Category: Hunting & Fishing

Deer overpopulation: Hunters caused it. What can we do about it?

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:

DUPAGE COUNTY, Illinois––It isn’t deer
overpopulation that has the Dupage County Forest
Preserve commissioners, Steve Hindi of the Chicago
Animal Rights Coalition, Don Rolla of the Elsa Wild
Animal Appeal, and local hunting groups all at four-cor-
nered loggerheads. It’s what to do about it.
They’re agreed there are too many deer in the
six-square-mile Waterfall Glen preserve: 537 at last
count, even after 253 were culled last spring. They’re
agreed there’s nowhere to relocate them. They’re agreed
deer roaming out of the preserve are a hazard to cars and
perhaps to passing trains as well. They’re agreed that the
deer are eating songbirds and other brush-dwelling
species out of cover. They’re even agreed that there prob-
ably won’t be any ideal solution––quick, humane, and
inexpensive.

Read more

Marine Mammals

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

The hit film Free Willy gave new
impetus to the ongoing campaign to persuade
Sea World in San Diego to return an orca named
Corky to her native habitat off British Columbia.
Her mother and several siblings remain with the
pod from which she was captured 24 years ago.
Sea World contends Corky could no longer sur-
vive in the wild. Free Willy has also started a
campaign on behalf of Keiko, the star of the
film, who resides at the El Nuevo Reino
Aventura amusement park in Mexico City. Free
Willy producers Lauren Shuler-Donner and
Richard Donner are reportedly ready to buy
Keiko and move him to a better facility, perhaps
even a fenced inlet off Cape Cod, using
$200,000 contributed by Warner Brothers, the
film’s distributor. Captured off Iceland in 1982,
and kept at Marineland in Niagara Falls before
being sold to his present keepers, Keiko hasn’t
drawn interest from major aquariums because of
a purportedly debilitating skin condition.

Read more

COURT CALENDAR

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

Activism
A federal grand jury in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, on July 16 indicted fugi-
tive activist Rodney Allen Coronado, 27, on
five felony counts including arson, pertaining
to a 1992 firebombing that gutted the
Michigan State University mink ranching labo-
ratory. The fire also destroyed the files of an
MSU staffer who was developing alternatives
to the use of animals in biomedical research.
Coronado, who has acknowledged involve-
ment in other direct actions including scuttling
two Icelandic whaling vessels, was reportedly
last seen in Oregon in early November 1992.
He is also sought for questioning by grand
juries probing arsons at animal research facili-
ties in Oregon, Washington, and Louisiana,
and by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in
connection with laboratory vandalism at the
University of Edmonton, in Alberta.

Read more

Hunting & Fishing

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

“We just don’t believe that

public safety is our responsibility,”

Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen direc-
tor Robert Crook told a recent Connecticut
legislative hearing on whether hunting
license fees should be raised to support hir-
ing more wardens. The CCS is backed by
the National Rifle Association.
The Texas chapter of the NRA
is up in arms over a U.S. Forest Service
proposal to limit target shooting to the
safest 500 acres of the 20,309-acre Lyndon
Johnson National Grasslands. Incidents
involving use of firearms have increased
from 286 in fiscal 1990 to 510 in 1993.
The Coalition to Ban Pigeon
Shoots will protest this Labor Day outside
a private shoot at the prestigious
Powderbourne Gun Club in East
Greenville, Pennsylvania, rather than at
the simultaneous public shoot in Hegins.

Read more

Wildlife

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

Hunting interests within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and recent presi-
dential administrations have kept the USFWS Division of Law Enforcement so under-
staffed and underbudgeted that senior agents admit they can’t effectively halt illegal
wildlife trafficking or even make more than a token effort to enforce the Airborne Hunting
Act, Jessica Speart revealed in the July/August issue of Buzzworm. The International
Primate Protection League has appealed for letters to Congress and the Senate in support
of H.R. 2360, a bill by Rep. Richard Lehman (D-Calif.) to create an assistant directorship
within USFWS for the Division of Law Enforcement, thereby increasing its clout in inter-
nal political struggles. However, IPPL believes the word “wildlife” should be deleted
from a phrase in Lehman’s bill that would require the new post to be filled by someone
with “wildlife law enforcement experience,” inasmuch as people with backgrounds in the
U.S. Customs Service, Secret Service, or Drug Enforcement Agency might be equally
well qualified, and would be less likely to have personal involvement in sport hunting.

Read more

Hot water in the North Atlantic

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, Canada––Paul
Watson’s homecoming to Atlantic Canada in July and early
August may have been the most bizarre event yet of his long
career in protest. Raised in a New Brunswick fishing vil-
lage, Watson has been reviled throughout the four Maritime
provinces since 1977, when as a Greenpeace representative
he sprayed green paint on baby harp seals to protect them
from hunters. Subsequent anti-sealing expeditions after
Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in
1980 have confirmed his bad reputation among those who
live by what they kill in the sea––but many Atlantic
Canadians are applauding Watson now for his July 28 attack
on a Cuban trawler, the Rio Las Casas.

Read more

WOOFS AND GROWLS

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1993:

USDA-licensed Class B animal dealer Noel
Leach of Chase City, Virginia, facing disciplinary action
for 46 alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act, sued
Friends of Animals on May 24 for purportedly defaming
his character and interfering with his business relation-
ships in connection with bringing many of the alleged vio-
lations to the USDA’s attention. Leach claims FoA under-
cover investigators trespassed on his property while gath-
ering evidence. FoA attorney Herman Kaufman respond-
ed to the suit with a request for dismissal, pointing out
that the action is based on an alleged tort in 1990 for
which the statute of limitations is just two years, and that
the statute of limitations in defamation cases in Virginia,
where the suit was filed, is only one year. Well known to
USDA inspectors, Leach was rapped for six previous
AWA violations in 1983. His primary business is selling
dogs and cats to research labs and dissection supply firms.

Read more

HUNTING & FISHING

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1993:

The Illinois Department of Agriculture in June
banned captive pigeon shoots on advice of the state attor-
ney general, bringing its policy into line with the state
Humane Care for Animals Act of 1973 and a January 1992
amendment to the state Conservation Code. The ban was a
major victory for anti-pigeon shoot activist Steve Hindi, of
Plano, Illinois, who has struggled since 1990 to get
enforcement of the laws against pigeon shooting.
The Fund for Animals has announced that it
will not protest against the annual Fred Coleman Memorial
Labor Day Pigeon Shoot in Hegins, Pennsylvania, this
year. Major protests orchestrated by the Fund and PETA in
1991 and 1992 backfired when they became confrontational.
Nearly twice as many shooters and shoot supporters attend-
ed the Hegins shoot last year as before the Fund got
involved, possibly attracted by the chance an activist might
get killed in the act of rescuing a bird. The Coalition
Against Live Bird Shoots in Pennsylvania will hold a small-
er protest this year; details have not yet been announced.

Read more

Alaska resumes wolf killing; SUES FRIENDS OF ANIMALS FOR CALLING TOURISM BOYCOTT

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1993:

FAIRBANKS, Alaska––As
many as 450 Alaskan wolves will be
trapped, snared, and shot during the next
three winters to make more moose and
caribou available to hunters, under pro-
posals adopted July 1 by the Alaska
Board of Game.
ANIMAL PEOPLE waited to
go to press until the Board of Game deci-
sion became final—a week after the nor-
mal deadline––because of the signal
importance of the wolf issue in the ongo-
ing clash between ecology-based and
hunter-driven philosophies of conserva-
tion. The board was expected to revive
the wolf control strategy scrapped last
winter under threat of a tourism boycott,
but the details were obscured in a blizzard
of 92 wolf management proposals on the
summer meeting agenda, two of them
from the Alaska Department of Fish and
Game and many others from influential
hunting associations.

Read more

1 … 68 69 70 71 72 … 75