DOLPHIN DEATH BILL

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

A bill to repeal the “dolphin-safe” tuna import standard
cleared the House Resources Committee, 28-13, on April
16. A full House vote is expected in May, with the best chance
of stopping the bill a threat of fillibuster by Senator Barbara
Boxer (D-California), who co-sponsored the 1990 standard as a
then-House member.
The “dolphin death bill” is favored by both the Clinton
administration and leading Republicans, who are concerned that
the “dolphin-safe” law may violate the General Agreement on
Trade and Tariffs and the North American Free Trade
Agreement, as preliminary rulings have held, thereby opening
the U.S. to World Trade Organization penalties. Under GATT
and NAFTA, nations may regulate the substance of imports,
but not the means by which they are made.

Quit lynching lynx, judge orders

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler on March 27 ordered
the Fish and Widlife Service to reconsider a 1994 decision against listing the Canadian lynx
as an endangered species.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service has consistently ignored the analysis of its expert
biologists,” Kessler wrote. The decision against listing, she continued, depended upon
“glaringly faulty premises,” including the contention that the lynx still occupies much of its
historical range, despite “overwhlming evidence that the lynx has been entirely eliminated
from 17 states,” leaving some only in Maine, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.
Sought by the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife, and 11
other groups, the proposed listing of the lynx was opposed by hunters and trappers––in part
because a listing would refute their longtime assertion that no species has become endangered.

Britain protects 33

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

LONDON––British environment
secretary John Gummer on February 1 proposed
the addition of 33 species to the
Wildlife and Countryside Act, the British
equivalent to the ESA, including the basking
shark, stag beetle, water vole, pool
frog, clearwing moth, and pearl mussel,
and recommended delisting only one, the
vipers bugloss moth, which he said is now
out of danger. The basking shark, endangered
by the Asiatic shark fin soup trade,
would become the first shark protected by
British law. The water vole, having a leading
part in the classic British children’s story
The Wind In The Willows, is the “warm
fuzzy” creature on the list, expected to lead
public opinion toward protection of all.
The stag beetle, according to the
Joint Nature Committee, advising Gummer,
is jeopardized by “the increasing trade in
this species, especially on mainland Europe
but also in Britain.” The source of the
demand is that, “Occasionally it is used for
dissection to demonstrate the insect structure
in educational establishments.”

Canada close to getting own ESA

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

OTTAWA––Overshadowed by the
CITES and ESA struggles, Canada staggers
toward adopting its first federal Endangered
Species Act, encumbered by resource industries
even stronger than their U.S. counterparts
and provincial governments with far more
autonomy than U.S. states. Canada has placed
276 species to date on an endangered species
list, but legally protecting those species has
been left to the often recalcitrant provinces.
As introduced last December 18,
the Canadian ESA would apply only to
species on federal land, or about 4% of the
Canadian land mass; includes only those
birds who are already covered by the
Migratory Birds Convention with the U.S.;

COURT CALENDAR

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

Michigan activists Patricia Marie Dodson, 48, of
Royal Oak, Hilma Marie Ruby, 59, of Rochester, Robyn
Rachel Weiner, 25, of Farmington Hills, Gary Howard
Yourofsky, 26, of West Bloomfield Township, and Alan
Anthony Hoffman, 47, of Roseville all were charged with
breaking and entering and mischief on April 2, two days after
the Ontario Provincial Police arrested them during their alleged
second attempt to release mink from the Ebert Fur Farm in
Blenheim, Ontario. About 300 of 2,400 resident mink were let
out of their cages the first time, and 1,500 the second, of whom
1,100 were recaptured, 300 died of exposure or were roadkilled,
and 100 were unaccounted for. Yourofsky and Dodson were
reportedly regional PETA contacts. The five are represented by
civil rights and animal rights lawyer Clayton Ruby, one of the
most prominent and popular figures in Canadian law, not related
to Hilma Ruby.

BUDGET AX HITS B.C. WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT HOOK-AND-BULLET CULTURE

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

VICTORIA, B.C.––Possibly adding by subtraction,
British Columbian prime minister Glen Clark of the left-leaning
New Democratic Party has axed eight senior fish and wildlife
managers since November 1996––and has put the provincial
wildlife department under five-year director of law enforcement
Nancy Bircher, apparently the first woman to head any
Canadian wildlife department.
Clark touts the exodus as downsizing to reduce the
provincial debt. Opponents term it “proof the government is
pursuing a brown agenda,” as Mark Hume of the Vancouver
Sun put it. Altogether, about 1,500 employees of environmental
departments have been laid off or ushered into early retirement,
even as the Clark regime has allowed logging in the
Stoltman Wilderness, near Squamish, and has resisted federal
pressure to reduce the B.C. commercial salmon fleet.

NORWAY SEEKS WATSON EXTRADITION

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

AMSTERDAM––Held in a Dutch maximum security
prison since April 2 on an Interpol warrant from Norway,
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson will
go to court May 26 in hopes of avoiding extradition on threeyear-old
charges of allegedly ramming the Norwegian coast
guard vessel Andennes, sending a false distress signal, and
trespassing in Norwegian waters, in addition to the charge of
being an accessory to the dockside scuttling of the whaling ship
Nybraena in 1992 for which he was first detained.
The additional charges were laid on April 18. The
District of Haarlem Court had on April 3 ordered that Watson
be kept on the Interpol warrant for 20 days to allow Norway
time to prepare an extradition case. That warrant, however,
asked only that Watson be sent to Norway to serve a 120-day
jail sentence he and colleague Lisa Distefano received in absen –
tia in May 1994 for their purported roles in the Nybraena sink –
ing. The vessel was later refloated and is still killing whales.
“Norway now claims we personally sank the vessel,”
Distefano told ANIMAL PEOPLE from the Sea Shepherd
offices in Venice, California, “but the Lofoten court record
notes, ‘The two were not in the country and could not take
direct part.’” Watson and Distefano had offered to go to
Norway for the trial if Norway would guarantee their safety and
agree to a change of venue from the Lofoten Islands, the hub of
the Norwegian whaling industry, which Distefano described as
“the source of numerous death threats against us.”

Letters [May 1997]

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

Eva Peron
First of all I would like to
thank you for the honorific mention
you made in the January/February
edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE i n
relation to the Asociation para la
Defensa de los Derechos del Animal
and myself.
As regards your reflections
on the case of Eva Peron, I consider
that the dualism you were referring
to when you highlighted the fact that
she loved dogs but wore fur is very
common in Argentina, where people
can give their lives for their dogs but
eat the meat of innocent animals or
wear the furs of species tortured in
leghold traps. However, in the case
of Evita, she lived in a time when
consideration of the rights of animals
was almost unknown.

Letters

Editorial: Potty-and-other environmentalism

May 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

The 28th annual Earth Day celebration came and went, 10 days after the close of
the 14th Summit for the Animals, a convocation of animal rights organization heads that
perennially does nothing. Chances are, most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers were as unaffected
by either as the organizers were by one another, despite the stated intent of Earth
Day organizers to spotlight the Endangered Species Act, and of the Summit organizers to
court the thoroughly indifferent environmental movement, whatever is left of it.
Better potty training might have prevented this sibling schism, along with air and
water pollution, before the popular concept of the environmental cause came to be eliminating
waste. In a time when “environmentalist” is misleadingly synonymous to much of
the public with Big Brother, as much due to onerously mandated recycling as to wise-use
wiseguy machinations, and when some leading “environmental” organizations such as The
Nature Conservancy as aggressively extirpate nature and wildlife as any commercial developer,
it is worthwhile to recall that the first Earth Day, which the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
helped publicize as a cub reporter in Berkeley, California, offered the notion of an
ecology-centered approach to living as a direct challenge to the environmental establishment
as much as to Washington D.C. and Wall Street.

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