Zoo, conservationists buy out hunting rights

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

PITTSBURGH, VANCOUVER –The Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium and
the British Columbia-based Raincoast Conserv-ation Foundation have
each taken sizeable habitats away from trophy hunters with recent
land acquisitions.
The Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium announced on January 9 that it
is spending $2.5 million to buy the 615-acre Glen Savage Ranch from
Jerry and Iris Leydig of Fairhope, Pennsylvania.
“The ranch now offers hunting of whitetail deer, elk, red
stags, wild boar, buffalo and black bear. That will end,” wrote
Bill Zlatos of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “Instead, the ranch
will become “an education and conservation center for breeding
elephants and other animals,” Zlatos said.
The Raincoast Conservation Found-ation on December 12, 2005
disclosed that a month earlier it paid $1.35 million Canadian (about
$1 million U.S.) to acquire the guiding and outfitting rights to more
than 20,000 square kilometers of B.C. coastal habitat stretching from
northern Vancouver Island to Princess Royal Island.
“Raincoast, with the six first nations that occupy the
territory, intends to put an immediate end to commercial hunting in
the area,” wrote Nicholas Read of the Vancouver Sun. “No one from
outside B.C. will be permitted to kill animals in the region for
sport. B.C. residents, who operate under different regulations,
may continue to hunt in the area, but members of the first nations
hope to see an end to that early next year.”

BLM asks beef ranchers to buy wild horses

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

WASHINGTON D.C.–Bureau of Land Management director Kathleen
Clarke and Public Lands Council president Mike Byrne on February 21,
2006 sent letters to more than 15,000 holders of BLM grazing permits,
asking them to buy some of the 7,000 wild horses and burros whom the
BLM was directed to sell “without limitation” by a stealth rider
slipped through Congress in November 2004.
Equine advocates decried the letter as a proposed “final
solution” for wild horses and burros.
“Any excess animal or the remains of an excess animal shall
be sold, if the excess animal is more than 10 years of age or the
excess animal has been offered unsuccessfully for adoption at least
three times,” stipulated the rider, introduced by Senator Conrad
Burns (R-Montana).
The Public Lands Council “represents permittees who hold
leases and permits to graze livestock on the federal lands in the
West administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the United
States Forest Service. It also coordinates the federal lands
policies of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, American
Sheep Industry Association and the Association of National
Grasslands,” says the PLC letterhead.

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Crows & parrots outwit exterminators

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

DARIEN (Ct.), SAN FRANCISCO –Crows and parrots, believed
to represent the apex of avian intelligence, evolved in an
environment favoring agility and efficiency in the lightest possible
package.
Any air war strategist could therefore predict the outcome in
conflict between the bird brains and exterminators with thoughts of
lead.
Foes of crows with shotguns, fireworks, lasers, and
recorded distress calls took the most murderous toll on crows they
could during the winter of 2005-2006, on battlefields from upstate
New York and the Philadelphia suburbs to the Rocky Mountains.
Most of the crows, however, are still there, or at least
not very far away.
Attempted parrot purges have been no more successful, even
though the entire U.S. wild parrot population is believed to be
probably about 20,000, not more than 50,000 by the highest serious
estimates. About 7,000 parrots, mostly monk parakeets and conures,
live in California, with at least 2,000 monk parakeets in Florida.
USDA Wildlife Services claimed in January that a week of
nonlethal hazing had driven all but 500 crows out of Auburn, New
York, where as many as 33,000 congregated a few weeks earlier.
Complaints about crows meanwhile erupted in Syracuse, Marcellus,
Cazenovia, and Cortland, noted Syracuse Post-Standard staff writer
John Stith.

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Alaska Board of Game scraps own accountability rules to allow shooting wolves from aircraft

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

ANCHORAGE–Ten years after Alaskans banned hunting wolves
from aircraft by ballot initiative, 157 pilot/gunner teams are
shooting wolves from aircraft by authorization of the Alaska Division
of Wildlife Conservation and Board of Game–as hunters have every
winter since 2003/2004–and there is nothing that Friends of Animals
can do through the law to stop it, Alaska Superior Court Judge
Sharon Gleason ruled on January 31, 2006.
On January 17, 2006, three years after FoA sued seeking to
stop the airborne wolf hunt, Gleason ruled that the Board of Game
violated its own rules by failing to publish written justification
for it, including explanations of why alternatives to lethal control
such as wolf sterilization could not be used.
The 2006 airborne wolf hunt was suspended for two weeks after
only 24 wolves were killed, out of a quota of more than 500. The
quota exceeds the total of 445 wolves killed during the first three
winters of the program.

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U.S. Supreme Court endorses seizure of hoarded animals

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

WASHINGTON D.C., Philadelphia–The U.S.
Supreme Court in early December 2005 upheld the
right of humane societies and animal control
agencies to seize animals from alleged hoarders
and charge convicted hoarders for their care, by
refusing to hear the last appeal of Janet Jones,
55, of Hatfield, Pennsylvania.
Jones founded a local animal rescue
organization, Animal Orphans, in 1998,
operating out of her home. In September 2002 the
Montgomery County SPCA seized 96 cats, nine
dogs, several hamsters, rats, and mice, and a
turtle who were found on the premises in
allegedly negligent conditions. Charged in
December 2002 with 105 summary counts of cruelty,
Jones was in November 2003 ordered by the
Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas to pay
the SPCA $45,600 for the animals’ care during the
year while the case was pending, and to forfeit
the animals.
The sum was within $5,000 of the animal
care costs for 2002 declared on the Animal
Orphans Inc. filing of IRS Form 990. But Jones
appealed. After the Montgomery County Court of
Common Pleas convicted her a second time, the
Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld the conviction
in September 2004. The Pennsylvania Supreme
Court in June 2005 refused to hear the case.
Jones then took the case to the U.S. Supreme
Court.

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New Legislation: Austria, New Jersey, Ohio

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Austria no longer allows biomedical research on chimpanzees,
gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and gibbons, effective on January
1, 2006, unless the studies are in the animals’ own interest. The
last apes actually used in experiments in Austria were retired by
Baxter Laboratories in 2002.

Less popular with animal advocates is a new Viennese
ordinance requiring that dogs born after January 1, 2006 must be
insured to a minimum liability of $864,000.

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DNR seeks to keep wildlife rehab out of West Virginia

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

CHARLESTON, W.V.– West Virginia is the only U.S. state that
does not issue wildlife rehabilitation permits, and the state
Depart-ment of Natural Resources means to keep it that way, says
wildlife section chief Curtis Taylor.
The West Virginia 2006 legislative session convened on
January 11. Humane Society of the U.S. director of urban wildlife
programs John Hadidian and urban wildlife field director Laura Simon
have indicated that obtaining wildlife rehab authorization will be a
state HSUS priority.
The issue surfaced in October 2005 when a state police
officer investigating a complaint about shots fired on posted land
found about 60 caged raccoons on land belonging to rehabilitator
Patricia Hoffman-Butler, 47. The raccoons were seized, killed,
and examined for disease by DNR officials. Hoffman pleaded no
contest to illegal possession of wildlife on December 13, 2005, and
paid $173.50 in penalties.
West Virginia banned keeping raccoons after a coonhunting
club trucked as many as 2,000 raccoons north from a rabies-endemic
part of Florida in 1976, and released most of them before realizing
that some were rabid.

U.S. Supreme Court may step into factory-farmed chicken poop

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

The U.S. Supreme Court, recently reconstituted with two new
members including a new chief justice, may hear arguments on the
right of states to regulate agricultural pollution.
Arkansas attorney general Mike Beebe in November 2005 asked
the Supreme Court to throw out a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in
June 2005 by Oklahoma attorney general Drew Edmondson against eight
poultry firms with Arkansas operations that allegedly pollute the
Illinois River, upstream from Oklahoma. The eight, among them many
poultry industry leaders, include Cargill, Cobb-Vantress, Simmons
Foods, Peterson Farms, Tyson Foods, Willow Brook Foods, George’s,
and Cal-Maine Foods.

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Animal Defense League & L.A. clash over right to protest vs. right to privacy

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

LOS ANGELES–Animal Defense League attorney John J. Uribe and
City of Los Angeles prosecutor Spencer Hart clashed in municipal
court on January 12 in the first 2006 round of a multi-year struggle
between the ADL and the city over the rights of privacy and the right
to protest.
ADL activists Pamela Ferdin and Jerry Vlasak, M.D., both
longtime opponents of the leadership of the Los Angeles Depart-ment
of Animal Regulation, are charged with criminal trespass for
allegedly violating a Los Angeles ordinance in June 2004 that
requires demonstrators to stay 100 feet from the doors of protest
targets’ homes.
Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo on December 16,
2005 reinforced those charges by filing another 14 misdemeanor counts
against the ADL and individual members, resulting from 62 alleged
criminal acts. The case alleges that members of the ADL chanted “We
know where you sleep at night” outside Los Angeles animal control
director of field operations David Diliberto’s home, placed the
names of his four children on the ADL web site, left a message on
his home answering machine saying “Resign or we go after your wife,”
typed a “666” text message purportedly symbolic of the devil on his
cell telephone, and posed as mortuary workers in a 3 a.m. visit to
his home, claiming they had come to collect a corpse.

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