Author: juanitoG

Sierra Club national board takes stand against body-grip trapping

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Sierra Club national board takes stand against body-grip trapping

SAN FRANCISCO–The Sierra Club national board of directors on May 19, 2012 adopted a new “Policy on Trapping of Wildlife” which may be the 110-year-old organization’s strongest statement yet against any form of hunting.
States the policy,  “Use of body-gripping devices–including leghold traps,  snares,  and Conibear traps–are  indiscriminate to age,  sex and species and typically result in injury, pain,  suffering,  and/or death of target and
non-target animals.  The Sierra Club considers body-gripping,  restraining and killing traps and snares to be ecologically indiscriminate and unnecessarily inhumane and therefore opposes their use.  The Sierra Club promotes and supports humane,  practical and effective methods of mitigating human-wildlife conflicts and actively discourages the use of inhumane and indiscriminate methods.  The Sierra Club recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples under federal laws and treaties granting rights of self-determination and rights to pursue subsistence taking of wildlife.” Read more

Trapper shoots horse as bait to trap last breeding wolf from Toklat pack

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Trapper shoots horse as bait to trap last breeding wolf from Toklat pack

DENALI NATIONAL PARK,  Alaska–Hunting guide Coke Wallace, of Healy,  has acknowledged walking an aged horse to the Stampede Trail near the northern boundary of Denali National Park,  shooting the horse,  and setting snares around the carcass.  The snares killed the last known breeding female wolf from the Grant Creek pack–the pack that roams the area made famous by the 1996 book by Jon Krakauer and 2007 feature film Into the Wild,  about the 1992 death nearby of 22-year-old would-be survivalist Christopher McCandless.
The Grant Creek pack,  also called the Toklat West pack,  is among the three wolf packs most often viewed and photographed by Denali visitors.  The pack has been continuously studied since 1939, first by Adolf Murie until his death in 1974,  then by Gordon Haber from 1966 until his death while spotting wolves from a light plane in 2009, and currently by Anchorage conservation biologist and former University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner. Read more

USDA-APHIS to regulate online pet breeders

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

USDA-APHIS to regulate online pet breeders

    RIVERDALE,  Maryland–The USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service on May 16,  2012 proposed “to revise the definition of retail pet store and related regulations to bring more pet animals sold at retail under the protection of the Animal Welfare Act.  Specifically,”  USDA-APHIS stated in the Federal Register,  “we would narrow the  definition of retail pet store so that it means a place of business or residence that each buyer physically enters in order to personally observe the animals available for sale prior to purchase and/or to take custody of the animals after purchase,  and where only certain animals are sold or offered for sale, at retail, for use as pets. Retail pet stores are not required to be licensed and inspected under the AWA.”  Publication of the proposed change opened a 30-day comment period. Read more

Paul Watson arrested on Costa Rican warrant

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Paul Watson arrested on Costa Rican warrant

 FRANKFURT–Season five of the Animal Planet series Whale Wars,  following the exploits of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in confrontation with Japanese whalers off Antarctica, debuted on June 1,  2012 with Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson awaiting an extradition hearing in Germany.  Watson was arrested in Frankfurt on May 13,  2012 on a 10-year-old Costa Rican warrant as he tried to board a flight to attend the Cannes film festival in France. Read more

LETTERS [June 2012]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Letters

“Proposal for an Accord” & cost/benefit

The April 2012 edition of Animal People included an article entitled “Proposal for an Accord between Animal Advocates and the Biomedical Research Community.”  A number of responses to the proposal were published in the May 2012 edition.
Based on my experience with the science and ethics of animal research,  described in my 1998 book Human Models of Animal Psychology,  I support much of and welcome the “Proposal for an Accord.”
However,  there is one issue that I would like to examine and underscore because it has enormous implications,  and the document is arguably inconsistent in addressing it.  Most contemporary legislation and regulation of animal
research uses the language of cost/benefit.  Although at one point the “Proposal for an Accord” accepts that limited frame,  stating that “the use of animals is approved only when any harm done to the animals is greatly outweighed by the anticipated benefits of their use,”  at another it states,  “Compulsory guidelines would specify the types of experiments and levels of pain that would not be permissible regardless of potential benefit (emphasis added).” Read more

EDITORIAL: Seeking an end to animal sacrifice

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Editorial feature: Seeking an end to animal sacrifice

Among all the many uses and abuses of animals which persist for a cultural pretext, animal sacrifice is perhaps the most widely practiced,  in a variety of different forms and contexts,  and the most difficult to address in an effective manner,  leading to fewer animals being killed–or ideally,  none.

The difficulty of stopping animal sacrifice occurs in part because the perspective of people who practice animal sacrifice tends to be almost incomprehensible to those who oppose it.  Opponents are sometimes many generations and often oceans away from any ancestors who ever sacrificed animals.  Killing animals to be eaten at traditional holidays remains as ubiquitous as the slaughter of turkeys at the U.S. Thanksgiving.  Yet,  from the perspective of people who believe in a just and merciful god, which includes about 85% of humanity according to recent global surveys of religious belief,  the theology of practitioners of overt animal sacrifice might seem to many to be blasphemous.

What sort of god would demand that animals be killed?  Even the priests of the Spanish Inquisition,  who accompanied the conquistadors to the New World and “converted” Native Americans to Catholicism through genocidal use of sword and flame,  theorized that animal and human sacrifices were so self-evidently evil that the gods of the practitioners of such sacrifices must be diabolical.

From a secular perspective,  animal sacrifice is relatively easily recognized as a set of rituals which permit the practitioners to kill and eat animals without guilt–whereas,  in other societies,  killing and eating animals is rationalized by arguments which draw exaggerated distinctions between the sentience of animals and humans.    Read more

BOOKS: One Dog at a Time: Saving the Strays of Afghanistan

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

One Dog at a Time:  Saving the Strays of Afghanistan  by Pen Farthing /  Thomas Dunne Books (175 Fifth Ave.,  New York,  NY 10010),  2012. 308 pages,  paperback.  $14.99.

British Army sergeant Pen Farthing,  now retired,  first deployed to Afghanistan in 2006. He had no idea what awaited him, beyond fighting the Taliban.  He found the living conditions in Afghanistan shocking:  “There was no electricity and sanitation was non-existent.” Read more

Obituaries

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Obituaries

“I come to bury Caesar,  not to praise him.  The evil that men do 
lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones.” 
–William Shakespeare

Judy Dynnick,  61,  of Rives Junction,  Michigan,  died on May 22,  2012 after a struggle of more than a year and a half against
liver cancer and other health problems.  Long involved in animal, environmental,  and feminist advocacy,  Dynnick in 2004 formed Jackson County Volunteers Against Pound Seizure to continue a struggle against the sale of shelter animals for laboratory use that was begun in 1960 by Jackson Animal Protective Association founder Dorothy Reynolds.  Reynolds died in 2001 at age 86.   The major buyer of the shelter animals for resale to labs,  Fred Hodgins of Hodgins Kennels in Howell,  Michigan, had won libel verdicts against two activists who attacked his business in letters to newspapers,  and won a reduction of a USDA penalty of $13,500 for alleged violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act to just $325,  plus reimbursement of attorneys’ fees of $155,385.  But Dynnick persisted.  On June 18, 2006 the Jackson County commissioners voted 10-1 to stop selling animals to Hodgins.  Dynnik credited her predecessors for their groundwork,  thanked attorney Allie Phillips and psychologist Bob Walsh for legal and scientific support,  and moved on to her next campaign,  the County Animal Shelter Wall Fund.  In November 2010 Dynnick thanked “everyone who contributed to the fund to get our Jackson County animal shelter walls completed,”  in place of the
previous chain link fencing.  “Even the isolation area is now completed,”  Dynnick wrote.  “This will help to keep employees safe
and greatly reduce disease transmission.  It is also much quieter at the shelter,  because the dogs can’t see each other.”  Wrote Aggie Monfette of Royal Oak,  Michigan,  “I was never fortunate enough to meet Judy face to face, but we became very close friends through the phone and e-mail. The animals have lost one of their best champions and I have lost a wonderful friend.” Read more

Pepsi drops the "Big Lick"

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  June 2012:

Pepsi drops the “Big Lick”

SHELBYVILLE,  Tennessee-– Walking horse trainers are still trying to force horses into taking the “big lick,”  the equine equivalent of a goosestep,  but Pepsi will no longer be paying the Walking Horse National Celebration to associate the “big lick” with Pepsi beverages.

A sponsor of the Walking Horse National Celebration since 2010,  Pepsi had paid $25,000 per year for exclusive rights to sell an estimated $50,000 worth of soft drinks during the event.  Pepsi dropped support of the prestigious “big lick” show on May 17,  2012, less than 24 hours after the ABC News programs Night-line  and Good Morning America aired videotape obtained by an undercover investigator for the Humane Society of the U.S. showing extensive abuse of horses at Whittier Stables in Collierville.   Read more

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