A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
The Buffalo War
by Matthew Testa & Bryan Cole
Independent TV Service
(51 Federal St., 1st Floor,
San Francisco, CA 94107), 2001.
PBS premiere on Nov. 1, 2001, 10 p.m.
60 minutes.
El Caballo:
The Wild Horses
of North America
by Doug Hawes-Davis
A Fund for Animals video produced by
High Plains Films (P.O. Box 6796, Missoula, MT 59807), 2001.
54 minutes. $25.00.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
Bjossa, 25, the last of a 30-year succession of orcas
displayed at the Vancouver Aquarium, captured near Iceland with her
longtime companion Finna in 1980, died on October 8 at Sea World San
Diego, her home since an April 2001 transfer to be with other orcas.
She had been the only orca in Vancouver since Finna died in November
1997. Already ill when moved, Bjossa took a turn for the worse in
August. She gave birth three times in Vancouver, but none of her
infants survived longer than 97 days. She was the first whale to die
at Sea World San Diego since March 1990.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
John C. Lilly, 86, died September 30 in Los Angeles. After
researching the physiology of high-altitude flight during World War
II, Lilly did investigations preliminary to space travel, inventing
the isolation tank in 1954 to simulate weightlessness. Seeking to
explore methods of communicating with aliens, Lilly founded the
Communi-cation Research Institute on St. Thomas to study dolphins as
aliens-surrogate, and became a frequent visitor to the Miami
Seaquarium, where he profoundly influenced apprentice trainer Rick
Feldman, known since 1970 as dolphin freedom advocate Ric O’Barry.
A chapter of O’Barry’s 1988 autobiography Behind The Dolphin Smile is
titled “The Lilly Factor.” At first awed by Lilly’s discoveries
about dolphin intelligence, O’Barry later developed deep misgivings
about his use of vivisection. After O’Barry began releasing
dolphins, they went different ways. Lilly wrote 19 books,
including Man and Dolphin and The Mind of the Dolphin, claimed he
could understand dolphin language while on LSD, and promoted the
notion of humans and cetaceans enjoying a spiritual bond. His work
inspired the films The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Altered States
(1980), and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
NEW YORK CITY, WASHINGTON D.C., BRUSSELS–Osama bin Laden
told the 19 terrorists who killed at least 5,690 people on September
11 to seize the aircraft they used as weapons by cutting the throats
of their first victims in the manner of hallal slaughter.
The bin Laden document was published by The New York Times
and closely reviewed by expert commentators, as the October 2001
ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial discusses (page 3)–except that the experts
did not menton hallal, the central metaphor in it. They did not
talk about the significance of bin Laden emphasizing that his suicide
attackers were to think of themselves as butchers and the people they
killed as meat.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico; LITCHFIELD, Calif.; SALT LAKE
CITY, Utah; LONDON, U.K.–As if on cue to ensure that animal
rights activism rates a high priority in the “war on terrorism,”
unknown persons on September 21 torched a storage building 200 feet
from the main chimpanzee facility at the Coulston Foundation in
Alamogordo, New Mexico, and on October 15 burned a hay barn at the
Bureau of Land Management’s Litchfield Wild Horse and Burro Corrals,
21 miles northeast of Susanville, California.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
Dog cases
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled 2-1 on October 11 that police officers may be held liable for
damages if they kill a stray dog who poses no danger to life or
property. The verdict reinstated a case filed by Kim and David Brown
of Reading, Pennsylvania, against Muhlenberg Township police
officer Robert D. Eberly, who on April 28, 1998 shot their
three-year-old Rottweiler as Kim Brown screamed “No!” The dog
wandered outside as the Browns moved furniture.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2001:
Canned Hunts: Unfair At Any Price
by Diana Norris, Norm Phelps, & D.J. Schubert
(with other Fund for Animals staff)
Fund for Animals (200 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019), 2001.
64 pages, paperback. $5.00. [May also be downloaded, for free,
at <www.fund.org>.]
“Canned hunts,” in which animals are raised and shot witbin
fenced bounds, present an ethical paradox.
Amounting almost literally to shooting fish in a barrel,
they belie the pretense of the participants to being “sportsmen.” At
larger facilities, the animals may be able to run and
hide–briefly–but they can’t run far, and the “guide” knows the
hiding places. Even the biggest canned hunt is much like an Easter
egg hunt, except that the object is dead animals instead of dyed
eggs.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2001:
The animal dimensions of the September 11 terrorist
hijackings of jetliners and mass murders at the World Trade Center,
the Pentagon, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, were as evident
as the search-and-rescue dogs sent to each scene to help find
survivors and remains, the bomb-sniffing dogs at airports whose
numbers suddenly seem all too few, and the many pets in transit who
were held overnight in air terminals when their flights were grounded.
Many stranded people probably wished they could hug a dog or
cat during the 30-to-48 hours before air travel resumed, and many of
the animals would have welcomed the attention, but there was no way
for anyone to make pet-sharing arrangements.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2001:
MOSCOW–Known for hardline positions against prostitution,
public begging, and other activities he considers offensive,
nine-year Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov on August 29 signed a decree
forbidding a two-day exhibition of Portuguese-style bullfighting that
was to have been held during the second weekend of September.
Luzhkov called bullfighting “an unacceptable display of violence.”
The 13 bulls imported for the event were not to have been
killed in the ring, although they reportedly were to be killed for
beef afterward, but would have been tormented with banderillas by
Portuguese matador Victor Mendes, French matador Marco Antonio
Romero, and Russian female bullfighter Lidia Artamanova, who had
apparently done all her previous bullfighting abroad.