PEOPLE

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Paul Obis, who founded Vegetarian
Times in 1975 and sold it to Cowles Media,
also publisher of Bow Hunter, in 1991, has
resumed eating meat, the July 21 edition of
Newsweek reported, because “22 years of eating
tofu is a long time.”
Irene Cruickshank resigned as
managing director of the New England AntiVivisection
Society, effective July 15.
Cruickshank had served through more than a
year of still unresolved conflict over control of
the NEAVS board between factions aligned
respectively with the Fund for Animals and
PETA. The outcome of the dispute may be
settled by a pending Superior Court judicial
ruling. Formerly allied, the Fund and PETA
jointly took charge of NEAVS in the 1988
board election, in a move seen at the time as
helping to unite and empower the most militant
arms of the animal rights movement.
Bernard Rollin, author of The
Unheeded Cry, lost 28 years of archives on
July 27 when a flash flood that killed five people,
injured 48, displaced 300 households and
wrecked 1,800 cars also tore through his basement
office. Rollin asks anyone who can
replace lost correspondence, articles, clippings,
etc. to send copies c/o Department of
Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, CO 80523. Humane livestock handling
consultant Temple Grandin is also on
the CSU faculty, but Rollin said her office,
several floors above the water, was unharmed.
Vegetarian Marie-Louise Meilleur,
117, of Corbeil, Ontario, was confirmed on
August 14 by the Guinness Book of Records as
the oldest living person whose birth is clearly
documented. Born on August 29, 1880, in
Kamouraska, Quebec, Corbeil has 300
descendants, including an 81-year-old son.

Activists & Organizations

EUROPEAN UNION RESCINDS TRAPPED FUR IMPORT BAN

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

BRUSSELS––The European Union General
Affairs Council on July 22 approved agreements with
Canada and Russia on “humane” trapping standards
which as Associated Press put it, “will insure use of the
cruel leghold trap for an indefinite period of time.”
The EU council also asked the European
Commission to strike a similar deal with the U.S., which
holds that it cannot federally supersede state trapping regulations,
and that any international regulation of trapping
violates the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
The July 22 deal allows Canada and Russia to
continue the use of steel-jawed leghold traps for another
two to four years, and allows the use of padded leghold
traps for either eight more years or indefinitely, if they
meet as yet unformalized international standards.
For Canada and Russia, the deal nullifies an
EU ban on the import of fur from animals usually caught
by leghold trapping, initially approved in 1991 to take
effect in 1995, but repeatedly postponed by all member
nations but The Netherlands.
Letters opposing further EU concessions to
reach agreement with the U.S. may be sent to the
European Commission, 200 Rue de la Loi, B1049,
Brussels, Belgium; fax 011-322-299-4686.

CHARC tapes rodeo shocker

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

WHEATON, Illinois––The calls became familiar: “Steve
here,” barked a hoarse voice from a highway telephone booth. “I went to
the [any town] rodeo last night. I caught ‘em shocking the bulls again in
the chutes and just coming out, right on the anus and testicles.”
Temporarily grounded by damage to his paraglider and lack of
funds to fix it, Chicago Animal Rights Coalition founder Steve Hindi
opened July by leading a fifth year of protest against the Wauconda
Rodeo, whose receipts have fallen 30% since the demonstrations began,
but Steve then fell uncustomarily quiet. Anonymous callers, possibly
spies, asked ANIMAL PEOPLE if he was maybe in jail somewhere.
But before Hindi et al were the Flying CHARCS, noted for flying
between birds and hunters, and for chasing deer away from hunters,
they were the videographers whose dramatic night footage stopped the
rocket-netting of deer in several Chicago suburbs, whose undercover
work won passage of an Illinois ban on horse-tripping as part of charro
rodeo, and whose penetration of the notorious annual Lone Pine turkey
shoot, formerly held in Middleport, Pennsylvania, shut it down as soon
as the organizers realized what Hindi’s camera had captured.

Biotech can’t bring ‘em back alive without DNA

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Noah, as Stephen Tello of Primarily Primates points
out, was both the first known zookeeper and––perhaps due to
job stress––the first winemaker.
He also ran the first captive breeding program.
According to the Biblical prescription, he needed just two of
each species. Genetic diversity apparently took care of itself.
Sometimes captive breeding to recover endangered
species works that easily, but more often not. In real life,
when some animals are paired at the wrong time, one eats the
other. Such considerations inhibit pairing only the second
female Cape pygmy rock lobster found in 200 years, discovered
in May, with a male found one month earlier. Both turned
up near East London, South Africa. Only one other female and
14 other males have ever been seen.
Model-maker Ian Hughes of the Dudley Zoo in
England recently saved the tiny triop Cancriformis shrimp
through captive breeding, of a sort. Believed to be the world’s
least evolved multicellular animal, the triop lays eggs that can
live up to 15 years before hatching, but wild triop habitat is a
single pool, closely protected by the conservation group
English Nature. Eggs from the pool were sent to many zoos
and scientists. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Merton
Mere managed to hatch a few, but Hughes hatched 10,000 on
his office window sill.

FEW CHEER SPECIES COMEBACKS

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Surprisingly little acclaim attends the rediscovery of
species believed to be recently extinct or extirpated––and less
political popularity. Rediscoveries are unpopular with proponents
of trade and development because they raise the threat of
new protective regulation, but are not much better liked by
advocates of stricter conservation laws, since they lend weight
to claims that the purportedly high current rate of extinction is
more an artifact of incomplete research than a scientific verity.
Rediscoveries are also sometimes even scientifically
suspect: some species haven’t been seen in decades perhaps
mainly because no one was looking.
Advances in genetic research have narrowed the likelihood
of anyone fooling the scientific community with a faked
rediscovery, but attempted fakery has occurred, especially in
cases where species still found in one habitat apparently turn up
again in another, without any sign as to how they persisted
without observation, or recolonized an area with no record of
having crossed intervening territory.

No relief for wild horses

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Fighting allegations that
wild horses removed from Bureau of
Land Management property are
clandestinely sold to slaughter, Salt
Lake District BLM state wildforce
manager Glade Anderson on July 28
told Deseret News staff writer
Steven R. Mickelson that Utah
Hunter Association volunteers
would henceforth screen prospective
adoptors and inspect their facilities.

What to do with 1,000-plus surplus lab primates?

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Rattie, a seven-inch albino rat
belonging to Judy Reavis, M.D., of
Benecia, California, earns her living
pulling computer wiring through woodwork
for Hermes Systems Management, exercising
skills developed originally by running
mazes in a psychological research lab to
claim rewards of cat food and candy.
If laboratory primates had comparable
abilities and work habits, labs now
downsizing would have little trouble finding
homes for them all––but primates have been
used mainly to suffer from disease and
breed more primates. As disease research
moves away from animal models, the cost
of keeping chimpanzee and rhesus macaque
colonies has the governments of both the
U.S. and Canada looking at phase-out
options. Chimp maintenance alone costs
U.S. federal agencies a combined total of
$7.3 million a year. The estimated cost of
maintaining each chimp over an average 25-
year lifespan is circa $300,000.

LETTERS [Sept 1997]

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

The bear truth
Regarding the Florida “Habitat for
bears” license plate campaign that kicked off
in June, mentioned in your July/August edition,
it is essential to note that other specialty
plates in Florida, like the manatee plate,
are specifically designed to provide funds for
the conservation of particular endangered
species. The bear plate, as proposed, would
simply create a new funding source for the
Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish
Commission. If the petition drive in support
of the bear plate is successful, the
Commission will get $15 from every plate
sold, to use as needed, including to promote
blood sports.
Revenue from hunting and fishing
license sales in Florida is plummeting. Sales
of one-year freshwater fishing licenses to
Florida residents, for instance, have
dropped by more than 100,000 since 1986.

Letters

Shipboard with the Sea Shepherds

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

News traveled chiefly by ship for thousands of years. The first newscasters were
literally anchormen, who shouted the latest word of current events to the crowds who gathered
at dockside whenever a ship came in. After printing was invented, early newspapers
published not the news itself but rather lists of ships arrived and departing, with their recent
and future ports of call, so that to find out what was happening in China, one could find
the crew of the latest arrived China clipper.
The news was still traveling by ship on August 3, a sunny Sunday we spent on
Puget Sound with Captain Paul Watson and the crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society vessel The Sirenian. We met them at Eastsound, the main village on Orcas Island,
where they relaxed in the shade of an old church, and sailed with them to Friday Harbor,
on San Juan Island, where Watson had a Monday night speaking engagement.

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