U.S. ignores sea turtle deadline

December 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The U.S.
was to tell the World Trade Organization by
December 6 what it plans to do to bring sea turtle
protection into line with the General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
Ignoring the WTO could bring trade
sanctions. But with President Bill Clinton and
Congress engaged in impeachment hearings,
the deadline passed with scant notice.
The U.S. on November 6 formally
accepted an October 12 WTO appellate court
panel ruling that barring shrimp imports from
nations whose shrimpers don’t use Turtle
Exclusion Devices (TEDs) is a so-called
“process standard,” violating GATT.
The verdict upheld the April opinion
of a GATT trade tribunal.

Too many disasters even before Mitch

November 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1998:

LA CIEBA, SAN JUAN, MIAMI, NEW
ORLEANS––Tracking a two-year-old female falcon by satellite
transmitter, as she migrated from Wood Buffalo National
Park in central Alberta, Canadian Wildlife Service ornithologist
Geoff Holroyd on October 23-24 watched her gain 300
miles between Haiti and South America, only to be whirled
backward by Hurricane Mitch.
Twelve hours later the exhausted falcon landed back
in Haiti, almost where she’d begun the day’s journey.
She was among the luckier victims of Mitch––and the
winds were the least of the storm, which raged off Central
America for four days, causing unprecedented torrential rain,
mud slides, and flooding. Altogether, Mitch killed an estimated
minimum of 9,000 people in Honduras, 2,000 in Nicaragua,
and hundreds of others in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico,
and on missing ships. Thousands more were missing.
The toll on animals, both wild and domestic, was
incalculable.

VIVISECTORS IN SPACE

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

MOSCOW, CAPE CANAV
ERAL––Fifteen two-year-old
Oriental newts and 80 snails were
brought aboard the Russian space station
Mir on May 18, to resume neurological
studies of the effects of
weightlessness on anatomy that were
disrupted in February when eight
newts died during their return to earth
aboard a cargo shuttle.
The newts and snails are to
remain in orbit until August––if they
endure that long.
Similar work undertaken by
the 16-day, $99 million “Neurolab”
flight of the NASA space shuttle
Columbia during April and early May
brought mostly unplanned early
deaths of the specimens. The casualties
might have contributed to
NASA’s May 5 announcement that
the Neurolab would not fly a second
time in August, as had been tentatively
planned.

Raising a crop of fire

July 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1998:

DALLAS, MANILA, KUALA
LUMPUR––Martha Hovers, attending 300
dogs at the Animal Refuge Foundation sanctuary
in Sherman, Texas, saw the smoke from
the burning Las Chimalapas biosphere refuge
and environs on May 27 and knew it was no
ordinary fire: the clouds were too dark, too
thick, too high. advancing as one dark blanket.
She called ANIMAL PEOPLE to make
sure we were on the story.
Among the largest dog sanctuaries in
the U.S., ARF is about as far from Las
Chimalapas as it could be and yet remain in
Texas. Mexico is most of a day’s drive south.
Las Chimalapas is in Oaxaca, toward the
southern end of Mexico, 2,000 miles away,
while the also burning El Triunfo nature reserve
is in Chiapas, even farther south.
Guatemala, where other forest fires
contributed more smoke to the blanket, is more
southerly still.

Dog ecology in Puerto Rico

May 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1998:

LUQUILLO, P.R.––To save a sato, one of the
Puerto Rican street dogs lately made legendary by humane
literature, a would-be rescuer first must find a sato– – and
that, these days, is surprisingly difficult.
Mailings from major humane organizations would
have you believe homeless dogs are everywhere in Puerto
Rico. Doing a personal ecological assessment of the Puerto
Rican homeless dog and cat problem, however, I spent six
days and five nights, March 25-30, combing the 320-
square-mile island from Luquillo in the east to Mayaguez in
the west, Old San Juan in the north to Ponce in the south. I
drove every major highway, circling the island and crisscrossing
representative parts of it six times, twice by night
and four times by day, mostly on mere ribbons of winding
asphalt barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast.

PARE MEANS “STOP!”

May 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1998:

CAGUAS––Emilio Massas,
founder and director of Protectores de
Animales Regional y Estatal, not only
invited me to visit when I called, but
dropped everything to drive across town
and lead me to the shelter.
I had been told by Alice Dodge
of Pet Search that Massas ran the best shelter
in Puerto Rico, and therefore saved
calling him for last.
But I also had been told by others
that there were good shelters elsewhere in
Puerto Rico, only to find on a visit that
each had serious deficiencies. One location
listed as a shelter by some activist groups
turned out to be a porch with one dog. The
best Puerto Rican shelter I’d already seen,
Villa Michelle in Mayaguez, was great––if
you could find it––but was far too small to
fully serve the community.

Watching the world go to hell

April 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1998:

INDONESIA, THAILAND,
BRAZIL, TIBET, NEW ZEALAND,
CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA––Wildlife officials
rescued eight orangutans including four
babies from the path of flames in early
February at Kutai National Park in East
Kalimantan, Indonesia, but found the
remains of two others in poachers’ traps.
A third orang was killed on March
12 when according to Indonesian media she
apparently mistook two farmers who had
been drafted into a firefighting force for
attackers, and rushed them to defend her
baby. She reportedly bit three fingers off one
of the men before the other man beat her to
death with a machete. Antara, the Indonesian
state press agency, hinted that the men
might actually have killed the mother in
attempting to steal and sell her baby.

O’Barry probes Latin whale-jails

December 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1997:

MARACAIBO, Venezuela––
Working undercover for the World
Society for the Protection of Animals,
Ric O’Barry of the Dolphin Project
suspected he might be in trouble with
Colombian cocaine kings, whom he
alleged had invested in a traveling
marine mammal act, but was more
concerned with Pepsi Cola than coke
when he called ANIMAL PEOPLE
to share information.
Pepsi and Polar Beer, O’Barry
said, were evidently major sponsors
of a Latin American tour by WaterLand/Mundo
Marino, of Cali, Colombia,
which O’Barry and colleague
Helene Hesselager in a November 13
report to WSPA termed “probably the
last traveling dolphin show in the
world, and clearly the most abusive.”

PUSHING THE “DOLPHIN DEATH BILL”

July 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Only the threat of filibuster
by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) remained to
keep revocation of the “dolphin safe” tuna import standard
from sliding through the Senate and into law, after the House
of Representatives approved HR 408, dubbed “the dolphin
death bill” by opponents, 262-166, on May 21. Unless Boxer
succeeds in indefinitely delaying the Senate vote this year, as
last year, the revocation bill will come before the Senate for a
vote later this summer as HR 39, and is strongly favored by
the Bill Clinton/Albert Gore administration.
The revocation, to bring U.S. law into conformity
with the 1994 Panama Agreement, will allow the fleets of 11
other nations to resume selling the U.S. tuna netted “on dolphin,”
but will require that no dolphins are seen being killed.

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