Wake-up call on behalf of wolves

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

NEW YORK, New York––The wolves massacred in Alaska last
winter are dead but not forgotten––and neither are those slated for death next
winter, as Alaska continues to kill wolves to make moose and caribou more
plentiful for hunters. To be sure the wolves are remembered, pajama-clad
Friends of Animals volunteers and staffers occupied the lobby of the ABC-
TV headquarters on the morning of May 19 during the broadcast of the
Good Morning America show, protesting a week-long promotion of
Alaskan tourism. Six demonstrators were arrested for trespassing.
ABC had already scheduled a 30-minute segment on the wolf
killing, featuring a debate between Stephen Wells of the Alaska Wildlife
Alliance and a spokesperson for the state of Alaska––but it aired after the
promotion of Alaska was over with and most of the resultant travel bookings,
FoA believed, would already have been made.
Preparing for further conflict, the Alaska House of Representatives
on April 28 passed a bill to enable the state Department of Fish and Game to
withhold data about wolf pack locations––purportedly to protect wolves
from poachers, but actually directed, newspaper editorials agreed, at inde-
pendent wolf expert Gordon Haber, who sued to obtain such information
last year, then embarrased officials with aerial surveys that showed many of
their claims about wolf, moose, and caribou numbers were inaccurate.

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Concessions to hunters win assault rifle ban

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.
The National Rifle Association took
the biggest defeat it has ever suffered
at the federal level in the House of
Representatives on May 5, as Indiana
Democrat Andrew Jacobs Jr. switched
his “no” vote to a “yes,” passing into
law a ban on 19 types of assault rifle,
which though backed by the Clinton
administration, had been expected to
fail by at least 15 votes.
Clinton bought the victory
with a string of concessions to the
hunting lobby. The assault rifle ban,
for instance, names 650 hunting
weapons and mandates that none shall
be outlawed during the 10 years the
assault rifle ban is to be in effect.

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MARINE MAMMAL NOTES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:
The Marine Mammal Protection Act was
reauthorized on schedule on April 29, including loop-
holes to let hunters to import polar bear trophies and to
allow the killing of seals and sea lions who eat threat-
ened fish runs at locks and fish ladders. Other provi-
sions include a total ban on intentionally shooting
marine mammals who interfere with fishing, and a pro-
gram to cut accidental kills during fishing to near zero
over the next seven years.
The Liberal Party of Canada convention on
May 15 overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling
for the resumption of offshore seal hunting, halted in
1983 after two decades of international protest. The
Liberals form the Parliamentary majority. Claiming
“the concerns of animal rights lobby groups should not
be put before the concerns of the people of
Newfoundland and Labrador,” the resolution claims
sealing is needed to create jobs because the fishing
industry has collapsed––making no mention that the col-
lapse was caused by overfishing condoned in the name
of job creation by a succession of both Liberal and
Progressive-Conservative governments.

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Save the whales! DID CLINTON SELL OUT WHALES TO SELL MISSILES?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico––The world will
know by the time you read this whether U.S. president Bill
Clinton sold out whales to sell $625 million worth of missiles to
Norway. As ANIMAL PEOPLEwent to press, Greenpeace and
the World Wildlife Fund, goaded by Friends of Animals, were
applying last-minute leverage to head off the apparent
sellout––including joint protest on May 17 in front of the White
House, a WWF first, while Clinton and vice president Albert
Gore met with Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland inside.
The proposed creation of an Antarctic whale refuge and
the resumption of commercial whaling head the agenda for the
46th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission
(IWC), commencing on May 23. As every year since 1982,
when the IWC decreed the moratorium on commercial whaling in
effect since 1986, Japan and Norway will push to break the
moratorium. As last year, Japan and Norway will also fight the
creation of the sanctuary, seeking the help of Antigua-and-
Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent-and-
the-Grenadines, four tiny Caribbean nations heavily dependent
upon Japanese foreign aid, whose votes were decisive in 1993.

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Editorial: What’s wrong with “sustainable use”?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

U.S. World Wildlife Fund president Kathryn Fuller didn’t just rattle the Clinton
administration with her May 12 declaration of opposition to any “first step toward the
resumption of commercial whaling.” More significant was her statement that, “Even if
commercial whaling could be sustainable, it cannot be justified,” a welcome marked depar-
ture from 35 years of WWF policy, which essentially has endorsed any use of wildlife that
even promised to be sustainable.
The most influential of all animal and habitat protection groups internationally,
WWF has been problematic since 1961, when founder Sir Peter Scott, a trophy hunter,
recruited the leadership elite from among fellow hunters who feared that African indepen-
dence would lead to the rapid loss of target species. The elite included longtime WWF
International president Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, who escaped punishment for
allegedly overshooting bird quotas in Italy in the early 1970s to resign, finally, in 1987,
after being implicated in a Dutch bribery scandal. Bernhard was succeeded by another of
the founding elite, Prince Philip, long the honorary head of the British chapter. One of the
world’s most prolific tiger-killers when tigers were abundant, Philip showed his allegiance
to conservation ethics that Christmas by leading his sons Charles, Andrew, and Edward in
killing 10,000 pigeons, 7,000 pheasants, 300 partridges, and several hundred ducks,
geese, and rabbits––all captive-raised––in a six-week vacation bloodbath. This slightly
exceeded Philip’s previous record of 15,500 captive birds killed during a five-week spree.

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WILDLIFE

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Fourteen years after being
declared an endangered species and 11
years after being pronounced extinct, the
Palos Verdes blue butterfly has been resdi-
covered. University of California geography
professor Rudi Mattoni, believed to be the
last person to see the butterfly before it pur-
portedly vanished, recognized it again on a
mid-March insect collecting visit to the U.S.
Navy’s Defense Fuel Supply Point in San
Pedro. The site is protected as critical habi-
tat for the also endangered California gnat-
catcher, a small songbird.

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Saving marine mammals and tigers: The balance of nature vs. the balance of terror

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The poli-
tics of wildlife protection are at the fore this
month as Congress rushes toward renewing
the Marine Mammal Protection Act on the eve
of the annual push by whaling nations to gut
the whaling ban enacted in 1986 by the
International Whaling Commission––and
everyone has something to trade but the
cetaceans and pinapeds whose fate depends on
the outcome. Simultaneously the fate of wild
tigers and rhinoceroses worldwide would
seem to depend more upon the success of
negotiations over inspection access to North
Korean nuclear power plants than upon either
economics or ecology.
A foreshadowing of the probable
compromises ahead over marine mammals
came on April 11, as President Bill Clinton
barred U.S. imports of wildlife products from
Taiwan effective in mid-May. Said Clinton,
“The world’s tiger and rhinoceros populations
remain gravely endangered and will likely be
extinct within the next two to five years if the
trade in their parts and products, fueled by
market demand in consuming countries, is
not eliminated.”

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Birds

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Virtually insuring the mass destruction of spar-
rows, who provide much of China’s insect control, Beijing
Weekend magazine on April 1 published the assertion of profes-
sor Chen Wenbo of the Beijing Drum Tower Hospital of
Traditional Chinese Medicine that eating six sparrows and 15
grams of Chinese wolfberries per day for three months can cure
male sterility. The professor, 57, claimed to have cured
30,000 patients with a diet of sparrows over the past 13 years:
86% of their wives became pregnant. Since 1991 the price of
sparrows at the bird market outside the hospital has reportedly
doubled from three U.S. cents apiece to six.
Siberian cranes failed to arrive this winter at
Keolado National Park, near Bharatpur, India, for the first
time in 30 years. Only six were seen in Iran, and none in
Pakistan, marking the virtual extinction of the western flock,
which numbered 200 about 30 years ago. About 2,900 Siberian
cranes survive in the eastern flock, wintering in eastern China.

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Alaska mandates predator control: CONCERNED ABOUT KILLER RATS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

JUNEAU, Alaska––Alaska gov-
ernor Walter Hickel on April 15 signed into
law a bill that forces the Alaska Board of
Game and Department of Fish and Game to
kill predators before either reducing bag
limits or curtailing hunting seasons to pro-
tect game populations. The new law for-
malizes as state policy the approach taken
in Game Management Unit 20-A, where
131 wolves were massacred this past win-
ter so that human hunters could shoot more
moose and caribou. It also takes the deci-
sion-making authority away from the
Board of Game, which hunting interests
feared might be too susceptible to pressure
from environmentalists and animal rights
groups––much to the surprise of the envi-
ronmentalists and animal rights groups who
have tried to deal with the Board of Game
over the wolf issue since November 1992.
Said Alaska senate majority
leader Robin Taylor, “You don’t manage
game by sitting back and saying you wish
the wolf wouldn’t eat the caribou. It’s like
shooting rats in a dump. They’re a predator
you have to control.”
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