Editorial: Flight from our origins

December 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1999:

Crossing Kenya in a low-flying Twin Otter, we recently felt transported in time as
well as space. Behind was the Eden-like Masai Mara National Park, spreading into the
Serengeti Plain of Tanzania with only an occasional cement obelisk to mark the boundary.
Hunting has been banned in the Mara, as in all of Kenya, since 1967. Though
there is some poaching, mostly by non-Kenyan marauders, most of the wildlife has little
fear of human observation. Within just 48 hours we watched a mother cheetah chirping
occasional admonitions about rough play and wandering out of sight to her five cubs, who
treated a parked cluster of tourist vehicles as if they were a playground; saw lions mating
almost as if in performance for us; stopped for a hyena who seemed as complacent in his
mud puddle as any person in a bathtub; gaped at nonchallant herds of elephants, hippos,
and Cape buffalo; and exchanged curious stares with any number of zebras, wildebeests,
Thomson’s gazelles, giraffes, vervet monkeys, baboons, etc.

Stopping the mad dog killers

October 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE, as part of our ongoing effort to help solve animal protection
problems by accurately defining them, has since 1992 been tabulating all the data we can get
about cruelty cases to develop species-specific, method-specific, and motive-specific composite
portraits of the typical offender.
Not surprisingly, the psychological pathologies inflicted on different species tend to
vary according to whatever the animals most often symbolize. Among our findings, reported
and updated from time to time in greater detail:
• Men who harm women may also harm dogs, but tend to hurt cats with a particular
passion. Serial killers of women are frequently also serial cat-killers.
• Men who serially kill other men may kill cats, but more often serially kill dogs.
• Overt violence is overwhelmingly a male proclivity, but passive/aggressive abuse,
exemplified by dog-and-cat hoarding, child-starving, and starving farm animals, may be
practiced by either gender, as a symptom of chronic depression. The victims tend to be any
beings who are at the mercy of the offender. Depressive behavior, including hoarding, tends
to come earlier in life for men, coinciding with financial reverses, and later for women, coinciding
with bereavement, but the full syndrome can occur in either gender at any age.

Editorial: Scapegoating alien invaders for real-world trouble

September 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1999:

The beaver-like nutria, apart from being a mammal and a vegetarian, does not much
resemble a goat. Yet St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, following the earlier example of
Jefferson Parish and the self-serving 10-year-old doctrine of the Louisiana Department of
Wildlife and Fisheries, has now officially begun to treat nutria as an all-purpose scapegoat for
infrastructure damage.
Late on July 20, five members of the St. Bernard Parish SWAT team shot 20 nutria
in a public park. The shooting amounted, however, to little more than target practice, possibly
doing more to discourage after-hours human park traffic than to cut the nutria population.
Jefferson Parish police have shot nutria by the thousand since 1995. Yet Jefferson
Parish still seems to have as many nutria as ever, because the habitat still favors them, and
any successful species tends to breed up to the carrying capacity of the habitat, countering
predation by breeding faster. More intense predation brings faster breeding still.

Editorial: Cruelty cannot be stopped by one-party politics

July 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Our July/August 1999 cover feature on the Korean failure to enforce often promised
bans on torturing dogs and cats to death as human food notes that the “victory” the humane
community thought was long ago won in Korea was unusual among global issues––because it
did not come through linking the abolition of cruelty to protecting an endangered species.
The only similar example coming quickly to mind was the 1991 European
Community passage of a ban on imports of leghold-trapped fur. To have taken effect on
January 1, 1995, the ban was repeatedly delayed and finally killed on the pretext that it would
hurt Native Americans––who have never in the 20th century accounted for more than 5% of
the total North American trapped fur volume. Yet as early as 1985 the Native American argument
caused Greenpeace to scrap opposition to trapping, sealing, and indigenous whaling,
showing the wildlife use industries how to hide behind so-called “endangered cultures.”

Editorial: Peace may begin with petting the same dog or cat

May 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1999:

One possible casualty of the fighting underway for more than a month now in
Kosovo may be the International Companion Animal Conference scheduled for October 21-22
in Sophia, Bulgaria. Though Bulgaria is a nation long at peace, it borders on both Serbia and
Macedonia, and Sophia is just 50 miles from either border.
Eager to assist the young humane movement in eastern Europe, the sponsoring
National Canine Defense League and North Shore Animal League are reluctant to accept postponement
if the conference can go ahead, the second of an intended annual series of teachingand-sharing
opportunities growing out of more than five years of outreach.
Except for our conversations with International Companion Animal Conference
planners, we have heard little or nothing about the war in Kosovo from animal protection
organizations. Under the chaotic circumstances, with hundreds of thousands of hungry, often
injured, penniless, shellshocked, and bereaved human refugees on the move, it is understandable
that no one is able to mount any sort of relief mission on behalf of the millions of
animals going unfed. Still, there are words to be said and points to be made.

Editorial: Building shelters won’t build a no-kill nation

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

On pages 12 and 13 of this edition, the Duffield Family Foundation, now doing
business as Maddie’s Fund, answers the question weighing most heavily on the minds of
ANIMAL PEOPLE readers since October 1998, when we announced that PeopleSoft
founders Dave and Cheryl Duffield had committed the entire $200 million assets of their
foundation to making the U.S. a no-kill nation, and had hired Richard Avanzino to direct the
effort, beginning at his retirement after 24 years as president of the San Francisco SPCA.
The $200 million question, bluntly put, is “How do we get on the gravy train?”
The answer, summarized, is “Build a railroad.”
As the ad explains, Maddie’s Fund wants to see animal care and control organizations
for harmonious partnerships, to reach the no-kill destination on a specified timetable.
Get there early and you might get a bonus––but crash like Casey Jones, cannonballing along
in disregard of others stalled on the tracks, and you won’t even get a ticket to ride.

Editorial: Amazing Amazon rainforest reality

March 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Chugging up the Rio Tambopata, one of the major Amazon tributaries, in a
motorized canoe, we were struck during a January 1999 visit to the Tambopata-Candama
Reserved Area in southeastern Peru by the contrast between the Amazonian rainforest as it
is and the image most people have of it––an image crafted over the past few decades chiefly
by conservation groups.
Funding rainforest research, documentary film-making, lobbying, and even the
start-up of ecotourism, most of these organizations have also rather blindly stumbled down
the tangled trail blazed since 1961 by the World Wildlife Fund.
WWF, as ANIMAL PEOPLE has often pointed out, is not just the world’s
wealthiest and most influential wildlife advocacy group: it also happens to be the world’s
best-disguised lobby for sport hunting and other consumptive wildlife use.
WWF founder Peter Scott was the duck-shooter who introduced the North
American ruddy duck to England; WWF and allies now clamor for an expanded ruddy
duck season and no bag limit, on the bio-xenophobic claim that ruddy ducks are miscegenating
English white-headed ducks into illegitimate hybrids.

Editorial: How to help animals in China

January 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

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.

Editorial: Humane ecology, Asia, and us

December 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

The pages of this edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE not used to document “Who gets
the money?” largely concern the plight of animals caught in the economic crunch now
afflicting Asia. A theme common to both topics is the widening gap between the wealthy
few and the working poor. But the parallel most striking to us is between the status of animal
protection in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century and in Asia at the end of the 20th.
In either time and place, icon species were pushed toward extinction by rapid
development, driven by the hope of a fast-growing population that aggressive entrepreneurship
could bring escape from poverty. Forests were logged, mountains blasted into slag
heaps, and just about any creature who could be killed was skinned and/or eaten.
Responding to the crisis, enlightened people created a counterforce with a reach
comparable to that of religion––albeit with still just a fraction of the political clout.
It would be a mistake to push the comparison farther. As ANIMAL PEOPLE
has often pointed out, the humane traditions of Asia are rooted in Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Jainism, and may be traced back at least 3,000 years. Whether east or west is following
the other is of interest only to the extent that tactical errors can be avoided.

« 1 … 13 14 15 16 17 … 24 »