A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1998:
POOLESVILLE, Md.––
Hanor Farms, one of the fastestgrowing
pork producers in the U.S.,
brought some of the realities of factory
farming to Washington, D.C.,
on October 1 when a trucker working
for an independent company
inexplicably left a load of 172 fivemonth-old
pigs on a city street.
The trucker was arrested
later in the day in connection with a
separate incident, and will reportedly
be charged for leaving the pigs.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1998:
SAN FRANCISCO––California Fish and Game
Commission assistant executive director Ron Pelzman ended an
October 2 hearing in Monterrey on the sale of live animals as
food by announcing that the commission will ask the state legislature
to require that all animals be killed before leaving the
market––and said the commission will in February again consider
banning the import of live turtles and frogs.
Pelzman said “live food” merchants would be asked
to obtain a $36 permit, revocable on evidence of violation.
The CFGC was moved toward action in part by the
mid-September seizure of 892 undersized red-eared slider turtles
who were illegally offered for sale at street fairs in
Mountain View and Berkeley.
“There is strong suspicion,” Action for Animals
president Eric Mills reported, “that the illegal baby turtles are
coming into the state in the same shipments as the currently
legal market turtles.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1998:
LA CIEBA, SAN JUAN, MIAMI, NEW
ORLEANS––Tracking a two-year-old female falcon by satellite
transmitter, as she migrated from Wood Buffalo National
Park in central Alberta, Canadian Wildlife Service ornithologist
Geoff Holroyd on October 23-24 watched her gain 300
miles between Haiti and South America, only to be whirled
backward by Hurricane Mitch.
Twelve hours later the exhausted falcon landed back
in Haiti, almost where she’d begun the day’s journey.
She was among the luckier victims of Mitch––and the
winds were the least of the storm, which raged off Central
America for four days, causing unprecedented torrential rain,
mud slides, and flooding. Altogether, Mitch killed an estimated
minimum of 9,000 people in Honduras, 2,000 in Nicaragua,
and hundreds of others in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico,
and on missing ships. Thousands more were missing.
The toll on animals, both wild and domestic, was
incalculable.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:
NEW DELHI, India––”You will
be happy to know that I have finally gotten
the animal welfare department, which is the
first of its kind anywhere in the world,”
People For Animals founder Maneka Gandhi
e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on
September 8.
“It is now a part of my ministry,”
Maneka said, as welfare minister for the government
of India, “and I would like to make
it into a full-fledged department.”
A senior independent member of
the Indian parliament, representing her New
Delhi district since 1989, Maneka is among
the power brokers in the coalition government
of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata party. She may actually have more
clout now than she did during two appointments
as environment minister while a member
of the Janata Dal party, from which she
was ousted in 1996 for denouncing alleged
corruption among fellow ministers.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:
ELK CREEK, Calif.––”Our object
in obtaining this land,” explained Humane
Farming Association Founder and president
Brad Miller, greeting the first outside visitors
to the 4,000-acre Suwanna Ranch after the
1998 No-Kill Conference, “was to see how
long we could maintain our policy of never
turning away a farm animal who had been
involved in a cruelty case, who had been
referred to us by a humane society, animal
control department, police department, fire
department, or county sheriff’s office.”
HFA guarantees farm animals who
have endured prosecutable cruelty a caring
home for life in a semi-natural environment.
But, Miller continues, “After many years of
doing this, our original HFA Farm Animal
Refuge in Fairfield,” just north of San
Francisco, “was becoming a little crowded.
We think, with this extra space, we’ll now be
able to keep going for quite a long time.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1998:
SAN FRANCISCO––In effect
endorsing cruelty to animals as perceived by
much of the rest of America, albeit not by
blind justice, the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors on August 3 adopted a series of
resolutions commending Chinatown live markets
for their July 20 courtroom victory over
the Coalition for Healthy and Humane
Business Practices, organized by attorney
Baron Miller.
Miller had sued Never Ending
Quails and 11 other live markets in an attempt
to oblige city and state agencies to enforce a
variety of anti-cruelty and public health
statutes, which he held should have forbidden
the methods the live markets commonly use to
keep and slaughter a variety of birds, reptiles,
and amphibians.
He argued that if the live markets
can’t meet humane standards, they should not
be allowed to operate at all.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:
Save The Doves on June 9 submitted
almost 140,000 signatures to the Ohio
secretary of state’s office in support of a referendum
measure on the November 1998 ballot
which, if approved, would restore a state
ban on hunting mourning doves––but was
informed on June 30 that only 84,320 signatures
were valid. Save The Doves was given
another 10 days to collect the 16,073 additional
signatures needed to reach the minimum
of 100,393 required to go before the
voters. Ohio first banned dove hunting in
1917. The ban was repealed in 1975, was
restored in 1977, and was repealed again in
1995. If Save The Doves gets enough signatures,
the pro-dove hunting front Ohioans
for Wildlife Conservation has indicated that
it will attempt to legally challenge the petition
format. Ohioans for Wildlife
Conservation appears to have been organized
by the Columbus-based Wildlife Legislative
Fund of America, which initially formed in
response to a 1977 attempt to ban leghold
traps in Ohio via referendum, then expanded
into a national organization with support
from the National Rifle Association.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1998:
JAKARTA, Indonesia––As dogs, cats, monkeys,
students, and looters are shot in Indonesian streets, against a
backdrop of razed stores, ethnic mayhem, and jungles ablaze
across Kalimantan and Malaysia, Hindu myth almost seems to
explain it all––especially amid the additional reverberations of
five nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert of India.
The blasts sent a warning to Pakistan, 97% Islamic,
that added to the stress in Indonesia, too, 87% Islamic.
“It is said that when great evil stalks the earth,”
explains Nanditha C. Krishna, honorary director of the C.P.
Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation in Chennai, India, “Vishnu will
appear as Kalki, and the world will go up in flames.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1998:
STATE COLLEGE, Pa., WOODSIDE,
Calif.––Eight thousand America
OnLine members on April 28 flooded Koko
the “talking” gorilla with more than 13,000
questions, in the first-ever public interview
of an animal of another species.
Actually “speaking” through a special
computer with a symbolic keyboard,
Koko answered about a dozen inquiries in 45
minutes. Monitored by reporters, who
packed the kitchen of the Gorilla Foundation
headquarters in Woodside, California,
Koko’s longtime teacher/translator Penny
Patterson converted typed text into sign language,
then summarized Koko’s responses
and e-mailed them out.
Koko talked about apple juice, her
favorite foods, her pet cats, her dreams, and
her personal aspirations. Nobody asked how
she’d like to become “bush meat,” the
African euphemism for poached primate.