Category: North America

RETURN OF THE PET THIEVES

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

NASHVILLE, MUNCIE, KALAMAZOO, FLINT––Missing dog reports reminiscent of the bad old days of roundups for laboratory use flooded animal shelter telephone lines and Internet chat boards between Thanksgiving 1999 and mid-January 2000 in at least three midwestern and southern regions linked by Interstate Highways 64, 65, and 69.

The first burst of theft reports fitting the pattern came in Maury County, Tennessee, south of Nashville. Almost all of the missing animals were reportedly purebreds.

After Christmas came 30 alleged thefts in southwestern Indiana.

“Red flags started going up,” said Evansville Courier & Press staff writer Judy Davis, when Gibson County Animal Services director Cindy Hyneman realized that, ‘All of the dogs’ descriptions matched––large, shorthaired, friendly dogs.’”

Read more

Fighting fur on the air

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

NEW YORK – – U . S . retail fur sales soared 30% 1999, says the Fur Information Council.

Receipts for the year rose to $1.57 billion––the most since 1988, when sales peaked at $1.85 billion. Adjusting for inflation, however, 1999 sales came to only 60% of the 1988 figure.

Other economic indicators hint that the retail surge may have resulted chiefly from heavy discounting to dump a fur glut caused by the 1998 devaluation of the Russian ruble, which brought the collapse of Russian demand for imported pelts.

Illinois wild fur exports to Russia, for instance, fell from $3 million worth in the winter of 1996-1997 to just $1 million worth in 1998-1999.

Read more

ANIMAL CONTROL AND SHELTERING

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

The Humane Society of Utah, working with Best Friends and other shelters in a concerted drive to make Utah a no-kill state, in 1999 placed 68% of the dogs it received and 61% of cats. Director Gene Baierschmidt told Douglas D. Palmer of the Desert News that the humane society killed 35,000 animals in 1975, but cut the toll to 2,500 in 1999, achieving a 21% reduction from 1998, and aims to go even lower.

The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society on February 1 became the third major shelter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to join a pact to make Pittsburgh a nokill city within five years. The A n i m a l Rescue League and Washington Area Humane Society announced their commitments to no-kill in late 1999. The Alleghany County shelter killing rate is 15.8 animals per 1,000 residents, low enough to suggest that the goal is realistic.

Read more

Shelter killing: how low can you go?

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

SAN FRANCISCO––”Total dog and cat euthanasias dropped below 3,000 for the first time in San Francisco history,” SF/SPCA president Ed Sayres told ANIMAL PEOPLE on January 20.

The 1999 toll ended at 2,916, Sayres said––2,834 at the city Department of Animal Care and Control, and 82 at the SF/SPCA.

And in San Francisco, “euthanasia” really means what the dictionary says it does: a death administered to relieve pain and suffering. Healthy dogs and cats have not been killed in San Francisco since 1994, when Sayres’ predecessor Richard Avanzino negotiated the Adoption Pact with the SF/DACC, to guarantee a home to every healthy dog or cat whom the SF/DACC cannot rehome or place.

Read more

Tales from the

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Bill Wewer, the far-right tax attorney and direct mail fundraiser who formed the Doris Day Animal League in 1986 and the anti-animal rights group Putting People First with his wife Kathleen Marquardt in 1990, was reported dead in San Francisco on April Fool’s Day 1999.

ANIMAL PEOPLE has repeatedly identified Cetacean Freedom Network founder Rick Spill as apparently being a Wewer alter ego, based on clues that Wewer himself provided in a taunting 1997 fax, many eyewitness identifications of photographs of each one as the other, and much other circumstantial and behavioral evidence.

But Spill reportedly appeared during the late November/early December protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, helping longtime close associate Ben White and others to build sea turtle costumes.

Read more

WHO GETS THE MONEY? addenda – late filings

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

The financial data below pertains to animal issue-related charities whose IRS Form 990 filings came too late to abstract in our 10th annual “Who Gets The Money?” charts, published in December 1999.

Each charity is identified by apparent focus: A for advocacy, E for education, S for sheltering.

Charities often declare to the IRS a balance of program vs. fundraising and maintenance expense (overhead) which differs from the balance as it would be stated under National Charities Information Bureau guidelines. The % column states each charity’s overhead costs as declared; the ADJ column states those costs as they would appear if the NCIB guidelines were followed. The NCIB recommends that overhead costs should not be more than 40% of total spending.

Read more

PETsMART dumps British subsidiary

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Phoenix––Describing a 92-store British subsidiary, Pet City, as “an asset that has not met our performance expectations,” PETsMART president Philip L. Francis on December 15 announced that it had been sold––at a substantial loss––to the British firm Pets At Home.

The deal was reportedly already in negotiation when the British TV program Weekend Watchdog on December 3 interviewed four former PETsMART/Pet City employees who described senior staff bludgeoning unsold hamsters and rabbits at stores in Fife, East Anglia, and Surrey.

PETsMART marketing director Simon Blower responded to the content of the broadcast a day before it actually aired by setting up “an external advisory panel, made up of independent consultants, veterinarians, and educators” to do a “comprehensive review” of Pet City animal care.

“We are absolutely determined to make whatever changes may be necessary to get things right in all our stores,” Blower said.

Read more

Did She Read It?

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

“Deer hunting kills birds,” an ANIMAL PEOPLE cover feature pointed out in March 1997, citing the loss of forest nesting habitat caused by deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania. ANIMAL PEOPLE explained that the Pennsylvania Game Commission annually sets hunting quotas to target bucks but spare does, to achieve rapid herd growth, and noted that the National Audubon Society, quick to blame cats for vanishing songbirds, had never fingered hunters’ demands for plentiful deer.

Pennsylvania Audubon Society executive director Cindy Dunn, however, sounded as if she’d read the article in a recent address to a deer management symposium in Media, Pennsylvania. Accusing Game Commission members of “getting their opinions from barroom biology,” Dunn blasted deer management policies favoring hunters who “would like to see a lot of deer in a short time,” and called hunting no solution to the loss of nesting habitat because, “You can shoot a lot of bucks without having any impact upon deer herd size.”

Canadians hunt the last seal

Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

ST. JOHN, GRISE FJORD––The Inuk of Grise Fjord, Nunavet, formerly part of the Northwest Territories of Canada, marked the New Year with a “Last Seal of the Millennium” hunting contest on the ice off Ellesmere Island.

The unrestrained viciousness of Atlantic Canadian seal massacres meanwhile may get worse, as the Supreme Court of Newfoundland ruled 2-1 on December 14, 1999 that sealing is a provincial jurisdiction and that the Canadian federal government therefore had no right to charge 101 sealers with illegally killing whitecoats and bluebacks during the 1996 hunt.

The verdict, which the Crown had 60 days to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, could leave all authority over the hunt in Newfoundland waters with provincial fisheries minister John Effords. Effords vocally favors killing at least half of the Atlantic Canadian seal population, in hopes that killing seals will bring back cod.

Read more

1 … 153 154 155 156 157 … 321