Save the whales! DID CLINTON SELL OUT WHALES TO SELL MISSILES?

June 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico––The world will

know by the time you read this whether U.S. president Bill

Clinton sold out whales to sell $625 million worth of missiles to

Norway. As ANIMAL PEOPLEwent to press, Greenpeace and

the World Wildlife Fund, goaded by Friends of Animals, were

applying last-minute leverage to head off the apparent

sellout––including joint protest on May 17 in front of the White

House, a WWF first, while Clinton and vice president Albert

Gore met with Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland inside.

The proposed creation of an Antarctic whale refuge and

the resumption of commercial whaling head the agenda for the

46th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission

(IWC), commencing on May 23. As every year since 1982,

when the IWC decreed the moratorium on commercial whaling in

effect since 1986, Japan and Norway will push to break the

moratorium. As last year, Japan and Norway will also fight the

creation of the sanctuary, seeking the help of Antigua-and-

Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent-and-

the-Grenadines, four tiny Caribbean nations heavily dependent

upon Japanese foreign aid, whose votes were decisive in 1993.

Philippines joins Indonesia in banning monkey business

June 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

MANILA, The Philippines– – A

high-ranking Philippine official confirmed

May 9 that a long-awaited Philippine ban on

wild-caught monkey exports will take effect

this year, fulfilling a promise made in 1986

and completing a phase-out begun in 1989.

Quoting a radio broadcast by

Philippine Protected Areas and Wildlife

Bureau director Corazon Sinha, the Xinhua

news service reported that the export ban will

cover both wild-caught and captive-bred mon-

keys––a significant extension of the 1989

plan, reiterated in early 1993 by Sinha’s pre-

decessor, Samuel Penafield. Ending all mon-

key exports would ease the burden of enforce-

ment, since officials would not be obliged to

determine where each monkey was born.

Sex and animal protection

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Chances are, most of the people who attended the seminar on “Differences

between men and women” at the American Humane Association’s annual training confer-

ence last fall wondered what this had to do with animal protection. Presenter Judy Lang

asked the same question––after delineating the many behavioral differences found by recent

l research. By then the audience was bursting with examples of specific situations where a

better understanding of sex differences might significantly help.

One difference of note, applicable to both humane education and anti-cruelty

enforcement, is the disparate degree to which men and women recognize personal feelings.

As Lang pointed out, women have a much stronger neurolink between their brain hemi-

spheres, which results in greater capacity for connecting thought with emotion. Thus

women are less likely to blindly react. Some research suggests women are less likely to

abuse children and animals in part because they are more likely to recognize their own anger

and frustration before it emerges in hostile behavior, and are therefore quicker to use empa-

thy as a brake upon negative feelings. Men commit both violent crimes and suicide far

more often; women are far more likely to seek psychological help. Lang stressed that the

physiological difference is a matter of degrees, not of absolutes, and should not be consid-

ered a handicap or an excuse for inhumane behavior: men can and must be taught to

“count to a thousand” before reacting. What is important is recognizing that men often need

to be taught a mode of responding that for women may be inuitive.

Saving marine mammals and tigers: The balance of nature vs. the balance of terror

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The poli-

tics of wildlife protection are at the fore this

month as Congress rushes toward renewing

the Marine Mammal Protection Act on the eve

of the annual push by whaling nations to gut

the whaling ban enacted in 1986 by the

International Whaling Commission––and

everyone has something to trade but the

cetaceans and pinapeds whose fate depends on

the outcome. Simultaneously the fate of wild

tigers and rhinoceroses worldwide would

seem to depend more upon the success of

negotiations over inspection access to North

Korean nuclear power plants than upon either

economics or ecology.

A foreshadowing of the probable

compromises ahead over marine mammals

came on April 11, as President Bill Clinton

barred U.S. imports of wildlife products from

Taiwan effective in mid-May. Said Clinton,

“The world’s tiger and rhinoceros populations

remain gravely endangered and will likely be

extinct within the next two to five years if the

trade in their parts and products, fueled by

market demand in consuming countries, is

not eliminated.”

Birds

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Virtually insuring the mass destruction of spar-

rows, who provide much of China’s insect control, Beijing

Weekend magazine on April 1 published the assertion of profes-

sor Chen Wenbo of the Beijing Drum Tower Hospital of

Traditional Chinese Medicine that eating six sparrows and 15

grams of Chinese wolfberries per day for three months can cure

male sterility. The professor, 57, claimed to have cured

30,000 patients with a diet of sparrows over the past 13 years:

86% of their wives became pregnant. Since 1991 the price of

sparrows at the bird market outside the hospital has reportedly

doubled from three U.S. cents apiece to six.

Siberian cranes failed to arrive this winter at

Keolado National Park, near Bharatpur, India, for the first

time in 30 years. Only six were seen in Iran, and none in

Pakistan, marking the virtual extinction of the western flock,

which numbered 200 about 30 years ago. About 2,900 Siberian

cranes survive in the eastern flock, wintering in eastern China.

Ex-tourism head vindicated as Alaska loses suit vs. FoA

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

SEATTLE, Washington– – Why

was Connell Murray fired as Director of

Alaska tourism?

“I don’t know and I didn’t ask,”

Murray told ANIMAL PEOPLE on April

11, from his boat in Puget Sound, “because I

didn’t much care. I was retired when I was

appointed by the governor, I said I’d stay for

two years, I was there for two years and

three months, and I’m retired again.”

Murray was dismissed effective

January 1, while on a trip to Asia, shortly

after he testified in a deposition that the

tourism boycott called by Friends of Animals

in November 1992 to protest the Alaska

Board of Game’s plan to kill wolves south-

west of Fairbanks had not demonstrably done

any economic harm. The boycott was lifted

when the wolf-killing plan was suspended in

late December 1992, and not reimposed until

after the Board of Game adopted the current

wolf-killing strategy in late June 1993.

Woofs and growls

May 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Animals and wildlife get

7% of the charity dollar in Britain,

4% in Canada, 2% in Spain, and

just 1% each in France and the

U.S., says a new study by the

Charities Aid Foundation––but the

figures aren’t directly comparable,

since medical care is primarily a

government reponsibility in the other

nations but remains heavily subsi-

dized by charity in the U.S.

AGRICULTURE

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on

March 17 announced his third proposal in

less than a year to increase grazing fees on

federal land and prevent soil erosion of over-

grazed leases in 17 western states. Expected

to take effect later this year, the new propos-

al does not require Congressional approval.

It would double the grazing fee to $3.96 per

animal unit, and set different environmental

standards from state to state within a frame-

work of national principles. The proposal

was immediately attacked by both ranchers

and environmentalists.

American Breeders Service of

DeForest, Wisconsin, now sells cattle

semen and embryos “that carry a predicted

twinning value of at least 40% for bulls and

30% for cows,” according to the USDA,

which developed the method. The idea is to

cut production costs by getting more births

per pregnancy, but the gains may be offset

by increased birthing injuries to cows,

which are the leading cause of downers.

Farewell to marine mammal protections

April 1, 1994 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.––Only par-

tially enforced since 1988, the Marine

Mammal Protection Act appears likely to be

reauthorized with markedly less clout for

whales, seals, and dolphins than it once had.

The House version of the reautho-

rization bill, HR 2760, easily cleared the

Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee on

March 16 after adoption of an amendment by

Rep. Jolene Unsoeld and Maria Cantwell

(both D-Wash.) that would allow the govern-

ment to issue permits for killing marine mam-

mals whose predation might depress the num-

bers of a potentially threatened animal.

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