Category: Hunting & Fishing

COYOTE-GETTERS RESTRICTED IN UTAH

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

SALT LAKE CITY– –
Private animal control contractors
should not be allowed to use M-44
spring-loaded “coyote getters,” Utah
Department of Agriculture director of
plant industry Dick Wilson told the
Utah Wildlife Damage Prevention
Board on October 10. The devices
shoot deadly sodium cyanide into the
mouths of coyotes who tug at an
attached piece of bait.
Utah currently allows 33
USDA Wildlife Services trappers to
use M-44s, but the cost of supervising
private use to avoid accidentally
killing humans, pets, and livestock,
Wilson estimated, could run as high as
$20,000 per user per year.

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HUNTING, BRAINS, SAFETY, AND SPORTSMANSHIP

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Joseph Berger, M.D., neurology
department chair at the University of Kentucky,
and behavioral neurologist Eric Weisman, M.D.,
also of Kentucky, rattled squirrel hunters in
August with a letter to The Lancet, the journal of
the British Medical Society, warning that all 11
patients they have treated for Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease in the past four years ate squirrel brains.
Berger and Weisman postulated that
eating squirrel brains might be an avenue of
transmission for the rare brain disease––a degenerative,
irreversible, always fatal malady apparently
related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or “mad cow disease,” also resembling
kuru, found among human cannibals.
As hunting season began, brains of any
kind often seemed scarce. Near Chibougamou,
Quebec, a 61-year-old hunter killed an 81-yearold
blueberry picker on August 29, mistaking
him for a bear. Their names were not released.

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Seals, whales, ESA and the Willys

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

MONACO, TORONTO, WASHINGTON
D.C. ––Close to losing 25 years of
activist gains through back door politics, the
International Fund for Animal Welfare and
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rallied
opposition to sealing off Atlantic Canada and
whaling in any form as ANIMAL PEOPLE
went to press, while Defenders of Wildlife
used the Internet to assemble resistance to an
Endangered Species Act rewrite apparently
favored by both the Bill Clinton/Albert Gore
administration and the Republican majorities
in the House and Senate.
IFAW sent out an eight-millionpiece
mailing asking members and sympathizers
to call or write Canadian authorities to
remind them that seal slaughter is as offensive
now as in 1984, when three decades of
campaigning finally brought a 12-year suspension
of the offshore phase of the killing.

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Updates on Carroll Cox investigations done for Friends of Animals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

While employed by
Friends of Animals, Carroll Cox
investigated––among many other
topics––the U.S. Navy practice
bombing of Farallon de Medinilla,
an uninhabited Pacific island used
extensively by endangered, threatened,
and otherwise protected
seabirds; the reason why the
Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species secretariat
last year rejected the fiscal 1994
U.S. wildlife import/export data
submitted by the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service; the alleged misuse
of a scientific research permit
issued to Albright College professor
Marsha Green, both by Green herself

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GREENPEACE GETS A WHALE

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

NOME––”Alaskan Inuit give warm
welcome to Greenpeace,” the Nunatsiaq News
headlined on August 8. “Members even
helped some villagers get a bowhead whale,”
added a subhead, “as a group of Greenpeace
activists visit Yu’ik and Inupiat villages to
gather information about global warming.”
Continued Nicole M. Braem of the
Arctic Sounder, as a guest contributor to
Nunatsiaq News, “One representative
explained the group does not oppose whaling
or subsistence hunting, and that they wanted
to hear about any changes in sea ice patterns,
snowfall, and animal abundance. ‘We’re here
to stop pollution, not whaling,’ Greenpeace
campaigner Sally Schullinger explained,”
according to Braem. “A community meeting
was postponed until the next day when
Gambell whalers decided to go get a dead
bowhead several miles from the village. The
village requested assistance from Greenpeace,
and crewmen in two inflatable rafts helped an
umiak skin boat tow the whale back to shore.”

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Shock treatment for marine mammals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Bob Fletcher, president of the 200-vessel
Sportfishing Association of California, is touting a
high-energy ultrasonic anti-sea lion device, developed
by Pulsed Power Technologies, of San Diego, with aid
of a federal grant. According to Los Angeles Times
hunting/fishing columnist Pete Thomas, the device
produces “a brief concussive wave of energy that
affects the inner ears of mammals close enough to be
affected.” Fletcher told Thomas that it makes sea lions
“take off like scalded dogs.”
Added Pulsed Power Tecnologies president
Dick Ayres, “The fur huggers won’t be happy with
anything that annoys marine mammals, but this is by
far the most effective and least intrusive device that has
come out.” The west coast fishing industry, including
Fletcher, is lobbying in support of a recent National
Marine Fisheries Service recommendation that it should
be allowed to start killing pinnipeds “in situations
where California sea lions and Pacific harbor seals conflict
with human activities, such as at fishery sites and
marinas,” if nonlethal deterrents don’t work.

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What did John Muir think of whaling?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

SEATTLE––Ingrid Hansen, conservation
committee chair for the Cascade Chapter of the
Sierra Club, apparently lost a battle but won a war
July 19 when the executive committee rejected her
motion that the Washington-based chapter should
“support the Makah Tribe’s proposal to take five
gray whales per year,” but also defeated executive
committee member Bob Kummer’s counter-motion
that the club should “oppose all taking of whales.”
As Hansen explained in an April 9 letter
to Makah Whaling Commission member Ben
Johnson Jr., national Sierra Club positions tend to
follow the recommendations of the local chapters
closest to the issues. The San Francisco-based
national office of the Sierra Club last spring asked
the Cascade Chapter if it had a position on Makah
whaling. A nonposition, if precedent holds, could
keep the influential Sierra Club on the sidelines as
the Clinton/Gore administration advances the
Makah application to whale before the International
Whaling Commission this October.

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Shipboard with the Sea Shepherds

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

News traveled chiefly by ship for thousands of years. The first newscasters were
literally anchormen, who shouted the latest word of current events to the crowds who gathered
at dockside whenever a ship came in. After printing was invented, early newspapers
published not the news itself but rather lists of ships arrived and departing, with their recent
and future ports of call, so that to find out what was happening in China, one could find
the crew of the latest arrived China clipper.
The news was still traveling by ship on August 3, a sunny Sunday we spent on
Puget Sound with Captain Paul Watson and the crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society vessel The Sirenian. We met them at Eastsound, the main village on Orcas Island,
where they relaxed in the shade of an old church, and sailed with them to Friday Harbor,
on San Juan Island, where Watson had a Monday night speaking engagement.

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Licensed to kill

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––You probably
think the Endangered Species Act, Marine
Mammal Protection Act, and Migratory Bird
Treaty Act protect wildlife.
What they actually do is require special
permission to kill or harass wildlife––and
spot-checking recent requests for permits and
exemptions, ANIMAL PEOPLE and Friends
of Animals’ special investigator Carroll Cox
quickly confirmed that the permitting and
exempting procedures are easily and often
manipulated.
“Permitting and exemptions are the
Achilles heel of wildlife law enforcement,”
says Cox, a former special investigator for the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and game warden
for the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife. “With the right permit or an exemption,
you can do anything.”

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