Baghdad deploys gunmen to kill dogs

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2010:
BAGHDAD–More than 42,000 of the estimated 1.25 million
stray dogs roaming Baghdad were shot in the 60 days preceding June
11, 2010 according to the London Daily Mail foreign service.
The pace of dog-shooting had apparently increased sixfold
since Sam Dagher of the The New York Times reported in March 2010
that about 10,000 dogs had been shot since December. The shooting,
Dagher said, augmented “a program begun late last year in which the
national Ministry of Agriculture’s veterinary services teamed up with
the municipality, the police, and even the army in some of the
tougher neighborhoods. Mostly the dogs are killed with rotten raw
meat laced with strychnine.” Dagher described a poisoning crew
“being harassed a bit over whether dogs are really Iraq’s biggest
worry.”

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Dogs & cats off the job–rats storm flooded Manila

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2009:

 

MANILA–Rats may leave a sinking ship, but not a flooded city.
Humans, the pets they could carry, work animals, and many
street dogs fled Manila, Rizal, and their suburbs by the thousands
after tropical storm Ketsana dumped a typical month’s worth of rain
in only nine hours on September 26, 2009.
Cats and dogs who were not evacuated and found no escape
routes climbed to high places, if they could, above the torrents,
but water spilling over 80% of the Manila metropolitan area kept most
of them wherever they ended up for at least the next four days, when
the flood began receding. Some were stranded for weeks. Much of the
metropolis was left to the rats and mice–and the Philippines are
known for rat and mouse biodiversity, with 62 native mouse and rat
species. Many are found in the greater Manila area, along with
non-native but ubiquitous Norway rats and at least three problematic
species who were accidentally imported from mainland Asia.

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Dealing with deer–and appreciating them

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2009:

 

At this writing hunting seasons are open on Virginia
whitetailed deer in every state that has any. Whether the season is
“rifle” or “archery,” “buck” or “antlerless,” open or limited to a
specific locale, there is no state that has Virginia whitetailed
deer in which reducing and limiting the growth of the deer herd is
not a stated management goal, even where the management plan is
still likely to accelerate herd growth.
This happens whenever and wherever so many bucks are killed
that each adult doe has food enough over the winter to produce twin
fawns.

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A misunderstood coyote tries to avoid trouble

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2009:

Captioned “An urban coyote strolls through West Hills, a
suburb of Los Angeles, California, in July 2002,” this photo
appears in Coyote Attacks: An Increasing Suburban Problem, in which
Robert M. Timm, Rex O. Baker, and USDA Wildlife Services employees
Joe R. Bennett and Craig C. Coolahan allege that coyotes are losing
their fear of humans, and are increasing threats toward humans and
pets.
The evidence in the photo, on closer look, tells a
different story. The little girl in the background appears to be
completely unaware of the coyote, but rather than stalking her, the
coyote is not trying to conceal himself. His tail is held low in a
submissive or defensive posture. He is not running as if flushed
from cover, but is walking in the apparent shadows of trees that may
have been cover he has just abandoned. His left ear is cocked toward
the photographer.

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BOOKS: Rat & Rats

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2008:

Rat by Jonathan Burt
Reaktion Books Ltd. (33 Great Sutton St., London EC1M 3JU, U.K.), 2006.
189 pages, paperback. $19.95.

Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat
of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
Bloomsbury (175 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2004. 242
pages, hardcover. $23.95.

Immersing myself in Rat, by Jonathan Burt, and Rats, by
Robert Sullivan, during my flight to Egypt for the December 2007
Middle East Network on Animal Welfare conference, I sat a few
evenings later in front of the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx during a
bombastic sound and light show and contemplated the role of rats in
creating the spectacle before me.
No matter what the Pharoah Cheops and his successors thought
they were doing, no matter what their scribes wrote down, and no
matter what anyone believed about an afterlife, the Giza pyramids
and Sphinx are first and foremost monuments to a temporary conquest
of rats by the first civilization to entice help from cats. Read more

70 years of missing the link

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
CHENNAI–Non-recognition of the
relationship between Indian street dog purges and
monkey invasions is no new phenomenon–and not
only Indians have failed to observe it.
Separate articles on page 22 of the July
1938 edition of the National Humane Review,
published by the American Humane Association,
detailed both a dog pogrom in Chennai, then
called Madras, and the industry of shipping
monkeys to U.S. laboratories that had emerged in
several leading Indian cities. Neither the
British correspondents who furnished the
information nor the Americans who wrote the
articles appeared to be aware that one practice
might be fueling the other.
“Stray dogs are a problem in India, as
in our own country,” the editors observed, “and
city handling in India is as revolting as in many
American cities. Through the endeavors of the
Madras SPCA, electrocution has taken the place
of clubbing dogs to deathŠThat the practices of
city dog catchers are much the same the world
over is indicated by a complaint that the dog
catchers were taking only healthy dogs and
passing up the diseased ones.”

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Monkeys may swing elections, but Delhi doesn’t want them

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
DELHI–“Marauding monkeys and the chaos they spread across
New Delhi” were “an important issue” in the April 2007 municipal
elections, reported Rahul Bedi of The Daily Telegraph.
But the outcome for monkeys was not apparent in the election
results, because no party really seems to have a politically viable
and popular solution.
Members of the Congress Party most flamboyantly campaigned against
“the monkey menace.” The Congress Party recommended raising a
“monkey army” of chained languors, to roust the smaller and much
more abundant rhesus macaques who cause most of the monkey trouble.
Indeed, chained languors are at times employed successfully
to guard specific locations for limited times–but apart from the
humane issues involved in capturing and training them, they are
often the losers when troupes of macaques gang up and counter-attack.
Few politicians other than former federal minister for animal
welfare Maneka Gandhi advocate leaving street dogs alone, to chase
off monkeys as they have for centuries. But several Delhi citizens
gave testimony to Bedi suggesting that urbanized macaques have become
a much bigger threat than street dogs ever were, except possibly in
potential for carrying rabies, and macaques can transmit rabies too,
if infected.

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RSPCA of Australia offers beer for cane toads

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
SYDNEY–” Hops for hoppers plan likely to croak,” the Sydney
Morning Herald headlined on February 27, 2007.
A year after the Royal SPCA of Australia began offering cane
toad hunters a free beer for every toad delivered to RSPCA shelters
alive, the offer has reportedly had few takers–while hunters
continue to club cane toads, shoot them, spear them, and sometimes
lick them, to get a potentially lethal high from a poison they
secret that has reputed psychadelic effects.
Native to the Amazon rain forest, 101 cane toads were
released in Queensland in 1935 to combat cane beetles, native to
Australia, who were attacking sugar cane crops. Ignoring the cane
beetles, cane toads instead became the most successful predators of
mosquito larvae Down Under.

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EU rules for moles

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
BRUSSELS–The European Commission in February 2007 upheld a
ruling by the European Union Health & Safety Executive that
strychnine may no longer be used to kill moles. The verdict means
all burrowing mammals should now be safer from poisoning, either as
targeted or accidental victims.
“Last September a new EU law regulated a wide range of
poisons, including strychnine, to ensure they were safe and had no
harmful effect on the environment,” explained Charles Clover of the
Daily Telegraph. “Manufacturers failed to offer evidence that proved
strychnine does not harm the environment, so the British government
appealed to the EU on behalf of the 3,000 licensed users of the
poison who kill moles on grassland or golf courses. ”
The appeal was denied.

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