Pennsylvania SPCA resumes animal control

December 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:
PHILADELPHIA–Effective on January 1, 2009, the
Pennsylvania SPCA will resume providing animal care and control
services to Philadelphia, after a six-and-a-half year hiatus. But
the new animal care and control contract will pay the Pennsylvania
SPCA $2.89 million, more than three times as much money as the
$790,000 contract that the charity relinquished in 2002.
“The Philadelphia Animal Care and Control Association has
provided services since 2002,” reported Dafney Tales of the
Philadelphia Daily News. “An audit released in October by the City
Controller’s Office found numerous problems with PACCA, including
insufficient software and phone systems, and failing to properly
handle bite cases. PACCA chief executive Tara Derby admitted to
failures, in a written statement, but said that many were
corrected,” and attributed other shortcomings to insufficient
funding.

Bali animal welfare societies battle rabies outbreak

December 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:
DENPASAR, Bali–Someone brought a rabid dog to Bali.
Yachting, fishing, or trading goods, the culprit apparently came
by boat, docking near Ungasan village, where about 170 families
live on a peninsula forming the southernmost part of Bali.
The rabid dog arrived at about the same time that more than
200 animal advocates from nearly 30 nations met at Sanur Beach, just
to the north, for the Asia for Animals 2008 conference. The last
visiting delegates had just left when the first human victims were
bitten in mid-September 2008.
The bite victims did not seek immediate post-exposure
vaccination. Between November 14 and November 23, 2008, four
victims died at hospitals in Denpasar and Badung: a 32-year-old, a
28-year-old, an 8-year-old, and another child whose age was not
disclosed.

Shelters respond to economic crisis

December 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:
The Best Friends Animal Society in November 2008 laid off 30
personnel, retaining 420. “Our revenues are up about 5% this year
compared to last, but in recent years we have averaged near 20%
annual growth,” chief executive officer Paul Berry told ANIMAL
PEOPLE. “Donors are giving less frequently, because they are
worried about the uncertain economy. We wanted to act now, in
advance of any urgency,” Berry added, “so that we could afford our
folks a proper severance and get them out in the job market now,
before the worst of it hits.” The largest previous layoff by any
major U.S. humane society of which ANIMAL PEOPLE has record came when
the Massachusetts SPCA, with 600 staff, laid off 20 and eliminated
32 vacant positions in 2003. The MSPCA had survived the Great
Depression without laying off anyone, but had earlier all but folded
the Bands of Mercy and Jack London Clubs to cope with the debt
incurred in building Angell Memorial Hospital, opened in 1915. At
peak in 1912 as many as 265,000 Bands of Mercy involved
schoolchildren in educational activities, while the Jack London
Clubs mobilized 750,000 teenaged animal advocates.

Editorial feature: How hard times affect animal rescue

December 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:

The October 2008 ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial, “The humane community can
handle hard times,” focused on the institutional side of coping with
the global economic crisis. How animals themselves are affected also
warrants discussion.
“Foreclosure pets” and “abandoned horses” have been the
topics of at least one major daily newspaper feature apiece per week,
by actual count, since late 2007.
There is not much of a “foreclosure pets” crisis in affluent
suburbs where the few foreclosures tend to be on townhouses in
developments that did not allow pets to begin with. Across town
though, handling animals surrendered by distraught people who have
abruptly become homeless is an increasingly urgent issue. Typically,
a young family of insecure income reached for the house-yard-dog
dream by taking out a sub-prime mortgage. Then someone lost a job,
often just because the economy skidded.

Pickens bids to save BLM wild horses

December 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2008:
RENO–Just as the Bureau of Land
Management seemed poised to kill 2,000 healthy
mustangs, due to lack of adoptive homes,
Madeleine Pickens “arrived on a white horse,” as
Washington Post staff writer Lyndsey Layton put
it.
Pickens on November 17, 2008 turned a
public hearing in Reno from a perfunctory
condemnation ritual to a celebration.
“Pickens, wife of billionaire T. Boone
Pickens, made known her intentions to adopt not
just the doomed wild horses but most or all of
the 30,000 horses and burros kept in federal
holding pens,” reported Layton. “Lifelong
animal lovers, the Pickenses just a few years
ago led the fight to close the last horse
slaughterhouse in the United States.”
Posted Pickens afterward to her personal
web site, “Wild horses on federal land are
living symbols of the history of the American
West and must be protected. My view is for a
wild horse sanctuary that will be a tourist
destination where Americans and tourists from
around the world can observe this great part of
American history.”

Please help ANIMAL PEOPLE to keep the humane cause on message!

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
What if the U.S. humane community had not made the catastrophic mistakes that it did in response to the Great Depression and the recessions that followed each of the major mid-20th century wars?
What if a strong independent voice had helped humane leadership to cope with financial crunches with a combination of practical help and reminders of the importance of remaining focused on mission?
What if humane work had continued to emphasize outreach, advocacy, prosecuting cruelty, and education, at a time when humane education was forthrightly presented as moral education, when state wildlife agencies were not yet dependent upon funding from the sale of hunting licenses, and when Americans consumed less than half as much meat per capita as today?
We cannot know what might have happened, but we can certainly contemplate the possibilities.

Remembering Marco

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
Remembering Marco by Geeta Seshamani
The September 2008 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE included a photograph of a donkey named Marco, with a memorial for him from ANIMAL PEOPLE artist Wolf Clifton and president Kim Bartlett.
An editor s note on page six mentioned that after rescuing Marco while traveling in India in January 2007, Bartlett funded an equine care mobile unit to help the working donkeys and horses along the heavily traveled Agra/Delhi corridor, and added that the unit is operated by Friendicoes SECA, which already had an equine unit in Delhi.
There was much more to the story.

$75 million offered to further non-surgical sterilization

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
CHICAGO For $75 million, can someone invent a vaccine against canine and feline pregnancy? Or a chemosterilant that will be widely accepted by the humane and veterinary communities?
If an effective immunocontraceptive or chemosterilant for dogs and cats existed, would it be used where most needed?
Might the money be more productively used in extending high volume, low cost, best practice dog and cat sterilization surgery to all parts of the world and in keeping existing low-cost sterilization programs operating, at a time of plummeting donations?
The headline item at the mid-October 2008 Spay USA national conference was the $75 million incentive package offered by Found Animal Foundation founder Gary K. Michelson, M.D., to encourage the development of nonsurgical dog and cat contraception.

RSPCA & Dogs Trust convince the Kennel Club to revise breed norms

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
LONDON The Kennel Club, the world s first and oldest purebred dog registry, is redrafting the show standards for 209 breeds to eliminate rules that favor dogs with extreme and unnatural characteristics which might impair their health.
The Kennel Club, founded in 1873 and regarded in the show dog world as the most prestigious guardian of pedigrees, quietly disclosed the revisions of rules barely six weeks after complaining to the Office of Communication, the British television regulatory agency, that it was unfairly treated by the producers of the British Broadcasting Corporation exposé Pedigree Dogs Exposed, aired in August 2008.
Among the dogs featured in the documentary were boxers with epilepsy, pugs with breathing problems, and bulldogs who were unable to mate or give birth unassisted, reported Associated Press writer Jill Lawless. After the show was broadcast, Lawless added, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Dogs Trust withdrew their support for Crufts, the annual Kennel Club show, begun in 1891.

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