Editorial feature: How to eradicate canine rabies in 10 years or less

September 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2007:

“Rabies could be gone in a decade,” BBC
News headlined worldwide on September 8, 2007.
“Rabies could be wiped out across the world,”
the BBC report continued, “if sufficient
vaccinations are carried out on domestic dogs,
according to experts.”
BBC News went on to quote staff of the
Royal Dick Veterinary School at Edinburgh
University in Scotland, who were among the
cofounders of the Alliance for Rabies Control and
promoters of the first World Rabies Day, held on
September 7, 2007.
None of the Alliance for Rabies Control
spokespersons appear to have actually set any
sort of timetable for possibly eradicating
rabies, but no matter. Experts have recognized
for decades that rabies is wholly eradicable from
all species except bats through targeted mass
immunization–and the chief obstacle to
eradicating bat rabies is that no one has
developed an aerosolized vaccine that could be
sprayed into otherwise inaccessible caves and
tree trunks. Inventing such a vaccine is
considered difficult but possible.

Sofia street dog population is also down by half

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
SOFIA–A 10-month municipal sterilization drive has cut the
street dog population of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital city, from
more than 20,000 to just over 11,000, mayor Boyko Borissov and
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences chair Ivan Yuhnovski told the Focus
news agency on July 12, 2007.
The Sofia municipal company Ekoravnovesie sterilized 3862
dogs and euthanized 852 due to illness, injury, or dangerous
temperament, said company director Miroslav Naidenov.
The number of dogs killed was approximately 10% of the totals
killed in 2003 and 2004, according to data sent to ANIMAL PEOPLE by
Sofia activist Alina Lilova in January 2005. “From 1999 though
2002, 45,000 dogs were killed,” Lilova added.
The rapidity of the street dog decline may reflect a marked
increase in traffic. While the human population of Bulgaria is among
the fastest falling in Europe, the population of Sofia has increased
since 2002 from 1.2 million to 1.4 million. Car ownership and use
have increased even faster.

T-61 debate resurfaces in Serbia

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
BELGRADE, NOVI SAD–Mid-summer 2007 festivals in Belgrade
and Novi Sad, Serbia, became pretexts for street dog pogroms,
reported journalists and animal advocates Jelena Zaric and Jelena
Tinska.
Zaric, a frequent source for ANIMAL PEOPLE in recent years,
forwarded coverage from a variety of media of dog captures in
advance of the Youth Olympics in Belgrade. City veterinarian
Milivoje Lazic acknowledged killing dogs with the parlaytic drug
T-61, and claimed that the killing method was approved by the World
Society for the Protection of Animals.
Tinska, an actress, talk show host, author, and reporter
who may be the most prominent vegetarian in Serbia, alleged that
the 2007 Novi Sad music festival will put mayor Maja Gojkovic into
history as “the biggest animal killer” in the history of the city.

Sri Lankan district court ruling puts Kandy Animal Birth Control program in jeopardy

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:

KANDY, Sri Lanka–A District Court ruling that there are too
many dogs at large in Kandy may permit the Kandy Municipal
Corporation to resume killing street dogs on October 5, 2007, 60
days after the ruling was issued.
The killing would contravene a national no-kill policy
proclaimed in June 2006 by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa,
who reaffirmed it in July 2007–but Kandy has defied official policy
to kill dogs before.
“The Kandy Animal Birth Control program started in 2002,
with municipal cooperation,” summarized Eva Ruppel (“Padma”) of the
Save Our Friends Association. When KMC cooperation was discontinued,
we went to the courts to prevent the killing of dogs. Despite a
court-order in our favor, the KMC killed 360 dogs in August 2005.”
ABC supporters stopped the killing by charging Kandy
officials with contempt of court. The August 5 ruling dismissed the
contempt charges, and gave the ABC program 60 days to reduce the dog
population.

Animal control reform in Kyiv

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
KYIV–Kyiv mayor Leonid Chernovetskyi on July 4, 2007
announced at a public hearing that was broadcast on live television
that he had fired city animal control director Myron Kuchynskyi for
cruelty to animals and multiple counts of veterinary and financial
misconduct.
“This announcement was wildly applauded by those
present–300-plus persons,” SOS Ukraine founder and television
journalist Tamara Tarnavska told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
“The number of telephone calls to the TV station and ratings
of the program were overwhelming,” Tarnavska continued.
Encouraged by the response, Chernovetskyi and vice mayor
Irena Kilchytska at a second public hearing held on July 11, also
broadcast live, endorsed a mass animal sterilization program,
adding a sterilization clinic to the municipal shelter in Borodianka,
and opening a shelter with 30 to 50 kennels in every district of the
city.

Bogus vaccines contribute to human rabies death toll in China

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
BEIJING–Counterfeit human post-exposure rabies vaccine has
resurfaced as a factor in the fast-rising human rabies death toll in
China, Chinese media reported in late July 2007. The fake vaccine
reappeared two years after officials believed it had all been
destroyed, following the deaths of two boys who received worthless
“post-exposure” treatment.
Human rabies deaths in China have increased from 163 in 1996
to 3,215 in 2006, with 1,043 in the first five months of 2007. The
rise is roughly parallel to the increasing popularity of dogs as
pets–but the rabies cases are overwhelmingly concentrated in the
southern and coastal areas where dogs are raised for meat. So-called
“meat dogs” are not required to be vaccinated, unlike pet dogs.
For the second consecutive year dogs were massacred amid
spring rabies panics in Qhongqing province. News coverage of the
killing was suppressed, unlike in 2006, when the officially
directed dog purges were much criticized by both official news media
and on public Internet forums.

Pound seizure shocks Sri Lanka

July 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka–Requi-sitioning
shelter animals for laboratory use, the mostly
banned and discredited practice called “pound
seizure” in the U.S., is now reaching Asian
awareness through the story of Wussie, a gentle
former street dog.
Told first by Sri Lankan newspapers,
Wussie’s story went global via the Hong
Kong-based Asian Animal Protection Network.
Scientific institutions and regulators in New
Delhi, Mexico City, Cambridge, U.K., and
Washington, D.C. were soon investigating their
unwitting involvement.

70 years of missing the link

June 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
CHENNAI–Non-recognition of the
relationship between Indian street dog purges and
monkey invasions is no new phenomenon–and not
only Indians have failed to observe it.
Separate articles on page 22 of the July
1938 edition of the National Humane Review,
published by the American Humane Association,
detailed both a dog pogrom in Chennai, then
called Madras, and the industry of shipping
monkeys to U.S. laboratories that had emerged in
several leading Indian cities. Neither the
British correspondents who furnished the
information nor the Americans who wrote the
articles appeared to be aware that one practice
might be fueling the other.
“Stray dogs are a problem in India, as
in our own country,” the editors observed, “and
city handling in India is as revolting as in many
American cities. Through the endeavors of the
Madras SPCA, electrocution has taken the place
of clubbing dogs to deathŠThat the practices of
city dog catchers are much the same the world
over is indicated by a complaint that the dog
catchers were taking only healthy dogs and
passing up the diseased ones.”

Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak orders report on street dog shooting & poisoning

June 1, 2007 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:

CAIRO–Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak has asked the
Ministry of Agriculture to “prepare a report about stray dogs in
Egypt, and to open an investigation into reports published by
various press and animal welfare organizations who have been appalled
by the practice of shooting and poisoning dogs,” the Al Masry-Al
Youm newspaper reported on May 19, 2007.
Unnamed Ministry of Agriculture sources reportedly told Al
Masry-Al Youm that Mubarak “called for applying humane international
measures in dealing with stray animals, instead of shooting and
poisoning, which detracts from Egypt’s status as a land of culture
and center of tourism.”

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