REFUGE OR NO-MAN’S LAND?

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

BURMA––”About 300 Karen
civilians fled into the Mae Sarieng district” of
Thailand, the Global Response environmental
and human rights electronic mail network
alerted 6,500 members on August 21, “after
Burmese soldiers torched six villages in
Burma’s Doi Kor province,” torturing relatives
and friends of the refugees who were
captured, according to interviews with the
escapees and relief workers published by the
Burma News Network and Bangkok Post.
The refugees, like many other
Karen fleeing the dictatorship of Burma over
the past several years, were interned at a
Thai government camp for displaced persons.
Especially problematic for human
rights advocates was that the incident came in
association with the establishment of the
Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve.

Germ war on rabbits

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand––
Frustrated by governmental caution, farmers in
at least six districts of the South Island of New
Zealand separately introduced the deadly rabbit
calicivirus in late August. Their evident strategy
was to goad the government into undertaking
large-scale deliberate releases, as Australia
did in October 1996, a year after an accidental
release from a test site on Wardang Island
turned four of the six Australian states into––in
effect––a germ warfare experiment.
Concerned about liability, New
Zealand authorities held back a long discussed
release. On the verge of the rabbit birthing season,
highland farmers finally forced the issue
by importing from Australia the internal organs
of rabbits who had died of calicivirus, pureeing
the organs in blenders with bait such as oats,
jam, or carrots, and pouring the mess around
rabbit warrens.

Speculative prices send parrot theft soaring

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

MIAMI– –Bill Gates, 50, not the
Microsoft baron but the manager of Animalia
Exotics in Miami, crawled out of a pool of his
own blood on August 20, dialed store owner
Joe Ferrero on his beeper, and when Ferrero
immediately called back, croaked “Joe, get
over here. I’m dying.”
Gates didn’t die, but he had been
badly pistol-whipped by two men who had just
cased the store with a seven-year-old girl and a
220-pound woman. The four left. The men then
returned to nab $200, an umbrella cockatoo,
and a Milian Amazon parrot. The birds were
worth an estimated $3,500, near the low end of
the parrot price scale.

BOOKS: Turtle Bay

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Turtle Bay
by Saviour Pirotta,
art by Nilesh Mistry
Farrar, Straus & Girous (19 Union Square
West, New York, NY 10003), 1997.
28 pages, hardcover, $15.00.

Turtle Bay, about old Japanese sponge
diver who sweeps a remote beach to prepare it for
loggerhead turtle nesting, might be the best way to
explain to a child why a favorite beach (or a part of
it) is off limits, whether to help sea turtles, piping
plovers, clapper rails, or any other animals whose
needs conflict with human recreation.

Marine life notes

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Researchers at Auckland University in Wellington, New
Zealand, in mid-August announced that DNA typing of 30 samples of
whale meat bought in Japanese supermarkets found remains of humpback
and fin whales, confirming cearlier findings by conservation groups that
contraband species are being killed and sold. Neither humpbacks nor fin
whales have been killed legally since 1986, when the International Whaling
Commission moratorium on commercial whaling began. Japan did later buy
whale meat from abroad that was frozen before 1986, a Japan Fisheries official
told the New Zealand Press Association, but the most recent purchase,
of humpback meat from Iceland, was in 1991. Similar DNA findings
obtained by EarthTrust scientists were published by the peer-reviewed journal
Science in 1994, but Japan Fisheries has repeatedly challenged the data.

Shock treatment for marine mammals

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Bob Fletcher, president of the 200-vessel
Sportfishing Association of California, is touting a
high-energy ultrasonic anti-sea lion device, developed
by Pulsed Power Technologies, of San Diego, with aid
of a federal grant. According to Los Angeles Times
hunting/fishing columnist Pete Thomas, the device
produces “a brief concussive wave of energy that
affects the inner ears of mammals close enough to be
affected.” Fletcher told Thomas that it makes sea lions
“take off like scalded dogs.”
Added Pulsed Power Tecnologies president
Dick Ayres, “The fur huggers won’t be happy with
anything that annoys marine mammals, but this is by
far the most effective and least intrusive device that has
come out.” The west coast fishing industry, including
Fletcher, is lobbying in support of a recent National
Marine Fisheries Service recommendation that it should
be allowed to start killing pinnipeds “in situations
where California sea lions and Pacific harbor seals conflict
with human activities, such as at fishery sites and
marinas,” if nonlethal deterrents don’t work.

Marine life feels the heat

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

Global warming and krill fishing by Russia, Japan,
and the Ukraine have tipped the biomass balance of the
Antarctic to favor salp, another microscopic creature of little
food value to marine mammals, Antarctic Marine Living
Resources program researchers reported in June.
Generating red tides, salp blooms kill as well as
compete with krill. The rise of salp and decline of krill reportedly
coincides with a 35% drop in the krill-dependent King
George Island population of Adele penguins.
The decline of Antarctic krill is not why record numbers
of blue whales and other baleen whales gathered this summer
off the Farallon Islands, experts said, since North Pacific
baleen whales migrate no farther south than the equator, but
warm water currents called El Nino, also tentatively linked to
global warming, have depleted the cetacean food supply in
parts of the North Pacific.
The depletion hit sea birds too, especially common
murres, who failed to nest this year along the Oregon coast.
Northern currents have reportedly warmed so much that southeast
Alaska salmon netters recently hauled in a one-ton Mola
mola––an oceanic sunfish usually found off Mexico. Pacific
mackerel have followed the warm currents to hit newly
released chinook salmon hard off Vancouver Island.

Making a bear problem

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

STOKES STATE FOREST, N.J.––With bills to ban bear
hunting pending before the New Jersey House and Senate, and a proposed
bear management plan awaiting consideration by the New Jersey
Fish, Game, and Wildlife Advisory Council in August, the New Jersey
Department of Fish, Game, and Wildlife needed a dramatic late July
incident to make their case that an estimated 350 to 550 bears,
statewide, pose an imminent threat to human safety.
Making that claim in support of an attempt to start a bear hunt
last year, without having a case to cite, NJ/DFGW officials were
embarrassed when opponents pointed out that New Jersey has never had
a bear incident doing noteworthy harm to a human.
Thus the NJ/DFGW was quick to ballyhoo a July 23 campground
encounter at Stokes State Forest, in which ranger Rob Sikoura
purportedly defended campers by rousting a mama bear and cubs, but
was forced to shoot the mama in self defense when she charged him as
he followed her across 40-foot-wide Flat Creek.

Wolves sacrificed to grizzly reintroduction

September 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1997:

DEER LODGE, MONTANA––The mid-July
mauling deaths of two wolf pups amid the high-profile
annihilation of the Boulder pack to which they belonged
almost went overlooked. But two sanitized accounts of
the deaths appeared on August 5.
“Federal workers captured three of the five
Boulder pack pups in mid-July,” wrote Kortny Rolston of
the Montana Standard, “and put them in a pen in Idaho
with two adult male wolves. Joe Fontaine, Montana wolf
recovery project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, said they learned recently that two of the penned
pups are dead.
“‘At this point it’s pure speculation, but we
think one of the males killed two of the pups,’” Fontaine
told Rolston.

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