Kites vs. kite-birds & other species in the skies of India & Pakistan

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

AHMEDABAD–As many as a million kites soared aloft over
Indian cities on January 15, 2006 as Hindus celebrated Makar
Sankranti, the Day of the Sun.
Festivals throughout India featured kite-fighting contests, in which
flyers tried to saw through each other’s strings.
Celebrity kite-fighters included Sonia Gandhi, president of
the ruling Congress Party, and recently retired former prime
minister and Bharatija Janata Party president Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
who met in Jaipur.
Everywhere kites rose through the air space occupied by
sidewalk and garden bird species such as sparrows and bulbuls, up
past ringnecked parakeets and house crows patrolling at treetop
height, on to baffle the kite-birds and vultures whose
congregations, circling on thermal currents, are often the first
sign that Indian airline pilots see of their destination cities,
while the cities themselves are still beyond the horizon.

So why doesn’t the Belgrade Zoo cage the war criminals & leave the elephant in India?

January 2, 2006 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

BELGRADE, Serbia–Belgrade Zoo director Vukosav Bojovic
sought publicity in mid-January 2006 for his intended acquisition of
an elephant named Djanom from an unnamed zoo in Punjab, India.
The Belgrade Zoo got publicity on January 11, 2006 as scene
of Associated Press file photos showing former Croatian Serb
paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic kissing a brown bear named
Kninja and her two cubs. Vasiljkovic visited the zoo on Sept-ember
19, 2005 to visit Kninja, formerly mascot of his militia unit.
Croatia on January 11 issued an international warrant seeking
Vasiljkovic’s arrest for alleged 1991 war crimes including torturing,
killing, and expelling Croatian civilians as well as soldiers from
their homes, plus arranging the assassination of Egon Scotland, 43,
who documented some of Vasiljkovic’s actions for the Munich daily
newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Believed to be living in Perth, Australia, Vasiljkovic,
51, “had petty convictions against him and was involved in
Melbourne’s brothel industry in the 1970s,” reported Natasha Robinson
of The Australian.

Asia
Europe

Pakistan quake animal victims still need help

December 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

KARACHI–More than two months after the devastating
earthquake of October 5, 2005, the arrival of winter has made the
plight of animals and displaced humans more desperate than ever in
the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan.
Snowstorms have meanwhile made delivering aid to the isolated
region more difficult than ever. More than 87,000 humans are known
to have been killed in the earthquake itself. Others, now living in
tents, have died from malnutrition and exposure. As many as 3.5
million people lost their homes. No statistics exist for the toll on
animals. Pastured livestock mostly survived the earthquake, but
thousands lost their caretakers. Refugees released the birds from
the Jalalabad Zoo in Muzaffarabad and moved into the cages, reported
Munir Ahmad of Associated Press.
“I would recommend sending donations to both the World
Society for the Protection of Animals and the Brooke Fund for
Animals,” Pakistan Animal Welfare Society representative Mahera Omar
relayed to ANIMAL PEOPLE through Seattle activist Eileen Weintraub.
“After their initial emergency response,” described in the November
2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE, “both organizations have formulated
long term strategies and their veterinarians are in the field
providing veterinary care and arranging for shelter for the animal
victims.

British readers send a gift to bile farm bears

December 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

CHENGDU–An early Christmas present sent
to the Animals Asia Foundation in October 2005 by
the readers of the Western Daily Press in
Bristol, England, bought the December 6, 2005
delivery of a newly liberated bear family of four
to the China Bear Rescue Center near Chengdu.
“As of 6 p.m. today,” Animals Asia
Foundation founder Jill Robinson e-mailed, “we
have four bears settling down in our hospital,
munching on a fresh fruit supper and slurping
shakes made of condensed milk, sugar, blueberry
jam, apples, and pears. One poor love is
blind. Some have cage-bar and stereotypic
scarring.”
Robinson noted that all had wounds in
their stomachs indicative of having been used for
bile collection by the “free drip” method, in
which shunts are implanted to keep their gall
bladders constantly open. This is the most
common method of collecting bile from caged bears
now, superseding the older method of permanent
catheterization.

Trafficking brings H5N1 threat home

December 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

NEW HAVEN–Pickled “jellyfish” could bring the potentially
deadly H5N1 avian flu virus to the U.S., a courtroom learned on
December 15 in New Haven, Connecticut. Food King Inc. owner
Vichittra “Vicky” Aramwatananont pleaded guilty to smuggling more
than 27,600 pounds of chicken feet into the U.S. from Thailand,
mislabeled “jellyfish” to evade inspection. The chicken feet were
sold in 11 states.
“Aramwatananont faces up to six months in prison, but is not
expected to receive jail time when she is sentenced on March 24,”
reported Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo. “Food King will pay
$170,000 as part of a plea agreement.”
Still passing mostly from bird to bird, rarely crossing into
humans and even more rarely into other mammals, H5N1 has killed 71
people in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Cambodia since
2003: just over half the total number of people known to have become
infected. Most victims were poultry workers, cockfighters, or
members of the families of poultry workers and cockfighters, who
shared their homes with sick birds.

BOOKS: Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fisheries

December 1, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fisheries: Propped up by the Aquarium Industry
& “Scientific Studies”
by Sakae Hemmi (Supervised by Eiji Fujiwara)

Elsa Nature Conservancy
(Box 2, Tsukuba Gakuen Post Office, Tsukuba 305-8691, Japan), 2005.
33 pages paperback, no price listed.

Sakae Hemmi and the Elsa Nature Conservancy of Japan
published this expose of “The reopened dolphin hunts at Futo on the
Izu Peninsula in Shiuoka Prefecture and the dolphin export plan of
Taiji Town in Wakayama Prefecture” just before the 2005 dolphin
drives were to begin, on the eve of an international day of protest
against the dolphin killing led by Ric O’Barry of One Voice.
Hemmi, campaigning against the Futo and Taiji dolphin
massacres since 1976, nearly nine years ago wrote A Report on the
1996 Dolphin Catch Quota Violation at Futo Fishing Harbor. That
report served chiefly to alert the international marine mammal
activist community to the longtime existence of committed opposition
to dolphin slaughter and commercial whaling within Japan.
Capturing dolphins for use in exhibition and
swim-with-dolphins attractions had already emerged as a lucrative
secondary market for the dolphin-killers, whose primary motive has
traditionally been attempting to exterminate competitors for fish.

BOOKS: Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines

December 1, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines
revealing corruption, conspiracy, government inaction

Linis Gobyerno, Inc. (P.O. Box 1588, 2600 Baguio City,
Philippines), 2005. 139 pages, spiral bound.

Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines will jolt readers
unfamiliar with the dog meat industry. The most shocking aspect of
this comprehensive report, however, should be that it is the third
in a series of book-length updates by Linis Gobyerno, detailing
non-enforcement of the 1996 Philippine ban on dog slaughter for human
consumption.
“This is not a national phenomenon,” the foreword
stipulates, “but a problem concentrated mainly in the Cordillera
region,” where under the thin legal cover of an exemption granted to
the indigenous Igorot tribe, non-Igorots conduct a clandestine
traffic in dog meat worth as much as $290,000 a month.
“As an Igorot, I vehemently do not accept dog-eating as my
culture,” writes Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines contributor Bing
Dawang. “I was not raised to eat dogs, and dog meat is not a
regular part of my diet, nor has it ever been.”

Visakha SPCA digs out after floods, fights disease outbreaks

November 2, 2005 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

VISAKHAPATNAM–Already hit by flooding after a September
19 cyclone, the Visakha SPCA was inundated twice more by further
cyclones before the end of October.
Monsoon rains and occasional cyclones are part of the normal
weather cycle along the Bay of Bengal, but fall 2005 brought the
region triple the usual rainfall.
The impact was felt as far south as Chennai, where the St.
Thomas Mount Animal Birth Control Center was badly damaged by flash
flooding, Blue Cross of India chief executive Chinny Krishna told
ANIMAL PEOPLE, and part of the Blue Cross shelter at Guindy was
briefly awash.
“Fortunately, thanks to our volunteer Shanthi, all animals
in the lower-lying enclosures were moved out to the main building,”
Krishna said.
The Visakha SPCA began clean-up and rebuilding at the same
time as extending emergency aid to surrounding areas, then had to
start over after the destruction of a retaining wall by the first
flood allowed a second and third flood.

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.

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