A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
SEOUL, South Korea– Trying to reduce visitor awareness of
dog-and-cat-eating during the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament,
starting in May, the government of South Korea on February 19 asked
the 22 dog meat vendors who sell at the Moran Market in Sungnam City
for “a voluntary discontinuation of all illegal sales and practices.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
BEIJING, HONG KONG, SHANGHAI–China cares about bears.
That was clear from nationwide outrage erupting in February
2002 after a 21-year-old engineering student poured sulfuric acid and
caustic soda over five bears at the Beijing Zoo “to see if bears are
really stupid.”
International Fund for Animal Welfare representative Zhang Li
offered help to the zoo in treating the bears, who repeatedly all
suffered vision loss, mouth injuries, and badly burned paws. Zhang
Li also appealed for a national law on animal welfare. An existing
law protecting wildlife may not apply to zoo animals.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
SEATTLE, AHMEDABAD– With smoke still rising from the ruins
of Muslim neighborhoods in Ahmedabad, India, neither the McDonald’s
Corporation nor Seattle attorney Harish Bharti and his 12 Hindu,
Sikh, and vegetarian clients wanted any more trouble.
As Ahmedabad cremated the remains of 56 Hindus killed when
Muslim militants torched a train on March 1, and buried the remains
of more than 400 Muslims killed the next day in retaliatory attacks
by Hindu mobs, McDonald’s agreed to pay $6 million to vegetarian
groups, yet to be named, and $4 million to charities serving
Hindus, Sikhs, children’s nutritional needs, and kosher dietary
teachings.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
Sealer walks
ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland–A three-judge Newfoundland Court
of Appeal panel on March 12 overturned the conviction of sealer Jason
Penny for allowing a wounded seal to suffer unnecessarily long from a
bullet wound in early 1996, by ruling that the prosecution failed to
submit adequate evidence establishing that the video used to convict
him had not been “altered or changed” by the International Fund for
Animal Welfare before it was turned over to the Crown.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002–
MACHIAPONGO, Virginia–Seeking links to Al Qaida terrorist
funding, about 150 officers of the U.S. Customs Service and other
federal law enforcement agencies on March 20 executed 14 search
warrants at sites in northern Virginia plus the Mar-Jac Poultry
slaughterhouse in Gainesville, Georgia.
The subject of investigation was reportedly Yaqub M. Mirza.
Mirza, reported Associated Press, heads a company called
Sterling Advisory Services, registered at the Mar-Jac address, and
is “listed as the registered agent for Mena Investments Inc. in
Herndon, Virginia.” In addition, said Associated Press, “Mirza
was an officer of the Saar Foundation, started in the 1970s by
members of a wealthy Saudi family to raise money for education and
technology projects in developing Islamic countries. It was
dissolved in December 2000.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002–
SACRAMENTO, California–Masami Cattle Ranch owner Masami
Ishida, 70, of Corning, California, was fined $1 million on
March 20, 2002 and was sentenced to serve six months in home
detention for allegedly polluting tributaries of the Sacramento River
with manure from the ranch and a slaughterhouse.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
A Feathered Family: Nature Notes from a Woodland Studio by Linda Johns
Sierra Club Books (85 Second St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1999.
272 pages, hardcover. $25.00.
Linda Johns is a painter, a sculptor, an author and an
apparently self-taught (she would say bird-taught) rehabilitator of
wild birds. All these elements come together in A Feathered Family.
The book is a series of verbal snapshots of one period in her 25
years of living in an isolated wooded area in Nova Scotia, just
before and after her partner Mack came to share her home.
It is a most unusual home, with an indoor garden for birds
to forage in, complete with two tall dead trees chosen for their
horizontal branches. There are mealworm cultures in an upstairs
closet and more perches than chairs. There is a hospice room for
isolating birds as occasionally needed, and an art studio, but most
of the house is an open design which has become a series of
interconnecting flyways. I found myself wanting to move in, despite
knowing the screen porch tub is occasionally stocked with ants.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
Birds of Eastern & Central North America (5th edition)
by Roger Tory Peterson
Houghton Mifflin (222 Berkeley St., Boston, MA 02116), 2002. 427
pages, illus., hardcover. $30.00.
I met Roger Tory Peterson just once, briefly, before a
public hearing at which we both testified against a Connecticut
Department of Environmental Protection plan to kill mute swans.
Peterson was 82, quite ill, and sent someone else to represent
him–but at the last minute he rose out of bed and came to pit his
moral weight against the might of both the hunting and birding
establishments. Native or non-native, Peterson said briefly, the
mute swans were birds, were sentient and intelligent beings,
contributed to human appreciation of all bird-kind, and deserved to
live.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
Lives of North American
Birds by Kenn Kaufman
Houghton Mifflin Company (215 Park Avenue South,
N.Y., NY 10003), 2001. 704 pages, paperback. $25.00.
The Lives of North American Birds is not a field guide for
identifying birds, though it is organized much like one. Instead it
provides detailed information about the lives of 680 species
occurring regularly in North America, with “shorter accounts for
more than 230 others that visit occasionally.”