Editorial: The advantages of being seen

October 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2000:

From Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek came word on August
6 that brothers Antonio and Luis Faceira of Angola are working with Wouter van Hoven of
the University of Pretoria Center for Wildlife Management in South Africa to restore
wildlife to the 3.5-million-acre Quicama National Park, near the capital city of Luanda.
Each a military general in the regime headed since 1979 by President Jose Eduardo
Santos, the Faceira brothers have fought Jona Savimbi and his UNITA insurgency for 25
years. Altogether, counting the last years of Portuguese rule, Angola has been almost continuously
at war since 1961.
Both sides have reputedly ravaged wildlife––for meat, target practice, and
money. Salopek mentioned reports of government officials strafing antelope from helicopters.
Craig Van Note, executive director of the World Wildlife Fund trade-monitoring
subsidiary TRAFFIC, in 1988 accused UNITA of killing as many as 100,000 elephants
over the preceding 12 years, in order to trade ivory for arms with the former apartheid government
of South Africa.

GeesePeace vs. USFWS

May 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

GeesePeace president David Feld, of Fairfax County, Virginia, on April 14 accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of sabotaging volunteer efforts to control Canada geese by oiling eggs so that they do not hatch.

The Fish and Wildlife Service appears to prefer controlling geese by sport hunting or by USDA Wildlife Services roundups of geese for donation to soup kitchens.

“They have required that permit applications be processed on pink paper, declared corn oil––the recommended oil for egg treatment–– to be a pesticide which can only be used by a certified applicator, and required nest sites to be identified 60 days in advance, which they know is impossible,” Feld told Washington Post staff writer William Branigan.

Feld said the Fish and Wildlife Service also barred volunteers from oiling eggs on private property, even with landowner permission.

Added Doris Day Animal League executive director and GeesePeace member Holly Hazard, “This is a problem that the Fish and Wildlife Service itself created. Egg-oiling is something they should lead the charge on. They are not even in the army.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service introduced nonmigratory Canada geese to most of the sites where they are now problematic, beginning more than 40 years ago.

Introductions continue. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, for instance, recently confirmed that it is trying to double the Iowa population of Canada geese, despite public complaints.

Airport deaths on purpose

May 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1999:

AMSTERDAM––KLM Royal
Dutch Airlines on April 15 apologized
because staff recently tossed 440 live
Chinese ground squirrels into a shredding
machine of the type normally used to pulverize
culled male chicks at a poultry hatchery.
The ground squirrels arrived at the
KLM terminal at Schiphol International
Airport, near Amsterdam, without health
certificates. They were traveling from a
Beijing exporter to a private collector
[believed to be also a dealer] in Athens,
Greece. KLM claimed the Beijing exporter
had refused to take them back.
The case came to light when 30
squirrels escaped, racing through outdoor
baggage handling areas and runways.

BOOKS: Animals As Airline Cargo

May 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1999:

Animals As Airline Cargo by Nathan J. Winograd
San Francisco SPCA Department of Law & Advocacy (2500 16th St., San Francisco, CA 94103), 1998. Free on request.

A Santa Monica Superior Court jury
ruled on March 10, 1999 that an American
Airlines pilot and flight crew acted properly in
restraining first class passenger Marcelle
Becker, of Beverly Hills, with her dog’s
leash, toward the end of a July 1995 flight
from New York to Los Angeles.
Becker had allegedly released her
13-year-old, 8-pound Maltese from his carrier,
and allowed him to roam the cabin. When airline
staff apprehended the dog, returned him
to the carrier, and shoved the carrier under the
seat in front of Becker, Becker contended,
they handled the dog so roughly that he died
soon afterward.

GUERILLA WARFARE HITS GORILLA TOURS

April 1, 1999 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

KAMPALA––An estimated 117 alleged members of
the displaced Hutu tribal militia Interhamwe on March 1 turned
from fighting the Tutsi-tribe-led coalition that has ruled
Rwanda since 1994 to strike a deadly blow at tourism in the
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park of western Uganda.
Four wildlife guards were killed in the March 1 dawn
assault, including community conservation chief warden Paul
Ross Wagaba, who was burned alive, and 32 park visitors
were abducted from tourist camp sites near Lake Katangira.
Five vehicles and trailers used as residences were
burned, along with the Ugandan headquarters of the
International Gorilla Conservation Project.
Chicago University gorilla researcher Elizabeth
Garland, 29, woke to gunfire but escaped physical harm by
slipping into the bush as other visitors fled their tents into open
view and were captured. She watched as the raiders segregated
the visitors by language and nationality, taking those who spoke
English with them.

Africa asks, “Is hunting really ecotourism?”

April 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1998:

PRETORIA, South Africa––WildNet Africa,
described by publisher Raymond Campling as “the InterNet’s
largest publisher on African wildlife matters, is polling web
site visitors on whether they think hunting is legitimately promoted
as eco-tourism.
As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, the tally was
1,901 ayes (47%), against 2,150 nays (53%).
The voting, at >>http://wildnetafrica.co.za<<, may
be influential as African nations heavily dependent on tourism
strive to recover from a collapse of traffic coinciding with civil
strife in Rwanda, the Congo, the Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.
Even relatively stable South Africa is reviewing traditional
approaches to tourism and wildlife management, as transition
to majority African rule coincides with the dampening
effect on tourism of fires that ravaged Kruger National Park in
1996, together with poaching and canned hunting scandals in
and around Kruger that emerged in mid-1997. Subsistence
communities on the Kruger fringes are being integrated into the
protected area in exchange for pledges that the villagers will get
a bigger piece of the related economic action. Corporate landholders
are encouraged to enroll their ecologically sensitive
holdings in the South African Natural Heritage Programme,
instead of fencing them off and turning them into private game
preserves, a growing trend in the former apartheid nations.

CITES BEATING LEAVES ANIMAL PROTECTION GROUPS TO REGROUP

July 1, 1997 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

HARARE––The 10-year global ivory
trafficking ban fell on June 19, as Zimbabwe,
Botswana, and Namibia won approval from the
1997 Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species triennial in Harare,
Zimbabwe, to sell 59 tons of elephant ivory to
Japan in early 1999, after 18 months of refinement
of safeguards supposed to prevent the sale
from providing cover to ivory poachers.
The sale, involving about a third of
the ivory stockpiled by the three southern
African nations, is the first legal crack in the
ban, imposed by CITES in 1989. The ban
braked the collapse of the African elephant population
from 1.3 million circa 1980 to just
600,000 a decade later.

Editorial: Politics and the unity myth

June 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1996:

“United we stand; divided we fall,” Martin Luther King proclaimed in his “I had
a dream” speech to the participants in the 1964 civil rights march on Washington, D.C.
Activists have quoted King out of context ever since. Borrowing an early motto of
the 13 Colonies, King spoke of the power of voting blocks, and the influence they might
have to purge Congress of racists. He asked his audience to stand up as Americans, part of
the United States, and claim their right to vote. He most certainly did not tell the marchers
to stand united with those who either used or espoused violent tactics, which he forthrightly
opposed all his life; nor with the politically corrupt who looted the cause, even if they
espoused similar rhetoric; nor did King have any more use for black separatism than he had
for white separatism. Martin Luther King made plain where he stood, welcoming everyone
who chose to stand with him, but he didn’t welcome purported allies whose actions
tended to undermine, pollute, or dilute his message of multiracial Americanism.
King, who earned part of his early reputation by desegregating bowling alleys,
certainly knew the limited applicability of “United we stand, divided we fall” as a
metaphor. In bowling, pins near the ones struck go down too. One need only pick up a
newspaper to find examples of political figures and causes neutralized or discredited not by
their own deeds, but by those of their associates.

American SPCA honors American Airlines

May 1, 1996 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1996:

NEW YORK, N.Y.––The
American SPCA on March 27 honored
American Airlines with a
Corporate Citizen Award, a year
after American Airlines received the
Animal Transportation Association’s
Animal Welfare Award.
Both awards recognize not
only safe routine handling of about
100,000 animals per year, but also
American Airlines’ donation of
transportation in connection with
numerous exotic animal rescues
facilitated by ASPCA wildlife programs
director Kathi Travers. In one
instance American Airlines put a
jumbo jet on a route normally handled
by smaller aircraft, to fly three
African lions to a sanctuary near Fort
Worth, Texas.

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