Video of singer killing tame bear may have helped in eastern N.D.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2010:
(Actual press date November 3.)
GRAND FORKS–North Dakota ballot Measure 2, seeking to ban
hunting deer and elk within high fences, failed statewide but passed
in the eastern third of the state.
Contributing to the regional split in the North Dakota voting
may have been intensive local exposure during the week before the
November 2010 election of a videotape of country music star Troy
Gentry illegally killing a tame black bear named Cubby at a Minnesota
game farm in 2004.

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Looking the wrong way for causes of bushmeat poaching and predator loss

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)
NAIROBI–Often exposed involvement of Asian financiers in
rhino horn and elephant ivory poaching fueled a ubiquitous belief
among frustrated animal defenders attending the early September 2010
African Animal Welfare Action conference in Nairobi, Kenya that
Asian workers in Africa are also implicated in out-of-control
bushmeat poaching and catastrophic crashes of predator populations.
African Animal Welfare Action conference attendees
guesstimated that Chinese workers alone were involved in from 20% to
80% of all the bushmeat poaching in Africa.

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Alleged rhino poaching gang served trophy hunters as well as Asian medicinal demand

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)

 

JOHANNESBURG–Startling photos of the
September 22, 2010 arraignment of 11 alleged
members of an international rhino poaching
syndicate reached the world despite the
officially unexplained efforts of police to keep
photographers out.
News photographers Werner Beukes of the
South African Press Agency, Herman Verwey of
Beeld, and Lewellyn Carstens of the South
African Broadcasting Corporation were detained
for 45 minutes and one of them was roughed up by
police, according to the South African National
Editors’ Forum. No motive for the police action
was offered.

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Avocados & ivory

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)
NAIROBI–Inspectors at the Jomo Kenyata Inter-national
Airport in Nairobi thought there was something odd about a two-ton
cargo of “avocados” that were to be flown to Malaysia on August 21,
2010.
Avocados, after all, are among the major exports of Sabah
state, Malaysia.
Opening the boxes, the inspectors found 317 pieces of ivory
and five rhino horns. Two suspects were arrested.

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Greenpeacers sentenced

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)
TOKYO–Greenpeace Japan anti-whaling campaigners Junichi Sato,
33, and Toru Suzuki, 43, were on September 6, 2010 convicted of
stealing more than 20 kilograms of whale meat from a warehouse in
April 2008, and were sentenced to a year in jail each, suspended
for three years. Sato and Suzuki contended that they took the whale
meat as evidence that members of the crew of the whaling ship Nissan
Maru were illegally selling meat from whales who had been killed in
the name of scientific research. The case, the award-winning film
The Cove, and the July 2010 deportation of Sea Shepherd
Conserv-ation Society activist Pete Betheune, whose boat the Ady Gil
was sunk by a Japanese whaler in January 2010, have greatly raised
Japanese awareness of the nation’s involvement in whaling.

BOOKS: Bad Hare Days

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)

Bad Hare Days by John Fitzgerald
Olympia Publishers (60 Cannon St., London, U.K. EC4N 6NP), 2008.
397 pages, paperback. $14.45 U.S., £9.99, 12.99 euros.

Northern Ireland banned hare coursing on
June 23, 2010, six years after the rest of the
United Kingdom. Ireland banned hounding deer on
June 29, 2010. The Florida Fish & Wildlife
Commission banned hounding foxes and coyotes in
so-called chase pens on September 1, 2010. Yet
opponents of pack hunting are not celebrating.

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BOOKS: From the Jungle to Kathmandu: Horn & Tusk Trade

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2010:
(published October 5, 2010)

From the Jungle to Kathmandu: Horn & Tusk Trade
Esmond Bradley Martin
Wildlife Watch Group
(20-Pulchowk, Machaagal, Lalitpur, Nepal), 2010.
186 pages, paperback.
Order c/o <www.citesnepal.org>

From the Jungle to Kathmandu anthologizes Kenyan wildlife traffic
investigator Esmond Bradley Martin’s previously published
investigations of rhino horn and elephant ivory poaching and
trafficking in Nepal, 1979-2008–the last decades of the former
hereditary dynastic government and first years of an elected
coalition government including leaders of a Maoist insurgency that
supported itself in part by selling rhino horn and elephant ivory.
Along the way Martin, formerly United Nations special envoy for
rhino conservation, refutes the common belief that rhino horn is
coveted in Asia for alleged aphrodisiacal properties.

Ted Nugent pleads “no contest” to poaching

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2010:

SACRAMENTO–Rock star and Outdoor Channel hunting show host
Ted Nugent on August 17, 2010 pleaded “no contest” in Yuba County
Superior Court to misdemeanor charges of illegally baiting a deer and
failing to have a properly signed hunting tag. Nugent was fined
$1,175.
The violations came to light when Nugent broadcast videotape
of his actions on the February 9, 2010 edition of his Spirit of the
Wild television program.
Hunting guide Ross Albert Patterson was fined $1,125 after
pleading “no contest” in connection with the same incidents, which
occurred in September 2009 in El Dorado County, California, near
the town of Somerset.

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BOOKS: Animal Investigators: How the world’s first wildlife forensic lab is solving crimes and saving endangered species

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2010:

Animal Investigators:
How the world’s first wildlife forensic lab is solving crimes
and saving endangered species
by Laurel A. Neme, Ph.D.
Scribner (c/o Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of
the Americas, New York, NY 10020), 2009.
256 pages, hardcover. $25.00.

Animal Investigators, by International Institute for
Sustainable Development Reporting Services newsletter editor Laurel
Neme, focuses on the work of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service animal
forensics laboratory, on the campus of Southern Oregon University in
Ashland, Oregon. The lab supports the work of 200 federal wildlife
law enforcement agents, every state fish and game agency, and the
wildlife law enforcement agencies of all nations belonging to the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Neme begins with the late 1989 discovery of 415 headless
walrus carcasses along the shores of the remote Seward Peninsula, in
northwestern Alaska.

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