BOOKS: No One Loved Gorillas More

January 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

No One Loved Gorillas More: Dian Fossey Letters from the Mist
by Camilla de la Bedoyere with photographs by Bob Campbell
National Geographic Society (1145 17th St. NW, Washington, DC
20036), 2005. 191 pages, illustrated. $30.00 hard cover.

World Atlas of Great Apes & Their Conservation
edited by Julian Caldecott & Lera Miles
University of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA
94704), 94704. 424 pages, illustrated. $45.00 hard cover.

A case could be made that if Dian Fossey had not authored
Gorillas In The Mist (1983), the World Atlas of Great Apes & Their
Conservation would not exist.
Even if Julian Caldecott and Lera Miles had managed to
compile the World Atlas of Great Apes, it probably would not have
been published in a volume with 150 color photos, 50 maps, and a
preface by United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. The heavily
footnoted text would be buried in obscure scholarly journals, not
piled on coffee tables.
Annan probably would never have written, “The great apes are
our kin. Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools,
politics, and medicine.”

BOOKS: Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers

January 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers:
The Past & Future of Human-Animal Relationships
by Richard W. Bulliet
Columbia University Press (61 West 62nd St., New York, NY 10023), 2005.
256 pages, hardcover. $27.50.

“Let’s start with sex and blood,” opens
Richard W. Bulliet, hypothesizing that sex and
violence in screen entertainment today feeds a
human fascination that earlier was satisfied by
watching animal mating and barnyard slaughter.
“Carnal reality made fantasy
unnecessary,” Bulliet asserts. “Paradoxically,
postdomestic societies with high levels of
sex-and-blood pornography may exhibit a strong
and generalized abhorrence for real-life maiming,
killing, and sexual predation.”
By “post-domestic,” Bulliet means
societies in which most people no longer directly
participate in animal husbandry.

Reviews

BOOKS: Animals, Ethics & Christianity

January 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Animals, Ethics & Christianity
by Matthew Priebe
14069 S. Lincoln Way, Galt, CA 95632, 2005.
73 pages, paperback. $4.00.

This booklet consists of a 45-page essay–plus 28 pages of
footnotes–on the relationship between humankind and other life
forms, assessed not on the basis of rights, but from the perspective
of the Bible.
Priebe questions how a true Christian should treat the
animals over whom humans were given dominion. He argues, citing
Biblical passages, that we should treat animals in the same way that
God treats us. Priebe argues that kind and merciful dominion is
God’s dominion, whereas cruel exploitation, characterising current
human use of animals, is Satan’s dominion.

Reviews

BOOKS: Bear & The Grizzly Maze

January 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

Bear by Robert E. Bieder
Reaktion Books Ltd. (79 Farringdon Rd., London, EC1M 3JU, U.K.),
2005. 192 pages, paperback. $19.95.

The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans
Dutton (375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014), 2005.
275 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

Robert Bieder and Nick Jans explore the mythology of bears
from opposite angles but to common purpose in Bear, a global
overview, and The Grizzly Maze, an examination of the fatal
maulings of bear advocate Timothy Treadwell, 46, and his friend
Amie Huguenard, 37, by a brown bear on October 6, 2003, in Katmai
National Park, Alaska.
Bieder, a career scholar, starts with the evolution and
diversification of bears. Bear ancestors emerged in Europe and Asia
as long as 25 million years ago, but the forebears of today’s bears
appeared at about the same time that great apes evolved in Africa.
Conflict emerged between modern bears and early humans as
soon as population expansion brought them into overlapping habitat.
Bears, as carnivores who had developed the ability to eat
vegetation, and humans, as ancestral vegetarians who had learned to
scavenge and hunt, were direct competitors. Each killed and ate the
other, if able.

BOOKS: Canada Goose Habitat Modification Manual

December 2, 2005 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

Canada Goose Habitat Modification Manual
by Donald S. Heintzelman
Friends of Animals (777 Post Road, Suite 205, Darien, CT 06820),
2005. 16 pages, illus. $4.00.

“Just as world-renowned ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson
opposed mute swan egg-addling, Friends of Animals opposes addling
Canada goose eggs,” the FoA Canada Goose Habitat Modification Manual
opens. “Addling–destroying eggs by shaking, piercing, or coating
the eggs with oil–is invasive and traumatic for these famously
protective nesters.”
Many humane organizations including GeesePeace reluctantly
promote addling as at least less invasive and traumatic than killing
geese. The moral issue involved is comparable to the question of
whether or not to spay a pregnant cat or dog, when the alternative
is that more homeless cats or dogs may be killed by animal control.
In New Jersey, for instance, with 4.3 non-migratory Canada
geese per square kilometer, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
recommends that as many as 57,000 geese should be killed during the
next 10 years, to try to achieve a 40% population reduction.
Intensive egg-addling is also part of the plan.

BOOKS: Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fisheries

December 1, 2005 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

Japan’s Dolphin Drive Fisheries: Propped up by the Aquarium Industry
& “Scientific Studies”
by Sakae Hemmi (Supervised by Eiji Fujiwara)

Elsa Nature Conservancy
(Box 2, Tsukuba Gakuen Post Office, Tsukuba 305-8691, Japan), 2005.
33 pages paperback, no price listed.

Sakae Hemmi and the Elsa Nature Conservancy of Japan
published this expose of “The reopened dolphin hunts at Futo on the
Izu Peninsula in Shiuoka Prefecture and the dolphin export plan of
Taiji Town in Wakayama Prefecture” just before the 2005 dolphin
drives were to begin, on the eve of an international day of protest
against the dolphin killing led by Ric O’Barry of One Voice.
Hemmi, campaigning against the Futo and Taiji dolphin
massacres since 1976, nearly nine years ago wrote A Report on the
1996 Dolphin Catch Quota Violation at Futo Fishing Harbor. That
report served chiefly to alert the international marine mammal
activist community to the longtime existence of committed opposition
to dolphin slaughter and commercial whaling within Japan.
Capturing dolphins for use in exhibition and
swim-with-dolphins attractions had already emerged as a lucrative
secondary market for the dolphin-killers, whose primary motive has
traditionally been attempting to exterminate competitors for fish.

BOOKS: Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines

December 1, 2005 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines
revealing corruption, conspiracy, government inaction

Linis Gobyerno, Inc. (P.O. Box 1588, 2600 Baguio City,
Philippines), 2005. 139 pages, spiral bound.

Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines will jolt readers
unfamiliar with the dog meat industry. The most shocking aspect of
this comprehensive report, however, should be that it is the third
in a series of book-length updates by Linis Gobyerno, detailing
non-enforcement of the 1996 Philippine ban on dog slaughter for human
consumption.
“This is not a national phenomenon,” the foreword
stipulates, “but a problem concentrated mainly in the Cordillera
region,” where under the thin legal cover of an exemption granted to
the indigenous Igorot tribe, non-Igorots conduct a clandestine
traffic in dog meat worth as much as $290,000 a month.
“As an Igorot, I vehemently do not accept dog-eating as my
culture,” writes Dog Meat Trade In The Philippines contributor Bing
Dawang. “I was not raised to eat dogs, and dog meat is not a
regular part of my diet, nor has it ever been.”

BOOKS: PerPETual Care & All My Children Wear Fur Coats

December 1, 2005 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2005:

PerPETual Care:
Who will look after your pets if you’re not around?
by Lisa Rogak
Litterature (212 Kinsman Rd., Grafton, NH 03240), 2003.
192 pages, paperback. $15.00.

All My Children Wear Fur Coats:
How to leave a legacy for your pet
by Peggy R. Hoyt, J.D., MBA
Legacy Planning Partners, LLC (251 Plaza Dr., Suite B, Oviedo, FL
32765), 2002. 182 pages, paperback, $19.95.

The importance of careful estate planning, especially when
the goal is to benefit animals, was underscored on December 2, 2005
when Circuit Judge Steven H. Goldman of St. Louis County, Missouri
permanently removed attorney Eric Taylor as a trustee of the Olive
Dempsey Charitable Trust.
Judge Goldman ordered Taylor to repay to the trust $266,213
in fees and expenses collected while serving as co-trustee with
accountant James Richardson.
Dempsey, a retired telephone company employee, hired Taylor
and Richardson to form the trust in 1998. At her death in December
2000 the trust had assets of about $2 million. During the next three
years, according to IRS Form 990, Taylor collected at least
$221,929 in administrative fees. Richardson, who resigned
co-trusteeship earlier, collected $159,103.

BOOKS: Katz On Dogs

November 2, 2005 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

Katz On Dogs: A Common Sense Guide
to Training and Living with Dogs by Jon Katz
Villard Books (299 Park Ave., New York, NY 10171), 2005.
240 pages. $24.95 hardcover.

Dogs have their place in Jon Katz’s
family, but Katz, author of A Dog Year and The
Dogs of Bedlam Farm, neither treats them as
children nor accords them equal status with
humans. He views no-kill shelters with
disfavour, arguing that there is little reason
to keep potentially dangerous, un-adoptable dogs
in a lifetime of crowded, noisy confinement.
Katz offers guidance both from his own experience
and from case studies about what kind of dog to
adopt, how to train and feed the dog, and how
to build a healthy rapport with a dog. Handling
the complexities of multi-dog families is also
discussed, as well as some ethical and spiritual
issues.
Though centered on useful information
about dog care, Katz On Dogs also discusses the
changing roles of dogs in modern American
society, and how increasing stresses on families
affect dogs.

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