Sentenced

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Religious conservative Mark Warren Sands, 50, of Phoenix,
Arizona, drew an 18-year prison sentence on February 11 for burning
seven luxury homes under construction between April 2000 and January
2001. Sands claimed credit for the ELF-like arsons in communiques
from environmental advocacy activist cells that existed only in his
own imagination. A former publicist for University Hospital in Salt
Lake City and a Phoenix-area health care organization, Sands more
nearly fit the profile of an agent provocateur than that of a radical
activist, having no public history of the open space advocacy that
he said was his motive. But Sands also acknowledged committing the
arsons to obtain a sense of adventure, and no evidence emerged to
link him to any kind of conspiracy.

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Bush & the beasts

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

WASHINGTON D.C.–Cultivating an image as an animal-lover,
U.S. President George W. Bush on February 12 signed into law the
Congressional reauthorization of the Asian Elephant Conservation Act.
Five weeks earlier, on January 8, Bush signed
reauthorizations of the African Elephant Conservation Act and the
Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Act.
The devil was in the details.

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Gas in Pakistan

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:
 
KARACHI, Pakistan–Natural gas exploration and extraction in
Kirthar National Park is apparently proceeding quietly, five months
after the Sindh High Court on October 4 dismissed a petition against
it brought by a coalition of nine Pakistani nonprofit organizations.
The verdict came as U.S. President George W. Bush pressured Pakistan
to crack down on public displays of anti-Americanism, but it crushed
an unusually American-like expression of dissent, in a nation with
little history of activism on behalf of animals and habitat.

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Funding the War on Roadkills

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

BOZEMAN, Montana–The $59.6 billion U.S. Department of
Transportation appropriation signed by President George W. Bush in
December 2001 included $500,000 for an anti-roadkill project under
study by the Western Transportation Institute, a program of the
College of Engineering at Montana State University in Bozeman.
That aspect of the bill appears to have been reported only by
Bob Anez, of Associated Press, who promptly interviewed WTI
research engineer Pat McGowan.

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From drunk hunters to a Republican who wants to ban elephants: State Legislative roundup, 2002

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Hunting
Frustrated that North Carolina law forbids hunting on state
land while under the influence of alcohol, but not on private
property, the Orange County commissioners sent a message to the
statehouse on January 15 by passing their own anti-drunk hunting
ordinance, and asked the three biggest cities within the
county–Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough–to do the same.
Neighboring Caswell County passed a similar ordinance in 2001.
Hunters typically get whatever they want from state
legislatures, however, due to the disproportionate influence of
rural representatives with long tenures as committee chairs, and
2002 started out the usual way, when the Maine legislature on
January 6 ratified a plan by the Department of Inland Fisheries and
Wildlife to expand coyote snaring in order to increase the deer herd.
Maine legislators solicited the plan in late 2001 after
hunters in several areas complained that coyotes were killing more
deer than the hunters were–although many of the deer coyotes kill
have previously been wounded by hunters who failed to dispatch them,
have been hit by cars, or are debilitated by starvation after an
over-abundant herd consumes all the accessible browse too early in
the winter.

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BOOKS: Wild Health

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Wild Health:
How Animals Keep Themselves Well
and What We Can Learn From Them
by Cindy Engel
Houghton Mifflin (215 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10003), 2002.
288 pages, paperback. $24.00.

Vegetarian activists and antivivisectionists often point out
the incomprehensible extent to which biomedical researchers have
overlooked the influence of diet on human health–and thus have
expended millions of animal lives in search of cures for ailments
which could be avoided by simply avoiding animal flesh and byproducts.
Though diet has received much more medical attention during
the past 30 years than in the preceding several centuries, human
physicians still tend to ignore Hippocrates’ admonition to, “Leave
your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal your patient with
food.”

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BOOKS: Saving Emily

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Saving Emily
by Nicholas Read
Prometheus Books (59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228), 2001.
150 pages, paperback. $14.00.

The two timeless themes of rural literature might be
summarized as, “Country lad (lass) goes to the big city and becomes
corrupted/resists temptation,” and “Displaced city lad (lass) comes
out to the country to discover what is true and real.”
The former theme was the staple of medieval morality plays,
structured the plots of the first English novels, underscored The
Beverly Hillbillies, and remains the predominant theme of
country-western music.

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BOOKS: Voices From The Garden

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Voices From the Garden: Stories of Becoming A Vegetarian
edited by Sharon & Daniel Towns
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, #201, New York, NY 10003),
October 2001. 176 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Are you curious about other folks “going veggie” stories?
The first-person accounts in Voices From the Garden come for the most
part from ordinary people who have in common doing one thing that
mainstream America might consider extraordinary: they eat a vegan or
vegetarian diet. They range in age from teenagers to veterans of
sixty years without meat. They recount what it is like to challenge
the status quo-past and present. Among them are also a handful of
well-known people, including the former cattle rancher and
vegetarian advocate Howard Lyman, PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk,
and Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism.

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Animal obituaries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

Sirius, 4, the yellow Labrador bomb-sniffing dog of Port
Authority police officer David Lim, was found on January 23 in the
rubble of the World Trade Center. Sirius’ remains received the same
ceremonious removal as those of human police and firefighters. Lim
left Sirius in the basement kennel of Tower II on September 11 while
he climbed to the 44th floor to assist with the evacuation. He was
carrying a woman down from the fifth floor when the building
collapsed, but was rescued after six hours in the flaming debris.
Lim is now training a new bomb-sniffing dog, a black Lab named Sprig.

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