International wildlife news

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

Africa
Members of 840 Masai
families during the second week in
March opened Kimana Tikondo
Group Ranch, a 15-square-mile forprofit
wildlife sanctuary in southern
Kenya, under the shadow of Mount
Kilimanjaro. Just 17 visitors paid
the $10 entrance fee the first week,
most of them members of a delegation
from the Wildlife Conservation
Society, formerly the New York
Zoological Society. Start-up funding
came from the U.S. Agency for
International Development. Kenya
Wildlife Services director David
Western hopes Kimana Tikando and
similar parks can make enough
money to persuade the Masai that
keeping wildlife is more profitable
than killing it to graze more cattle.

The politics of seal slaughter by Captain Paul Watson

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

It isn’t easy being a Canadian. We don’t get a hell
of a lot of respect. To most of the world, especially the U.S.,
we’re a quiet people with an unremarkable history, occupying
a considerable amount of frozen geography.
They’ve heard of maple syrup, Canadian
Club––and that we host the largest single slaughter of a
wildlife species anywhere on Earth.
Our annual massacre of harp and hooded seals is
infamous internationally both for scale and for gruesome cruelty.
The seal club is better known than the rye whisky kind.
Not that it makes economic sense. It doesn’t make
money and hasn’t for decades. The sealers are glorified welfare
bums, living high on subsidies and being paid more for
who they are than what they do.

Marine life

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

As expected, U.S. President Bill
Clinton announced February 9 that the U.S.
would “vigorously pursue high-level efforts to
persuade Japan to reduce the number of whales
killed in its research program,” but stopped
short of imposing trade sanctions, as he is
authorized to do in response to a Commerce
Department advisory issued in December that
Japan is violating the intent of the International
Whaling Commission moratorium on commercial
whaling by setting “research” quotas for
minke whales so high––now more than
400––that the “research” amounts to commercial
whaling.

The hunting lobby at work

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

British Field Sports Society deputy chair Lord
Mancroft and the Duchess of Devonshire in early March
asked the reputed 80,000 BFSS members to join the 28,000-
member Royal SPCA so as to influence policy away from
opposition to fox hunting and other blood sports. The RSPCA
has formally opposed hunting since 1976. New members had
to join the RSPCA by March 22 to be eligible to vote at the
organization’s June annual meeting––and as many as 1,500
hunters reportedly did, as RSPCA board members and staff
scrambled to find a way to legally bar them.
“The biennial conference of the parties to the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
is due to be held in Zimbabwe in 1997,” reminds Shirley
McGreal of the International Primate Protection League.
“Problems are developing, as the government of Zimbabwe
wants to hold the meeting in Victoria Falls. Hotel rooms for
government officials are available in the town, which has a
total of 900 beds, but usually 1,500 or more people attend
CITES conferences. Because of the room shortage, representatives
of non-governmental organizations would be lodged far
away, in Zambia and Botswana, out of the action.” This
would give Zimbabwe more opportunity to lobby officials in
favor of abolishing the international ban on ivory trafficking.

Wolves

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

More Yellowstone releases
Yellowstone––Following the release of 28
Canadian-captured grey wolves in Yellowstone National
Park and central Idaho last spring, 38 wolves are to be
released in the Yellowstone region this spring.
The second round of the high-profile reintroduction
of wolves––extirpated by the forerunner of the
Animal Damage Control program in 1922––began in
January with the apprehension of the wolves by British
Columbia bounty trappers. The B.C. wildlife branch has
contracted to supply up to 180 grey wolves to the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service over the next four years. The
wolves will be taken out of a region overlapping the area
where B.C. wildlife branch officers killed more than 700
wolves during the mid-1980s, to make more ungulates
available to trophy hunters. The present wolf population
of the region is estimated at 300.

Missouri to trap otters: New icon for antifur drive with European ban pending

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

BRUSSELS––If Europe banned the
import of seal pelts because of the cuteness of
harp seals, just wait until they meet river
otters––not only cute, but playfully active
and insatiably gregarious.
The Missouri Department of
Conservation quietly approved the resumption
of trapping river otters in May 1995, but
word didn’t reach the public until Valentine’s
Day, when the world learned from an article
by Mead Gruver in the St. Louis River Front
Times that the Missouri Trappers aim to give
Miss Missouri an otter coat this year.
Thus alerted, the Fur Bearer
Defenders and the Sea Wolf Alliance warmed
up their fax machines. Within hours bigger
organizations including the Animal Legal
Defense Fund, Fund for Animals, and the
Humane Society of the U.S. were on the case.

Artful Dodge gets Agudo family out of Venezuela

April 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

GLENCOE, Missouri––Wanted for treason by Venezuela, because in February
1993 he and colleague Aldemaro Romero videotaped fishers in the act of killing a dolphin,
Professor Ignacio Agudo is safe in Brazil, after two years on the run. His daughters Esther,
seven, and Lina, 15 months, are with him.
Romero too is alive and well, having escaped to Miami in February 1994. His wife
followed soon after. But Agudo’s wife Saida, Esther and Lina’s mother, died in hiding on
April 26, 1995, at age 36, because she couldn’t get medication she needed for a chronic
heart condition. Their grandfather, Agudo’s father, repeatedly interrogated by Venezuelan
police, shot himself in December 1994, to avoid giving away their location.

BOOKS: Beyond The Killing Tree: A Journal of Discovery

March 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Beyond The Killing Tree: A Journal of Discovery
by Stephen Reynolds.
Epicenter Press (POB 82368, Kenmore, WA 98028), 1995. 192 pages. $19.95, hc.

“…I have never been in sync with
anti-hunters,” Stephen Reynolds declares
somewhat provocatively in Beyond The
Killing Tree. “I haven’t respected their opinions
because the majority have never hunted.
They don’t understand the need or the craving
for the chase.”
While Reynolds himself has hunted,
and enjoyed it, he has also undergone a
change of heart. Witnessing too many death
struggles of noble and innocent beasts for no
better purpose than the “craving of the chase”
or thrill of the kill has caused him to reconsider
the longterm price of indulging the
craving.

Sportsmen

March 1, 1996 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Philadelphia Inquirer photographer
Vicki Valiero’s image of bowhunter
Rex Perysian astride a dead pig just about
told the story on February 2 of her visit to a
canned hunt in Cheboygan, Michigan, on
assignment with staff writer Alfred
Lubrano––but if the picture wasn’t graphic
enough, there were Perysian’s words: “I’ll
grab it like I grab my women,” he told his
pals. Then Perysian dropped the animal’s
head and bellowed into the woods, boasting
that the kill had sexually aroused him.”
The article went on to detail, first-hand, the
exercise in sadism that brought Perysian and
pals to that climax.
Michael Nunn, manager of the
Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge,
in Oregon, on January 31 advised Friends of
Animals that he would recommend that the
refuge “back off” from a proposed aerial
coyote shoot, and instead do two years of
data collection before deciding on any
course of action. Refuge staff blamed coyotes
for a low rate of young pronghorn survival,
but outside biological expertise identified
other more likely causes, including
overgrazing. FoA attacked the coyotekilling
plan in newspaper ads that reportedly
sparked more than 1,200 letters of protest.

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