RSPCA of Australia offers beer for cane toads

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
SYDNEY–” Hops for hoppers plan likely to croak,” the Sydney
Morning Herald headlined on February 27, 2007.
A year after the Royal SPCA of Australia began offering cane
toad hunters a free beer for every toad delivered to RSPCA shelters
alive, the offer has reportedly had few takers–while hunters
continue to club cane toads, shoot them, spear them, and sometimes
lick them, to get a potentially lethal high from a poison they
secret that has reputed psychadelic effects.
Native to the Amazon rain forest, 101 cane toads were
released in Queensland in 1935 to combat cane beetles, native to
Australia, who were attacking sugar cane crops. Ignoring the cane
beetles, cane toads instead became the most successful predators of
mosquito larvae Down Under.

Indian humane societies clash with PETA & government over wildlife rescue role

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
Indian humane societies clash with PETA & government over wildlife rescue role

by Merritt Clifton

BANGALORE–PETA/India, the Karnataka state forestry agency,
and the Central Zoo Authority of India are aligned against all five
of the local humane societies in a turf war over who has the right to
house and treat wildlife.
Summarized The Hindu on February 27, 2007, “In a petition before
the Supreme Court, PETA seeks the closure of all unrecognised zoos
and unauthorized rescue and rehabilitation centers,” allegedly
because “poor infrastructure has led to unnecessary pain and
suffering of animals housed in them.”

Placing predators in land of 1.1 billion people

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:

Indian tigers, lions, and leopards who menace humans or
livestock are killed, as predators are in other nations–but Indian
animal advocates have long sought alternatives.
The tiger conservationist Jim Corbett, born in India of
British parents, first won fame by shooting the tigers he
memorialized in his 1946 memoir The Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Yet far
from boasting of his kills, Corbett pleaded for tiger habitat to be
set aside, within which tigers could be tigers, safe from the
threat of human encroachment.
Though tiger reserves were eventually created, as Corbett
recommended, and one of the largest was named in his honor,
poaching and encroachment have diminished most of them. The Sariska
tiger reserve, formerly among the most accessible to tourists, was
apparently poached completely out of tigers in 2003, as was
officially confirmed in November 2004. Poachers admitted killing 10
of the 20-odd tigers who were believed to have inhabited Sariska.
The rest appeared to have existed only on paper as result of counts
inflated to keep tourists coming.

South Africa, Zimbabwe claim need to cull elephants

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
ADDO NATIONAL PARK– South African environmental affairs and
tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk on February 28, 2007
announced that culling elephants may resume soon after a 12-year
suspension, under a draft policy open for public comment until May 4.
“If culling is allowed after the process of public comment,
and if it is included in the final draft,” van Schalkwyk said,
speaking cautiously to media at Addo National Park on the Eastern
Cape, “it would really depend on the management plans and
management objectives of each of the parks” where elephants might be
killed.
Addo and Kruger National Park, South Africa’s oldest and
largest, are most often mentioned as sites of alleged elephant
overpopulation.
“We have about 20,000 elephants in South Africa,” van
Schalkwyk said, of whom “more or less 14,000 are in Kruger National
Park. In 1995, when we stopped culling we had around 8,000
elephants. The population growth of elephants is six to seven
percent [per year]. This is the hard reality,” Van Schalkwyk
explained.

Wolves, grizzlies lose protection– and Alaska resumes wolf bounty

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:

WASHINGTON D.C.–Wolves and grizzly bears, the iconic
predators of the North American frontier, lost their Endangered
Species Act protection within the continental U.S. within days of
each other in March 2007, opening the possibility that both may soon
be legally hunted.
Demonstrating how wolves and grizzlies became endangered in
the first place–and what has historically always happened when rural
states are allowed jurisdiction over large predators–Alaska Governor
Sarah Palin’s office on March 20 introduced a $150 bounty on wolves.
The bounty is open only to the 180 pilots and aerial gunners who are
registered volunteer participants in the state’s predator control
program.

BOOKS: Turtles of the World

April 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:

Turtles of the World
by Franck Bonin,
Bernard Devaux,
& Alain Dupré
Translated by
Peter C. H. Pritchard
Johns Hopkins University Press (2715 North
Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218), 2006. 416
pages, with 300 color photos & 320 color maps.
$50.00.

“For many years Franck Bonin, Bernard
Devaux, and Alain Dupré have traveled the world
together to study turtles in their natural
habitats,” says the Johns Hopkins University
Press flak sheet of the authors of Turtles of the
World, an encyclopedic inventory of nearly 300
turtle species which was by reputation the most
comprehensive ever produced even before Peter C.
H. Pritchard translated the French text into
English, to reach a broader audience.

BOOKS: Kinship With The Wolf

March 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Kinship With The Wolf
by Tanja Askani
Park Street Press (One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767), 2006.
144 pages, paperback. $19.95

The text accompanying this collection of superb portrait
photographs of wolves describes the social lives and behavior of a
family of wolves living in captivity at the Luneburger Heide Wildlife
Reserve in Germany. Author Tanja Askani gives an absorbing account
of the emotional lives of wolves, and of their complex social
structures and rituals.
Askani mentions that some wolves take an instinctive dislike
to a particular person for no apparent reason, and gives a
fascinating description of how wolf family life can give leadership
lessons to business executives. She includes a particularly
interesting chapter on the status of wolves in Europe, reviewing the
current wolf population estimates and conservation initiatives in
each nation of the European Union. Outside the EU, wolves continue
to be viciously persecuted in Norway and Russia. Even within the EU,
where wolves are nominally protected, the protections are often not
enforced.

BOOKS: Cats Of Africa

March 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Cats Of Africa by Luke Hunter
Photography by Gerald Hinde
Johns Hopkins U. Press (2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore,
MD 21218), 2006. 176 pages, hardcover. $39.95.

As well as the well-known lion, leopard,
and cheetah, and the less familiar but still
reasonably common caracal, serval and African
wildcat, Africa hosts the golden cat, jungle
cat, sand cat, and blackfooted cat. Cats of
Africa author Luke Hunter, a Wildlife
Conservation Society carnivore specialist,
covers them all–but his volume is not to be
confused with the distnguished Cats of Africa by
Anthony Hall-Martin and Paul Boseman, published
in 1998, now out of print.
We were surprised to read that “none of
the big cats purr.” This has been alleged by
others, but we have personal experience that
cheetahs purr, a loud deep purr sounding much
like a small motorbike. Lion expert Paul Hart,
of the Drakenstein Lion Park near Cape Town,
South Africa, advises that lionesses in heat
express themselves by what could be described as
purring.

Bringing birds back to Iraq

March 1, 2007 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
BAGHDAD–Rediscovering and restoring the bird life of Iraq is
an obsession for ornithologists who remember the nation as the
crossing of flight paths for migratory species coming and going from
all parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The Mesopotamian marshlands, twice the size of the Florida
Everglades, were reputedly the richest birding habitat in the world
before dictator Saddam Hussein drained 90% in 1991 to try to flush
out rebels against his rule.
About 40% of the marshlands have been reflooded and restored
since 2003. All 150 bird species known to have lived there in 1979
have been seen in recent winter-and-summer surveys, Birdlife
International adviser Richard Porter told BBC News in January 2007.
That leaves many of the 237 species native to the rest of
Iraq still largely unaccounted for, between habitat loss and decades
of unrestrained shooting.

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