Alaska mandates predator control: CONCERNED ABOUT KILLER RATS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

JUNEAU, Alaska––Alaska gov-
ernor Walter Hickel on April 15 signed into
law a bill that forces the Alaska Board of
Game and Department of Fish and Game to
kill predators before either reducing bag
limits or curtailing hunting seasons to pro-
tect game populations. The new law for-
malizes as state policy the approach taken
in Game Management Unit 20-A, where
131 wolves were massacred this past win-
ter so that human hunters could shoot more
moose and caribou. It also takes the deci-
sion-making authority away from the
Board of Game, which hunting interests
feared might be too susceptible to pressure
from environmentalists and animal rights
groups––much to the surprise of the envi-
ronmentalists and animal rights groups who
have tried to deal with the Board of Game
over the wolf issue since November 1992.
Said Alaska senate majority
leader Robin Taylor, “You don’t manage
game by sitting back and saying you wish
the wolf wouldn’t eat the caribou. It’s like
shooting rats in a dump. They’re a predator
you have to control.”

Ex-tourism head vindicated as Alaska loses suit vs. FoA

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

SEATTLE, Washington– Why
was Connell Murray fired as Director of
Alaska tourism?
“I don’t know and I didn’t ask,”
Murray told ANIMAL PEOPLE on April
11, from his boat in Puget Sound, “because I
didn’t much care. I was retired when I was
appointed by the governor, I said I’d stay for
two years, I was there for two years and
three months, and I’m retired again.”
Murray was dismissed effective
January 1, while on a trip to Asia, shortly
after he testified in a deposition that the
tourism boycott called by Friends of Animals
in November 1992 to protest the Alaska
Board of Game’s plan to kill wolves south-
west of Fairbanks had not demonstrably done
any economic harm. The boycott was lifted
when the wolf-killing plan was suspended in
late December 1992, and not reimposed until
after the Board of Game adopted the current
wolf-killing strategy in late June 1993.

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Alaska kills one wolf per 1,218 tries

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

FAIRBANKS, Alaska– The
Alaska Department of Fish and Game on
April 7 ended the first phase of its wolf-
killing campaign in Game Management Unit
20-A, the sector southwest of Fairbanks.
State killers bagged 94 wolves, 80 in snares,
two in leghold traps, and 12 with rifles.
Private hunters and trappers killed 37 more.
The state declared the total of 131 met the
winter quota of 150.
The “predator management” pro-
gram, ostensibly undertaken to protect moose
and caribou, also killed by accident 12
moose, of 23 caught; two caribou, of eight
caught; six coyotes; 13 foxes; a protected
golden eagle; an endangered wolverine; and
a snowshoe hare. Two grizzly bears were
aught, but escaped alive. In all, 36% of
the victims were non-target species.

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ANIMAL HEALTH

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Zoonosis
The politics of rabies took a twist
on April 1 when in all seriousness Patricia
Munoz, public health director for
Washington County, New York, told the
county public health committee that she need-
ed an infectious disease control nurse on her
staff to handle the growing rabies-related
caseload. The Washington County public
health department handled about 500 more
cases of all types during the first three months
of 1994, including 16 cases of possible expo-
sure to rabid animals. Munoz got the com-
mittee to recommend the hiring, then dis-
closed that the nurse would also handle
hepatitis and salmonella cases, both of which
are far more numerous.

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REVIEWS: Lefty’s World

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Lefty’s World
Video documentary, Kindness Publications (Suite 135, 1859 North Pine Island
Road, Plantation, FL 33322). 40 minutes. $17.95 plus $1.50 shipping.
Nominally, Lefty’s World is a companion to Lefty’s Place, producer Lewis
Nierman’s book about the rehabilitation of an injured Muscovy duck, recommended for
school libraries in our January/February issue. But it stands alone, with little overlap.
Wolf, age three and a half, will watch Lefty’s World ahead of most of the children’s video
classics in his impressive collection. He likes to see the Muscovy ducks and other familiar
wildlife––and he understands much of Sonny Dufault’s direct, informative narration.

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BOOKS: The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s Animals on the Move

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

The Serengeti Migration: Africa’s
Animals on the Move, by Lise Lindblad,
with photos by Seven-Olaf Lindblad.
Hyperion/Disney Press (114 Fifth Ave., New York, NY
10011), 1994. 40 pages, hardcover, $15.95.
“Daddy, what’s this lion doing? The lion is eating
the zebra. But the zebra didn’t want to be eaten. The zebras
wish the lions would eat something else. But that’s what lions
do. We don’t have to eat animals.”
There’s only one gory photo in this picture-book
version of the Serengeti migration we’ve all seen on TV, but
of course it was the one Wolf zeroed in on, with a keen intu-
itive grasp of the difference between ourselves and natural
predators plus appreciation of the victim’s perspective.
What did he think of the book otherwise?
“It has buffalo in it. It has birds. It has antelopes.”
––Merritt Clifton & son

COURT CALENDAR

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Crimes Against Humans
Larry Gibson, 33, ex-deputy
sheriff for Douglas County, Oregon,
was arrested April 14 in Townsend,
Montana, for the alleged murder of his
two-year-old son Tommy on March 18,
1991. Gibson claimed he was jogging
when the boy disappeared, while his wife
was indoors; their daughter, then four,
said strangers drove off with him.
Unconvinced, investigators theorized in
May 1991 that Gibson shot his son by
accident while killing a neighbor’s cat
near the time of the disappearance.
Gibson’s wife, daughter, and another
son born since then recently left
him––whereupon the daughter, now
seven, told police she actually saw
Gibson strike Tommy, then stuff him
into a garbage bag.

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Nuisance wildlife: swans as goose control

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

Nuisance wildlife control
experts in the upper midwest
report that mute swans may be the
best brake on the proliferation of
giant nonmigratory Canada geese.
Wildlife agencies in Atlantic coast
states from Rhode Island to Georgia
have practiced aggressive mute swan
“control” via egg-addling for about a
decade, after mute swan sightings
during the annual National Audubon
Society Christmas bird counts dou-
bled. Not noting that the number of
people out counting birds had also
doubled, the agencies warned that
the Atlantic coast was on the verge
of a mute swan population explo-
sion, 150 years after they were first
imported from England; blamed
swans for causing the decline of
heavily hunted migratory waterfowl;

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AGRICULTURE

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1994:

The General Agreement on Trade
and Tariffs will increase the amount of pork
the U.S. can export to Europe to 624,000 met-
ric tons by 1999, six times the 1991 volume.
Drawn by relatively weak U.S. pollution
laws, European hog producers are rushing to
set up U.S. branches, including the Pig
Improvement Co., of Great Britain, the
world’s largest hog breeder, which hopes to
raise 100,000 hogs per year at a site near
Hennessy, Oklahoma. The facility will gen-
erate as much sewage as a town of 170,000
people. A Danish firm is reportedly planning
an even bigger operation: a 600,000-hog con-
finement farm to be sited in Alaska, where
there are virtually no laws pertaining to farm-
related pollution because farming ventures
there have historically failed.

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