Sealing on thin ice

April 1, 2012 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2012:

CAP-AUX-MEULES, Quebec— Seal clubbing and shooting started on March 22, 2012 for Iles-de-la-Madeleine vessels, five days ahead of schedule, because ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were receding so rapidly that Quebec sealers were at risk of finding no seals to kill.
Canadian Fisheries Department area director Vincent Malouin told Canadian Press that only two to five boats from Iles-de-la-Madeleine were expected to hunt seals in 2012. Iles-de-la-Madeleine was allocated a sealing quota of 25,000, from a total Canadian quota of 400,000, the same as in 2011, despite a lack of evident markets for seal pelts since 2010, when the European Union banned seal pelt imports. Read more

BOOKS: Behavior of North American Mammals

March 1, 2012 juanitoG Leave a comment

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

NIH to quit funding new chimp studies– but broke past pledges

January 1, 2012 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 2012

By Merritt Clifton, Animal People

WASHINGTON D.C.–Deferring without delay to recommendations from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, issued just hours before, the National Institutes of Health on December 15, 2011 suspended making new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees. The NIH also agreed, for the first time, to apply uniform scientific and ethical criteria to evaluating chimp studies.

Reported the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, “Recent advances in alternate research tools have rendered chimpanzees largely unnecessary as research subjects.” Read more

Among African Apes

September 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2011:

Among African Apes
Edited by Martha M. Robbins & Christophe Boesch
University of California Press
(2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley,
CA 94704), 2011. 196 pages, hardcover. $29.95.

A series of essays and memoirs by field researchers, Among African Apes both intrigues and troubles the reader. Editor Martha M. Robbins says her life is often perceived as glamorous. It is not. Sometimes Robbins and her colleagues sit for hours just waiting for animals to appear. Collecting and then analyzing data is tedious work. Read more

BOOKS: The Dolphin in the Mirror

July 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2011:

The Dolphin in the Mirror
by Diana Reiss
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
(215 Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10003), 2011.
265 pages, hardcover. $27.00.

Diana Reiss, Ph.D., shares her extensive experience with
dolphin intelligence in her first book, The Dolphin in the Mirror. A
Hunter College professor of psychology, and director of dolphin
research at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Reiss has studied
dolphins on the West Coast, in Europe, and in various other places
while earning her advanced degrees.

Editorial feature: Slaughtering animals, crime, & societal health

June 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2011:
Phillip Danforth Armour (1832-1901) is
today remembered only for the meatpacking company
he founded, but in his own time was lauded for
allegedly contributing to the progress of
civilization by moving animal slaughter out of
sight, smell, and sound of women, children,
and decent men.
Born into an upstate New York farming
family, Armour drove barge-hauling mules
alongside the Chenango Canal in his teens, then
walked all the way to California at age 19 to
join the Gold Rush. He soon discovered that more
gold was to be made by starting a Placerville
butcher shop than in mining.

Contraceptive research firm SenesTech splits with “600 Million”

May 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2011:
PORTLAND, Oregon–The Arizona-based contraceptive research
firm SenesTech and the Florida-based nonprofit 600 Million Stray Dogs
Need You are no longer working together to develop the product that
600 Million has touted to prospective donors for more than a year as
“‘super’ birth control pellets for animals.”
Both organizations remain involved in seeking non-surgical
contraceptive products.

Review: Not a chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human

November 1, 2010 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2010:

Not a chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human
by Jeremy Taylor
Oxford University Press (c/o 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016),
2010. 338 pages, paperback. $14.95

This first book by Jeremy Taylor, for 30 years a scientific
documentary film maker, is intense. Not a chimp: The hunt to find
the genes that make us human consists chiefly of discussions of such
topics as sequence divergence, pyramidal neurons, and translocation
of chromosomes. Taylor is aware of the implications of his research
for animal rights activists, philosophers, and attorneys, and for
species conservationists, bioethicists, and biomedical researchers
too, but he limits his discussion of these matters to a few pages at
the beginning and end of what is otherwise a scientific treatise.

More health findings hit PMU industry

October 1, 2010 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2010:
(Actual press date November 3.)

LOS ANGELES, DALLAS–The fast-falling numbers of horses bred
to produce estrogen supplements made from pregnant mares’ urine are
expected to drop further after publication of new findings from the
U.S. government-funded Women’s Health Initiative linking estrogen
supplements to elevated rates of death from breast cancer and risk of
developing kidney stones.
The new findings came eight years after the Women’s Health
Initiative in July 2002 reported thatestrogen supplements appear to
be linked to increased risk of women suffering heart attacks,
strokes, and blood clots in their lungs.

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