Dogs down, monkeys up in India

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
BANGALORE, HYDERA-BAD–Faster up a tree or the side of a
building than a feral cat, biting more powerfully and often than any
street dog, able to leap over monkey-catchers at a single bound,
and usually able to outwit public officials, rhesus macaques are
taking over Indian cities.
The chief reason is the recent drastic decline in street dogs.
The ecological role of Indian street dogs is threefold. As
scavengers, street dogs consume edible refuse. As predators,
street dogs hunt the rats and mice who infest the refuse piles. In
addition, as territorial pack animals, street dogs chase other
scavengers and predators out of their habitat.

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High Court favors impounding dogs

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2007:
MUMBAI–The Constitutional bench of the Bombay High Court on
April 20, 2007 heard arguments on the constitutionality of Animal
Birth Control programs in Mumbai and Goa. The cases before the High
Court parallel claims made by ABC program opponents in Bangalore and
Hyderabad that releasing street dogs after sterilization
unconstitutionally jeopardizes the safety of citizens.
“The 3-judges bench is expected to direct setting up
committees as per the ABC rules to monitor the implementation and
progress of ABC in Mumbai and in Goa,” reported Mumbai attorney
Norma Alvares. “The judges have accepted the argument that killing
dogs is not the solution to the problem, and want to give ABC a
chance to show that it is effective in reducing the numbers of dogs
and curbing rabies.

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Kerala orders dog purge

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2007:
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM–Kerala state minister for local
self-government Paloli Mohammed Kutty less than 10 days before the
end of April 2007 “directed the heads of local self-government
institutions to take effective steps to end the stray dog menace
before May,” The Hindu reported on April 22.
The order followed a Kerala High Court ruling that local
governments have the authority to kill dogs to end a perceived threat
to public health and safety, despite the decade-old national policy,
never fully implemented, favoring Animal Birth Control.
Kerala, officially 25% Islam and 19% Christian, also with a
strong Communist party, is among just two states of India where
cattle slaughter is legal, has a large cattle export industry, and
is perhaps the only state where resisting mainstream Hindu cultural
dominance has political currency.
Cattle slaughter and animal sacrifice were already political
flashpoints in Kerala long before the advent of ABC, which soon
became a comparable target.

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Bangalore dog panic spreads to Hyderabad

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2007:
HYDERABAD–The fear and outrage about dog attacks gripping
Bangalore for more than three months spread to Hyderabad in April
2007, two years after the city administration took over the local
Animal Birth Control program and allegedly used the pretext of
capturing dogs for sterilization as cover for killing dogs in high
volume.
Partly because of that history, the Hyderabad dog panic was
relatively muted. And, as many reporters pointed out, there were
plenty of administrative failings to blame for Hyderabad incidents,
beyond just the dog policies.

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Succeeding in Galapagos, Animal Balance takes s/n to the Dominican

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
SAN FRANCISCO– Moving to the Dominican Republic with her
personal pets in February 2007, planning to start surgeries in
March, Animal Balance founder Emma Clifford hopes that lessons
learned in introducing dog and cat sterilization to the Galapagos
Islands off Ecuador, human population 30,000, can be applied in a
Caribbean island nation of more than nine million.
“I think we’ll be the first to do a focused spay/neuter
campaign in the Dominican,” Clifford told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “We are
targeting villages across the northern coast, starting in Cabrera.
We will work with the local vets and the national veterinary school.
As the Dominican Republic is the place for baseball,” where more
people of all ages play than anywhere else in the world, “we have
been collecting used baseball gloves, and will be giving them out as
incentives for people to get their animals sterilized, along with
the collars and leashes. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa
has joined us and lent his name to the project to help gain
interest,” with credibility on animal issues earned as cofounder
with his wife Elaine of Tony La Russa’s Animal Foundation.

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Editorial: Media relations & the Bangalore dog crisis

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:

 
The Bangalore dog crisis, extensively covered in both this
and the previous edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE, has underlying meaning
for almost every reader.
Heavily publicized dog attacks, in Bangalore and elsewhere,
may cause India to rescind or weaken the decade-old policy mandating
civic participation in the national Animal Birth Control program,
and forbidding indiscriminate massacres of street dogs.
This would be a reversal of momentum toward achieving no-kill
animal control of global influence–and would come even though ABC
has cut the street dog population of India by as much as 75% in 10
years, according to the most recent World Health Organization
estimate. Dog attacks are down proportionately, including in
Bangalore, which has 74% fewer dog attacks per 1,000 citizens than
the national average.

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Failure to isolate & vaccinate incoming animals shuts shelter

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
LAS VEGAS–A six-member Humane Society of the U.S. shelter
evaluation team in mid-February 2007 joined Lied Animal Shelter staff
in euthanizing more than 1,000 of the 1,800 animals in custody.
About 150 of the animals were ill, and 850 were believed to
have been exposed to the illnesses, with a high likelihood of
becoming infected.
“It has been a mess, but we are almost out of the emergency
phase. Adoptions will open again soon,” Animal Foundation of Nevada
president Janie Greenspun Gale told ANIMAL PEOPLE on February 19.
Gale promised to identify a newly hired executive director for the
shelter “soon.”

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When the cat is away…

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
SYDNEY–Seven years after exterminators in June 2000 killed
the last feral cats on Macquarie Island, an Australian possession
within the Antarctic Circle, the island’s feral rabbit population
has soared from about 10,000 when the cat-killing began in the
mid-1980s to an estimated 100,000. “Rabbits are destroying Macquarie
Island’s fragile vegetation, causing erosion and exposure, which
threatens its seabirds,” University of Tasmania geographer Jenny
Scott warned in a report commissioned by Birds Australia.
The Australian federal government and state government of
Tasmania are now disputing over which is to pay the $15 million
(Australian) estimated cost of killing all the rabbits. “The last
supply boat of this season leaves Hobart in early April, so the two
sides need to come to a cost-sharing arrangement and get their people
and equipment on that boat,” World Wildlife Fund representative
Julie Kirkwood told Nick Squires of the South China Morning Post.
The plan to kill the rabbits is also supported by the
Australian Green Party.

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Film to help Turkish street dogs

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
ISTANBUL–“It is with pleasure that we launch the trailer of
Ghosts of the City, a documentary explaining the situation of stray
dogs in Turkey,” e-mailed Spanish activist and film maker Ivan
Jiminez to ANIMAL PEOPLE on Valentine’s Day 2007.
Ghosts of the City, Jiminez said, explains “the necessity
to implement sterilization of both stray animals and house pets, and
elaborates on issues such as the status of the dog in the Qu’ran and
responsible pet care.” Jiminez is involved in
efforts to pressure the city of Istanbul into properly fulfilling a
national mandate adopted by the Turkish government in 2004 to replace
killing dogs with an Animal Birth Control program similar to the one
underway in India since 1997. (See page one.)

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