Editorial: Culture is no excuse for cruelty

January 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1994:

It is with further disgust that we note the opobrium cast upon Afro-American nov-

elist Alice Walker, a distinguished defender of animals, abused women, and children, for

attacking ritual female genital mutilation in her new books Possessing The Secret of Joy and

Warrior Marks. From 85 to 114 million women alive today, mostly black African

Muslims, have suffered the excision of all or part of their clitoris and labia minor in a rite

performed by elder women, without anesthetic or antiseptics, when girls of their culture

reach adolescence. Millions more suffer this procedure each year. Many die of resultant

infection. The purpose of the abuse is to make young women marriageable in a genuinely

patriarchal society by insuring virginity at marriage and chastity thereafter through making

sexual intercourse painful or uninteresting.

WAR

December 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1993:

While other bloodbaths have

diverted concern from Saddam

Hussein’s purge of Shiites from

Southern Iraq, an effect of the killing

may soon be evident throughout

Europe, Asia, and

northern Africa, when waterfowl

numbers crash as result of the

drainage of about half the 6,000

square miles of wetland between the

Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The

wetland is perhaps the most impor-

tant feeding, resting, and breeding

area for migratory birds in the

Middle East. Saddam ordered the

the rivers diverted in August 1992,

ostensibly for irrigation but more

plausibly to drive the Shiites, who

oppose his regime, into Shiite-con-

trolled Iran. The wetlands are the

traditional Shiite stronghold.

FUR IS STILL DEAD: Industry numbers confirm collapse, despite claims

November 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1993:

Daniel A, the successor to the bankrupt Antonovich fur chain, itself declared bank-

ruptcy in early October. The high-profile collapse, on the heels of a previous collapse, under-scored the continuing crash of the fur trade. Despite the Fur Information Council of America claim that retail fur sales rose to $1.1 billion last year, ending a four-year decline, other data newly released by the fur trade itself confirms the ANIMAL PEOPLE projection based on gar-ment and pelt prices that sales actually fell to between $648 and $750 million. Evans Inc., annu-ally accounting for about 10% of U.S. fur sales, sold $107 million worth of goods––but trim items with minimal fur content accounted for $30.4 million of it. The fur trade claimed mink pelt prices were up 30%, but Wisconsin, accounting for nearly 25% of U.S. mink production, recorded a 16% drop in sales and a 13% drop in revenue, indicating only a marginal price rise. The number of U.S. fur garment wholesalers also fell, from 2,200 at the start of 1992 to just 1,500 going into this winter. Finally, a study of the fur trade done by Southwick Associates for the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies confirms the accuracy of the ANI-MAL PEOPLE model of fur trade economics, coming within 11% of the ANIMAL PEOPLE projections in 17 of 18 major categories of information. The only wider variance is in the esti-mates of retail jobs produced: Southwick found four times as many by counting all employees of retailers who sell fur, instead of counting only those who actually work in fur sales. The ANI-MAL PEOPLE model was developed in early1988 by editor Merritt Clifton, under contract with the Humane Society of the U.S., and has been used to produce yearly estimates of fur trade eco-nomic data ever since. The Southwick Associates model is based on 1990 statistics obtained directly from the fur trade and state wildlife departments.

FUR

June 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1993:

Someone used rat poison in late

April to kill more than 17,000 mink at

the Sakhalin Fur Industrial Association fur

farm on Sakhalin Island in the former

Soviet Union. The fur farm claimed a loss

of $2.8 million, although at current world

pelt prices the actual loss was probably

closer to $400,000. Possible suspects

include rival fur entrepreneurs trying to

boost prices for their own pelts by creating

a shortage and simultaneously wiping out a

rival; someone in management attempting

to cash in on the limited insurance cover-

age; and/or disgruntled employees.

BOOKS: Animal Rights & Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic

March 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

Animal Rights Human Rights: Ecology,

Economy and Ideology in the Canadian

Arctic, by George Wenzel. 1991. 206 pages,

paperback. University of Toronto Press.

Animal Rights Human Rights author George

Wenzel, says the back cover, “is an anthropologist and geo-

grapher,” who has been working among the Inuit (Eskimos)

of Baffin Island since 1972. His book “is both a careful aca-

demic study and a disturbing comment on how environmen-

tal activity may oppress a whole society.” To wit, Wenzel

supposedly shows how anti-seal hunt protesters’ “own cul-

tural prejudices and questionable ecological imperatives

brought hardship, distress, and instability to an ecologically

balanced traditional culture.”

Vivisection

March 1, 1993 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

Physicians for Human Rights on February 6 asked the American Medical

Association to lead a probe of how German medical doctor Hans Joachim Sewering, 76,

became president elect of the World Medical Association. Sewering,a member of the Nazi SS

from 1933 until 1945, is accused of complicity in sending 203 people, including children, to

their deaths at Eglfing-Haar, a

euthanasia site for the disabled.

Ironically, the WMA was formed in

1947 in response to Nazi medical

abuses.

Editorial: Helping a few good men and women find a better way

November 1, 1992 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

I find no subject more difficult to write about than child abuse, because none other

provokes such conflicting emotions. I don’t claim to have been an abused child; indeed in

some ways I had unique advantages. Both my parents were schoolteachers, well aware of

the faults of formal education and quite adept at providing educational opportunities outside

of the classroom, as well as quite willing to help me dodge classroom attendence to do any-

thing and everything else useful and constructive––attending courtroom proceedings, ram-

bling around Europe, and working parttime for newspapers, among other alternative

“lessons” that were never graded. At the same time, our family was not immune to the

times and the stresses that afflict all of us. We went through part of a winter without gas and

electricity during a period of prolonged parental unemployment; there were several years in

my early teens when because my father was working the equivalent of two fulltime jobs, I’d

rarely have seen him if I hadn’t been working for him almost every day away from school; I

was beaten and starved for disciplinary reasons in a manner unfortunately not uncommon ;

and we all had to cope with several terrifying explosions of a long-smoldering mental illness

WAR IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN: Saving Children and Animals

November 1, 1992 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

WASHINGTON, D.C. –– The

press dispatches should have warned the

world. “Rivers and water holes have

dried up for the first time anyone can

remember, starving and burning to death

some 400 hippos,” Associated Press cor-

respondent Angus Shaw wrote from

Zimbabwe in mid-July. “Dead birds have

dropped out of shriveled trees, tortoises,

snakes, rodents, and insects have disap-

peared, and predators are killing more

weakened animals than they can eat… As

southern Africa suffers its worst drought

ever, thousands of animals have died and

officials are continuing to shoot many

more to feed the increasingly desperate

human population. The meat from the

culled animals has been targeted for chil-

dren showing signs of malnutrition.”

CHILDREN & ANIMALS

October 1, 1992 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1992:

* Representatives of about 50 animal

protection and child protectionorganiza-

tions met September 14 and 15 in Washington

D.C. under the auspices of the American

Humane Association to discuss common prob-

lems and opportunities to seek solutions

together. We were there; watch for a full

report in the November issue of ANIMAL

PEOPLE.

* “Until recently,” charges the current

edition of the newsletter Notes From The

Green World, “the image of the abandoned

Latin American child was of a ragged child

sleeping in a doorway. Today the image is of

a body, lacerated and dumped in a city slum,”

especially in Brazil, where death squads hired

by local merchants torture and exterminate

suspected thieves with perhaps more impunity

than if they shot stray dogs. Editor Walter

Miale cites extensive documentation of his

charges, including by Amnesty International.

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