Namibian seal hunt

July 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

The 2006 Namibian sealing season opened on July 1, with a
quota of 85,000 pups, 20,000 more than in 2005, and 7,000 bulls.
Adult females are exempted, to keep the seal breeding population up.
Just a fraction of the size of the annual Atlantic Canadian
seal hunt, the Namibian hunt has attracted little public attention
and protest–and even less since South Africa ended sealing in 1990.
As Namibia and South Africa share the same seal population, a common
misperception was that all sealing had ended along the Atlantic coast
of Africa. In fact, the Namibian sealing quota was doubled to
60,000 after 2000, when according to the Namibian government as many
as 300,000 seals starved due to depleted fisheries. Overfishing and
climatic change due to global warming appeared to be the major causes
of the seal deaths, but Namibia claimed the seals had overpopulated
their habitat. Current reports indicate, however, that the
Namibian seal population has never recovered to more than 75% of the
size it was in 1993, the recent recorded peak year.

China tries to rewrite the prescription for tigers

July 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

HONG KONG–Trying to reshape world opinion about tiger
conservation, in hopes of reopening legal commerce in tiger parts,
the State Forestry Administration of China during the second week of
June 2006 hosted visits to two major tiger farms by four outside
“experts.”
Three of them soon extensively praised Chinese tiger programs
in published statements.
Free market economic advocate Baron Mitra, who directs the
Liberty Institute in Delhi, India, in a guest column for India
Today unfavorably compared tbe faltering Indian effort to conserve
wild tigers with the Chinese proliferation of tigers in captivity.

Norwegian buyer declares whaling moratorium after IWC ban holds

July 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

OSLO, ST. KITTS, TOKYO– The Norwegian fish wholesaling
firm Norges Rafisklag on July 7, 2006 asked whalers to stop killing
whales because there is insufficient market for whale meat to warrant
more whaling this year.
“We don’t have buyers for more whales than those already
shot. Therefore we are sending out a message to halt the hunt,”
Norges Rafisklag spokesperson Hermod Larsen told NRK, the Norwegian
national broadcasting company.
Larsen is the Norges Rafisklag regional director for Lofoten,
the hub of the Norwegian whaling industry. Norges Rafisklag is the
only major buyer of whale carcasses.
“It’s not possible now, for those who don’t have their own
[storage] facilities, to shoot more whales for the time being,”
Larsen added.

Thai zoo deals with Kenya and Australia put on hold

July 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

BANGKOK, MELBOURNE, NAIROBI–Two controversial
international zoo transactions involving Chiang Mai Night Safari Zoo
in Thailand may yet proceed, but as of mid-July 2006 were both on
hold.
Fast-tracked by the national governments of Thailand,
Australia, and Kenya, both animal exchanges were derailed by rising
public skepticism about the humaneness of keeping wildlife in
captivity.
Activist pressure in each case eventually exposed alleged
self-interested dealing by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and
Chiang Mai Night Safari Zoo director Plodprasop Suraswadi, who
previously served as both fisheries minister and wildlife minister,
but lost both positions amid allegations of facilitating wildlife
trafficking.
Both Thaksin and Plodprasop were sued on June 7, 2006 by the
Love Chiang Mai network, for allegedly improperly creating the Night
Safari Zoo in a national park.

Navy, NRCA settle conflict over sonar use

July 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

LOS ANGELES–The U.S. Navy and the Natural Resources Defense
Council on July 11, 2006 announced an out-of-court settlement of
cross-filed lawsuits over the use of high intensity mid-frequency
sonar during the “Rim of the Pacific 2006” war games.
“The settlement prevents the Navy from using the sonar within
25 miles of the Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument and
imposes a variety of monitoring methods to watch out for and report
the presence of marine mammals,” said Associated Press writer Eric
Berkowitz.
Involving 35 ships from eight nations, RIMPAC 2006 during
the latter half of July tested the ability of U.S. anti-submarine
defenses to detect ultra-quiet diesel/electric submarines belonging
to Australia, Japan, and South Korea, whose technology is believed
to be similar to that of China, Iran, and North Korea.

BOOKS: Wildlife Demography

June 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jine 2006:

Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex, Age, & Count Data
by John R. Skalski , Kristen E. Ryding, & Joshua J. Millspaugh
Elsevier Academic Press (30 Corp. Dr., Suite 400, Burlington, MA
01803), 2005. 656 pages, hardcover, $69.95.

As the ANIMAL PEOPLE statistician as well as the editor, I
jumped at the chance to review Wildlife Demography: Analysis of Sex,
Age, & Count Data, for two reasons.
First, at times I feel as if I spend half my life explaining
to people in humane work and animal control the basics of animal
population analysis. Humane workers and animal control officers have
a constant need to estimate and compare populations of street dogs,
pet dogs, feral cats, pet cats, raccoons, deer, nonmigratory vs.
migratory Canada geese, et al.

BOOKS: Caribou Rising

June 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

Caribou Rising by Rick Bass
Sierra Club Books (85 Second Street, San , CA 944105), 2004.
164 pages, hard cover. $19.95.

Rick Bass is a hunter. He sees the natural world through the
crosshairs, but considers himself an ethical hunter, as opposed to a
slob hunter, because he measures the success of a hunt by his
“quality of experience,” rather than by the volume of dead meat he
recovers. He thereby considers himself a conservationist, though
the relationship of hunting fraternity notions of fair chase to
protecting biodiversity is at best indirect.
On a hunting trip to Alaska, Bass finds an indigenous native
American community, the Gwich’in, living off a herd of caribou
whose numbers have fallen from nearly 200,000 to about 129,000 in
recent years.

BOOKS: Falcon, Bee & Parrot

June 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

Falcon by Helen MacDonald
Bee by Claire Preston
Parrot by Paul Carter
Reaktion Books Ltd. (33 Great Sutton St.,
London, EC1V 0DX), 2005. 208, 224, and 224
pages,
paperback. $19.95 each.

Reaktion Books’ new natural history book
series explores not only the natural history of
animals, but also their places in human history,
culture, and current affairs. The authors
discuss the differences between the real-life
behavior of each animal and the behavior
attributed to the animal as used in political,
military, and commercial symbolism.

What’s become of Persian Gulf bird habitat?

June 1, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2006:

SAN FRANCISCO–Iraq was known for attracting some of the
world’s largest and most varied congregations of migratory birds,
before becoming a war zone, and especially before former dictator
Saddamn Hussein drained the northern swamps to crush political foes.
Sergeant First Class Jonathan Trouern-Trend of the
Connecticut National Guard, 38, wondered what might be left when he
started a year-long deployment to Iraq in March 2004. He found many
species still thriving amid the destruction.
A birder since age 12, Trouern-Trend began a web log devoted
to his sightings in Iraq, continued with frequent postings until his
rotation home to Marlborough, Connecticut, in February 2005.
Excerpts from the web log were compiled as a book at the
suggestion of Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, and
published by Sierra Club Books in May 2006 as Birding Babylon: A
Soldier’s Journal from Iraq.

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