COURT CALENDAR

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

Michigan activists Patricia Marie Dodson, 48, of
Royal Oak, Hilma Marie Ruby, 59, of Rochester, Robyn
Rachel Weiner, 25, of Farmington Hills, Gary Howard
Yourofsky, 26, of West Bloomfield Township, and Alan
Anthony Hoffman, 47, of Roseville all were charged with
breaking and entering and mischief on April 2, two days after
the Ontario Provincial Police arrested them during their alleged
second attempt to release mink from the Ebert Fur Farm in
Blenheim, Ontario. About 300 of 2,400 resident mink were let
out of their cages the first time, and 1,500 the second, of whom
1,100 were recaptured, 300 died of exposure or were roadkilled,
and 100 were unaccounted for. Yourofsky and Dodson were
reportedly regional PETA contacts. The five are represented by
civil rights and animal rights lawyer Clayton Ruby, one of the
most prominent and popular figures in Canadian law, not related
to Hilma Ruby.

NORWAY SEEKS WATSON EXTRADITION

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

AMSTERDAM––Held in a Dutch maximum security
prison since April 2 on an Interpol warrant from Norway,
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson will
go to court May 26 in hopes of avoiding extradition on threeyear-old
charges of allegedly ramming the Norwegian coast
guard vessel Andennes, sending a false distress signal, and
trespassing in Norwegian waters, in addition to the charge of
being an accessory to the dockside scuttling of the whaling ship
Nybraena in 1992 for which he was first detained.
The additional charges were laid on April 18. The
District of Haarlem Court had on April 3 ordered that Watson
be kept on the Interpol warrant for 20 days to allow Norway
time to prepare an extradition case. That warrant, however,
asked only that Watson be sent to Norway to serve a 120-day
jail sentence he and colleague Lisa Distefano received in absen –
tia in May 1994 for their purported roles in the Nybraena sink –
ing. The vessel was later refloated and is still killing whales.
“Norway now claims we personally sank the vessel,”
Distefano told ANIMAL PEOPLE from the Sea Shepherd
offices in Venice, California, “but the Lofoten court record
notes, ‘The two were not in the country and could not take
direct part.’” Watson and Distefano had offered to go to
Norway for the trial if Norway would guarantee their safety and
agree to a change of venue from the Lofoten Islands, the hub of
the Norwegian whaling industry, which Distefano described as
“the source of numerous death threats against us.”

Editorial: Potty-and-other environmentalism

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

The 28th annual Earth Day celebration came and went, 10 days after the close of
the 14th Summit for the Animals, a convocation of animal rights organization heads that
perennially does nothing. Chances are, most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers were as unaffected
by either as the organizers were by one another, despite the stated intent of Earth
Day organizers to spotlight the Endangered Species Act, and of the Summit organizers to
court the thoroughly indifferent environmental movement, whatever is left of it.
Better potty training might have prevented this sibling schism, along with air and
water pollution, before the popular concept of the environmental cause came to be eliminating
waste. In a time when “environmentalist” is misleadingly synonymous to much of
the public with Big Brother, as much due to onerously mandated recycling as to wise-use
wiseguy machinations, and when some leading “environmental” organizations such as The
Nature Conservancy as aggressively extirpate nature and wildlife as any commercial developer,
it is worthwhile to recall that the first Earth Day, which the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
helped publicize as a cub reporter in Berkeley, California, offered the notion of an
ecology-centered approach to living as a direct challenge to the environmental establishment
as much as to Washington D.C. and Wall Street.

Former flyer saved sea turtles

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND,
Texas––Ila Loetscher, 92, has announced
her retirement after 35 years of patrolling
beaches in Texas and Mexico, machete in
hand, to roust sea turtle egg poachers, rehabilitating
sick and injured sea turtles, and
dressing as a turtle to lecture school children
at twice-weekly “Turtle Talks.”
Sea Turtle Inc., the nonprofit organization
Loetscher founded in 1977, continues,
planning to relocate from her beachfront
home to a state-of-the-art conservation center
as soon as funds can be raised to build it.
Loetscher with Amelia Earhart and
others in 1929 cofounded the Ninety-Nines,
an all-female flying club whose members
achieved countless records and firsts, another
of which eluded Earhart when she vanished
over the Pacific in her 1937 attempt to
become the first woman to fly around the
globe. Loetscher found her more enduring
avocation, preventing the ocean disappearance
of some of the earth’s most ancient large
species, after moving to the Texas coast in
1958 and finding a hurt turtle on the beach.

Saving right whales and lobsters too

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

Infuriating New England lobster fishers with recent
court victories that restrict their methods on behalf of endangered
northern right whales, Richard “Mad Max” Strahan
may save the lobsters too.
A vegetarian Buddhist tai chi practitioner, Strahan
has “no permanent address or telephone,” according to
Portland Press Herald staff writer Edie Lau, but does have
an e-mail address and self-taught expertise in marine biology
and law. As “a confrontational street person,” again in
Lau’s words, Straham last September forced the National
Marine Fisheries Service to produce rules published April 4
that as outlined in a NMFS summary, “restrict the federal
portion of Cape Cod Bay right whale critical habitat to certain
lobster gear types” from April 1 until May 15, and
“close the entire Great South Channel right whale critical
habitat to lobster pot fishing from April 1 to June 30.”

Clear NMFS of buyers and sellers

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

by Carroll Cox, special investigator, Friends of Animals

Entrusted with the duty of protecting marine life in
U.S. waters, the National Marine Fisheries Service is at the
same time a division of the Department of Commerce, mandated
to promote trade. This builds into NMFS a conflict of interest
similar to that within the USDA between the mandate to
promote agriculture, the first function of the agency, and the
duty to safeguard public health and animal welfare.
The much better known conflict of interest within the
USDA was subject of a 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose
series by the Kansas City Star, and of an expose by Marian
Burros, food editor of The New York Times, as recently as
April 9 of this year. Between exposes, at least 45,500
Americans died of food-borne diseases, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the clout of
the meat, egg, and milk industries within the USDA,
Congress, and the White House is such that nothing has been
done to separate the functions of promotion and inspection.

A GRAVE SITUATION FOR CHS

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

The Connecticut Humane Society in
late March announced it will replace the 50-
year-old animal health clinic at its Newington
headquarters with a new $1 million facility to be
built on the site of the CHS pet cemetery, also
about 50 years old, not used in 10 years according
to CHS president Richard Johnston, and
occupying the only buildable space left on the
CHS grounds. About 3,000 pet graves will be
moved to two new plots. Remains of animals
whose owners can’t be located––at least a third
of the total, Johnston indicated––may be placed
in a mass grave. The CHS filing of IRS Form
990 for fiscal year 1995 reportedly showed
assets of $20.7 million, income of $3.2 million,
program costs of $2 million, management costs
of $534,346, and two salaries over $50,000:
Johnston, at $87,834, and executive director
Gus Helberg, $56,276.

Animal control & rescue

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

The Commiossioners Court of Harris
County, Texas, voted 3-2 on March 31 to stop
selling animals to biomedical research, on a
motion by Commissioner Steve Radack.
Commissioner Jerry Eversole and County
Judge Robert Eckels also favored the resolution,
ending a 25-year-plus history of rejecting such
motions, as offered from the floor, 5-0.
Euthanizing as many as 80,000 animals a year,
Harris County sold 791 animals in 1996, less than
half as many as it 1994, earning $32,000.
The trustees of the Bernice Barbour
Foundation, a major funder of humane society
special projects, voted in March “to fund only
programs of organizations which spay/neuter animals
before adopting them out. We feel it is most
important that animals being recycled by shelters
and humane groups,” sccretary/treasurer E v e
Lloyd Thompson told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “or
being shipped into eastern humane societies to fill
requests by the public for puppies for adoption,
do not have the opportunity to reproduce.”

Ed Sayres leaves the American Humane Association

May 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.––Ed Sayres, director of the American
Humane Association’s animal protection division since August 1995,
“resigned his position to seek new opportunities,” AHA executive director
Robert F.X. Hart announced in an April 16 prepared statement.
Personally serving as interim director of the animal protection division,
Hart got an immediate baptism by flood, coordinating the AHA relief
effort in the vicinity of Grand Forks, North Dakota.
ANIMAL PEOPLE reported in April that Sayres was a leading candidate
for the top job at the New York Center for Animal Care and Control,
vacated on January 21 by the resignation under fire of founding director Marty
Kurtz. Sayres confirmed on April 20 that he was interviewed for the CACC
job two days earlier, but said he had not yet been told if he would be hired.

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