Category: Reviews

Free downloads from brightergreen.org

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  May 2012:

Climate,  Food Security,  & Growth:   Ethiopia’s Complex Relationship With Livestock  (22 pages)
by Mia MacDonald & Sangamithra Iyer
Cattle,  Soyanization,  & Climate Change:    Brazil’s Agricultural Revolution  (42 pages)
Skillful Means:  The Challenge of China’s Encounter With Factory Farming  (28 pages)

both by Mia MacDonald & Justine Simon   *   Brighter Green,  2011.

Free downloads from:  <www.brightergreen.org>

    Like Veg or Non-Veg?  India at the Crossroads,  reviewed in the March 2012 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE,  these slightly earlier reports from the Brighter Green ecological think-tank on the growth of animal agriculture in Brazil,  China,  and Ethiopia present a wealth of footnoted data,  summaries of economic and environmental challenges,  evaluations of the factors driving agribusiness in each nation,   and recommendations specific to each nation,  urging its government to de-emphasize promoting the livestock industry. Read more

BOOKS: Goodbye, Friend

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  April 2012:

Goodbye, Friend
by Gary Kowalski
New World Library (14 Pameron Way,  Novato,  CA  94949),  2012.
176 pages,  paperback.  $14.00.

Goodbye, Friend enters a crowded market of books written to guide human survivors through grief after the loss of a beloved pet. Unitarian Universalist minister Gary Kowalski came to write about pet loss after receiving a note from a congregant asking him to announce another congregant’s dog’s death. Kowalksi hesitated,  wondering how the congregation would accept the news.  But the entire congregation appreciated the woman’s loss and provided comfort to her. Read more

BOOKS Of Moose & Men: A Veterinarian’s Pursuit

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  April 2012:

Of Moose & Men:  A Veterinarian’s Pursuit
of the World’s Largest Deer by Jerry Haigh
ECW Press  (2120 Queen Street East,  Suite 200,
Toronto,  Ontario,  M4E 1E2,  Canada),  2012.  272 pages,  hardcover.  $22.95.

Wildlife veterinarian Jerry Haigh moved from Scotland to Kenya,  where he authored Wrestling With Rhinos (2002) and The Trouble With Lions (2007).   Of Moose and Men:  A Veterinarian’s Pursuit of the World’s Largest Deer has emerged from his subsequent experience at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon,  Saskatchewan. Read more

BOOKS Falling for Eli: How I lost heart, then gained hope through the love of a singular horse

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  April 2012:

Falling for Eli:
How I lost heart, then gained hope through the love of a singular horse
by Nancy Shulins
DaCapo Lifelong Books (11 Cambridge Center,  Cambridge,  MA  02142), 2012.  272 pages,  paperback.  $15.99.

    Former Associated Press correspondent Nancy Shulins shares an uplifting memoir in  Falling for Eli:  How I lost heart,  then gained hope through the love of a singular horse.  Married to a great guy named Mark,  Shulins wanted to start a family,  but despite a long series of expensive fertility treatments,  medical issues prevented her from becoming pregnant. Seeing friends and family doting on their children saddened her.  Shulins even stopped walking her dog Jack in the park to avoid the “fertile Myrtles” women who had recently given birth. Then Mark introduced her to friends nearby who kept horses. Read more

FILMS: The Hunter

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  April 2012:

The Hunter
Starring Willem Dafoe,  Frances O’Connor,  & Sam Neill
Directed by Daniel Nettheim
Adapted from novel The Hunter by Julia Leigh.
Porchlight Films,  2011 (Australia).  U.S. release on April 6,  2012.

By Wolf Clifton
The Tasmanian tiger,  more properly called the thylacine, was a large carnivorous marsupial with tiger-like stripes and a dog-like build.  Thylacines dwelt in the forests of Tasmania until hunted to apparent extinction,  chiefly by sheep herders who feared predation-although the historical evidence is that thylacines were only an incidental sheep predator.  The last thylacine killed in the wild was shot in 1930.  The last known thylacine,  captured in 1933, was accidentally locked out of his night quarters at the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart,  Australia,  and died of exposure on September 7, 1936.     Founded in 1895,  the Beaumaris Zoo had kept thylacines since 1909,  and was the only zoo that had them.  Without living thylacines to exhibit,  the zoo collapsed financially and was permanently closed in 1937. Read more

On the Origins of New Forms of Life: A New Theory

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  April 2012:

On the Origins of New Forms of Life:  A New Theory
by Eugene McCarthy
Free download from:  http://www.macroevolution.netThe March 2012 ANIMAL PEOPLE cover article “Why an ancient armored mammal needs better defenses” transiently mentioned the argument of evolutionary geneticist Gene McCarthy that pangolins and armadillos might be living descendants of stegosaurs and ankylosaurs,  two related dinosaur families whom McCarthy contends were synapsid proto-mammals,  not reptiles.
McCarthy also contends that pterodactyls and pterosaurs were ancestrally related to bats. McCarthy believes that placental mammals emerged much earlier than paleontologists commonly suppose.
In correspondence with ANIMAL PEOPLE, McCarthy has hypothesized that triceratops and the other ceratopsian horned dinosaurs might have been giant chameleons– which,  while a heretical notion,  might be possible within the full context of McCarthy’s ideas about how genetic traits evolve. Read more

BOOKS: Behavior of North American Mammals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Behavior of North American Mammals
by Mark Elbroch & Kurt Rinehart
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (22 Berkeley St.,  Boston,  MA  02116), 2011.  374 pages,  hardcover.  $35.00.

“Behavior of North American Mammals,”  says the publisher’s flack sheet,  “is a guide not for identifying mammals,  but to understanding what they do,”  including “information on seasonal activity,  food and foraging,  home range and habitat, communication,  courtship,  and mating,  development and dispersal of young,  interactions with their own species,  and interactions with other species.” Read more

Veg or Non-Veg? India at the Crossroads

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Veg or Non-Veg?  India at the Crossroads
by Mia MacDonald & Sangamithra Iyer
Brighter Green,  2012.  Free 46-page download: <http://www.brightergreen.org/files/india_bg_pp_2011.pdf>

 

Brighter Green founder Mia MacDonald and associate Sangamithra Iyer ask,  “Can India provide enough food for its people as well as support hundreds of millions of cows and buffalo and billions of chickens in increasingly industrialized conditions?  And can it do so while protecting its natural resources and the global climate,  and ensuring progress in human development?” Read more

Beaver & Climate Change Adaptation in North America: A Simple, Cost-Effective Strategy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Beaver & Climate Change Adaptation in North America:  A Simple, Cost-Effective Strategy
by Bryan Bird,  WildEarth Guardians,  Mary O’Brien,  Grand Canyon Trust,  & Mike Petersen,  The Lands Council

Free 55-page download from: <www.wildearthguardians.org/site/DocServer/Beaver_and_Climate_Change_Final.pdf?docID=3482>

“The reestablishment of American beaver and  its habitat  is a viable and cost-effective climate change adaptation strategy,” begins Beaver & Climate Change Adaptation in North America.  “Due to the unique hydrological engineering accomplished by dam-building beaver,  support and reestablishment of beaver constitute an important climate change adaptation tool in the United States.” Read more

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