OTHER WILDLIFE/HUMAN CONFLICTS

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Pledging to pay $150,000 for
spring-and-fall air drops of raccoon
rabies vaccination pellets over northern
Vermont to keep the disease out of
Quebec, the Quebec government came
through last spring, but at deadline was
reportedly struggling to find the money
to follow through with the fall drop.
U.S. federal funding was also uncertain.
Two vaccination pellet drops proceeded
as scheduled in Ohio, however,
to contain the westward spread of the
disease. Begun in 1976 by hunters who
translocated rabid raccoons from
Florida to West Virginia, the midAtlantic
raccoon rabies pandemic has
now spread to 16 states, but appears to
have been halted in mid-Ohio by a May
1997 application of vaccination pellets
along a 10-mile-wide, 695-square-mile
barrier, running from Mosquito Lake
to Wellsville. The September drops
reinforced the earlier drop, covering
1,200 square miles from Lake Erie to
the Ohio River.

COYOTE-GETTERS RESTRICTED IN UTAH

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

SALT LAKE CITY– –
Private animal control contractors
should not be allowed to use M-44
spring-loaded “coyote getters,” Utah
Department of Agriculture director of
plant industry Dick Wilson told the
Utah Wildlife Damage Prevention
Board on October 10. The devices
shoot deadly sodium cyanide into the
mouths of coyotes who tug at an
attached piece of bait.
Utah currently allows 33
USDA Wildlife Services trappers to
use M-44s, but the cost of supervising
private use to avoid accidentally
killing humans, pets, and livestock,
Wilson estimated, could run as high as
$20,000 per user per year.

COURT CALENDAR

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Activism
Defended by attorney Richard Halpern, Mike
Durschmidt of Chicago on October 16 became one of the
few animal rights protesters ever to win aquittal with a
“necessity” defense, in which the defendant contends it was
necessary to break a law to prevent a greater harm from
occurring. A Lake County Circuit Court jury agreed that
Durschmidt was justified in lying down in the ring at the
1996 Wauconda Rodeo to prevent children from racing on
the backs of sheep, and was therefore not guilty of trespass,
but did convict Durschmidt of resisting arrest for not leaving
at police direction. Sentencing was deferred.
Acquitted by a lower court, Brigitte Bardot
was convicted on appeal on October 9 of inciting racial
hatred in a 1996 newspaper column for complaining of
alleged “foreign overpopulation” in France at the same time
she denounced lamb slaughter in connection with the E i d
a l – A d h a Islamic religious holidays as “torture” and “most
atrocious pagan sacrifice.” Bardot was fined $1,600 and
was ordered to pay a symbolic 20¢ to the Movement
Against Racism and for the Friendship of People, which
pursued her prosecution.

YELLOWSTONE REGION BOOKS

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Yellowstone Wildlife: A Watcher’s Guide
Track of the Coyote
Glacier Park Wildlife:
A Watcher’s Guide to Glacier Park & Waterton Lakes
Grand Canyon, Zion & Bruce
All by Todd Wilkinson, with photos by Michael H. Francis
All from NorthWord Press (POB 1360, Minoqua, WI 545498), 1995.
Watcher’s Guides are 96 pages, paperback, $11.95.
Others are 144 pages, paperback, $14.95.

NorthWord Press had the misfortune
to send us their Todd Wilkinson/Michael
Francis library on the great National Parks of
the Rocky Mountains in late 1995 just after
we’d explored the Continental Divide from
Bozeman, Montana, to Puerto Penasco,
Mexico, and had extensively reported on our
findings. Fortunately these books were
designed to have a long shelf life, and are still
in print. Yellowstone Wildlife explains to the

Yellowstone wolves leghold-trapped

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

HELENA, Montana––A little publicized aspect of
the Yellowstone region wolf reintroduction is that although
tranquilizer darts and net guns are also used in captures and
recaptures, the wolves involved may be repeatedly legholdtrapped,
with potentially tragic consequences.
Many of the initial breeding wolves were first
leghold-trapped in Alberta for outfitting with radio collars a
year or more before they were recaptured, sometimes again by
leghold trapping, for relocation to Yellowstone and central
Idaho. Then they may have been leghold-trapped on further
occasions, for maintenance of their radio collars, removal
from proximity to livestock, and checks of reproductive status.
Offspring are also routinely leghold-trapped to be fitted with
radio collars, if they can’t be caught by other means.

Ranchers want taxpayers to keep them in clover

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt has asked President
Bill Clinton to veto a “grazing reform” bill that
House Agriculture Committee chair Bob Smith
(R-Oregon) sent to the House on September
24––if it clears Congress.
Wilderness Society lobbyist Fran
Hunt said the Smith bill “would lock in a new
subsidized grazing fee for livestock operators
on public lands, “ at about a third the federal
cost of land maintenance; “enact new hurdles
that would make it even more difficult for the
Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management
to protect and restore public rangeland”;
“limit public participation in federal decisionmaking”;
“hamper the ability of concerned
groups and individuals to appeal unsound federal
grazing decisions”; and “undercut the
multiple use management and conservation of
the National Grasslands by removing them
from the National Forest system.”

Fishy business whirling

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

High-profile U.S. and Canadian efforts to restore endangered western
salmon runs have their counterpart in a restoration of native trout to
Yellowstone, announced in January 1997 by Yellowstone National Park
superintendent Mike Finley.
Like the salmon restoration, the trout restoration is driven by concern
for declining biodiversity––but unlike the salmon projects, is not associated
with actual scarcity of fish. The problem gripping the Pacific Northwest
is that the combination of heavy fishing, dam-building, and silted spawning
streams caused by logging not only annihilated salmon runs, but also built
industries whose very existence conflicts with the recovery of salmon, even as
fishing also depends upon having abundant salmon of the more coveted subspecies
[the less coveted pink salmon seem to be thriving by the absence of
their bigger kin].

Wild equines win new safeguards

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

RENO––The Bureau of
Land Management on October 15
settled a lawsuit filed in June by the
Fund for Animals and Animal
Protection Institute by agreeing to
require wild horses and burro adoptors
to pledge that they have no
intention of selling the animal either
for slaughter or for rodeo bucking
stock; to require slaughterhouses to
keep all paperwork on BLM-freezebranded
equines, and to require
slaughterhouses to notify the BLM
immediately of the receipt of any
such animals; to bar wild horse and
burro adoptions through power of
attorney; and to bar individuals from
adopting more than four wild equines
during a one-year period.

HUNTING, BRAINS, SAFETY, AND SPORTSMANSHIP

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Joseph Berger, M.D., neurology
department chair at the University of Kentucky,
and behavioral neurologist Eric Weisman, M.D.,
also of Kentucky, rattled squirrel hunters in
August with a letter to The Lancet, the journal of
the British Medical Society, warning that all 11
patients they have treated for Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease in the past four years ate squirrel brains.
Berger and Weisman postulated that
eating squirrel brains might be an avenue of
transmission for the rare brain disease––a degenerative,
irreversible, always fatal malady apparently
related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or “mad cow disease,” also resembling
kuru, found among human cannibals.
As hunting season began, brains of any
kind often seemed scarce. Near Chibougamou,
Quebec, a 61-year-old hunter killed an 81-yearold
blueberry picker on August 29, mistaking
him for a bear. Their names were not released.

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