we all complicit in a ‘crime of stupefying proportions’?
Those words are Costello’s, whose two lectures on animal rights
–‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the
Animals’– make up the longest section of the book. The
preoccupation is very much Coetzee’s own, and has moved increasingly
close to the moral center of his work.”

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HSUS rep Samantha Mullen is sued in N.Y. for knocking no-kill

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

PEARL RIVER, N.Y.– Friends of Rockland
Shelter Animals Inc. on June 20 sued the Humane
Society of the United States and HSUS program
coordinator Samantha Mullen for allegedly
interfering in a business relationship by making
“false and misleading statements” in a February
19, 2003 letter to C. Scott Vanderhoef, chief
executive for Rockland County, New York.
According to the complaint, Friends of
Rockland Shelter Inc. “with the assistance of the
American SPCA, was involved in valid, existing
and ongoing negotiations” to take over the county
shelter from Hi Tor Animal Care Center, a
private contractor.

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Cat killer thrown out of office

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

 

PALMYRA, Nebraska–Village chair Rex Schroder, 30, was
recalled on August 5, 130-55, a month after state attorney general
Jon Bruning charged him with cruelty for trapping and killing
neighbor Heather Bruns’ cat, trapping her dog, and killing a feral
cat. Schroder, a 15-year Palmyra resident and five-year elected
official, indicated that he believed rural values and property
rights would prevail, but after the vote, wrote Barbara Nordby of
the Lincoln Journal Star, “Attempts to find supporters of Schroder
in Palmyra were unsuccessful.”

Fates that really “scare the monkeys” of Guangzhou, China

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

GUANGZHOU, BOSTON– Among the less visible effects of the
2002-2003 SARS outbreak in China may be a claimed shortage of monkeys
in U.S. laboratories.
Of the 99,939 nonhuman primates imported into the U.S. from
1995 through 2002, 26,134 came from China, according to an analysis
of trade data by Linda Howard of the Aesop Project.
The total included almost exactly a third of the 78,903
crab-eating macaques acquired by U.S. labs and lab suppliers.
The U.S. bought more monkeys from China than from any other
nation. Next were Mauritius, furnishing 22,695 monkeys; Indonesia,
17,379; and Vietnam, 13,535. SARS put most of those sources at
least temporarily off limits.
Among the more horrifying possibilities raised by an
ambiguous description of the situation published on July 18 in the
South China Morning Post is that Chinese-reared crab-eating macaques,
if excluded from lab use, may be eaten.
Wrote South China Morning Post Guangzhou correspondent Leu
Siew Ying, “About 10,000 rhesus monkeys and thousands of snakes held
at wild animal farms in Guangzhou are waiting for health authorities
to determine their fate. Depending on whether or not they were
responsible for transmitting SARS, the inmates will head either to
laboratories or dinner tables.”

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Animal Obituaries

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

Black Bear #107, age 15, was roadkilled on June 29 near
Spring Hill, Florida, in a location environmentalists had argued
would become a death trap for bears if a 24-hour Walmart Supercenter
was built nearby. The store was built anyway, opening earlier in
2003. Two black bear cubs were killed nearby in September 2001.

Mira, 6, rescued by the Ferret Association of Connecticut
at age three months after being stepped on and burned with bleach,
was euthanized on June 18 after a two-year battle with cancer.

“Maynard,” a squirrel monkey used in behavioral research at
New England Regional Primate Research Center, escaped from his cage
while being trucked across the facility on July 11, acquired his
name when spotted 10 miles away in the town of Maynard 19 days later,
and was roadkilled nearby on August 1.

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Obituaries

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

William B. Johnston, DVM, 56, State Public Health
Veterinarian for the Alabama Department of Public Health, and crrent
president of the National Association of State Public Health
Veterinarians, died on August 4 from esophageal cancer. Colleague
Millicent Eidson recalled him as a “national leader” in developing
the use of oral rabies vaccination to control raccoon rabies.
Eighteen states have now controlled rabies outbreaks by using the
Raboral vaccine.

Barbara Bonner, 46, founder and director of the Turtle
Hospital of New England, died suddenly at home in Upton,
Massachusetts, of unknown causes on August 1. Bonner was noted for
advocacy and educational efforts on behalf of Asian turtle species,
many of which are on the verge of extinction due to meat hunting.

Robert McCloskey, 88, died on June 30 on Deer Isle, Maine.
McCloskey won the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal in
1941 as writer/illustrator of Make Way For Ducklings, about the
ducks who have long inhabited the Boston Public Gardens, and in 1957
for Time of Wonder, about the Maine coastal islands. He also wrote
and illustrated Blueberries for Sal (1948), in which a child and a
bear each follow the wrong mama home.

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BOOKS: The man who talks to dogs

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

The man who talks to dogs:
The story of America’s wild street dogs and their unlikely savior
by Melinda Roth
Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press (175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010), 2002. 232 pages. $24.95, hardcover.

“To be a stray dog in most major cities is to be a dead dog
walking,” believes Randy Grim, founder of Stray Rescue of St.
Louis. The dogs Grim and his team rescue may be few compared to the
many in need, but Randy believes in the value of every life, and
strives to save every dog he can, no matter how sick, estranged,
or aggressive.
Though Grim always loved animals, he used to have a “normal”
life, running a successful grooming shop. Bonnie changed his life.
She appeared one day in front of Grim’s shop: a pregnant stray, all
skin and bones, sick and crippled. She trusted Grim and followed
him.
Soon Bonnie gave birth to thirteen puppies. Unfortunately
Bonnie developed mastitis, and could not breast-feed her pups. For
six weeks Grim hand-fed all 13 pups, every two hours, twenty-four
hours a day. Puppy care left him no time for anything else. Most of
his friends turned away, but Grim continued until each of the pups
were weaned.

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BOOKS: The Story of My Life

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

The Story of My Life by Shayna
As Told to Greta
by Greta Marsh
1st World Library (8014 Shoal Creek Blvd., Suite
100, Austin, TX 78757), 2001. 221 pages,
paperback. $24.50

Ex-racing greyhounds tend to be quiet,
despite the frustrations of their often muzzled
former lives. Horse and greyhound rescuer Greta
Marsh, on the other hand, has much to say on
their behalf, and on behalf of all abused and
exploited creatures, including disadvantaged
humans.
Thus the decision by Marsh to write The
Story of My Life through the imagined voice of
her deceased first greyhound Shayna was not
fortuitious. Because Shayna sounds much more
like Marsh than like a dog, The Story of My Life
never quite transcends disbelief. We supposedly
have a dog here who pays little attention to most
subjects of concern to dogs, but can sometimes
talk to her former racing handler and Marsh, as
well as fellow dogs, and is familiar with both
animal rights and human rights issues.

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