Letters [April 1993]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Edison was a genius
I just received your letter
announcing your newspaper. As I
started reeading what you had to say,
I felt as if you knew my husband and
me personally. We are longtime
vegetarian/animal advocates who
write letters, take in strays, spay
and neuter, help the sick and
injured, and do what we can in gen-
eral to fight cruelty.

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Editorial: Listen, talk, dicker

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Members of the ardently pro-vivisection Foundation for Biomedical Research got
quite a shock with their January/February 1993 newsletter. On pages four through six, the
editors extensively, respectfully, and congenially interviewed Henry Spira, the most effec-
tive antivivisection activist of our time and perhaps of any time. He’s not a household word,
because he doesn’t do big direct mailings touting his accomplishments, nor does he head a
multimillion dollar organization, or go on television regularly to shout about victories he
barely acknowledges, because he believes gloating is counterproductive. Still, working
virtually alone, with a miniscule budget, Spira has accomplished more over the past 17
years toward getting animals out of laboratories than any of the national animal rights
groups and antivivisection societies; perhaps more than all of them put together. The bio-
medical research establishment certainly knows his name, and significantly, some of the
most influential people in that establishment thought it was high time to open public,
friendly dialog––even if they got bashed for it by colleagues conditioned to view animal
use/protection as a war zone, a Manichean struggle between good and evil in which one
side or the other must ultimately be annihilated.

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American SPCA drops New York pound contract: “Killing animals shouldn’t be the business of a humane society.”

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

NEW YORK, N.Y.––The Amer-
ican SPCA announced March 25 that it will
cease providing animal control service to
New York City after September 1994, and
will begin turning operations over to the city
as promptly as possible.
Losing money on animal control
work, the ASPCA has threatened to pull out
many times since 1977, most recently in
1991. Each time, New York offered conces-
sions and the work of picking up and eutha-
nizing strays went on as usual. In 1991, for
instance, the ASPCA returned responsibility
for selling dog licenses to the city––an intend-
ed fundraising function that had become a
loser––and accepted a bigger direct subsidy
instead.

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Women’s health vs. horses: ESTROGEN BOOM BRINGS BREEDING FOR SLAUGHTER

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

BRANDON, Manitoba––Rocketing demand for estrogen replacement drugs
is expected to double the number of farms producing pregnant mare’s urine (PMU) from
300 in 1991 to 600 by the end of 1993. Already, 485 farms are collecting urine from an
estimated 75,000 catheterized mares. Because the mares must be pregnant to produce a
commercially viable amount of estrogen, they will give birth to as many as 90,000 foals
this year––most of them in May. The equine gestation cycle normally runs from June to

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Wildlife in no-man’s-land: Are war zones safer than refuges?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

When the Persian Gulf War erupted in February
1991, ecologists shuddered at the probable fate of the wet-
lands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The region, where Kuwait meets Iraq, is among the world’s
busiest corridors for migratory birds––both songbirds and
waterfowl, coming and going from Europe, Africa, Asia,
and the Indian subcontinent. The bird populations were
already in trouble. Intensive sheep-grazing had desertified
thousands of acres of vegetation. Oil-rich Kuwaiti
thrillseekers compounded the damage with reckless use of
offroad vehicles and contests to see who could shotgun the
most birds, without regard for either endangered species or
bag limits.

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CHILDREN & ANIMALS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

$40 million in public funds are
used to teach “hunter education” to
700,000 U.S. school children a year. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts up $32.2
million, while the balance comes from the
states; all 50 states participate. “They’re
teaching hunting as ‘gun safety,’ ‘physical
education,’ and any other excuse they cna
think of,” says Katherine Trimnal of
Columbia, South Carolina, who has been
investigating the program for some time.
This program is completely separate from
Project Wild, which also promotes a pro-
hunting message at cost of $23 million a
year.

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Diet & Health

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

Responding to public panic over
tainted meat, President Bill Clinton on
February 11 ordered the USDA to hire 160
more meat inspectors, while Agriculture
Secretary Mike Espy promised a complete
overhaul of the meat inspection
system––which the Ronald Reagan and
George Bush presidential administrations
had streamlined by reducing the number of
inspectors. The panic began in December
when a six-year-old girl in San Diego
County, California, died after eating a
tainted Jack-in-the-Box hamburger, and
escalated January 22, when a two-year-old
boy died in Seattle, Washington, from the
same cause. More than 400 people who ate
Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers developed E.

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Where horse rescue gets hot by Sharon Cregier

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

AMMAN, Jordan –– The sound of a stick on
hide summons Chris Larter to her second-story balcony.
“It’s the donkey-beaters,” Larter explains. Below, a
mare, foal at foot, plows a stony verge. Sheep and shep-
herd dodge four-lane traffic to graze the edges of con-
struction projects. And of course there are boys driving
donkeys. “Last time they were trying to cut a donkey’s
ears off,” Larter continues. She recalls braving a hail of
stones to take photos, locating the parents of the donkey-
boys, and pleading for the donkey’s welfare.
Today, courage requires police reinforcement.
Obtaining backup, Larter partially unloads a staggering
donkey, obliging the donkey-boys to make multiple trips
to finish moving their cargo.
Larter is field supervisor, publicity officer, and
photographer for the Jordanian Society for the Protection
of Animals, sponsored by the 70-year-old Society for the
Protection of Animals in North Africa. Based in England,
SPANA is among the last and most popular remnants of
the British occupation of Jordan, 1920-1946.

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Gene and Diana Chontos: Helping the tough and stubborn

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

“Talking to someone about myself beyond my life
with burros seems abstract to me now,” Diana Chontos told
ANIMAL PEOPLE, “since my life has become burros and
their continued survival. I am a daughter of the pioneers of
Washington, and continue to live by many of the same val-
ues as my great-grandparents, except that during my child-
hood I found the practice of slaughtering and eating animals
abhorent. As soon as I possibly could, I became a vegetari-
an.” Her first animal rescue may have been at age 13,
when, “I rode my horse, galloping bareback, between a
gun-happy bounty hunter and a beautiful coyote I had been
watching as she caught and ate grasshoppers.”
Gene Chontos, Diana’s partner of 18 years, came
to animal rescue later in life, but no less dramatically. “I
was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1937,” he
remembers, “son to Hungarian immigrants. My father and
all his kin served the Bethlehem Steel Company as cheap
labor and resided in lower class poverty, replete with ethnic
prejudice, hatred, and violence. I escaped at age 17
through a four-year enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps.”

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