Mammoth find in Nepal: BUT CAN “EXTINCT” SPECIES BE PROTECTED FROM POACHERS?

October 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1996:

KENT, NAIROBI, HARARE––
Animal finds don’t come any bigger. British
explorer Col. John Blashford-Snell and
actress Rula Lenska, cofounder of the Born
Free Foundation, announced on September
16 in Kent, Great Britain, that DNA anlysis
of dung has confirmed the hint they dropped
at a July 15 press conference that remnant
woolly mammoths roam a densely wooded
600-square-mile section of Bardia National
Park, Nepal, deep in the Himalayas.
Blashford-Snell and Lenski found
the herd about three years after villagers
claimed that woolly mammoths had stampeded
their homes and crops.

Marine mammals

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

Small whales
The Sacramento Bee warned in
June that the vaquita whale is “on the verge
of extinction, a victim of commercial gill net
fishing” in the Sea of Cortez, and that the
reserve set up to protect the vaquita may be “a
sanctuary in name only.” The vaquita is a
small toothed whale, a class not protected by
the International Whaling Commission.
Romanian Institute for Marine
Research scientist Alexandru Bologna says
only 10,000 dolphins remain in the heavily
polluted Black Sea, down from 70,000 in
1970, and one million in 1950, when the former
Communist regime began “economic capitalization
of dolphins,” i.e. slaughter.

Four studies of cat ownership

August 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:

Data gathered in Las Vegas by Dr. Roger Nassar in
1983, in Santa Clara and San Diego counties of California by
Karen Johnson and Laura Lewellyn of the National Pet Alliance in
1993 and 1995, and in the Boston area by Carter Luke of the
Massachusetts SPCA, also in 1995, is arranged below by date of
survey. The findings are remarkably consistent. The decline in
number of homes keeping dogs from 1983 to 1993-1995 is about
twice as steep as other pet ownership studies indicate, but is consistent
with a 20-year national trend. The lower percentage of
owned cats who are former strays in the Boston area probably
reflects the impact of the harsh northeastern winter on the homeless
cat population.

BSE link to humans

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

PARIS––French government neurologists
Corinne Lasmezas and Jean-Philippe
Deslys on June 13 announced they had discovered
the first experimental evidence of a
link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), also known as Mad Cow Disease,
and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a similar
brain-destroying ailment that until recently
was considered a rare condition of age. Ten
cases of a new form of BSE occurring in
younger people caused researchers to warn
the European Union and British Parliament in
March that BSE might be the cause of CJD,
touching off a global boycott of British beef.
The French team in 1991 injected
material from the crushed brains of cattle who
died from BSE into the brains of two adult
macaques and a newborn macaque, all of
whom developed identical brain lesions in
1994 and later died.

Salmonella, anyone?

July 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:

NEW ORLEANS––Peter Holt of
the USDA research service station in
Athens, Georgia, on May 20 told the
American Society of Microbiologists
that the standard technique of starving
hens for a week to 10 days to make
them molt and lay more eggs also
drastically increases their susceptibility
to salmonella.
“A normally fed bird required
something around 50,000 salmonella
bacteria to cause an infection,” Holt
said of his findings. “With the molted
birds it was less than 10.” Of the 46.8
billion eggs produced per year on U.S.
farms, the USDA estimates, about 14
million carry salmonella.

Diet & Health

June 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1996:

A British study of mothers found
that 80%, including many vegetarians and vegans,
give infants plenty of fruit and vegetables
but not enough fat. “The key is to breast-feed
longer, up to two years if possible,” commented
vegan advocate Dr. Charles Attwood, author
of Dr. Attwood’s Low-Fat Prescription for Kids.
“When this is not possible, infants need other
fat sources. The key is calories, whether fat or
not, so any calorie-dense food is okay during
infancy.”
British Rail on May 2 banned a
Vegetarian Society poster of a zucchini, captioned,
“A vegetarian diet can be orgasmic.”
Said Vegetarian Society campaign director
Steve Connor, “It’s penis envy.” Accepted was
a poster of a chile pepper captioned,
“Vegetarian food makes you red hot.”

A matter of brains: MAD COW DISEASE PANIC CONTINUES

May 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1996:

LONDON, BRUSSELS, PARIS,
WASHINGTON D.C.––International panic
over the possible linkage of “mad cow disease”
with the brain-destroying Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in humans, just beginning to wane as
the May edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went
to press, may rebound with the publication of
data suggesting that the disease may be carried
from species to species by mites––and may be
virtually impossible to eradicate.
“You could remove all the poor cows
and then find that weren’t even the source in
the first place,” said Henryk Wisniewski,
whose team at the New York State Institute for
Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities
discovered the possible role of mites, publishing
their findings in the The Lancet, a leading
British medical journal. Exploring the theory
that bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a
mutated form of the sheep disease scrapie,
Wisniewski injected hay mites from a scrapieplagued
part of Iceland into the brains and
abdomens of 71 mice. Ten of the mice developed
the microscopic spongelike holes in the
brain that are symptomatic of scrapie, BSE,
and CJD.

Seeking the psychological well-being of primates

May 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1996:

NEW YORK, N.Y.––Even before Congress in 1985 amended the Animal Welfare
Act to mandate that laboratories are responsible for the “psychological well-being” of nonhuman
primates used in research, Henry Spira may have known that resolving the long impasse
in the 200-year-old debate over the ethics of using animals in biomedical research would
come down to accommodating primate behavior.
No primatologist himself, Spira brought to animal advocacy a background including
a multinational childhood, waterfront union organizing, and 22 years of teaching English
in inner city schools. Throughout, Spira noticed that what most people want most in any
conflict is not the goal itself, but rather, not to lose.
Losing means losing stature in the troop. Loss of stature means loss of security.
Goal-oriented negotiating, Spira realized, means finding a way for both parties to gain
stature: to achieve important objectives without sacrificing principle.
Read more

Wild felines

April 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1996:

Reduced to a U.S. population estimated
at 350 to 700 by the trapping boom
of the early 1980s, the North American lynx
may now be the most notable casualty of the
Congressionally imposed moratorium on protecting
additional species under the
Endangered Species Act. U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service biologist Lori Nordstrom
recommended in 1994 that the lynx be given
federal protection, beyond the limited protection
already extended by 13 of the 20 states it
once inhabited. However, with the ESA up
for renewal and so-called “takings” of property
rights to protect endangered species a hot
topic in the 1994 Congressional election campaign,
the USFWS denied the listing. The
denial is contested in a recent lawsuit filed by
Jasper Carlton of the Biodiversity Legal
Foundation, with 12 other organizations as
co-plaintiffs.

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