Kamchata bears wiped out

September 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

TORONTO–Bear researchers Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns
returned to Canada heartbroken in mid-July 2003 after poachers using
a helicopter killed all 20-to-40 of the grizzly bears they had
studied since 1995 on the Kamchata Peninsula of Siberia.
Russell and Enns documented their work in a PBS television
special, Walking With Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia, and in the
book Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of
Kamchata.
“The people who killed the bears nailed the gall bladder of a
baby grizzly to the research station’s kitchen wall as a gruesome
taunt,” wrote Alanna Mitchell of the Toronto Globe & Mail.
“The bears were killed so we would go home,” Russell told
her, after permanently closing the research station because no more
living bears could be found.
Russell and Enns formed and funded a ranger team in 1998 that
aggressively pursued poachers of bears, sturgeon, and salmon.
Tigers had already been poached out of the region.

Chimp sanctuaries save evidence of human origin

July 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2003:

CHINGOLA, Zambia–Humane education and
conservation through rescue are the commonly
cited goals of great ape sanctuaries in Africa,
but another could be added: genetic research is
increasingly demonstrating that in saving the
scattered remnants of isolated and soon to be
extinct wild chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla
bands, the sanctuaries are becoming
conservatories of the history of human evolution.
David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute
in Cam-bridge, Massachusetts, in the June 19,
2003 edition of Nature erased yet another of the
presumed distinctions between humans and chimps.
Summarized New York Times science writer Nicholas
Wade, “The genomes of humans and chimpanzees are
98.5% identical, when each of their three
billion DNA units are compared. But what of men
and women, who have different chromosomes?
Men and women differ by one to two percent of
their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same
as the difference between a male human and a male
chimpanzee or between a woman and a female
chimpanzee.”

How pygmies came to be on the bushmeat menu and memories of a primate researcher who worked in both the bush and the lab

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

A Primate’s Memoir:
A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life
Among the Baboons
by Robert M. Sapolsky

Touchstone (c/o Simon & Schuster,
1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020), 2001.
304 pages, paperback. $14.00.

Eating Apes
by Dale Peterson
with afterword & photos
by Karl Amman
University of California Press
(2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley,
CA 94720), 2003.
333 pages, hardcover. $24.95.
Read more

Finding the sentience of fish

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

Credit scientific discovery. Credit
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Credit Finding Nemo, the latest pro-animal
animated production in a 64-year string from Walt
Disney Productions.
Whatever the reason, humans around the
world are suddenly talking about the suffering of
fish as never before.

Animal Advocates and Indigenous Peoples: The Survey Results

June 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:

Animal Advocates and Indigenous Peoples: The Survey Results
by Lee Wiles

In a survey conducted during the winter of 2002-2003, 1,000
randomly selected U.S. readers of Animal People were asked various
questions about, among other things, their attitudes toward
indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, indigenous
peoples’ use of animals, and the animal advocacy movement’s
interactions with indigenous peoples. A total of 358 ANIMAL PEOPLE
readers responded.
The survey discovered that approximately equal numbers of
animal advocates are sympathetic and unsympathetic toward the
indigenous rights movement. This split appears to be due to the
ambivalence many animal advocates feel toward indigenous peoples
after several disputes over hunting and trapping.

Kharkov bioethics course makes a difference

March 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

KHARKOV, Ukraine–Humane educators have been wondering ever
since Massachusetts SPCA founder George Angell introduced the first
humane curriculum more than 100 years ago whether the results of
their teaching can be effectively measured.
Olga Ivanova Tolstova, founding chair of the Bioethics
Centre at the Kharkov Zoological & Veterinary Academy in the Ukraine,
believes she and her fellow faculty members have developed evidence
that encouraging students to think about the ethics of animal use
makes a profound difference.

Protesting is good for you!

January 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

LONDON-“People should get more involved in campaigns,
struggles, and social movements, for their own personal good,”
University of Sussex psychologist Dr. John Drury recently told
Reuters Health. Interviewing nearly 40 activists on issues including
fox hunting, the environment, and labor relations, Drury found
that protesting helped them overcome feelings of personal stress,
pain, anxiety, and depression.

McDonald’s settlement challenged by 6 of 7 original plaintiffs

January 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

CHICAGO–“We are not being besieged by thousands of angry
vegetarians,” Houston attorney Cory S. Fein told Cook County Judge
Richard Siebel on January 13.
But Fein may have invited such a response. Fein was in court
to defend the list of 26 proposed grant recipients offered by
McDonald’s Restaurants in settlement of class action lawsuits brought
by Hindus and vegetarians who unwittingly ate French fries seasoned
in a mist of beef broth. McDonald’s advertised that its fries were
cooked in pure vegetable oil from 1990 until after Seattle attorney
Harish Bharti filed the first of a series of related cases in May
2001.

Outraged researchers oust Maneka Gandhi from Indian lab supervision

January 1, 2003 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

NEW DELHI–“I am exhausted by this year,”
Maneka Gandhi e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on New
Year’s Eve. “I lost three jobs, two of my
oldest dogs, both 17, and all the elections in
my constituency. The only thing that I kept this
year was my temper, but I would be happy to lose
that as well! The only thing I gained was
weight.”
Technically Mrs. Gandhi lost the first of
the three jobs in November 2001, when Prime
Minister of India A.P. Vajpayee reassigned her
from Minister of Culture to Minister of
Statistics, after she clashed with the Korean
ambassador over his allegedly eating dogs.

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