Legal pitfalls & political traps

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

ST. LOUIS––Legal otter trapping
for pelts commenced in Missouri
for the first time since 1937 on
November 20, 11 days after Judge
Robert H. Dierker of the 22nd Circuit
Court rejected the argument of state residents
Cecily Westerman, Ed Leonard,
Stan Slaughter, and the Animal Legal
Defense Fund that the otter season was
improperly authorized.
Dierker agreed that as
Missouri taxpayers, the three named
plaintiffs had standing to challenge the
regulation that established an otter season.
He also rejected Missouri
Conservation Commission arguments
that trapping is required to control the
otter population and prevent property
damage. “The record seems clear,”
Dierker wrote, “that the Commission
concluded in 1995 that there were
enough otters to accommodate commercial
trapping interests, and other reasons
to have a trapping season were at
best ancillary factors.”

101 sealers hit for killing pups

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland––Canadian Sealers
Association president Mark Small, of Wild Cove, Newfoundland,
was among 101 individuals indicted on November 21 for
allegedly illegally killing and selling the remains of hooded seal
pups, called bluecoats, during the heavily subsidized resumption
last spring of the annual offshore hunt that was an early
focus of the animal rights movement.
Small was charged with selling 152 bluecoats to the
Carino Co. Ltd. in three batches last March.
Apparently beginning on April 4, several weeks
before the killing ended, the Canadian Department of Fisheries
and Oceans repeatedly raided the Carino seal carcass processing
plant in South Dildo, Newfoundland, seizing more than 25,000
pelts––nearly 10% of the official kill quota of 250,000 harp
seals and 8,000 hooded seals. The slaughter was briefly interrupted
when the DFO discovered that the sealers had actually
killed more than 16,000 hooded seals, but resumed with the goahead
to kill another 60,000 harp seals.

Herpetology

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Norris Simpson, 88, of Charles County, Maryland, was
killed on October 22 along with all 16 of his grandson’s pets when an iguana
upset a heat lamp, starting a housefire. The fire was at least the fourth
in Maryland caused by an iguana upsetting a heat lamp since 1993. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that iguanas are not suitable
pets in classrooms or homes with small children for a different reason:
about 90% carry salmonella, which tends to hit children harder and faster
than adults, and can kill or cause permanent disability even before parents
recognize that the children are seriously ill. The U.S. pet industry imported
under 28,000 iguanas per year a decade ago, but brought in 800,000 in
1993, and total sales, including of iguanas bred in the U.S., now exceed a
million a year.
A colony of about 130 Blanding’s turtles has survived in the
marshes of Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia, since the ocean receded
5,000 years ago to isolate them from the main populations now located
in Maine and Ontario, says Blanding’s Turtle Recovery Project chief Tom
Herman, of Acadia University. Cold weather, predation, and nest flooding
have inhibited their reproduction, but since they live up to 70 years,
Herman hopes to have time to insure that some young do survive.

CHILDREN & ANIMALS

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

The school board in Prairie City, Oregon, on
November 20 ordered the district middle school to halt a planned
three-week animal rights forum after just one week, because the
forum, intended as an exercise in developing critical thinking,
outraged local hunters, meat-eaters, ranchers, and timber workers,
who objected to anyone even raising the possibility that their
occupations and/or proclivities might be ethically questionable.
Vegetarian teacher Rick Bogle, whose policy on putting bugs
outside alive instead of killing them brought an earlier furor, had
invited guest speakers including Portland activist Nancy Perry, a
representative of the local humane society, an animal husbandry
expert from the Oregon State Extension Service, and a pro-hunting
representative of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
His discussion guide asked students to separate fact from opinion
in articles on animal-related topics, and to answer questions on a
scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” about
such statements as “I would rather shoot an elk than just watch it
in the wild,” “Whales are more important than mice,” and “A
well-balanced diet must include red meat.”

TURNING CAT-ASTROPHE TO CASH FLOW

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Your organization is in desperate
trouble. Inspired by the success
elsewhere of low-cost neutering,
neuter/release, or no-kill high-volume
adoption, you started such a program––
but now, just a year to three years later,
instead of seeing a dramatic drop in
your workload, you’re asked to handle
more cats than you ever imagined could
exist. Your volunteers are exhausted
and demoralized. You’re broke.
It’s time for a serious pep
talk. Your problems are––ironically––a
predictable indication of your success
and bright prospects. You are well
embarked on a journey that enough others
have made that the mileposts are
marked. Believe it or not, you are at
the breaking edge of perhaps the most
rapidly successful grassroots transformation
of public policy in global history,
and it’s not surprising that you
sometimes feel as if you’ve stepped
through the Looking Glass into chaos.

Awards & honors

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Elizabeth Lewyt, who with her
late husband Alex founded the North
Shore Animal League in 1954 and still
works at the shelter nearly every day, in
October received the American Humane
Association’s Lifetime Achievement
Award. Also honored by AHA were
Darrin Buswell, veterinary technician at
Wayside Waifs Animal Shelter in Kansas
City, Missouri, who rescued many shelter
animals from a middle-of-the-night fire;
Friskies Pet Care public relations manager
Barbara Royer, for service to the
AHA ideals; KOTV-Oklahoma reporters
Michelle Lowry and Catherine Curtin,

Real-life problem solving

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Problem:
The neighborhood surrounding
the Animal Protective League and
Cuyahoga County pound in Cleveland is
so overrun with stray cats that on
November 10 the situation made the
cover of the ‘B’ section of the Sunday
Plain Dealer. “Neighbors say unwanted
cats and dogs are regularly dumped in the
neighborhood because evicting pet owners
believe the nearby APL will take
them in. And many pet dumpers want to
avoid going into the APL, they say,
because the organization asks for donations––$15
a cat, $3 a kitten––to cover
the costs of taking them in,” wrote Plain
Dealer reporter Michael O’Malley.
Confirmed APL head Jeff Kocian, “We
find boxes of kittens. They drop them off
at the corner, they leave them off in the
driveway. As fast as we pick them up,
the next night somebody throws another
box out. We find injured cats in boxes.”

Animal control & rescue

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

Expanding from eight students to 31 in
just three years, the Burlington County
(Pennsylvania) veterinary technician program has
added an internship at the Burlington County animal
shelter. The internship gives aspiring shelter
vet techs experience with hard-to-handle, starved
and abused animals. Formerly, current intern
Kathleen Westphal recently told Louise Harbach
of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “All the animals
we’d see were well-behaved and had been well
cared for. The worst we’d see were some pets who
hadn’t been groomed properly.”
The Vernon A. Tait All-Animal
Adoption Preservation and Rescue Fund Inc.
plans to hit the road soon in Connecticut with a 24-
foot mobile neutering clinic, staffed by John A.
Caltabiano, DVM, and funded by the $500,000
first installment of an unexplained bequest from
Tait, who drowned in a 1992 accident at age 71.

WHO GETS THE MONEY?

December 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1996:

This is our seventh annual report on the budgets,
assets, and salaries paid by the major national animal-related
charities, listed on the following pages, together with a handful
of local activist groups and humane societies, whose data
we offer for comparative purposes. This is the fifth of these
reports published in ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Each charity is identified in the second column by
apparent focus: A stands for advocacy, C for conservation of
habitat via acquisition, E for education, H for support of hunting
(either for “wildlife management” or recreation), L for litigation,
P for publication, R for animal rights, S for shelter
and sanctuary maintenance, V for focus on vivisection issues,
and W for animal welfare. The R and W designations are used
only if a group makes a point of being one or the other.
While many groups are involved in multiple activities,
space limits us to providing only four identifying letters.

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