Animal control & rescue abroad

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

The Royal SPCA of New South
Wales, Australia, on June 28 won State
Parliament passage of a new cruelty law
which bars steeplechasing and hurdling
with horses, steel-jawed traps, the serving
of live food in restaurants, grinding sheep’s
teeth, attending cockfights, docking dogs’
tails after five days of age, clitoridectomizing
greyhounds to prevent detection of doping,
and dogs riding untethered in open
vehicles. The law also renews a clause
from the previous legislation that allows
private parties to bring cruelty cases.
The Czech Union of Nature
Conservation magazine NIKA recently
published an English edition to familiarize
the rest of the world with Czech environmental
efforts. Copies are available c/o
NIKA, Slezaka 9, 120 29 Prague 2,
Czechoslovakia. Generous gifts to cover
printing and postage will be appreciated.

Salton Sea crisis breaks rehabbers

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

IRVINE––The 12-year-old
Pacific Wildlife Project avian rehabilitation
center in Irvine, California, is reportedly
near collapse after spending $80,000
to treat about 1,000 birds who were sickened
by botulism last summer at the
Salton Sea.
About 14,000 birds died near the
inland sea, and another 5,000, of at least
40 species, have died so far this year.
Director Linda Evans billed the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service for the funds, coincidental
with the construction by volunteers
of a $90,000 emergency treatment facility
near the Salton Sea National Wildlife
Refuge, but refuge manager Clark Bloom
said the refuge had no money to send her.

SHELTERS

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Anchorage, Alaska, has adopted a
new animal control law as of July 1, and turned
the $1.4 million animal control contract over to a
new contractor, Allvest Inc., replacing TLC Inc.,
which had held the contract for 13 years. Allvest,
unlike TLC, will have a full-time veterinarian, a
fleet of six heated 4-wheel-drive animal pickup
vehicles, a lost-and-found web site, and will
encourage volunteers to work directly with animals.
Allvest also operates rehabilitation halfway
houses for humans.
The U.S. military support service contracting
firm Brown & Root, of Houston,
Texas, in early summer sent Galveston County
Animal Shelter director Shirley Tinnin a n d
Rosenberg animal control officer Nora Angstead
to Bosnia for 11 days, to train 60 Bosnians in
humane rabies control. Tinnin and Angstead fulfilled
the job on unpaid administrative leave.

CIVIL SERVICE

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Whistleblowers
The Professional Institute of
the Public Service, representing
Canadian public scientists, on August 7
demanded passage of a whistleblower
protection law promised by the Liberal
goverment during the 1993 election
campaign and recommended in 1995 by
Auditor General Denis Desautels, but
not yet introduced to Parliament.
Instead, the Department of Fisheries
and Oceans responded to the recent disclosure
of extensive falsification of official
data pertaining to cod, salmon, and
seals by circulating a 1982 disciplinary
code which lists public criticism of the
department as an offense on the same
level as mutiny and fraud. As A N IMAL
PEOPLE reported in July/August
(“Scientists say Canada falsified data”),
outside scientists revealed in May and
June that the DFO concealed evidence
that Atlantic cod have been overfished
to endangerment, and undercounted the
1996 offshore sealing kill, officially
262,402, by as much as 100%.

Roger Rabbit redoux

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

According to the July edition
of Paw Prints, newsletter of Volunteer
Services for Animals in Providence,
Rhode Island, American SPCA president
Roger Caras told the group’s
recent fundraising banquet about “the
detrimental effect so-called no-kill shelters
have had on the efforts of humane
organizations, as many people now
erroneously believe that unwanted animals
are no longer euthanized so it’s
okay to not neuter their pets.”
One could also erroneously
believe from Caras’ 1996 book A
Perfect Harmony that neutering rabbits,
the third most popular house pet
species, is pointless, since he seriously
asserted there that they are capable of
asexual reproduction.

What did John Muir think of whaling?

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

SEATTLE––Ingrid Hansen, conservation
committee chair for the Cascade Chapter of the
Sierra Club, apparently lost a battle but won a war
July 19 when the executive committee rejected her
motion that the Washington-based chapter should
“support the Makah Tribe’s proposal to take five
gray whales per year,” but also defeated executive
committee member Bob Kummer’s counter-motion
that the club should “oppose all taking of whales.”
As Hansen explained in an April 9 letter
to Makah Whaling Commission member Ben
Johnson Jr., national Sierra Club positions tend to
follow the recommendations of the local chapters
closest to the issues. The San Francisco-based
national office of the Sierra Club last spring asked
the Cascade Chapter if it had a position on Makah
whaling. A nonposition, if precedent holds, could
keep the influential Sierra Club on the sidelines as
the Clinton/Gore administration advances the
Makah application to whale before the International
Whaling Commission this October.

MARINE CONSERVATION

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Hoping to gain influence
against Atlantic Canadian sealers, the
International Fund for Animal
Welfare gave $10,000 to the Liberal
Party of Canada in 1996, following
gifts of $46,000 to the Progressive
Conservatives and $42,500 to the
Liberals in 1993. “In hindsight,” IFAW
Canadian director Rick Smith recently
told Maria Bohuslawsky of the Ottawa
Citizen, “the intransigence of the Liberal
government in terms of environmental
issues, and lack of access to the government
that groups such as ours have,
would indicate the donation was illadvised.”
Pocketing the money, the
Liberals boosted the sealing quota from
185,000 in 1995 to 283,000 this year.

Nonprofit management

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Investigating business satisfaction with
the outcome of joint projects involving environmental
advocacy groups, the August edition of
The Green Business Letter found the Nature
Conservancy scoring 4.33 on a scale of five; the
World Wildlife Fund 4.07; the National
Wildlife Federation 3.96; the National Audubon
Society 3.90; the Council on Economic
Priorities 3.74; the Environmental Defense
Fund 3.73; the Natural Resources Defense
Council 3.25; the Rainforest Action Network
3.25; the Sierra Club 2.88; and Greenpeace just
1.85.
The Internal Revenue Service has proposed
raising the financial threshhold at which
nonprofit organizations must file IRS Form 990 to
$40,000 in annual receipts. The current threshhold
is $25,000. IRS Form 990, which by law must be
available to the public, is the primary nonprofit
accountability document.

Activists & Organizations

Wise-use wiseguys

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Farmers For Fairness, a front for
factory hog farmers, “has begun to achieve
its purpose” in North Carolina, Raleigh News
& Observer staff writer James Eli Shiffer
warned on July 13. “For several months, the
industry has mounted a broad-based campaign
to clean up the image of the hog business,”
Shiffer explained. “The push has
included the state’s top lobbyists, rallies in
front of the General Assembly, and a
$300,000 advertising blitz,” including as
many as 400 TV commercials and 200 radio
commercials a week. It paid off when “a hog
control bill in the state House was broadened
to become the ‘Clean Water Responsibility
Act’ in the Senate, with a focus on sewage
plants and golf courses.” According to
Shiffer, Farmers for Fairness principals
include president Nick Weaver, “an executive
in the Goldsboro Milling hog company,”
secretary/treasurer Lu-Ann Coe, who is also
publicity director for the hog farm building
firm Hog Slat Inc., and political consultants
Carter Wrenn and Paul Shumaker, who
are respectively director of the Conservative
Club and chief political advisor to state
House speaker Harold Brubaker.

Activists & Organizations

« 1 … 446 447 448 449 450 … 648 »