Category: Asia

How to save sea turtles–and why the species conservation approach is failing

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

VISAKHAPATNAM–The Malaysian cargo ship MV Genius Star-VI,
carrying 17 crew members and a load of timber, on April 13, 2004
sank in rough seas 180 miles southeast of Haldia, West Bengal.
Chinese crew members Gao Fuling, Wuxun Yuan, and Zhu Yuan
went overboard together, Gao and Wuxun with life jackets while Zhu
clutched a plank, wrote Jatindra Dash of Indo-Asian News Services.
For the next 34 hours they swam for their lives.
“Gao and Zhu described how two turtles met with them and
tried to help them,” Indian Coast Guard Commander P.K. Mishra told
Dash.
Soon after the sinking, the first turtle tried to help Gao
lift a floating box that he thought might be used to wave in the air
as a signal to aircraft or other vessels.
“When the turtle failed, he pushed me up to the box so that
I could latch on to it,” Mishra said Gao told him. Later, when Zhu
lost his plank, “Zhu said a turtle swam with him for hours and
brought the wood plank back to him,” Mishra added.
All three men were eventually rescued by Mishra’s vessel.
Twelve other men were picked up by other merchant ships. Two were
never found.

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India vaccine breakthrough

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

BANGALORE–A new anti-rabies vaccine “developed by the
Indian Institute of Science, which promises to reduce rabies
prevention costs by nearly 75%, has been cleared for commercial use
on pet dogs and other animals by the Drug Controller of India,” T.A.
Johnson of The Times of India reported on May 16.
“Based on a novel hybrid of a DNA recombinant vaccine and
cell culture vaccine, the new vaccine will be produced and marketed
by Indian Immunologicals under the name Dinarab,” Johnson said.
But IIS scientist P. Rangarajan cautioned that although
Dinarab has been successfully tested on monkeys and mice, it has
not yet been approved for trials in humans and “will take a while
before reaching the market.”
Meant to be used mainly as a post-exposure treatment by
public health clinics, Dinarab may alleviate chronic shortages of
post-exposure vaccines in India, associated with lack of reliable
refrigeration plus problems in manufacture and transport.

Discovering Help In Suffering

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Discovering Help In Suffering
by Ursula Wilby

In late February and early March 2004 I visited India.
Arriving in Delhi I was surprised to see dogs everywhere. Some were
in rather bad shape with mange. But others looked healthy and–at
least from a distance–well fed.
Our first stop after Delhi was Jaipur. I got up at the crack
of dawn, camera ready, and positioned myself in a nearby square,
watching the town wake up. It was fascinating to observe the dogs
and their behaviour toward each other and all the other animals
competing for scraps of food thrown out on huge rubbish piles. The
first thing I noticed was that the dogs, without exception, seemed
happy. Although they did not rush up to me, it was quite obvious
that they were treated well, as they never avoided human contact
either.
I was puzzled by the number of dogs. While there were more
than we normally see in northern European cities, there still seemed
to be too few, considering that there apparently was no human
interference with mating.
I decided to ask at the hotel how the dog population was kept
at a reasonable level. The answer I got was that if there were too
many dogs, the government would round them up and take them away.

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Court Calendar

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

A two-judge panel from the Supreme Court of India on March
11, 2004 upheld the right of civil authorities to ban the sale of
meat, fish, and eggs within the pilgrimage city of Rishikesh. The
ban was first formally proclaimed in 1956, and was extended in 1976.

The U.S. Department of Justice and FBI in April 2004 agreed
to pay $2 million to Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney and the
estate of the late Judi Bari in settlement of a civil suit resulting
from the FBI response to a bomb that detonated in their car in
Oakland, California on May 24, 1990. Bari, who never fully
recovered from her injuries, died of cancer in 1997. The FBI
investigated Cherney and Bari as suspects in making and transporting
the bomb, but never charged them, while allegedly ignoring evidence
that the bomb may have been planted by opponents of Earth First!
After a two-month trial in 2002, a federal jury ordered the FBI and
Oakland police to pay $4.4 million to Cherney and the Bari estate.
The city of Oakland agreed to pay $2 million in four annual
installments, but the FBI appealed.

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Animal Welfare awareness of Chinese youth

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Animal Welfare awareness of Chinese youth
by Peter Li, Zu Shuxian, & Su Pei-feng

In early 2002 five bears at the Beijing Zoo were attacked on
two separate occasions with sulfuric acid by a mysterious visitor.
For months Chinese media gave extensive coverage to the incident,
including the eventual prosecution and conviction of perpetrator Liu
Hai-yang.
Coming from a single-child family, Liu Hai-yang was among
China’s 80 million “little emperors” who reputedly harbor an
inordinate sense of entitlement. A science major at Beijing’s
prestigious Tsinghua University, Liu showed no signs of remorse. He
questioned his detention, demanded his release, and defended his
act as a “scientific experiment.”
To animal advocates, the incident illustrated why the
passage of anti-cruelty legislation must not be delayed any longer.
Yet others, including some Chinese officials, argued that
proposals to legislate animal welfare are beyond what China is ready
to accept.
The Liu case was among the topics most discussed at an
October 2002 symposium on animal welfare held in Heifei, Anhui
Province. Responding to the issues raised there, with
co-sponsorship from the World Society for the Protection of Animals
and the University of Houston downtown campus, we surveyed Chinese
college students to investigate whether the alleged “little emperor”
syndrome can actually be found in attitudes toward animals, and what
the prevailing attitudes toward animals are likely to be in coming
decades, as today’s college students become China’s future leaders.

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Baby seals & bull calves bear the cruel weight of idolatry

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

The 350,000 baby harp seals who were clubbed or shot and
often skinned alive on the ice floes off eastern Canada this spring
had more in common with the thousands of bull calves who were
abandoned at temples in India during the same weeks than just being
days-old mammals subjected to unconscionable mistreatment.
Unlike the much smaller numbers of seals who were killed off
Russia, Norway, and Finland, and unlike the somewhat smaller
numbers of bull calves who were shoved into veal crates here in the
U.S., Canadian harp seal pups and Indian surplus bull calves are
victims not only of human economic exploitation, but also of their
roles as icons and idols.
The words “icon” and “idol” have a common origin in the
ancient Greek word that means “image.” Yet they mean such different
things–and have for so long–that two of the Judaic Ten
Commandments, about setting no other God before the One God and not
worshipping graven images, sternly address the difference.
An icon is a physical image representative of a holy concept,
usually but not always depicting a person who is believed to have
exemplified the concept in the conduct of his or her life. Icons may
also depict animals, abstract symbols, supernatural beings, or
deities. A icon may be venerated for being symbolic of the holy
concept, but to venerate it for its own sake is considered idolatry,
and therefore wrong in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths,
as well as in some branches of other major religions.

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Tibetans take up “direct action”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2006:

 

KATHMANDU–“Large numbers of troops and police are patrolling
the streets of Rebkong, Quinghai Province, Tibet, to prevent a
bonfire of skins originally scheduled for February 12, 2006. It
appears that the Chinese government has banned the public burning of
chuba costumes trimmed with tiger, leopard and otter skins,” the
Wildlife Protection Society of India posted on February 15, based on
information received from Tibet Info Net.
Fiery protests resembling western-style “direct action”
continued in Tibet into March 2006, despite the military presence,
according to Nepal-based Radio Free Asia, and have occurred for at
least eight months, contrary to previous belief that they began with
fur burnings in January 2006.
Radio Free Asia on February 1, 2006 reported that in August
2005 at Manikengo, “Tibetans, some of whom said they were angry
because they had been pressured to sell their animals for slaughter
at below-market prices, broke into a Chinese-owned slaughterhouse
during the annual Tibetan horse race festival, which attracts
thousands of people. They found what they described as a large
number of animals, including dogs and horses, sources said.

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Global effort exposes bid to dismantle Indian lab animal welfare regulations

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

NEW DELHI–An apparent covert attempt to
erase regulatory protection of rats, mice, and
birds in Indian laboratories, in the name of
harmonizing Indian regulations with international
standards, was flushed into the open and at
least briefly delayed on March 19 when an
appalled insider leaked the strategic blueprint
to ANIMAL PEOPLE through a chain of street dog
rescuers.
The document was received on a Friday afternoon.
ANIMAL PEOPLE immediately forwarded
copies to regulatory experts throughout the
world, including several in India, soliciting
comment.
The Indian experts promptly recognized
that the proposed “harmonization” was more a move
to dismantle the entire Indian laboratory animal
welfare assurance structure.
Working through the weekend to provide
informed reinforcement were Humane Farm Animal
Care founder Adele Douglass, who led the effort
to obtain the 1990 addition of dog and cat source
tracking requirements to the U.S. Animal Welfare
Act; Aesop Project founder Linda Howard; Animal
Welfare Institute president Cathy Liss; and
International Society for the Protection of
Exotic Animal Kind & Livestock founder Marc
Jurnove, whose case in 1998 established the
right of private citizens to sue the USDA to
obtain Animal Welfare Act enforcement.
By Monday morning cabinet-level e-mails
forwarded from New Delhi indicated that the
status of the strategic blueprint had been
downgraded to “internal brainstorming,” and
there seemed to be a strong likelihood that no
action would be taken until after the current
Indian national election campaign, and perhaps
not then, depending on the strength and
direction of ongoing global response.

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U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization includes animal welfare considerations in plan to “stamp out” deadly avian flu

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

GENEVA–The United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization, not known for
pro-animal stances, on March 18 recommended as
part of the FAO “Control Strategies for Highly
Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1) in Asia” that
involved nations should “Provide humane
euthanasia methods for all animals to be
euthanized.”
The recommendation was included as the
sixth of nine points emphasized under the subhead
“Stamping-out policy for infected poultry
(including Valuation, Disposal, Cleaning and
Disinfection, Biosecurity and Animal Welfare).”
The inclusion of an expressed concern for
animal welfare, while not unprecedented, hints
at an FAO response to the view expressed earlier
by World Health Organiz-ation spokesperson Peter
Cordingly that, “It might be time, although
this is none of WHO’s business, that humans have
to think about how they treat animals and how
they farm them, how they market them–basically
the whole relationship between the animal kingdom
and the human kingdom.”
WHO and the FAO are parallel entities
established under U.N. auspices, and often work
together in combating epidemics.

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