Editorial: Animal rights, Republicans, and Original Sin

April 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

“Four new trends will greatly affect the course of environmental politics in the
1990s,” writes Competitive Enterprise Institute director of environmental studies Jonathan
Adler in his recently published opus, Environmentalism at the Crossroads. “They are: the
growing influence of deep ecology and its radical preservationist policy prescriptions; the
environmental ‘backlash,’ as represented by the property rights and wise use movements;
the emergence of the environmental justice movement and the tensions it has created within
organized environmentalism (as members of racial and ethnic minorities demand representation);
[and] the challenge to conventional environmental policies by free market environ –
mentalism.”

Missouri to trap otters: New icon for antifur drive with European ban pending

April 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

BRUSSELS––If Europe banned the
import of seal pelts because of the cuteness of
harp seals, just wait until they meet river
otters––not only cute, but playfully active
and insatiably gregarious.
The Missouri Department of
Conservation quietly approved the resumption
of trapping river otters in May 1995, but
word didn’t reach the public until Valentine’s
Day, when the world learned from an article
by Mead Gruver in the St. Louis River Front
Times that the Missouri Trappers aim to give
Miss Missouri an otter coat this year.
Thus alerted, the Fur Bearer
Defenders and the Sea Wolf Alliance warmed
up their fax machines. Within hours bigger
organizations including the Animal Legal
Defense Fund, Fund for Animals, and the
Humane Society of the U.S. were on the case.

Hogwash

April 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

Pork barrel politics came into the American lexicon
through the political campaigns of North Carolina-born lawyer and
war hero Andrew Jackson, U.S. President 1829-1837, who helped
Tennessee break off from North Carolina and then built a political
empire by allegedly passing out salt pork at the polls.
Off the pig! popped up in the 1960s. In inner city slang,
it meant “kill the police,” but when ANIMAL PEOPLE asked
activists at the recent Midwest Animal Liberation Conference if
they recognized it, none under age 35 did. They guessed, instead,
that it had something to do with living downwind or downstream of
a hog farm.
In the old days, before antibiotics, almost every farm
kept a hog or two, who ate slops––a mixture of kitchen wastes and
barnyard offal––and wallowed at will in a mucky outdoor pen.
Hardly anyone imagined that hybrid corn, motor vehicles, and
penicillin might make possible the use of standardized methods in
rearing the creatures who inspired the expression, “Independent as
a hog on ice.”

COURT CALENDAR

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Crimes against humans
Preliminary hearings began
January 30 in Chicago in the case of Marsha
Norskog, of Palos Hills, vs. Roger and Gayle
Pfiel, of Crete Township. In October 1995 the
Pfiel’s son Steven, 19, drew 100 years for the
July 14, 1993 thrill-killing of Norskog’s daughter
Hillary, 13, and the March 1995 bludgeoning/slashing
murder of his brother Roger, then
19. Norskog contends in a potential landmark
case that Steven Pfiel’s history of sadistic animal
killing gave his parents ample warning that
their son was a threat to commit murder, but
that instead of dealing with his violent tendencies,
they encouraged him to hunt and gave
him the car and hunting knife he used to kill
Hillary. Roger Pfiel is a meatpacking executive.

Activism

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

The Louisiana-based Coalition to
Abolish the Fur Trade said on January 22 that
it had received an Animal Liberation Front communique
claiming credit for the release four
days earlier of 200 to 400 mink from a fur farm
owned by Robert Zimbal, of Sheboygan,
Wisconsin. The release came three days after
the release on their own recognizance of 17 of
22 anti-fur activists who had refused to pay bail
and had gone on a three-day hunger strike, following
their January 13 arrest for trespassing at
a CAFT-led protest against the International
Mink Show in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Two
juveniles were released immediately and three
arrestees posted bail. Hitting fur farms in
British Columbia, Washington, Minnesota,
and Tennessee, the ALF claims to have
released 6,800 mink, 30 foxes, and a coyote in
six raids since October 1995, as well as spraypainting
$75,000 worth of furs at the Valley
River Center Mall in Eugene, Oregon, on Fur
Free Friday. Virtually all the released mink
were quickly recovered. The other releases
haven’t been acknowledged in fur trade media.

Sportsmen

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Philadelphia Inquirer photographer
Vicki Valiero’s image of bowhunter
Rex Perysian astride a dead pig just about
told the story on February 2 of her visit to a
canned hunt in Cheboygan, Michigan, on
assignment with staff writer Alfred
Lubrano––but if the picture wasn’t graphic
enough, there were Perysian’s words: “I’ll
grab it like I grab my women,” he told his
pals. Then Perysian dropped the animal’s
head and bellowed into the woods, boasting
that the kill had sexually aroused him.”
The article went on to detail, first-hand, the
exercise in sadism that brought Perysian and
pals to that climax.
Michael Nunn, manager of the
Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge,
in Oregon, on January 31 advised Friends of
Animals that he would recommend that the
refuge “back off” from a proposed aerial
coyote shoot, and instead do two years of
data collection before deciding on any
course of action. Refuge staff blamed coyotes
for a low rate of young pronghorn survival,
but outside biological expertise identified
other more likely causes, including
overgrazing. FoA attacked the coyotekilling
plan in newspaper ads that reportedly
sparked more than 1,200 letters of protest.

Clinton not expected to stand up to Japanese whalers

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

WASHINGTON D.C.––At the ANIMAL PEOPLE deadline, President Bill Clinton
was imminently expected to send a message to Congress about Japanese whaling, responding to
a December advisory from the Department of Commerce that Japan was vulnerable to trade sanctions
because of its decision to kill minke whales within the Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary.
But Clinton was not expected to impose sanctions.
Argued Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) in a February 7 letter to Clinton, “At this point,
any efforts short of sanctions would signal a lack of commitment to whale conservation by the
United States.” Japan officially moved into compliance with the 1986 global moratorium on
commercial whaling in 1988, but has continued to conduct gradually escalating hunts of minke
whales for “scientific research.”

Marine mammals

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

Nets and dolphins

EDINBOROUGH––The Royal
SPCA and World Wide Fund for Nature
head a nine-group coalition protesting a proposal
by Scots Office Minister Raymond
Robertson to make Scots fishers more competitive
by lifting a ban on the use of
monofilament gil nets which might drown
harbor porpoises. Such nets are used in the
waters of other European nations.
Eleven dolphins apparently
drowned in fishing nets washed up in
Cornwall between January 4 and January 11,
prompting Cornwall Wildlife Trust chair
Nick Tregenza to apply to the European
Commission for funds with which to develop
an alarm to warn dolphins away from
nets. The EC is already funding a similar
project called CETASEL, formed under the
1994 Agreement on the Conservation of
Small Cetaceans of the Baltic and North
Seas, a.k.a. ASCOBANS. “The project
started in the beginning of 1995, and the
first sea trials were carried out in March
1995,” said CETASEL coordinator Dick de
Haan. “The first enclosure trial, on a
stranded harbor porpoise, showed the animals’
sensitivity to ‘chirp and sweep’
sounds. In 1996 two sea trials are planned
off the southwestern coast of Ireland.”
Read more

Most recent data shows shelter euthanasias down to 5.1 million a year

March 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1996:

In October 1993, ANIMAL PEOPLE projected from about half of the data below that the annual U.S. shelter euthanasia toll could be as low as 5.1 million dogs and
cats per year––approximately a third of the then-prevalent guesstimates by national organizations. Adding in additional shelter-by-shelter intake and euthanasia statistics, compiled
over the past five years by a variety of different groups and individuals, confirms the estimate; of states for which multiple counts are available, only Indiana shows a rising
euthanasia toll, and that trend may have been reversed since the most recent available data was collected. Because not all the surveyors asked the same questions, figures are missing
from some of the columns. Dog and cat intake add up to a slightly different figure than total intake in some cases because some shelters report rounded numbers for some categories
rather than exact figures, producing a minor cumulative distortion. The New York data represents all shelters serving 87% of the human population, projected to cover the whole population
of the state. The Ohio data represents animal control shelters covering 34% of the state, projected to cover the whole population of the state.

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