Category: North America

Marineland of Canada sues Niagara Action for Animals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

St. Catherines, Ontario– Niagara Action for Animals has
appealed for financial help in defending against a lawsuit brought
against it by Marineland of Canada.
Opened in 1961, Marineland of Canada was the first
oceanarium residence of Keiko, the orca star of the Free Willy!
films. Captured off Iceland in 1979, Keiko lived at Marineland of
Canada for approximately two years before he was sold to El Reino
Aventura in Mexico City, where the first of the Free Willy! films
was made in 1993. Keiko died in a Norwegian fjord in December 2003
after an only partially successful return to the wild.
The Niagara Action for Animals web site and published
references to the group indicate that it is chiefly involved in
sterilizing dogs and cats.
Niagara Action for Animals has been involved in protests
against Marineland of Canada for approximately 10 years, coordinator
Daniel K. Wilson said, but the ANIMAL PEOPLE files indicate that it
neither started the protests nor was particularly prominent in
leading them until 2001.

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Arizona, New Jersey, and Alaska governors & wildlife

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

TUCSON, TRENTON, FAIRBANKS–Arizona Governor Jane
Napo-litano asked the Arizona Game & Fish Department to stop hunting
four pumas in Sabino Canyon, near Tucson, even after the department
agreed to live-trap instead of kill them, refused to authorize use
of a National Guard helicopter to help in the hunt, and told media
that she might ask the legislature to authorize her to hire and fire
the Game & Fish Department head, to make the agency more
accountable. Currently the head answers only to the five-member Game
& Fish Commission. Naming one member per year, newly elected
Arizona governors are in the last year of their first term before
they have named the majority.
Two weeks after closing Sabino Canyon on March 9, 2004
because the pumas purportedly posed a threat to hikers, the Game &
Fish Department had yet to bag a puma, but nabbed convicted Animal
Liberation Front arsonist Rod Coronado and Esquire writer John H.
Richardson for allegedly trespassing in the canyon while the hunt was
underway.
New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey, via environmental
commissioner Bradley M. Campbell, meanwhile asked the New Jersey
Fish & Game Council to refrain from authorizing another bear hunt,
after 328 bears were killed in the first New Jersey bear hunt since
1970. Wildlife officials had estimated that there were 3,200 bears
in New Jersey. Further study found that there are fewer than 1,500.

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L.A. city animal control chief Greenwalt retires

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

LOS ANGELES–Mayor James K. Hahn on March 2 announced that
Los Angeles Animal Services general manager Jerry Greenwalt, 63, a
33-year city employee, is to retire on April 12.
Greenwalt had headed L.A. Animal Services since October 2001.
During his tenure, coinciding with the tenure of Los Angeles County
Animal Services chief Marcia Mayeda, Los Angeles city and county
dropped their rate of shelter dog and cat killing to just 8.7 per
1,000 residents, by far the lowest since L.A. records have been kept
and about 40% better than the California and U.S. norms.
Since June 2003, however, wrote Los Angeles Times staff
writer Jessica Garrison, the Animal Defense League “waged a
relentless, bitter campaign against Greenwalt that included
demonstrations at his home, City Hall, local animal shelters, and
Hahn’s home.”
Greenwalt previously was interim director of the Los Angeles Zoo.
SPCA/LA president Madeleine Bernstein was named to head a
committee to seek Greenwalt’s successor.

Animal Fighting, 1997-2003

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

Dogfighting
Year 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Headline busts 11 24 54 66 75 48 48
Related drugs/homicide 3 9 13 12 16 12 5
People involved 76 136 237 297 282 306 426
Dogs seized 95 365 791 896 869 428 549
Felony convictions 1 2 7 25 18 14 35

Cockfighting
Year 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Headline busts 10 15 18 19 35 32 32
Related drugs/homicide 0 6 6 3 5 6 5
People involved 350 498 389 874 1508 497 458
Birds seized 725 763 1023 876 7995 3390 4113
Felony convictions 0 0 3 9 0 1 8

Data collected by ANIMAL PEOPLE on dogfighting and
cockfighting arrests during the past seven years offers hope that the
boom in animal fighting of the past two decades may have crested–but
only just barely, and only in response to increasingly effective law
enforcement. The trends indicate a leveling off at somewhat less
than the peak volume of activity, yet still a very high volume
compared to the pre-peak years.

2 charities, 1 name: National Humane Society, Care For The Wild, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

National Humane Society

The Council of Better Business Bureaus Wise Giving Alliance
has advised donors and news media that “Despite written requests in
the past year, the National Humane Society has not provided current
information about its finances, programs, and governance. The BBB
Wise Giving Alliance reports on national charities and determines if
they meet 23 voluntary standards on matters such as charity finances,
appeals, and governance. Without the requested information, it
cannot verify if the charity meets these standards.”
The National Humane Society discussed by the Wise Giving
Alliance was incorporated in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1998 by four
people including brothers Glenn and Randy Kassal, plus Barbara May
and Lillie Gara. IRS Form 990 filings do not indicate any subsequent
changes in board composition. This National Humane Society raises
funds primarily by raffling luxury cars. It has used an address in
Newark, Delaware since 1999.
Earlier, Glenn and Randy Kassal were prominently involved in
a Boca Raton-based entity called American Animal Protection Charities
Inc.

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Conservationists seek to bring back banned Compound 1080 poison

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

KATHU, South Africa; SACRAMENTO, Califonia–Thirty-two
years after then-U.S. President Richard Nixon outraged ranchers by
partially banning sodium monofluoroacetate to protect wildlife, a
year before signing the Endangered Species Act, some leading
conservation groups are aligned with ranchers worldwide to expand the
use of the poison, better known as Compound 1080.
The conservationist arguments are that nothing else is as
effective in killing “invasive” species, and no other poison is as
easily used to kill only those predators who actually attack
livestock.
“The Poison Working Group of the Endangered Wildlife Trust,
the National Wool-growers Association, and Cape Wools have over the
last three years combined to try to legalize and promote the use of
this poison in South Africa, to exterminate or control black-backed
jackals and caracals,” charged Kalahari Raptor Centre co-director
Chris Mercer in a March 2004 position paper. Compound 1080 is to be
applied to baits hung one meter above the ground, Mercer said.
“The theory is that only the larger jackal [and caracal] could reach this bait, and that the smaller Cape fox and bat-eared
fox could not,” Mercer continued. “Working daily with small
mammals,” including experience with jackals, caracals, and both
fox species, “we know that the poisoned baits will be easily reached
by all of them. The foxes will jump for them, and striped polecats,
meerkats, and mongooses will climb to get them. The Endangered
Wildlife Trust war on our wildlife will wipe out our small mammals.

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Horse advocate Ewing testifies for slaughter

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois–Donna Ewing, 69,
founder of the Hooved Animal Humane Society in
1971 and the rival Hooved Animal Rescue &
Protection Society in 2001, recently testified
to an executive committee hearing of the Illinois
House of Representatives that horse slaughter for
meat should not be banned.
“Humane societies became involved with
wild horses and stopped ranchers from killing or
culling the wild horses, and the consequence has
been that animals have been kept in concentration
camps at tremendous expense… billions of
dollars, because the humane people said you
cannot kill our wild horses,” Ewing said. “They
need to be controlled to a certain degreeŠIf we
don’t have a place where these animals, the
unwanted horses, the old horses, the sick …
well, they can’t take the sick ones for human
consumption ŠThere’s going to be a glut on the
market. People will be turning their animals
loose and I will be finding dying, starving
horses more than I have been now.

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Ebola exposure risk

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

FORT DETRICK, Maryland– A National Research Council fellow
doing postdoctoral virology research at the U.S. Army Research
Institute for Infectious Diseases accidentally grazed herself with a
needle on February 11 while injecting mice with a weakened strain of
Ebola virus. Quarantined for 30 days on February 12, at “Level
Four” biosecurity, she remained free of Ebola symptoms at least
through February 18, reported David Dishneau of the Baltimore Sun.
The researcher was trying to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Ebola
victims typically die after several days of high fever, diarrhea,
vomiting, and both internal and external bleeding.

How the U.S. kills sick & “spent” chickens

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SAN DIEGO–Calls to television stations
and letters to newspapers indicate that Americans
were mostly shocked by coverage of live burial
and sometimes live incineration of chickens in
Souteast Asia to stop the spread of avian flu
H5N1–but live burial of chickens is also common
here, to dispose of “spent” hens and surplus
male chicks from laying hen “factories.”
The U.S. egg industry kills about 170
million spent hens and as many as 235 million
male chicks per year. In 2002 about 111 million
spent hens were killed in U.S. and Canadian
slaughterhouses. Nearly 59 million hens, along
with the male chicks, were killed by other
means. That number is expected to increase by
about 21 million in 2004, warned Poultry Times
writer Barbara Olenik in September 2003.
“The USDA purchased approximately 30
million spent hens a year through their canned
boned and diced chicken purchase programs,
making it the largest market for spent hens,”
Olenick explained. “However, in July 2003 the
USDA announced new specifications that fowl
producers must meetŠdue to complaints of bone
fragments and injuries to consumers in the
National School Lunch Program.”

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