1st chimp at Tacugama kills man, leads escape

May 1, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone– Bruno, 20, the orphaned
chimpanzee for whom Bala Amarasekaran founded the Tacugama Chimpanzee
Sanctuary in 1995, led 31 other chimps in an April 23 mass breakout,
killing tourist driver Issa Kanu.
The three American passengers, in Sierra Leone to help build
a new U.S. embassy about two miles from Tacugama, were reportedly
flown to Atlanta for treatment of undisclosed injuries.
Reuters identified them as Gary Morris, Paul Gregory, and
Donald Ford. Agence France-Press said they were Alan Robertson,
Gary Brown, and Richie Goodie.
“The men are recovering gradually from shock and their wounds
are no longer life-threatening,” a nurse told AFP.

Investigator has a history of conflict with nonprofit organizations

April 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2006:

Undercover investigations are rarely disclosed to the world
by the sponsors while still underway–at least not on purpose.
Findings, however, are typically intensively publicized,
especially when produced on behalf of major international nonprofit
organizations.
The publicity blitz usually starts after all undercover
personnel are out of harm’s way, often after a brief embargo while
findings are shared with law enforcement.
Standard operating procedure may have been inverted by some
of the sponsors of the Jason Mier/Karl Amman probe of alleged Kenya
Airways involvement in wildlife trafficking–depending on whose
version of what happened one accepts.

Africa
Law

How many times must the ape traffic be exposed, before it is forever banned?

April 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2006:

CAIRO, KANO, NAIROBI–Ten years after the World Society for
the Protection of Animals exposed the Cairo connection in the
international live great ape traffic, five years after Egyptian
customs officials refocused attention on the traffic by drowning a
four-month-old gorilla and a baby chimpanzee in a vat of chemicals at
the Cairo airport after seizing the apes from smugglers, the alleged
perpetrators are still in business, charge independent investigator
Jason Mier and wildlife photographer Karl Amman.
Worse, Mier and Amman say, the alleged perpetrators still
appear to be protected by the apparent collusion, corruption,
indifference, and inefficiency of public officials and airline
personnel in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and Cameroon.
Some of the same people and ports of entry are apparently
involved in clandestine ivory trafficking exposed by Esmond Martin
and Daniel Stiles in four reports published since 2000.
Mier and Amman recently completed a year-long investigation
of a “group of smugglers I am convinced is the largest operating in
Africa,” Mier told ANIMAL PEOPLE. A zoologist by training, Mier has
worked in Africa since 2000. Amman has investigated African wildlife
trafficking since 1990.

Rescuers send lion to canned hunt supplier

March 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

BUCHAREST, CAPE TOWN–Romania is not
usually regarded as a lion-exporting nation,
South Africa is rarely if ever thought of as a
lion importer, and the animal advocacy groups
Born Free Foundation and Vier Pfoten are unlikely
canned hunt suppliers, but recent lion rescues
have taken some very strange twists.
First, in mid-2004 a young African lion
named Lutu was “found starving to death in a
squalid cage in Romania,” according to Mark
Townsend of the London Observer. Actress Amanda
Holden raised $250,000 to enable the Born Free
Foundation to send Lutu to the Shamwari private
wildlife viewing reserve in South Africa.
Instead, in August 2004, days before Lutu was
to be moved, he disappeared.
“All that is currently undisputed
regarding the fate of Lutu,” Townsend wrote two
months later, “is that his owner broke an
agreement with the Born Free Foundation by
selling Lutu to a mystery buyer for an unknown
sum.”

$36 million to Mozambique

March 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Jay Knott, USAid director for Mozambique, on January 27,
2006 announced a 30-year, $36 million plan to restore Gorongosa
National Park, whose large wildlife was poached to the verge of
extirpation during 11 years of occupation by Renamo rebels,
1981-1992.
The Massachusetts-based Gregory C. Carr Foundation is to
“fund conservation services, create a wildlife sanctuary, and set
up the mechanisms to reintroduce Gorongosa as a tourist destination,”
said the Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique, in Maputo.
Gorongosa Nat-ional Park director of tourism development
Vasco Galante mentioned “two main immediate objectives for the
park–to secure its biodiversity, and to work with the communities
who are living within the park boundaries.”
This resembled the rhetoric that USAid long used in support
of the Zimbabwean CAMPFIRE program [see page 12], which USAid also
introduced to Mozambique, but while anticipating that tourists might
start arriving as early as 2007, neither Knott nor Galante appears
to have mentioned hunting.

Drought tests Kenyan and Zimbabwean hunting policies

March 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

NAIROBI, HARARE–The vultures inspecting drought-parched
Kenya and Zimbabwe have counterparts in the corridors of national
capitols, watching to see whose wildlife management mode will fail
first.
Kenya, since banning sport hunting in 1977, has made
non-consumptive wildlife watching the nation’s second largest and
best known industry.
Much of the faltering Zimbabwean economy is based on trophy hunting.
The Kenyan model requires attracting large numbers of
tourists, who in good times employ thousands of hotel staff,
drivers, guides, and souvenir vendors.
The Zimbabwean model draws far fewer people, who seek much
less by way of accommodation, minimizing the need for up-front
investment in infrastructure. Yet trophy hunters spend considerably
more per person than wildlife-watchers.

If only the baboon ploy helped with elephants

December 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

JOHANNESBURG, CAPE TOWN–Baboons are a
traditional head-ache for South African wildlife
officials, but environment and tourism minister
Marthinus van Schalkwyk probably wishes elephant
issues could as easily be handled.
Failing to achieve broad-based agreement
in favor of culling the Kruger National Park
elephant population at a series of consultatation
meetings in November and December 2005, South
African environment and tourism minister
Marthinus van Schalkwyk scheduled another
consultation meeting for early 2006.
Van Schalkwyk is believed to favor
culling, but only with political cover
sufficient to prevent harm to the South African
tourist industry.
Van Schalkwyk’s Cape Province counterpart avoided
a similar confrontation over baboons when
CapeNature acting chief executive Fanie Bekker
appropriated 3.5 million rand, worth about
$530,000 U.S., to hire baboon monitors.

Will Thai zoo crowd eat Kenya wildlife?

November 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

BANGKOK, NAIROBI–A long-controversial sale of 135 wild
animals from Kenya to the Chiang Mai Night Safari zoo in Thailand on
November 10 appeared to be almost a done deal.
Kenya president Mwai Kibaki and Thai prime minister Thaskin
Shinawatra ceremonially signed the agreement at the State House in
Nairobi.
The transaction is to include both black and white rhinos,
elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, servals, hippos,
and at least 14 hooved species.
But the deal was originally to have included more than 300
animals, as described in July 2005. It was scaled back after Youth
for Conservation rallied international opposition to the animal sale,
over a variety of humane, tactical, precedental, and conservation
considerations.

Africans defending national wildlife parks turn from guns to courts

November 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

NAIROBI, HARARE, GABORONE, JOHANNESBURG–Amboseli,
Kalahari, Hwange, Kruger: the names alone evoke images of
wide-open wild places on a sparsely inhabited continent–at least to
non-Africans. But to many Africans whose tribal lands they
historically were, these and other globally renowned wildlife parks
are symbols of conquest, occupation, and deprivation.
To those who till land or keep livestock, the parks are the
source of marauding wildlife, and appear to hoard disproportionate
shares of the green grass and water.
To those who have nothing, the parks symbolize inaccessible
opportunity.
To politicians, the great African wildlife parks often
represent potential largess, expendible to build a power base.
Preserving the parks as unpeopled as European and American
ecotourists and wildlife conservation donors imagine the “real”
Africa to be is a multi-million-dollar industry, but there is also
big money in opening them to more hunting and other commercial
exploitation, while returning the parks to tribal control is an
oft-expressed rhetorical ideal often most strongly favored by whoever
anticipates gaining easy access to resources in exchange for giving
tribal partners a few more dusty acres in which to graze goats.

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