Category: Law

HUNTING, BRAINS, SAFETY, AND SPORTSMANSHIP

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Joseph Berger, M.D., neurology
department chair at the University of Kentucky,
and behavioral neurologist Eric Weisman, M.D.,
also of Kentucky, rattled squirrel hunters in
August with a letter to The Lancet, the journal of
the British Medical Society, warning that all 11
patients they have treated for Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease in the past four years ate squirrel brains.
Berger and Weisman postulated that
eating squirrel brains might be an avenue of
transmission for the rare brain disease––a degenerative,
irreversible, always fatal malady apparently
related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or “mad cow disease,” also resembling
kuru, found among human cannibals.
As hunting season began, brains of any
kind often seemed scarce. Near Chibougamou,
Quebec, a 61-year-old hunter killed an 81-yearold
blueberry picker on August 29, mistaking
him for a bear. Their names were not released.

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Direct action crackdown

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Noel Molland, 36, of
Okehampton, Devon, Paul Rogers, 33, of
Southsea, Hampshire, Steve Booth, 38, of
Galgate, Lancashire, Saxon Birchnall
Wood, 24, of Sandhurst, Berkshire, and
Simon Russell, 33, of Pevensey, East
Sussex, pleaded not guilty on August 30 in
London, England, to allegedly conspiring
together and with previously convicted
Animal Liberation Front press officer
Robin Wood to incite persons unknown to
commit criminal damage between January
1991 and January 1996. All five, and Robin
Wood, were associated with Green Anarchist
magazine. Booth also produced his own magazine,
Lancaster Bomber, as did Molland,
who called his Eco Vegan. Burchnall Wood
allegedly distributed manuals on making
bombs and sabotaging vehicles, the Crown
said. Russell was for several years the electronic
voice of the British ALF. The group,
whose trial continues, are believed to have
been the core of the British ALF in the 1990s.
Attacks on some targets the defendants
allegedly directed activists toward continue.

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Protest of bison killing took guts

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL
PARK––The Fund for Animals, Biodiversity
Legal Foundation, Ecology Center, Predator
Project, and individual coplaintiffs on
September 23 announced an out-of-court settlement
of a lawsuit against the National Park
Service for maintaining groomed snowmobile
trails in and out of Yellowstone National Park
each winter, which become corridors to
slaughter as bison follow the cleared, packed
routes north into Montana. More than 1,000
bison were shot last winter alone for entering
Montana, where ranchers fear the bison may
reintroduce brucellosis, undoing a long campaign
to eliminate the disease.

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Counterattacks

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

U.S. District Judge Henry
Morgan, of Norfolk, Virginia, on
September 3 threw out an industrial espionage
charge that was part of a 21-count
lawsuit filed by Huntingdon Life Sciences
Inc. against PETA and undercover investig-
ator Michele Rokke. Huntingdon on
August 21 dropped four similar complaints
pertaining to alleged theft of trade secrets
and disruption of business. PETA and
Rokke still face 16 allegations that they
engaged in racketeering, trespassing, conspiracy,
and illegal wiretapping. Procter &
Gamble cancelled testing that had been
jobbed out to Huntingdon in June, soon
after Rokke and PETA displayed some of
the material at a press conference. Huntingdon
holds that the damaging information was
obtained under false pretenses, since Rokke
did not disclose her PETA affiliation when
she was hired to clean cages. Morgan ruled
in July that PETA had obtained information
about Huntingdon illegally, and enjoined
further release of the materials Rokke gathered
until after the case is decided.

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COURT CALENDAR

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

WILLS BANKRUPT
Former Humane Society of the
U.S. vice president David Wills on August
22 filed for personal bankruptcy. Among his
17 listed creditors were H S U S, which in
October 1995 fired Wills and later sued him
for allegedly misappropriating $93,000; John
H o y t, president of HSUS and Humane
Society International from 1970 until last year,
who is believed to have personally loaned
Wills money; Sandra LeBost, of Royal Oak,
Michigan, to whom Wills agreed in June
1995 to pay $42,500 in restitution and damages
for nonrepayment of loans; and
William and Judith McBride, also of Royal
Oak, Michigan, who are believed to have
reached an out-of-court settlement with Wills
in a similar case involving alleged failure to
repay a loan of $20,000.

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Animal /child abuse

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Northeastern University sociologist Arnold Arluke and
Carter Luke of the Massachusetts SPCA on August 28 reported
that of 153 violent animal abusers involved in 401 cases whose
behavior they tracked for 10 years, 70% committed other crimes,
and 38% committed crimes of violence––but only 15% of the
alleged animal abuse went to court, and only 8% of the alleged perpetrators
drew any jail time for their crimes against animals, which
usually preceded the crimes against humans. The point, said
MSPCA president Gus Thornton, is that “People who burn the
neighbor’s cat are not otherwise well-adjusted adults.”
The association of animal abuse with human abuse was
demonstrated to national media but little remarked in that context on
August 20, when 30 young women joined 428 men on the freshman
“rat line,” to endure six months of mandatory hazing as their initiation
to the Virginia Military Academy. The arrival of the women,
the first admitted to VMI, was anonymously protested by someone
who left 30 dead lab rats and a sign reading “Save the Males” on the
parade ground where the hazing commenced. “Somebody has a
really sick mind,” observed VMI superintendent Josiah Bunting to
David Reed of Associated Press.

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Rarely caught

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Just a handful of alleged bird thieves have ever been
caught, including a woman who was charged on September
17 with stealing a Goffin cockatoo from the Village Pet
Center in Midvale, Utah, by stuffing the bird into a diaper
bag. She reportedly admitted to police that she resold the
cockatoo three weeks later to another pet store for $600, 60%
of the estimated retail value.
Akron police officer Tom Miksch in March 1995
made the first pinch of a parrot thief that ANIMAL PEOPLE
has on record. Miksch recovered a Moluccan cockatoo valued
at $2,499 in the first animal-related crime he said he had
handled in 25 years on the force. One of the two alleged perpetrators,
Gary L. Peavler, 39, had 90 previous adult arrests
and 42 prior convictions, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported,
on charges including mutiple counts of intoxication, plus
cases of assault, petty theft, and gross sexual imposition.

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Speculative prices send parrot theft soaring

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

MIAMI– –Bill Gates, 50, not the
Microsoft baron but the manager of Animalia
Exotics in Miami, crawled out of a pool of his
own blood on August 20, dialed store owner
Joe Ferrero on his beeper, and when Ferrero
immediately called back, croaked “Joe, get
over here. I’m dying.”
Gates didn’t die, but he had been
badly pistol-whipped by two men who had just
cased the store with a seven-year-old girl and a
220-pound woman. The four left. The men then
returned to nab $200, an umbrella cockatoo,
and a Milian Amazon parrot. The birds were
worth an estimated $3,500, near the low end of
the parrot price scale.

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Making a bear problem

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

STOKES STATE FOREST, N.J.––With bills to ban bear
hunting pending before the New Jersey House and Senate, and a proposed
bear management plan awaiting consideration by the New Jersey
Fish, Game, and Wildlife Advisory Council in August, the New Jersey
Department of Fish, Game, and Wildlife needed a dramatic late July
incident to make their case that an estimated 350 to 550 bears,
statewide, pose an imminent threat to human safety.
Making that claim in support of an attempt to start a bear hunt
last year, without having a case to cite, NJ/DFGW officials were
embarrassed when opponents pointed out that New Jersey has never had
a bear incident doing noteworthy harm to a human.
Thus the NJ/DFGW was quick to ballyhoo a July 23 campground
encounter at Stokes State Forest, in which ranger Rob Sikoura
purportedly defended campers by rousting a mama bear and cubs, but
was forced to shoot the mama in self defense when she charged him as
he followed her across 40-foot-wide Flat Creek.

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