Conservation group experts urged dog shooting in Ethiopia

November 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GOMA, Ethiopia–Why were free-roaming dogs shot in November 2003 in and around Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia? How much did the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme and Born Free Foundation have to do with it?

Why, after Homeless Animal Protection Society of Ethiopia cofounder Hana Kifle photographed a probable rabid wolf in August, was the EWCP vaccination program for pet dogs and working dogs, underway since 1996, not extended to homeless dogs?

Oral rabies vaccination of the Ethiopian wolves was reportedly approved by the Ethiopian government on November 7, apparently long after the EWCP first requested permission to use it.

But the dog-shooting continued.

“After we reported that the health problem occurred among the critically endangered wolves,” HAPS president Efrem Legesse told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “the vet team came to the area [weeks later] and decided to destroy all dogs. Without spending much time at all where the wolves are dying, they finally convinced the park warden that shooting is the only solution.

China may push vaccination

October 2, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BEIJING–Appalled by the dog-killing they recently witnessed
in eight provinces of southern China, officials of the China Health
Ministry and Agriculture Ministry are recommending that future rabies
control efforts should focus on vaccination, a well-placed source
told ANIMAL PEOPLE on October 10, 2003.
The China Daily on September 3 blamed “the increasing number
of dogs and mismanagement of the canine population, including
insufficient and improprer vaccination against rabies” for the
deaths of 550 people in the first six months of 2003, 90 more than
in the first six months of 2002.
The most rabies deaths occurred in Guangdong: 74 total, 46
of them in the Maoming area. As many as 60,000 dogs were reportedly
killed in a futile effort to contain the outbreak, which closely
followed the SARS panic. At least 12 more Guangdong residents,
including six children, died from rabies in August.

Horse farmers lose PMU contracts

October 2, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BRANDON, Manitoba–Five hundred representatives of the 409
farms that produce pregnant mare’s urine for use by Wyeth Organics on
October 10, 2003 were notified in person at the Keystone Center in
Brandon that the PMU industry may be just about finished.
A third of them were told during the following
weekend–Thanksgiving weekend in Canada–that their services will no
longer be required. Leaving 30 seasonal jobs unfilled due to
plummeting demand for PMU products, Wyeth plans to buy only half as
much PMU as last year.
PMU sales fell after publication of a series of studies
during the past year by the U.S. National Institutes of Health which
documented that hormonal therapy harms menopausal women’s health more
than it helps. Sales had already contracted somewhat under boycott
pressure from animal rights groups. The boycotts began about five
months after ANIMAL PEOPLE in April 2003 exposed the close
confinement of the PMU-producing mares and the sale to slaughter of
most of their foals. The ANIMAL PEOPLE report was based on
investigative findings by Canadian Farm Animal Trust founder Tom
Hughes.

SARS kills cat program

October 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

SINGAPORE–SARS seems to have killed the Singapore Stray Cat
Rehabilitation Scheme.
Sponsored by the Agrifood & Veterinary Authority, the Stray
Cat Rehabilitation Scheme has sterilized more than 3,000 homeless
cats since 1998, but a four-month review of the project determined
that barely 10,000 of the estimated 70,000 to 80,000 homeless cats in
Singapore have been sterilized, between public and private efforts.
AVA chief Ngiam Tong Tau said on October 8 that “All but one
of the 16 town councils [in Singapore] wanted the scheme stopped,
and the holdout was halfhearted in support,” wrote Sharmilpal Kaur
of the Straits Times.
“The program was reappraised in the wake of fear that cats
might spread SARS,” Kaur continued. “Though tests found no such
link, culling was stepped up because of a push to clean up public
areas.”

SARS spread from live markets, but when?

October 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:

BEIJING–Blood tests indicate that about 1% of the children
in 17 provinces of China were exposed to Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome before the outbreaks of 2002-2003 that hit 24 of the 31
provinces.
Evidently passing from animals sold in filthy live markets to
humans working in food preparation, and then spreading from human to
human, SARS eventually killed 916 people in 32 nations, with about
650 of the deaths occurring in mainland China and Hong Kong.
The blood study was conducted by the Beijing Military Zone
Air Force Logistics Sanitation Unit, using samples taken from
healthy children before SARS appeared.
In a parallel study, the Beijing Capitol Pediatrics Research
Institute found that among 77 children hospitalized for various
reasons in 2001, 42% had antibodies to SARS. Among 92 children
hospitalized during the SARS outbreak, 40% had the antibodies–but
none had SARS symptoms.
Both studies indicate that the coronavirus responsible for
SARS was already widely distributed among the human population–at
least among children–well before it turned deadly. The findings may
explain why relatively few children developed the deadly strain of
SARS, but confounds the mystery of how SARS originated, since
children are also less likely than adults to consume wildlife
products.

Mascots: Avian disease mycoplasma galliseptum grounds Auburn University eagles

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

AUBURN, Alabama–A deadly outbreak of the avian bacterial
disease mycoplasma galliseptum is expected to end ceremonial eagle
flights at Auburn University home football games this fall, just
three years after the short-lived “tradition” started.
The use of live animals as football mascots has come under
intensifying protest from PETA, SHARK, and other animal rights
groups at colleges, universities, and even some high schools in
recent years. Auburn Univeristy appeared to have successfully
addressed the controversy back in 2000, however, by transferring
responsibility for the care of the caged eagles who symbolically
represent the War Eagles football team from the Alpha Phi Omega
fraternity to the Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center.
Alpha Phi Omega had looked after a succession of four “War
Eagles” since 1960.
Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center director Joe
Shelnutt taught a 24-year-old golden eagle named Tiger to circle
Jordan-Hare stadium on cue.

Spooked by SARS, China kills dogs to fight rabies & “scare the monkeys”

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

BEIJING–“Beijing has no more Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome patients,” city deputy health chief Liang Wannian told the
People’s Daily on July 29.
Hu Jintao, President of China, one day earlier lauded the
Communist Party leadership for eradicating SARS–nine months, more
than 8,500 cases worldwide, and at least 789 deaths after the
disease first appeared among food workers in Beijing and Guangdong.
About half of the cases and deaths came in mainland China, with
nearly 300 more deaths in Hong Kong. SARS also hit hard in Taiwan
and Vietnam, afflicting people in more than 30 nations altogether.
Other informed observers were critical of the Chinese government
response, as well as increasingly skeptical that Chinese authorities
have the will to enforce the complete shutdowns of wildlife
trafficking and live meat markets that could ensure no repetition of
the SARS outbreak and the economically devastating ensuing panic.
“It is now evident,” editorialized the moderators of the
ProMed online information network maintained by the International
Society for Infectious Diseases, “that China’s suppression of news
about SARS helped fuel a global epidemic that could have been
controlled more quickly, with fewer casualties and much less
economic damage, if news of the outbreak had been reported rapidly
and fully to the world.”

Top U.S. & British medical journals report–Hormone drugs from pregnant mare’s urine can cost lives & minds

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

LONDON–Sales of hormone supplements made from pregnant
mare’s urine, already down 65% in less than a year, may fall even
faster after the August 9 publication by the British Medical
Association journal The Lancet of new evidence that taking popular
combinations of estrogen and progestin appears to produce a 66%
greater risk of developing breast cancer within five years, and a
22% greater risk of dying from it.
Taking estrogen alone increased the risk of developing breast
cancer by 30%.
The data came from clinical observation of nearly one million
British women between the ages of 50 and 64, who were surveyed at
annual mammogram appointments beginning in 1996.
The $10 million study was directed by Valerie Beral, M.D.,
of Oxford University, with funding from the British government and
Cancer Research U.K., a private charity.
Beral and team estimated that taking estrogen/progestin
combination drugs could be linked to 15,000 more cases of breast
cancer during the past 10 years than would otherwise have occurred.
Taking estrogen alone could be associated with 5,000 additional cases.

Prairie dogs with monkeypox blow the whistle on the exotic pet trade

July 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2003:

CHICAGO, ATLANTA– With sentries ever
vigilant atop burrows, uttering different
whistles to denote flying, four-footed, and
two-footed gun-toting predators, what prairie
dogs do best is alert their whole habitat to the
approach of any danger.
In recent weeks prairie dogs alerted the
U.S. to the risk of little known lethal diseases
arriving from abroad through the exotic pet trade.
The triggering event was the arrival of
monkeypox, a milder cousin of smallpox, with 18
Gambian giant pouched rats and a number of
Ghanian dormice received on April 21 by Phillip
Moberly of Phil’s Pocket Pets in Villa Park,
Illinois.

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