A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Royal SPCA of Britain, world’s wealthiest humane society, will lay off staff
LONDON–-Struggling with a revenue decline of about £4 million per year since 2008, and an
operating deficit of £7.3 million in 2011, the Royal SPCA of Britain–the wealthiest humane society in the world–is following three years of downsizing with a new round of budget cuts and staff reductions. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Cats Behaving Badly by Celia Haddon
Thomas Dunne Books (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2012.
239 pages, hardcover. $23.99.
Originally published in Britain in 2010, Cats Behaving Badly, by longtime Daily Telegraph pets columnist Celia Haddon, nails cat behavior better than any other book I have reviewed for Animal People. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Cinemazoo: my urban safari by Gary Oliver with Wendy Bancroft
Granville Island Publishing (212 -1656 Duranleau,
Granville Island, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6H
3S4), 2011. 162 pages, paperback. $24.95.
“I always like it when the situation calls for a bit of drama, of pizzazz–when I have to assume some kind of persona, put on a bit of theatre,” writes Urban Safari Rescue founder Gary Oliver in possibly the most personally revealing passage of Cinemazoo: my urban safari. “Which is interesting,” Oliver continues, “because when you meet me, I’m not at all theatrical. I wear a big black cowboy hat, but that’s because I’m bald and I like cowboy hats.” Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Carbofuran & Wildlife Poisoning: Global Perspectives and Forensic Approaches
Edited by Ngaio Richards * John Wiley & Sons
(111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030), 2011.
304 pages,hardcover. $49.95.
Thirty-nine experts in various related disciplines contribute chapters to Carbofuran & Wildlife Poisoning: Global Perspectives and Forensic Approaches. The contributors might outnumber the readers who will ever peruse this first book-length examination of carbofuran and wildlife mortality from cover to cover.
Published nearly 50 years after Rachel Carson in Silent Spring sparked enduring concern about the effects of pesticides on wildlife, Carbofuran & Wildlife Poisoning might also be read as an exposé, but almost everyone who encounters it will already be aware that carbofuran kills wildlife in many different ways–and probably kills more birds and mammals than any other pesticide still in use. The primary purpose of Carbofuran & Wildlife Poisoning is simply to pull together within one set of covers all of the information that people encountering possible effects of carbofuran may need to know, whether to diagnose the problem or to organize a litigative or political response. Read more
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
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2012:
Death at SeaWorld by David Kirby
St. Martin’s Press (c/o MacMillan (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY
10010), 2012. 480 pages, hard cover. $26.99.
Marine mammal trainer Dawn Brancheau, age 40, was on February 24, 2010 killed at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, toward the end of a lunchtime show with Tilikum, known to most of the world these days as an orca, but still called a “killer whale” by SeaWorld.
Tilikum “had Dawn Brancheau in his mouth,” writes Death at Seaworld author David Kirby. “The orca would not release his trophy. Ten minutes later, workers pried the trainer’s lifeless body from the whale’s mouth. How could this happen despite corporate training and safety measures?” Read more
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
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
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