“He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.”

June 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK–– National Park Service rangers have

killed 400 wild burros in Death Valley since 1987, but through the intervention of Wild

Burro Rescue, the 1995 quota is zero. It will stay zero for as many years as WBR is able to

rescue the number of burros the NPS would otherwise shoot to prevent ecological damage.

“I got shingles,” said WBR co-founder Gene Chontos, “but we did it,” raising

$23,000 between reaching a deal with the NPS last December and commencing the rescue

on March 18––and then rounding up 20 burros with the help of six mounted wranglers and a

rented helicopter. The team caught 19 burros the first day, with difficulty.

WILDLIFE

June 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

The National Parks Board of South

Africa announced May 10 that, “To maintain

for as long as possible the option of translocat-

ing family groups of elephants,” only 300 will

be killed this year instead of 600 as biologists rec-

ommended. “The breeding herds will mainly be

culled in areas where the greatest damage has been

done to trees,” the NPB added. “Of special con-

cern is the declining baobob population,” in

Kruger National Park, which has about 8,000 ele-

phants in an area the size of Israel. The elephants,

including 70 bulls, are to be shot from helicopters.

Tranquilizer darts will no longer be used before-

hand because this appears to increase rather than

decrease the stress to the elephants, who afterward

are immobile but fully conscious.

GROWLS

June 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Wilderness Society president Jon

Roush, who makes $125,000 a year, in

February and March sold $140,000 worth

of old growth timber from an 80-acre tract on

his 763-acre Montana ranch, bordering the

Bitteroot National Forest. “The area he cut,”

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

reported in The Nation of April 24, “is less

than two miles from a national wilderness area

and well within the boundaries of the

Salmon/Selway Ecosystem ––the largest com-

plex of wild land in the Lower 48 and home to

elk, black bears, mountain lions, and grey

wolves.” Roush in 1983 successfully sued the

U.S. Forest Service, contending that logging

and roadbuilding would irrevocably harm the

watershed. The roads built then were used to

remove the logs from his own land.

Fishing industry fights over bones

May 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

“This meeting was called to fight over

the meat,” reads the caption below a popular

office calendar cartoon showing wild-eyed and

desperate Neanderthals. “There is no meat. It is

moved that we fight over the bones.”

The cartoon could describe the col-

lapse of oceanic ecosystems. Recent editions of

the journals Science and Nature warned of

crashing zooplankton and algae populations, as

result of pollution, global warming, and over-

fishing, which is taking biomass out of the

oceans faster than it can be restored. But instead

of making oceanic habitat restoration a global

priority, both fishing fleets and the political rep-

resentatives of fishing nations fight with increas-

ing fury for whatever fish remain, with ominous

implications for world peace as well as for

aquatic animals.

POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE

May 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

The Sierra Club, National Audubon

Society, and Natural Resources Defense

Council on April 4 unveiled a $1.3 million TV

campaign and a $500,000 radio blitz to inform the

public about how regulatory rollbacks under the

Republican “Contract with America” will affect

“the food they eat, the water they drink, and the

air they breathe,” and about the links between

“those who pollute and those who write the laws

on pollution.” Sierra Club director Carl Pope

called it the largest such effort “ever launched by

the environmental community.” The announce-

ment came five days after Speaker of the House

Newt Gingrich accused “left-wing environmental-

ists” of using environmental protection laws as a

vehicle to “oppose free enterprise, jobs, and eco-

nomic activity.” They look for the “hysteria of

the year,” Gingrich charged, “whether it’s going

to be nuclear winter or global warming or whatev-

er this year’s particular hysteria is.”

ZIPPO raid

May 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

“As a portable source of flame, the

Zippo windproof lighter has always been the

natural choice for those who care about the envi-

ronment,” claims a press release for the Zippo

“mysteries of the forest” collectible lighter

series. “Zippo believes it is vital,” the flaks

add, “that we safeguard the delicate balance of

the remaining wilderness for both the animals

that live there and for future generations of

humanity.”

Agriculture

May 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

Academy Award-winning actress

Whoopi Goldberg has agreed to appear in a

Friends of Animals ad campaign publicizing

horse slaughter. In 1994 U.S. slaughterhouses

killed 348,000 horses; another 28,612 U.S.-

born horses were killed in Canada. Most were

young “surplus” from speculative breeding.

A South African Airways flight

from London to Johannesburg with more

than 300 people and 72 prize breeding pigs

aboard returned to England for an emergency

landing on April 6 when, as a spokesperson

put it, “The collective heat and methane that

the pigs gave off in the cargo hold caused the

alarms to activate.” Fifteen pigs suffocated

when automatic fire extinguishers filled the

hold with halon gas.

Editorial: Earth Day is over. Take a clod to lunch.

May 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

The Editor’s most original contribution to the initial Earth Day, 25 years ago,

may have been coining the slogan, “Today is Earth Day; take a clod to lunch.” In the 1970

atmosphere of Berkeley, California, where the Editor was then a cub reporter, it went

without saying that the lunch would be vegetarian. The radical idea was not that meat-eat-

ing was and is the most fundamental environmental issue. Already Food First author

Frances Moore Lappe, Population Bomb author Paul Erlich, and Silent Spring author

Rachel Carson had delineated the links between meat production and depleted topsoil, star-

vation, and overuse of pesticides. Every incipient environmentalist in that particular time

and place at least paid lip-service to the ideal of vegetarianism. Disagreement arose, rather,

over the affirmation that the path to change lay through breaking bread instead of heads;

that environmental problems were due not to inherent flaws in the capitalist system, but to

rectifiable ignorance, which could be overcome more easily through discussion than

through fulminating about smashing the state.

MARINE MAMMALS

April 1, 1995 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1995:

The clock is apparently running out on the sea

lion/steelhead conflict in Puget Sound, in favor of sea lions

who were caught, caged, and sentenced to death in February

under 1994 revisions to the Marine Mammal Protection Act,

for menacing the last steelhead from the endangered Lake

Washington winter run as they approached Ballard Locks. A

variety of nonlethal methods have failed to deter the sea lions,

but a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society proposal to relocate

them to San Francisco Bay and a publicity-grabbing cage

occupation by Ben White of Friends of Animals apparently

bought them time until the salmon run was over. Forthcoming

amendments to the Endangered Species Act are expected to

relieve authorities of the duty to save the last fish of particular

runs when the species as a whole is not endangered.

A female orca calf, stillborn at the Vancouver

Aquarium on March 8, died from blood loss due to a pre-

maturely ruptured umbilicus. “A calf experiencing this kind

of catastrophic event would be doomed whether in an aquari-

um or in the wild,” said consulting veterinarian David Huff.

The calf was the third the Vancouver Aquarium has lost, with

none surviving longer than 97 days. The death came five days

after an infant orca died at the Kamogawa Sea World (no rela-

tion to the U.S. Sea World chain) in Japan. The losses, along

with that of another infant orca at Sea World San Antonio on

December 28, renewed protest against trying to breed orcas in

captivity. However, noted MARMAM online bulletin board

host Robin Baird, “A large proportion of the killer whale

calves who have not survived have been from two particular

mothers, both at aquaria which have not had a single surviving

calf.” Orca calves born at U.S. Sea World facilities by contrast

have a better survival rate than wildborn counterparts.

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