The wild west

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

HERRO OF THE HOUR
LAS VEGAS––Believing the nonprofit Animal
Foundation International could adopt out more animals and euthanize
fewer than the for-profit Dewey Animal Control Center, AFI
president Mary Herro bid successfully on the Las Vegas animal
control sheltering contract, taking over the job in December.
After five months, AFI had received 3,409 dogs and
cats from animal control, only five fewer than Dewey, and had
returned 652 animals to their owners, 29 more than Dewey.
Adoptions were right at Herro’s target pace of 500 a month:
2,534, up from 686 under Dewey, and the euthanasia percentage
was down to 31%, from 46%, already low compared to the
national norm of about 65%, reflecting the impact of the 75,000
discount neutering surgeries done by AFI since 1989. But
euthanasias were also up, from 1,871 under Dewey to 2,041 under
AFI, because public turn-ins rose from 487 under Dewey to 1,463
under AFI, and owner surrenders jumped from 179 to 1,650.

GOP still gunning for ESA

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Endangered species protection
programs, already crippled by budget cuts, would
be deeply cut again under the proposed Interior Department
budget for fiscal 1997 approved on June 5 by the House
Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. Total Interior
spending would be $12 billion, down $500 million from
fiscal 1996, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service budget
was cut by $12.5 million, including a 39% cut in the
budget for researching endangered species listing proposals,
and a 50% cut in U.S. support of the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species.
The proposed cuts were in line with a revised
strategy for dismantling the Endangered Species Act reportedly
favored by Louisiana Representative Billy Tauzin,
who struck as U.S. Fish and Wildlife chief Mollie Beattie,
49, fell ill again with brain cancer. Undergoing her first
surgery in December, Beattie returned to work in April
after a second operation, but three weeks into May was
forced to go back on sick leave, and resigned on June 5,
leaving administration of the ESA to deputy director John
Rogers––who inherited multiple political headaches.

Meeting to beat bush meat

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

BERTOUA, Cameroon–– In
March ANIMAL PEOPLE shocked the
animal protection community with
Kenyan wildlife photographer Karl
Amman’s expose essay “The Great Ape
Project and the bush meat trade,”
describing the “overwhelming evidence
that the bush meat trade is one of the
biggest, if not the biggest, primate conservation
issues facing Africa today.”
Amman frustratedly described
how major conservation and animal protection
groups ignored his findings
through six years of field research. A
two-year association with the World
Society for the Protection of Animals
brought some exposure, but no substantive
action from other players.
“Is there any time left for theoretical
debates on great ape rights?”
Amman concluded. “Would the chimpanzees,
bonobos, and gorillas of Africa
not benefit more if the combined talent,
energy, and influence of the scientific
community now engaged in the Great
Ape Project took some time to devise a
strategy on how to keep these animals
out of the cooking pot?”

CHINESE PRIMATES

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

Amid ongoing controversy
over how and whether to protect
the commercially valuable old
growth forest in Deqing county,
Yunnan province, home of about
200 of the last wild snubnosed golden
monkeys, China has at least two
other primate conservaton problems.
One is the recent rediscovery
of a mouse-sized marmoset in the
Wuyi mountains of eastern Fujian
province. The seven-ounce marmoset
was a prestigious pet circa
800 years ago, but was long
believed extinct. The other problem
is the rapid decline of black
gibbons, the most primitive of the
great apes, on Hainan island. Only
15 to 20 black gibbons remain,
down from a reported 2,000 some
40 years ago.

WOOFS AND GROWLS

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

Though ANIMAL PEOPLE
heard frequent complaints that our former
World Wide Web site, maintained by the
Animal Rights Resource Network, was
incomplete and hard to find, it reportedly
drew 183,000 “hits” in five months, amounting
to as many as 1,220 readers a day.
Consultant Patrice Greanville is now at work
on a new site to be posted under our own
name soon, which will include a complete
archive of back issues plus prompt additon of
current issues. The ARRN site proved unviable
for both technical and philosophical reasons,
the latter resulting from a conflict of
the ideological mandate of ARRN with the
ANIMAL PEOPLE journalistic ethic.

Activists & Organizations

Distortion

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

NEW YORK––AIDS patient Jeff
Getty, who received an experimental baboon
bone marrow transplant in December, decried
“the tactics of distortion” in a June 13 Wall
Street Journal op-ed essay, which is apparently
to be offered to other newspapers, but evidently
was never fact-checked.
According to Getty, “AIDS
researchers at Stanford University were forced
to build labs and complexes underground following
attacks on university property carried out
in the name of animal rights.”

ZOONOTIC DISEASE

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

Ebola
The Philippines on June 10 lifted
a ban on monkey exports in effect since
March 21, when Ebola virus was discovered
in two out of 50 crab-eating macaques sold to
the South Texas Primate Center in Alice,
Texas, as one shipment of a lot of 100, by the
Philippine firm Ferlite Scientific Research Inc.
One macaque died of the disease, another was
definitely infected, and the remainder were
killed to keep the lethal virus from spreading.
Of the five Philippine monkey breeding companies,
only Ferlite remains under quarantine.
Ferlite, exporter of about 400 of the 2,500
monkeys the Philippines sells each year, was
also the source of the only previous Ebola outbreak
in the U.S., which was contained at a
primate center in Reston, Virgina, in 1989.

BSE link to humans

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

PARIS––French government neurologists
Corinne Lasmezas and Jean-Philippe
Deslys on June 13 announced they had discovered
the first experimental evidence of a
link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease,
and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a similar
brain-destroying ailment that until recently
was considered a rare condition of age. Ten
cases of a new form of BSE occurring in
younger people caused researchers to warn
the European Union and British Parliament in
March that BSE might be the cause of CJD,
touching off a global boycott of British beef.
The French team in 1991 injected
material from the crushed brains of cattle who
died from BSE into the brains of two adult
macaques and a newborn macaque, all of
whom developed identical brain lesions in
1994 and later died.

Law & order

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Law-and-order advocate Senator
Charles Williams (R-Fla) on October 13, 1995 hosted the Second Annual
Predators Dove Hunt in Dixie County, Florida. Eighty-eight hunters
reportedly slew more than 440 doves who were drawn to fields and nearby
roads littered with corn, millet, wheat, and milo. Three hours into the
event, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cited all participants.
Thundered House Resources Committee chair Don Young (RAlaska),
as he opened a May 16 hearing into the incident, “While I do not
know whether this was a good or bad bust, a number of those cited strongly
believe that the only thing baited, trapped, tried, and fined on that hot
October day were law-abiding citizens. Among those cited were three
county sheriffs, a regional commissioner of the Florida Game and
Freshwater Fish Commission, mayors, clerks of the court, Florida prison
officials, and city and county commissioners.”

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