Shock treatment for marine mammals

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Bob Fletcher, president of the 200-vessel
Sportfishing Association of California, is touting a
high-energy ultrasonic anti-sea lion device, developed
by Pulsed Power Technologies, of San Diego, with aid
of a federal grant. According to Los Angeles Times
hunting/fishing columnist Pete Thomas, the device
produces “a brief concussive wave of energy that
affects the inner ears of mammals close enough to be
affected.” Fletcher told Thomas that it makes sea lions
“take off like scalded dogs.”
Added Pulsed Power Tecnologies president
Dick Ayres, “The fur huggers won’t be happy with
anything that annoys marine mammals, but this is by
far the most effective and least intrusive device that has
come out.” The west coast fishing industry, including
Fletcher, is lobbying in support of a recent National
Marine Fisheries Service recommendation that it should
be allowed to start killing pinnipeds “in situations
where California sea lions and Pacific harbor seals conflict
with human activities, such as at fishery sites and
marinas,” if nonlethal deterrents don’t work.

Marine life feels the heat

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Global warming and krill fishing by Russia, Japan,
and the Ukraine have tipped the biomass balance of the
Antarctic to favor salp, another microscopic creature of little
food value to marine mammals, Antarctic Marine Living
Resources program researchers reported in June.
Generating red tides, salp blooms kill as well as
compete with krill. The rise of salp and decline of krill reportedly
coincides with a 35% drop in the krill-dependent King
George Island population of Adele penguins.
The decline of Antarctic krill is not why record numbers
of blue whales and other baleen whales gathered this summer
off the Farallon Islands, experts said, since North Pacific
baleen whales migrate no farther south than the equator, but
warm water currents called El Nino, also tentatively linked to
global warming, have depleted the cetacean food supply in
parts of the North Pacific.
The depletion hit sea birds too, especially common
murres, who failed to nest this year along the Oregon coast.
Northern currents have reportedly warmed so much that southeast
Alaska salmon netters recently hauled in a one-ton Mola
mola––an oceanic sunfish usually found off Mexico. Pacific
mackerel have followed the warm currents to hit newly
released chinook salmon hard off Vancouver Island.

What did John Muir think of whaling?

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

SEATTLE––Ingrid Hansen, conservation
committee chair for the Cascade Chapter of the
Sierra Club, apparently lost a battle but won a war
July 19 when the executive committee rejected her
motion that the Washington-based chapter should
“support the Makah Tribe’s proposal to take five
gray whales per year,” but also defeated executive
committee member Bob Kummer’s counter-motion
that the club should “oppose all taking of whales.”
As Hansen explained in an April 9 letter
to Makah Whaling Commission member Ben
Johnson Jr., national Sierra Club positions tend to
follow the recommendations of the local chapters
closest to the issues. The San Francisco-based
national office of the Sierra Club last spring asked
the Cascade Chapter if it had a position on Makah
whaling. A nonposition, if precedent holds, could
keep the influential Sierra Club on the sidelines as
the Clinton/Gore administration advances the
Makah application to whale before the International
Whaling Commission this October.

MARINE CONSERVATION

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Hoping to gain influence
against Atlantic Canadian sealers, the
International Fund for Animal
Welfare gave $10,000 to the Liberal
Party of Canada in 1996, following
gifts of $46,000 to the Progressive
Conservatives and $42,500 to the
Liberals in 1993. “In hindsight,” IFAW
Canadian director Rick Smith recently
told Maria Bohuslawsky of the Ottawa
Citizen, “the intransigence of the Liberal
government in terms of environmental
issues, and lack of access to the government
that groups such as ours have,
would indicate the donation was illadvised.”
Pocketing the money, the
Liberals boosted the sealing quota from
185,000 in 1995 to 283,000 this year.

Shipboard with the Sea Shepherds

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

News traveled chiefly by ship for thousands of years. The first newscasters were
literally anchormen, who shouted the latest word of current events to the crowds who gathered
at dockside whenever a ship came in. After printing was invented, early newspapers
published not the news itself but rather lists of ships arrived and departing, with their recent
and future ports of call, so that to find out what was happening in China, one could find
the crew of the latest arrived China clipper.
The news was still traveling by ship on August 3, a sunny Sunday we spent on
Puget Sound with Captain Paul Watson and the crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society vessel The Sirenian. We met them at Eastsound, the main village on Orcas Island,
where they relaxed in the shade of an old church, and sailed with them to Friday Harbor,
on San Juan Island, where Watson had a Monday night speaking engagement.

Licensed to kill

September 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––You probably
think the Endangered Species Act, Marine
Mammal Protection Act, and Migratory Bird
Treaty Act protect wildlife.
What they actually do is require special
permission to kill or harass wildlife––and
spot-checking recent requests for permits and
exemptions, ANIMAL PEOPLE and Friends
of Animals’ special investigator Carroll Cox
quickly confirmed that the permitting and
exempting procedures are easily and often
manipulated.
“Permitting and exemptions are the
Achilles heel of wildlife law enforcement,”
says Cox, a former special investigator for the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and game warden
for the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife. “With the right permit or an exemption,
you can do anything.”

BOOKS: The World of the Arctic Whales

July 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

The World of the Arctic Whales:
Belugas, Bowheads, and Narwhals
by Stefani Paine
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1997.
114 pages, paperback, $18.00.

Few if any true stories about whales have a
happy ending. The World of the Arctic Whales, a
lavishly illustrated coffee table reference, includes
three sad stories in one: the slaughters of the cheerfully
gregarious belugas, the ancient bowheads, and
the quasi-mythical narwhals. The saddest part, as
dispassionately recounted as the wealth of scientific
information Stefani Paine recites, is that all three
species are still killed in the name of aboriginal subsistence
by people whose only real reason for killing
them is preserving traditions of barbarity which also
included, in the heyday of whaling, both infanticide––especially
of females––and the exposure of old

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.

Odd Bodkin II

July 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

ANCHORAGE––Responding to “substantial new information”
pertaining to the application of National Biological
Service sea otter project leader James L. Bodkin to kill up to 20
endangered sea otters, reported on page 17 of the June edition of
ANIMAL PEOPLE, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has
announced intent to reopen the public comment period.
Documents obtained by ANIMAL PEOPLE indicate
that Bodkin, working out of the Alaska Science Center in
Anchorage, may be seeking a pretext to open sea otter hunting.
Heavily hunted for fur in the 19th century, sea otters
were believed to be extinct early this century, but remnants of two
subspecies were found off California and Alaska in the late 1930s.
Resenting competition from sea otters for lucrative and now depleted
abalone and sea urchins, fishers held a decade ago that the
otters had recovered enough to be removed from the federal endangered
species list. The campaign lost momentum when oiled sea
otters became the icon species of the clean-up effort after the 1989
Exxon Valdez oil spill.

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