Category: Asia

ANIMAL WELFARE ABROAD

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

An attempt to vasectomize urban
baboons and vervets in the Diani beach district
along the south coast of Kenya started
slowly in January, as after fixing and releasing
just one vervet, the team was unable to catch
any more monkeys of either species,
Columbus Trust official Clement Kiragu told
The Nation, of Nairobi.
Britain will within a year introduce
“pet passports” in lieu of the six month
quarantine of all imported dogs and cats
which has been in effect since 1900, agriculture
minister Nick Brown announced on March
26. The “pet passports” will certify that the
bearer animals have been vaccinated against
rabies, have microchip ID, have had a blood
test, have no exotic infections, and come from
a nation with no endemic rabies. While pets
who have come from most European Union
nations and Australia, New Zealand, Japan,
Taiwan, and Singapore will qualify, pets from
the U.S. and Canada would not, under the
rules as Brown explained them ––but, Brown
added, “We are looking again at the position
for the U.S. and Canada.”

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Pigs blamed for Malaysian crisis

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

KUALA LUMPUR––The ongoing
Asian fiscal crisis, global pork price collapse,
and panic in Malaysia over lethal disease outbreaks
might matter least to the pigs taking
the brunt of the human terror. Come good
times or bad for humans, pigs get killed.
As March ended, nearly 3,000
Malaysian troops shot or gassed pigs in ditches,
in districts where as many as 900 farmers
allegedly left the animals to starve or roam.
Eleven thousand villagers were
evacuated before the shooting began.
One million pigs were to be killed
by April 1, but the massacre reportedly
progessed at a fraction of the intended speed
due to pigs putting up frantic resistance.

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REVIEWS: Sakae Hemmi

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

A Report on the 1996 Dolphin Catch-Quota Violation
at Futo Fishing Harbor, Shizuoka Prefecture
Wild Orca Capture: Right or Wrong?
both by Sakae Hemmi
Elsa Nature Conservancy (POB 2, Tsukuba-Gakuen Post Office,
Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8691, Japan.) No prices listed.

 

A Report on the 1996 Dolphin
Catch-Quota Violation at Futo Fishing
Harbor, Shizuoka Prefecture, initially published
in Japanese, now translated, details
how in October 1996 the Elsa Nature
Conservancy forced the Futo Fishing
Cooperative to release more than 100 dolphins
who were captured in excess of a “drive
fishery” kill quota, and a week later obliged
two aquariums to release six psuedorcas who
had been taken from the excess for exhibition.
“The protest movement against the
dolphin capture was the first of its kind,”
author Sakei Hemmi explains. Previous
opposition to drive fisheries came from foreign
activists, notably filmmaker Hardin
Jones, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
founder Paul Watson, and Steve Sipman,
who invented the name “Animal Liberation
Front” in connection with releasing two dolphins
from a Hawaiian laboratory in 1976.

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Where elephants roam

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

BANGKOK, Thailand; BRITS, South Africa––
The five survivors among a group of six young Asian elephants
whom Thailand exported to Indonesia in October 1997 returned
home on December 31 to floral necklaces, cheering crowds, a
welcoming banner at dockside in Ao Makham, and all the
bananas, sugar cane, and pineapples they could eat.
Presiding over the feast were prime ministerial secretary
Wattana Muangsuk, Phuket member of parliament
Anchalee Theppabutr, and Phuket governor Padet Insang.
Explained Attaya Chuenniran of the Bangkok Post,
“The five beasts, and another, who died in Indonesia, were
sent with their mahouts in October 1997 under a 10-year contract
to help their Indonesian counterparts catch wild elephants,”
who were allegedly terrorizing the countryside in the
wake of fires set to clear brush and facilitate rainforest logging.

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South China tigers go the way of the Yeti

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

BANGKOK, BEIJING––1998, the Chinese “Year
of the Tiger,” ended with an admission from Wang Menghu,
deputy secretary-general of the China Zoological Protection
Association, that the South China population of Asian tigers
has gone to the realm of the yeti––the legendary “abominable
snowman.”
On December 14, Chinese forestry and wildlife conservation
director Zhang Jianlong and colleague Lie Yongfan
told the world through the government news agency Xinhua
that official investigations underway since 1984 have found no
evidence that the yeti ever existed.
“All reported sightings were actually other wild animals,”
Zhang said.
Elaborated Yan Xun, director of the 1,800-squaremile
Shennongjia Reserve, “There are no basic primate foods
such as berries or broadleaf trees in the mountains of
Shennongjia, where most yeti enthusiasts believe the mysterious
creature lives.”

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Temple elephants approach extinction

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka– – Eleph-
ant hunting and capture have been banned in
Sri Lanka since 1960.
Now the Sri Lankan tradition of
temple elephant keeping is at risk. None have
been born in captivity in five years; only
seven have been born in half a century.
Often hired to lead processions,
and a magnet for visitors and donations, temple
elephants have long been a mainstay of
the Sri Lankan religious economy. And the
ostentatiously devout like to keep their own
yard elephants. Of the estimated 2,000 elephants
in Sri Lanka, about half are privately
owned. Most are beyond their prime reproductive
years, even if they could be induced
to mate in captivity.
When a baby elephant vanished
from the Pinnawela elephant refuge circa
November 1, wildlife conservation department
deputy director Nandana Atapattu
observed to Susannah Price of the South
China Morning Post that, “Owning an elephant
is extremely prestigious––he could be
sold for a million rupees,” or about $37,000.

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Dogs, chickens, monkeys, and China

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

FUZHOU, China––“An old
Chinese saying, ‘Killing the chicken to scare
the monkey,” may explain the crackdown”
on dissent now underway in China, Melinda
Liu and Russell Watson offered in the
January 11 edition of Newsweek.
“This year brings some anniversaries
that may stir unrest,” they added, citing
the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen
Square massacre, the 40th anniversary of an
unsuccessful Tibetan revolt against Communist
rule, and the 50th anniversary of the
Communist takeover of China itself.
“Killing the chicken to scare the
monkey” may also explain the dog purges
threatened in December in Fuzhou City,
Fujian province, and actually carried out in
Wuhu, Anhui province.

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Apology to the animals from Brother #2

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

“Known as Brother Number Two to the
late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, Nuon Chea was
architect of the brutal forced evacuation of
Cambodian cities in 1975,” Seth Mydans of T h e
New York Times reported on December 29 from
Phnom Penh. “Chea later had command responsibility
over a wave of purges in which many thousands of
people were tortured and killed.”
Now 71, Chea was asked by Englishspeaking
reporters at a news conference following his
surrender to the government of current Cambodian
prime minister Hun Sen if he had apologies to make.

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Editorial: How to help animals in China

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE has received many heartfelt appeals for a boycott of all goods
from China and/or all tourism to China, in response to the recent Humane Society of the U.S.
disclosures pertaining to the use of dog and cat fur by some Chinese garment makers, whose
customers include U.S. retailers.
The dog and cat fur traffic was overdue for exposure, HSUS is to be commended
for doing it, and expressions of outrage are also in order.
But a broad boycott of China would be unfair, ineffective, and self-defeating. The
dog and cat fur traffic is not uniquely Chinese; neither is China the largest supplier. The
largest supplier, our files indicate, is Russia, along with other nations formerly belonging to
the USSR, where animals killed by city pounds have been pelted and the pelts sold since
Czarist times. As ANIMAL PEOPLE has reported, the killing and pelting is often done by
prisoners. The proceeds underwrite both the animal control agencies, such as they are, and
the prisons. Neither have ever approached internationally accepted humane standards.

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