BOOKS: The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s Animals on the Move

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s

Animals on the Move, by Lise Lindblad,

with photos by Seven-Olaf Lindblad.

Hyperion/Disney Press (114 Fifth Ave., New York, NY

10011), 1994. 40 pages, hardcover, $15.95.

“Daddy, what’s this lion doing? The lion is eating

the zebra. But the zebra didn’t want to be eaten. The zebras

wish the lions would eat something else. But that’s what lions

do. We don’t have to eat animals.”

There’s only one gory photo in this picture-book

version of the Serengeti migration we’ve all seen on TV, but

of course it was the one Wolf zeroed in on, with a keen intu-

itive grasp of the difference between ourselves and natural

predators plus appreciation of the victim’s perspective.

What did he think of the book otherwise?

“It has buffalo in it. It has birds. It has antelopes.”

––Merritt Clifton & son

Diet & Health

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

The Council for Agricultural

Science and Technology reported March 21

that advances in farming methods and the

growing popularity of vegetarianism could

mean a 30% decrease in the amount of land

used for food crops during the next 50 years

even as the global human population doubles.

The 64-page CAST study, commissioned by

the Program for the Human Environment at

Rockefeller University, was authored by

Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station

agronomist Paul Waggoner, who explained

that the calories and protein produced on pre-

sent cropland are already sufficient to feed 10

billion vegetarians, rather than the five to six

billion people who now eat a diet including

varying amounts of meat.

ZOO NOTES

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

Willie B., a silverback gorilla

kept in isolation at the Atlanta Zoo from his

capture in the wild in 1962 until 1988,

became a father on February 9, at the age of

35. The mother of the newborn is Choomba,

age 30, making the couple the oldest to breed

successfully in captivity. The zoo built bigger

gorilla quarters in 1988 to house a 17-member

colony borrowed from the Yerkes Primate

Research Center, also in Atlanta. Hoping to

add Willie B.’s genes to the limited captive

breeding pool, the zoo initially paired him

with much younger females, in the belief they

would heighten his sexual appetite, but he

failed to impregnate any of them, and was

suspected of sterility. He and Choomba were

paired only after they signaled their interest in

each other from separate cages for months.

Will Clinton earn stripes on tiger boycott?

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

GENEVA, Switzerland– – The

Standing Committee of the Convention on

International Trade in Endangered Species

met March 21-25 to decide whether to call a

global boycott of exports from Taiwan and

China to protest their role in wildlife poach-

ing and smuggling. Chinese and Taiwanese

demand for aphrodisiacs and other traditional

wildlife-based medicines is the source of

much and perhaps most of the money in the

illegal wildlife traffic.

Animal Control & Rescue

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

International

Police in the East City dis-

trict of Beijing, China, beat 351 dogs

to death during the second week of

February. “Our policy is to annihilate

them,” said district deputy chief of pub-

lic security Li Wenrui. Some other dis-

trict police bureaus spared smaller pure-

breds––if their owners could find homes

for them outside the city. Still others

killed dogs by strangulation, electrocu-

tion, and dragging them behind jeeps.

Press releases said the dogs were taken

to a shelter run by the Public Security

Ministry, but Jan Wong of the Toronto

Globe and Mail’s China Bureau reported

there is no such place. The Communist

government banned dogs as a nuisance

and a waste of food when it came to

power in 1949. Dogs have been hunted

out and killed every few years since

1951. Despite the killing, stepped up

since 1986, an estimated 100,000 dogs

inhabit Beijing, where a black market

dog can cost as much as many workers’

annual income. Foreigners and others

who can get dogs licensed and vaccinat-

ed may keep them––but rabies vaccine is

so scarce that the disease has killed as

many as 60,000 Chinese since 1980,

and most license applications are denied.

Woofs and growls

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

People

Resisting pressure from some of the most influen-

tial members of his own political party, Kenyan president

Daniel Arap Moi on March 10 refused to accept Wildlife

Services director Richard Leakey’s mid-January resignation,

and ordered him to resume his work. Arap Moi took two months

to review allegations of corruption and racism directed against

Leakey, 49, by leading politicians who favor economically

exploiting the vast Kenyan wildlife reserves––among them

tourism minister Noah Katana and local government minister

William Ole Ntimama, two of the most influential figures in the

government after Moi. In four years as Wildlife Services direc-

tor, Leakey won worldwide acclaim for professionalizing the

warden staff and curbing poachers, who had severely dimin-

ished the elephant and rhinoceros populations during the 1980s.

Leakey quits

March 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1994:

NAIROBI––Accused of

corruption, racism, and misman-

agement by 23 influential cabinet

ministers eager to exploit wildlife

and habitat, renowned paleontolo-

gist Richard Leakey resigned

January 14 after five years as head

of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Leakey’s vigorous attack

on corruption and defense of

endangered species brought more

than $150 million in aid to Kenya.

Editorial: Culture is no excuse for cruelty

January 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1994:

It is with further disgust that we note the opobrium cast upon Afro-American nov-

elist Alice Walker, a distinguished defender of animals, abused women, and children, for

attacking ritual female genital mutilation in her new books Possessing The Secret of Joy and

Warrior Marks. From 85 to 114 million women alive today, mostly black African

Muslims, have suffered the excision of all or part of their clitoris and labia minor in a rite

performed by elder women, without anesthetic or antiseptics, when girls of their culture

reach adolescence. Millions more suffer this procedure each year. Many die of resultant

infection. The purpose of the abuse is to make young women marriageable in a genuinely

patriarchal society by insuring virginity at marriage and chastity thereafter through making

sexual intercourse painful or uninteresting.

COURT CALENDAR

December 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1993:

Crimes against wildlife

Hong Kong authorities confiscat-

ed $20,000 worth of rhinoceros horn in a

series of late October raids on apothecaries,

following leads provided by the London-based

Environmental Investigation Agency. But the

raids may have come too late to save rhinos in

the wild, as fewer than six remain in protect-

ed areas of Zimbabwe, according to wildlife

veterinarian Dr. Michael Kock, who could

find only two in a two-week aerial search.

There were 3,000 when Zimbabwe achieved

native sovereignty in 1980. Kock sawed the

horns off about 300 rhinos a year ago, trying

to make them worthless to poachers, but dis-

covered that even the nub left behind after

dehorning will fetch $2,400 U.S. Kock says

he has evidence that the Asian poaching car-

tels are actively trying to “kill every rhino,”

because, “If they eliminate the rhino, the value

of the horn will skyrocket. They can sit on a

stockpile for 10 years; they know there is

always going to be a market.”

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