Category: Asia

Hong Kong seeks to end live markets & pig farming

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Hong Kong–Citing H5N1 prevention as an urgent pretext, the
Hong Kong Health, Welfare, & Food Bureau in February 2006 asked the
Legislative Council to ban live poultry sales by 2009, a goal the
bureau has pursued since 1997.
Under a permit buy-back plan introduced in 2004, 272 of 814
live chicken vendors and 30 of 200 Hong Kong chicken growers have
gone out of business, the bureau said.
The Hong Kong government is also trying to buy out and close
all 265 local pig farms, which raise 330,000 pigs per year,
producing 520 metric tons of waste per day. Pigs have in the past
been an intermediary host for avian flus that spread to humans.
However, the Legislative Council panel on Food Safety and
Environmental hygiene on April 11 rejected the Health, Welfare, and
Food Bureau’s plan to require all poultry sold in Hong Kong to be
slaughtered at a central plant to be built in the New Territories,
the semi-rural district between the mainland and the cities of
Kowloon and Hong Kong. The plan was also voted down by the North
District Council–because incoming poultry might bring in H5N1.

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“Sylvester & Tweety” go global

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

Robben Island Museum, responsible for managing Robben
Island, South Africa, is again trying to eradicate feral cats.
Sharpshooters killed cats on the island in 1999 and 2005, when 58
cats were shot, but as many as 70 cats remain, environmental
coordinator Shaun Davis recently told Cape Argus reporter John Yeld.
The shooting was suspended for a time to allow animal advocacy groups
including Beauty Without Cruelty/South Africa to trap the surviving
cats and take them to mainland sanctuaries. BWC/ South Africa
spokesperson Beryl Scott told Yeld that the initial effort was “not
that successful,” partly through lack of official cooperation, but
on April 24 Davis announced that the number of traps set for cats
would be expanded from 10 to 50, and that no cats would be shot
before June. The cats are blamed by University of Cape Town avian
demographer Les Underhill for killing all but three of the fledgling
population of about 60 endangered African black oystercatchers during
the past breeding season. Allan Perrins, chief executive officer of
Cape of Good Hope branch of the South African National SPCA,
suggested that the actual culprits might have been some of the feral
rabbits on the island, who might have turned carnivorous and become
nest predators. Seals are also blamed by some observers. Seals have
been kept from re-establishing haulouts on Robben Island in recent
years to protect seabird colonies, but on April 21, 2006 “Both
Robben Island and the department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism
agreed to allow the return of Cape fur seals,” e-mailed Seal
Alert/South Africa founder Francois Hugo. Robben Island, designated
a World Heritage site by the United Nations Environmental Program,
provides habitat to 132 bird species in all.

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Blue Cross of India wins case vs. bullock cart racing

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2006:

CHENNAI– Justice R. Banumathi of the Madurai Bench of the
Madras High Court in Chennai, India, on March 29 directed the Tamil
Nadu state government to prevent cruelty to animals in connection
with bullock cart racing and Indian-style bullfighting, which
masquerades as a way of “honoring” cattle.
“It is high time the government shouldered the responsibility
of taking up the cause of animals,” Banumathi said. “Equally, it
is high time the police shared responsibility in boldly declining
permission” for public events involving illegal cruelty, she added.
“Though animal fights are expressly banned under the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960,” Blue Cross of India
chief executive Chinny Krishna told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “these sad
spectacles go on year after year. Scores of spectators and animals
are badly injured and killed each year. The bulls are driven crazy
with fear, are force fed alcohol and ganja (opium), have their
tails bitten, and are then let loose before a drunken crowd to find
a person who can ‘tame the bull.’ The largest of these bullfights,”
Krishna said, “is organised by the Government of Tamil Nadu in
Alanganallur, near Madurai, in January each year.

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Turkish street dog massacres

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2006:

ANKARA–Officials of the ruling Islamic nationalist Justice &
Development Party have denied responsibility for the deaths of
hundreds of street dogs whose remains were found at the Mamek refuse
dump in separate lots on March 12, 14, and 24 by veterinarian Burcu
Iskikalp and local animal advocates. Necropsies indicated that at
least two dogs had been raped. A 64-year-old man was charged a week
earlier with raping a dog at a different dump, in Corum.
Turkish law has since 2003 forbidden killing street dogs
except in response to medical emergency, but the law is reportedly
widely defied due to lack of federal government enforcement.

A little girl who loved her chickens

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

An irony of the H5N1 global epidemic is that many of the
youngest human victims are those with the most positive attitudes
toward poultry–like Sumeyya Makuk of Van, Turkey.
“Sumeyya Mamuk considered the chickens in her yard to be
beloved pets. The 8-year-old girl fed them, petted them, and took
care of them,” wrote Benjamin Harvey of Associated Press. “When
they started to get sick and die, she hugged them and tenderly
kissed them goodbye.
“The chickens were sick. One had puffed up and she touched
it. We told her not to. She loved chickens a lot,” said her
father, Abdulkerim Mamuk. “She held them in her arms.”
Continued Harvey, “Her oldest brother Sadun said Sumeyya
loved animals and took care of puppies and kittens.
When her mother saw Sumeyya holding one of the dying
chickens, she yelled at her and hit the girl to get her away.
Sumeyya began to cry. She wiped her tears with the hand she’d been
using to comfort the dying chicken,” and fell ill herself.
Prompt treatment at the Van 100th Year Hospital saved Sumeyya
Mamuk, Harvey reported.

Film star gets year in prison for poaching

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

JODHPUR–Indian film star Salman Khan, 40, on February 17,
2006 was sentenced to serve a year in prison and was fined an amount
equal to about $125 U.S. for poaching two chinkara deer on the nights
of September 26-27, 1998.
This was the first of four poaching cases pending against
Khan, who is also fighting vehicular manslaughter charges in Mumbai
for killing a man in a 2002 traffic accident.
Jodhpur Chief Judicial Magistrate B.K. Jain acquitted seven
others accused in the 1998 chinkara poaching case, including
comedian Satish Shah.
Among the stars-of-the-month depicted in the 1999 World
Wildlife Fund-India calendar, Salman Khan often led illegal shooting
parities into the Rajasthan desert during fall 1998, witnesses
testified, but repeated complaints to police and wildlife officials
failed to bring him to justice.

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Chinese “Year of the Dog” begins with good omens

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

The Year of the Dog, observed throughout the regions of Asia
sharing cultural affinity to China, has rarely been auspicious for
dogs.
1910, for example, brought famine and a rise in dog-eating
to Korea, following a Japanese invasion. In 1922 the Chinese
Communist Party declared that dogs are social parasites. The
notoriously dog-hating Mao Tse Tung became head of the Chinese
Communist Party in 1934, began his rise to national rule in 1946,
and in 1958 purged both dogs and songbirds, after the Great Leap
Forward brought famine on a globally unprecedented scale.
The 1994 Year of the Dog predictably began in Beijing with a
dog massacre. The Beijing Youth News estimated that as many as
100,000 dogs inhabited the city when the killing started. The
Beijing Evening News pretended that dogs found by the police were
taken to “an animal shelter run by the Public Security Ministry,” but
China bureau correspondent Jan Wong of the Toronto Globe & Mail
learned otherwise.
Chief dog-killer Li Wearui boasted to Wong that his team beat
to death 351 dogs in 10 days. His assistant Fei Xiaoyang preferred
strangling dogs with steel wire. The Beijing Legal Daily published a
photo of police dragging a dog to death behind a jeep.

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Hong Kong tries again

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Hong Kong banned keeping chickens and ducks as pets,
effective on February 20, 2006, after H5N1 was confirmed in 10 wild
birds of four different species.
Hong Kong tried to ban and cull other bird species kept as
pets when H5N1 first appeared in 1996, killing six residents, but
many people released their pets rather than allowing them to be
killed–which might have spread the disease if any of the pet birds
had been infected.
Doing door-to-door inspections, the Hong Kong Agriculture,
Fisheries and Conservation Department found 42 illegal bird-keepers
with 180 chickens and 57 other fowl in their possession, among the
first 43,600 households visited. They also found 1,000
chickens at an illegal slaughterhouse.
The Hong Kong Health, Welfare, & Food Bureau asked the
Legislative Council to ban live poultry sales by 2009, a goal the
bureau has pursued for more than 10 years. Under a permit buy-back
plan introduced in 2004, 272 of 814 live chicken vendors and 30 of
200 Hong Kong chicken growers have gone out of business, the bureau
said.

Hitting fur in the high Himalayas

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

NEW DELHI, CHENNAI–Rajasthan police on
February 3, 2006 arrested Nepal-based Tibetan
wildlife trafficker Tshering Nema, also known as
Neema Kampa, in north Delhi, finding him in
alleged possession of the skins of 34 leopards
and four otters.
“The consignment was en route to Siliguri
in West Bengal,” reported the Times of India
News Network, “to be then dispatched to Tibet
through Nepal.”
Identified by the Indo Asian News Service
as “an associate of notorious poacher Sansar
Chand,” Nema is believed to have been a kingpin
in the gang that in 2004 exterminated tigers
within the Sariska tiger reserve, significantly
reduced the Ranthambore reserve population, and
poached down the populations at 12 of India’s 25
other tiger reserves.
Nema allegedly relayed poached pelts to
Tibet via his father, Tamdin Vangyal of Nepal.
Rajasthan Police spokesperson A.K. Jain said that
Vangyal was also in Delhi when Nema was nabbed,
but eluded arrest.

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