Iceland halts commercial whaling

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2007:

REYKJAVIK–Iceland fisheries minister Einar K Guofinnsson on
September 3, 2007 announced that Iceland will not issue new
commercial whaling quotas.
Iceland in 2006 joined Norway in unilaterally defying the
21-year-old Inter-national Whaling Commission moratorium on
commercial whaling by issuing itself permits to kill 30 minke whales
and nine endangered fin whales. Anticipating a market in Japan for
whale meat, Icelandic fishers killed seven minke whales and seven
fin whales, but were unable to get permission to export the meat.
“There is no reason to continue commercial whaling if there
is no demand for the product,” Guofinnsson said.
Iceland, like Japan, has sustained a remnant whaling
industry despite the IWC moratorium by authorizing whalers to hunt in
the name of research. Iceland issued “scientific whaling” permits to
kill 38 minke whales in 2003, 25 in 2004, 39 in 2005, and 60 in
2006–far below the Japanese toll of 6,795 whales killed in research
whaling since 1987.

Saving wild burros in their native habitat

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
OLANCHA, California–Wild Burro Rescue founder Diana Chontos
has in common with the film ogre Shrek that she lives in a stone
house in the middle of nowhere, is a seldom-seen legend, and puts
saving her asses ahead of the comfort of a damsel in frequent
distress.
Among the differences are that Shrek memorably saved one ass,
in his 2001 screen debut. Chontos had already saved hundreds,
beginning in 1984. Shrek lives in a swamp, with abundant water.
Chontos lives in the high desert near parched Owens Lake, drained in
the early-20th century water diversion scandal dramatized by Jack
Nicholson in the 1974 film Chinatown.
Chontos herself could play the damsel in distress, possibly
with significantly greater fundraising success, but the role never
suited her.

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Who is killing the Virunga gorillas?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:

GOMA, DRC–Seeking the killers of endangered mountain
gorillas in Virunga National Park, near the eastern border of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, UNESCO and the World Conservation
Union on August 14, 2007 sent out a posse.
“The killings are inexplicable,” said a United Nations press
release. “They do not correspond to traditional poaching,” and
“have taken place despite increased guard patrols and the presence of
military forces.
“Seven mountain gorillas have been shot and killed this year,
four of them last month, more than during the conflict that wracked
Africa’s Great Lakes region in the late 1990s,” the release
continued. “Some 700 gorillas are estimated to still survive in the
area, about 370 of them in Virunga.”

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Dolphin captures in Solomon Islands are linked to Panama, Dubai

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:

GAVATU– As of July 24, 2007, Canadian dolphin broker
Christopher Porter was reportedly holding as many as 50 recently
captured dolphins in sea pens at Malaita in the Solomon Islands.
“Ocean Embassy, also known as the Wildlife International
Network, is in the Solomon Islands trying to export the dolphins to
Dubai,” Dolphin Project founder Ric O’Barry told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Five new dolphin facilities in Dubai want dolphins, whales, polar
bears–every marine mammal they can get. Ocean Embassy is the broker.
“Somehow Ocean Embassy has been able to stay out of the media
regarding Dubai,” O’Barry added. “They brokered the deal but Porter
gets all of the attention. Ocean Embassy represents big money,”
O’Barry continued. “They dwarf Porter’s operation. The parent
corporation began selling securities via a private placement offering
in the United States in late 2003. At present, the parent company is
represented by 195 investors from the United States, Mexico, the
United Kingdom, and France.

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Monkey-laundering?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
HONG KONG–Is a small amount of monkey-eating in southern
China covering for a large amount of monkey trafficking from the wild
to U.S. labs?
Among the reasons for vigilance:
* Monkey-trapping and smuggling appear to be increasing
throughout Southeast Asia, allegedly for Chinese markets. Yet
reports from within China indicate no rise in monkey consumption,
amid increasing efforts to suppress eating contraband wildlife.
* U.S. lab use of nonhuman primates has more than doubled,
from 25,534 in 2002 and 25,834 in 2003, to 54,998 in 2004, and
57,531 in 2005, the latest year for which the USDA Animal & Plant
Inspection Service has complete data.

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Quebec wardens bust a poaching legend

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
MONTREAL–For more than 30 years rumors
circulated among Quebec game wardens about trophy
hunting outfitters north of the St. Lawrence
River who would allegedly trap wolves and bears
with baited hooks, then fly rich clients out to
shoot them.
The perpetrators allegedly also chased
big moose and caribou to exhaustion with
helicopters, to give unscrupulous and
politically powerful customers easier shots.
But none of the suspects were ever caught
in any of the acts and arrested. Catching
ordinary deer poachers in relatively populated
southern Quebec was difficult. Catching
well-funded and well-equipped poachers hundreds
of miles from any accidental witnesses was deemed
almost impossible.

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Attempt to legally adopt chimp goes to appeal

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
VIENNA–Austrian judge Barbara Bart on April 24, 2007
rejected the request of British teacher Paula Stibbe, 38, a
longtime resident of Vienna, that she be allowed to legally adopt
Hiasl, 26, a male chimpanzee, whom she has visited weekly at a now
bankrupt sanctuary since 1999. Stibbe immediately appealed the
verdict.
Stibbe petitioned to adopt Hiasl, she said, out of concern
that he might be sold to a laboratory outside of Austria. Bart ruled
that the adoption could not proceed because Hiasl is neither a
mentally impaired human nor in a crisis situation requiring emergency
intervention.

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70 years of missing the link

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
CHENNAI–Non-recognition of the
relationship between Indian street dog purges and
monkey invasions is no new phenomenon–and not
only Indians have failed to observe it.
Separate articles on page 22 of the July
1938 edition of the National Humane Review,
published by the American Humane Association,
detailed both a dog pogrom in Chennai, then
called Madras, and the industry of shipping
monkeys to U.S. laboratories that had emerged in
several leading Indian cities. Neither the
British correspondents who furnished the
information nor the Americans who wrote the
articles appeared to be aware that one practice
might be fueling the other.
“Stray dogs are a problem in India, as
in our own country,” the editors observed, “and
city handling in India is as revolting as in many
American cities. Through the endeavors of the
Madras SPCA, electrocution has taken the place
of clubbing dogs to deathŠThat the practices of
city dog catchers are much the same the world
over is indicated by a complaint that the dog
catchers were taking only healthy dogs and
passing up the diseased ones.”

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Monkeys may swing elections, but Delhi doesn’t want them

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
DELHI–“Marauding monkeys and the chaos they spread across
New Delhi” were “an important issue” in the April 2007 municipal
elections, reported Rahul Bedi of The Daily Telegraph.
But the outcome for monkeys was not apparent in the election
results, because no party really seems to have a politically viable
and popular solution.
Members of the Congress Party most flamboyantly campaigned against
“the monkey menace.” The Congress Party recommended raising a
“monkey army” of chained languors, to roust the smaller and much
more abundant rhesus macaques who cause most of the monkey trouble.
Indeed, chained languors are at times employed successfully
to guard specific locations for limited times–but apart from the
humane issues involved in capturing and training them, they are
often the losers when troupes of macaques gang up and counter-attack.
Few politicians other than former federal minister for animal
welfare Maneka Gandhi advocate leaving street dogs alone, to chase
off monkeys as they have for centuries. But several Delhi citizens
gave testimony to Bedi suggesting that urbanized macaques have become
a much bigger threat than street dogs ever were, except possibly in
potential for carrying rabies, and macaques can transmit rabies too,
if infected.

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