Mammoth find in Nepal: BUT CAN “EXTINCT” SPECIES BE PROTECTED FROM POACHERS?

October 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1996:

KENT, NAIROBI, HARARE––
Animal finds don’t come any bigger. British
explorer Col. John Blashford-Snell and
actress Rula Lenska, cofounder of the Born
Free Foundation, announced on September
16 in Kent, Great Britain, that DNA anlysis
of dung has confirmed the hint they dropped
at a July 15 press conference that remnant
woolly mammoths roam a densely wooded
600-square-mile section of Bardia National
Park, Nepal, deep in the Himalayas.
Blashford-Snell and Lenski found
the herd about three years after villagers
claimed that woolly mammoths had stampeded
their homes and crops.

BOOKS: China’s Threatened Wildlife

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

China’s Threatened Wildlife
by Liz and Keith Laidler
Blandford, distributed by Sterling
Publishing (387 Park Avenue South,
New York, NY 10016-8810),
192 pages, 50 color illustrations, $24.95.

Most of us are semi-familiar with the
giant panda, perhaps the red panda, the
Yangtse dolphin, Chinese alligator, and Pere
David’s deer, but these are just a handful of
the unique, little-known, fast-vanishing wild
inhabitants of the most populous and longest
settled nation on earth, which nonetheless has
surprisingly many corners seldom explored or
exploited––until now, when increasing affulence
has in turn stimulated demand for costly
folk medicines whose ingredients are valued to
the degree that they are scarce, and are scarce
to the degree that the species from which they
come are endangered.

Marine mammals

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

Small whales
The Sacramento Bee warned in
June that the vaquita whale is “on the verge
of extinction, a victim of commercial gill net
fishing” in the Sea of Cortez, and that the
reserve set up to protect the vaquita may be “a
sanctuary in name only.” The vaquita is a
small toothed whale, a class not protected by
the International Whaling Commission.
Romanian Institute for Marine
Research scientist Alexandru Bologna says
only 10,000 dolphins remain in the heavily
polluted Black Sea, down from 70,000 in
1970, and one million in 1950, when the former
Communist regime began “economic capitalization
of dolphins,” i.e. slaughter.

Indian wolf terror

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

LUCKNOW, India––Uttar Pradesh
chief forest conservator Ashok Singh pledged
July 5 to quickly exterminate a wolf pack
blamed for killing and disemboweling more
than 30 small children since March in Uttar
Pradesh state, northern India.
“It was initially difficult to track
down the wolves’ hideout,” Ashok Singh said,
“but now that it has been done, we are sure to
kill the beasts.” The lair was found in the
Kusfara forest on July 2 near the half-eaten
remains of a two-year-old, who like many
other victims was snatched from bed in an
open-air hut. One wolf was killed at the scene.

Reptiles

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

Herp traffic
The 72 Malagasy ploughshare tortoises
stolen from a captive breeding project at
the Amphijoroa Forest Park in Madagascar in
May have turned up “for sale in Prague,”
reports Allen Salzberg of the New York Turtle
and Tortoise Society. But due to corrupt
authorities, herpetologists “have little hope of
getting them or the people selling them,”
Salzberg adds. The Austrian Chelonical
Society warned in June that any members who
buy any of the stolen tortoises will be expelled.
German customs officials on July
8 announced the arrest of a 32-year-old man
caught at Augsburg with 328 tortoises
“stacked up like plates” in his luggage. The
man, who may get up to five years in prison,
reportedly “admitted selling around 3,000 rare
and protected tortoises since 1991,” either
caught or bought cheaply in Serbia.

Makah don’t get quota: SEA SHEPHERDS FIND REPUBLICAN FRIENDS

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

ABERDEEN, Scotland– – Striking
another surprise blow for whales, this time
through Congressional politics, the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society on June 26
sunk Japanese and Norwegian hopes for
expanded legal whaling––at least for this year.
Eighteen years after Captain Paul
Watson established the Sea Shepherds’ reputation
as what he calls “good pirates” by ramming
the outlaw Portuguese whaler Sierra, 14
years after the International Whaling
Commission declared a global moratorium on
commercial whaling, the ban held at the 48th
annual meeting of the IWC, as under pressure
from the House Resources Committee the U.S.
delegation on June 26 withdrew an application
to allow members of the Makah tribe, of Neah
Bay, Washington, to kill five grey whales.

Religion & animals

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

The first deed of the shortlived Hindu fundamentalist
government of India, inaugurated May 24 only to
resign five days later, was to introduce a bill to ban cow
slaughter. Killing cows is against the Hindu religion, practiced
by 750 million Indians, but 110 million Moslem citizens
eat beef. Paradoxically, though Moslems are only 14%
of the total Indian population of 930 million, 10% of all the
Moslems in the world live in India; only Pakistan has more.
The Shaolin Temple, in central Henan province,
C h i n a, on June 6 won a lawsuit against the Luohe Canned
Food Factory, which had used actors depicting the Buddhist
monks of Shaolin in a TV plug for ham. Devout vegetarians,
the Shaolin monks devised and still teach the martial art of
kung-fu to avoid using lethal weapons in self-defense.

Conflicts with wildlife

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

The fourth annual Dr. Splatt
roadkill survey, coordinated by
Brewster Bartlett of Pinkerton
Academy in Derry, New Hampshire,
found a marked decrease in roadkill
frequency, for the third year in a row,
but a sharp rise in roadkilled beavers
––especially in the Derry area. Forty
schools participated in the nine-week
roadkill count this year. The distribution
and participation level is sufficient
to produce credible roadkill estimates
for the northeast, with just
enough information from other
regions to make crude national projections
possible, which are nonetheless
the best supported by data of any
made to date. The northeast is
believed to have the greatest roadkill
frequency because it has the most
wildlife habitat in close proximity to
large human populations, with the
most heavily traveled roads and also
the most old, narrow, and winding
roads. The overall roadkill frequency
is probably down primarily because
the unusually long winter depressed
wildlife breeding populations, while
beaver kills were up, Bartlett
believes, in part because beavers had
a successful breeding season last year
in heavily surveyed parts of New
Hampshire where busy roads cut
through wetlands. Most of the dead
beavers in that area, Bartlett told
ANIMAL PEOPLE, appeared to be
young, apparently just setting out to
find their own territory.

CHINESE PRIMATES

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

Amid ongoing controversy
over how and whether to protect
the commercially valuable old
growth forest in Deqing county,
Yunnan province, home of about
200 of the last wild snubnosed golden
monkeys, China has at least two
other primate conservaton problems.
One is the recent rediscovery
of a mouse-sized marmoset in the
Wuyi mountains of eastern Fujian
province. The seven-ounce marmoset
was a prestigious pet circa
800 years ago, but was long
believed extinct. The other problem
is the rapid decline of black
gibbons, the most primitive of the
great apes, on Hainan island. Only
15 to 20 black gibbons remain,
down from a reported 2,000 some
40 years ago.

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