ON LIFE, LIBERTY AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS FOR WILDLIFE IN CONFINEMENT

June 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

by John Lukas

Director, White Oak Conservation Center, Yulee, Florida

This guest column is adapted from a cage-rattling

presentation Mr. Lukas delivered to the recent White Oak con –

ference on zoos and animal protection, hosted by the Howard

Gilman Foundation.

Happiness is not a term zoo administrators and oth-

ers who hold wildlife in confinement like to use. Many of us

were trained to think of “happiness” as a human interpreta-

tion, linked with anthropomorphizing animals, and therefore

problematic when much of what we do is oriented toward try-

ing to get animals to behave in the manner appropriate to their

own species. Nonetheless, I use the term “happiness,”

because even if we have trouble suitably defining it, I believe

we cannot avoid having to think about it as an essential com-

ponent of animal well-being.

Wake-up call on behalf of wolves

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

NEW YORK, New York––The wolves massacred in Alaska last

winter are dead but not forgotten––and neither are those slated for death next

winter, as Alaska continues to kill wolves to make moose and caribou more

plentiful for hunters. To be sure the wolves are remembered, pajama-clad

Friends of Animals volunteers and staffers occupied the lobby of the ABC-

TV headquarters on the morning of May 19 during the broadcast of the

Good Morning America show, protesting a week-long promotion of

Alaskan tourism. Six demonstrators were arrested for trespassing.

ABC had already scheduled a 30-minute segment on the wolf

killing, featuring a debate between Stephen Wells of the Alaska Wildlife

Alliance and a spokesperson for the state of Alaska––but it aired after the

promotion of Alaska was over with and most of the resultant travel bookings,

FoA believed, would already have been made.

Preparing for further conflict, the Alaska House of Representatives

on April 28 passed a bill to enable the state Department of Fish and Game to

withhold data about wolf pack locations––purportedly to protect wolves

from poachers, but actually directed, newspaper editorials agreed, at inde-

pendent wolf expert Gordon Haber, who sued to obtain such information

last year, then embarrased officials with aerial surveys that showed many of

their claims about wolf, moose, and caribou numbers were inaccurate.

MARINE MAMMAL NOTES

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

The Marine Mammal Protection Act was

reauthorized on schedule on April 29, including loop-

holes to let hunters to import polar bear trophies and to

allow the killing of seals and sea lions who eat threat-

ened fish runs at locks and fish ladders. Other provi-

sions include a total ban on intentionally shooting

marine mammals who interfere with fishing, and a pro-

gram to cut accidental kills during fishing to near zero

over the next seven years.

The Liberal Party of Canada convention on

May 15 overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling

for the resumption of offshore seal hunting, halted in

1983 after two decades of international protest. The

Liberals form the Parliamentary majority. Claiming

“the concerns of animal rights lobby groups should not

be put before the concerns of the people of

Newfoundland and Labrador,” the resolution claims

sealing is needed to create jobs because the fishing

industry has collapsed––making no mention that the col-

lapse was caused by overfishing condoned in the name

of job creation by a succession of both Liberal and

Progressive-Conservative governments.

Save the whales! DID CLINTON SELL OUT WHALES TO SELL MISSILES?

June 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico––The world will

know by the time you read this whether U.S. president Bill

Clinton sold out whales to sell $625 million worth of missiles to

Norway. As ANIMAL PEOPLEwent to press, Greenpeace and

the World Wildlife Fund, goaded by Friends of Animals, were

applying last-minute leverage to head off the apparent

sellout––including joint protest on May 17 in front of the White

House, a WWF first, while Clinton and vice president Albert

Gore met with Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland inside.

The proposed creation of an Antarctic whale refuge and

the resumption of commercial whaling head the agenda for the

46th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission

(IWC), commencing on May 23. As every year since 1982,

when the IWC decreed the moratorium on commercial whaling in

effect since 1986, Japan and Norway will push to break the

moratorium. As last year, Japan and Norway will also fight the

creation of the sanctuary, seeking the help of Antigua-and-

Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent-and-

the-Grenadines, four tiny Caribbean nations heavily dependent

upon Japanese foreign aid, whose votes were decisive in 1993.

Philippines joins Indonesia in banning monkey business

June 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

MANILA, The Philippines– – A

high-ranking Philippine official confirmed

May 9 that a long-awaited Philippine ban on

wild-caught monkey exports will take effect

this year, fulfilling a promise made in 1986

and completing a phase-out begun in 1989.

Quoting a radio broadcast by

Philippine Protected Areas and Wildlife

Bureau director Corazon Sinha, the Xinhua

news service reported that the export ban will

cover both wild-caught and captive-bred mon-

keys––a significant extension of the 1989

plan, reiterated in early 1993 by Sinha’s pre-

decessor, Samuel Penafield. Ending all mon-

key exports would ease the burden of enforce-

ment, since officials would not be obliged to

determine where each monkey was born.

Editorial: What’s wrong with “sustainable use”?

June 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1994:

U.S. World Wildlife Fund president Kathryn Fuller didn’t just rattle the Clinton

administration with her May 12 declaration of opposition to any “first step toward the

resumption of commercial whaling.” More significant was her statement that, “Even if

commercial whaling could be sustainable, it cannot be justified,” a welcome marked depar-

ture from 35 years of WWF policy, which essentially has endorsed any use of wildlife that

even promised to be sustainable.

The most influential of all animal and habitat protection groups internationally,

WWF has been problematic since 1961, when founder Sir Peter Scott, a trophy hunter,

recruited the leadership elite from among fellow hunters who feared that African indepen-

dence would lead to the rapid loss of target species. The elite included longtime WWF

International president Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, who escaped punishment for

allegedly overshooting bird quotas in Italy in the early 1970s to resign, finally, in 1987,

after being implicated in a Dutch bribery scandal. Bernhard was succeeded by another of

the founding elite, Prince Philip, long the honorary head of the British chapter. One of the

world’s most prolific tiger-killers when tigers were abundant, Philip showed his allegiance

to conservation ethics that Christmas by leading his sons Charles, Andrew, and Edward in

killing 10,000 pigeons, 7,000 pheasants, 300 partridges, and several hundred ducks,

geese, and rabbits––all captive-raised––in a six-week vacation bloodbath. This slightly

exceeded Philip’s previous record of 15,500 captive birds killed during a five-week spree.

WILDLIFE

May 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Fourteen years after being

declared an endangered species and 11

years after being pronounced extinct, the

Palos Verdes blue butterfly has been resdi-

covered. University of California geography

professor Rudi Mattoni, believed to be the

last person to see the butterfly before it pur-

portedly vanished, recognized it again on a

mid-March insect collecting visit to the U.S.

Navy’s Defense Fuel Supply Point in San

Pedro. The site is protected as critical habi-

tat for the also endangered California gnat-

catcher, a small songbird.

Saving marine mammals and tigers: The balance of nature vs. the balance of terror

May 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The poli-

tics of wildlife protection are at the fore this

month as Congress rushes toward renewing

the Marine Mammal Protection Act on the eve

of the annual push by whaling nations to gut

the whaling ban enacted in 1986 by the

International Whaling Commission––and

everyone has something to trade but the

cetaceans and pinapeds whose fate depends on

the outcome. Simultaneously the fate of wild

tigers and rhinoceroses worldwide would

seem to depend more upon the success of

negotiations over inspection access to North

Korean nuclear power plants than upon either

economics or ecology.

A foreshadowing of the probable

compromises ahead over marine mammals

came on April 11, as President Bill Clinton

barred U.S. imports of wildlife products from

Taiwan effective in mid-May. Said Clinton,

“The world’s tiger and rhinoceros populations

remain gravely endangered and will likely be

extinct within the next two to five years if the

trade in their parts and products, fueled by

market demand in consuming countries, is

not eliminated.”

Birds

May 1, 1994 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Virtually insuring the mass destruction of spar-

rows, who provide much of China’s insect control, Beijing

Weekend magazine on April 1 published the assertion of profes-

sor Chen Wenbo of the Beijing Drum Tower Hospital of

Traditional Chinese Medicine that eating six sparrows and 15

grams of Chinese wolfberries per day for three months can cure

male sterility. The professor, 57, claimed to have cured

30,000 patients with a diet of sparrows over the past 13 years:

86% of their wives became pregnant. Since 1991 the price of

sparrows at the bird market outside the hospital has reportedly

doubled from three U.S. cents apiece to six.

Siberian cranes failed to arrive this winter at

Keolado National Park, near Bharatpur, India, for the first

time in 30 years. Only six were seen in Iran, and none in

Pakistan, marking the virtual extinction of the western flock,

which numbered 200 about 30 years ago. About 2,900 Siberian

cranes survive in the eastern flock, wintering in eastern China.

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