BOOKS: Ivory Markets of Europe

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Ivory Markets of Europe:
A survey in France, Germany, Italy, Spain & the U.K.
by Esmond Martin & Daniel Stiles

Save the Elephants (P.O. Box 54667, 00200
Nairobi, Kenya), 2005. 104 pages, paperback.
No price listed.

Ivory Markets of Europe is the fourth and
perhaps most startling in a series of regional
reports on the elephant tusk ivory trade produced
by geographer Esmond Martin and anthropologist
Daniel Stiles since 2000.
Martin and Stiles began by looking at Africa, where most ivory originates.
They found that ivory artifacts are still
readily available at leading tourist
destinations, despite the 1989 ivory trade
moratorium imposed by the United Nations
Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species. The source of most of the ivory still
available in Africa appears to be elephant
poaching.

BOOKS: Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs Should Be Prohibited
and Cephalopods & Decapod Crustaceans:
Their Capacity To Experience Pain & Suffering

Advocates for Animals (10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4PG,
Scotland, U.K.), 2005.

Rule #1 for headline writers is that brevity is the soul of wit.
Rule #2 is, “Never use a word that your readers will not
instantly recognize.”
Bad titling unfairly handicaps Why The Tail-Docking Of Dogs
Should Be Prohibited, which would be both more succinct and
grammatically correct without either “the” or “of.”
Bad titling outright sabotages Cephalopods & Decapod
Crustaceans: Their Capacity To Experience Pain & Suffering.
If you know what a cephalopod is, raise a tentacle. If you
know what “decapod crustaceans” are, raise a claw.
At 16 and 20 letter-sized pages, respectively, these new
Advocates for Animals handbooks are exactly what activists need when
urging lawmakers to ban tail-docking, or are speaking up for octopi,
squid, crabs, lobsters, and crayfish.

Wisconsin and Michigan wolves

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

The heavily publicized Yellow-stone region wolf wars have
parallels in the upper Midwest, the one part of the Lower 48 states
where wolves were never killed out.
After wolves gained Endangered Species Act protection in
1974, the Wisconsin wolf population continued to struggle for a
decade, but now has increased to as many as 455, a fourfold
increase in 10 years, coinciding with abundant deer and falling
numbers of human deer hunters.
Wolves in the upper Midwest in April 2003 were federally
downlisted from “endangered” to “threatened,” but the “endangered”
status was judicially restored in January 2005. In the interim,
the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources killed 70 alleged
“problem” wolves.
Humane Society of the U.S. conservation consultant Karlyn
Atkinson Berg told Lee Berquist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in
February that Wisconsin wolf numbers warrant downlisting.
“Unfortunately,” Berg said, “the history of wolves is that
if a wolf kills one sheep, then people want to kill 100 wolves.” she
said. Farmers, Berg observed, are “never required to exercise good
husbandry,” to prevent predation on unattended animals.
There are now about 405 wolves on the Michigan Upper
Peninsula, say state biologists, who believe the Michigan
population has reached the carrying capacity of the habitat.

$36 million to Mozambique

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Jay Knott, USAid director for Mozambique, on January 27,
2006 announced a 30-year, $36 million plan to restore Gorongosa
National Park, whose large wildlife was poached to the verge of
extirpation during 11 years of occupation by Renamo rebels,
1981-1992.
The Massachusetts-based Gregory C. Carr Foundation is to
“fund conservation services, create a wildlife sanctuary, and set
up the mechanisms to reintroduce Gorongosa as a tourist destination,”
said the Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique, in Maputo.
Gorongosa Nat-ional Park director of tourism development
Vasco Galante mentioned “two main immediate objectives for the
park–to secure its biodiversity, and to work with the communities
who are living within the park boundaries.”
This resembled the rhetoric that USAid long used in support
of the Zimbabwean CAMPFIRE program [see page 12], which USAid also
introduced to Mozambique, but while anticipating that tourists might
start arriving as early as 2007, neither Knott nor Galante appears
to have mentioned hunting.

Film star gets year in prison for poaching

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

JODHPUR–Indian film star Salman Khan, 40, on February 17,
2006 was sentenced to serve a year in prison and was fined an amount
equal to about $125 U.S. for poaching two chinkara deer on the nights
of September 26-27, 1998.
This was the first of four poaching cases pending against
Khan, who is also fighting vehicular manslaughter charges in Mumbai
for killing a man in a 2002 traffic accident.
Jodhpur Chief Judicial Magistrate B.K. Jain acquitted seven
others accused in the 1998 chinkara poaching case, including
comedian Satish Shah.
Among the stars-of-the-month depicted in the 1999 World
Wildlife Fund-India calendar, Salman Khan often led illegal shooting
parities into the Rajasthan desert during fall 1998, witnesses
testified, but repeated complaints to police and wildlife officials
failed to bring him to justice.

BLM asks beef ranchers to buy wild horses

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

WASHINGTON D.C.–Bureau of Land Management director Kathleen
Clarke and Public Lands Council president Mike Byrne on February 21,
2006 sent letters to more than 15,000 holders of BLM grazing permits,
asking them to buy some of the 7,000 wild horses and burros whom the
BLM was directed to sell “without limitation” by a stealth rider
slipped through Congress in November 2004.
Equine advocates decried the letter as a proposed “final
solution” for wild horses and burros.
“Any excess animal or the remains of an excess animal shall
be sold, if the excess animal is more than 10 years of age or the
excess animal has been offered unsuccessfully for adoption at least
three times,” stipulated the rider, introduced by Senator Conrad
Burns (R-Montana).
The Public Lands Council “represents permittees who hold
leases and permits to graze livestock on the federal lands in the
West administered by the Bureau of Land Management and the United
States Forest Service. It also coordinates the federal lands
policies of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, American
Sheep Industry Association and the Association of National
Grasslands,” says the PLC letterhead.

Drought tests Kenyan and Zimbabwean hunting policies

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

NAIROBI, HARARE–The vultures inspecting drought-parched
Kenya and Zimbabwe have counterparts in the corridors of national
capitols, watching to see whose wildlife management mode will fail
first.
Kenya, since banning sport hunting in 1977, has made
non-consumptive wildlife watching the nation’s second largest and
best known industry.
Much of the faltering Zimbabwean economy is based on trophy hunting.
The Kenyan model requires attracting large numbers of
tourists, who in good times employ thousands of hotel staff,
drivers, guides, and souvenir vendors.
The Zimbabwean model draws far fewer people, who seek much
less by way of accommodation, minimizing the need for up-front
investment in infrastructure. Yet trophy hunters spend considerably
more per person than wildlife-watchers.

Falcons, chickens, & avian flu

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

Falconing, along with factory farming, cockfighting,
bird-shooting, wild bird trafficking, and keeping caged songbirds,
has emerged as a factor in the increasingly rapid global spread of
the deadly H5N1 avian influenza.
As the March 2006 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, 92
humans in seven nations had died from H5N1. More than 30 nations had
experienced H5N1 outbreaks since 2003, 14 of them since February 1,
2006. Hit, in chronological order, were Iraq, Nigeria,
Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Iran, Austria,
Germany, Egypt, India, France, and Hungary.
More than 200 million domestic fowl have been killed in
mostly futile efforts to contain H5N1, according to the United
Nations Food & Agriculture Organization–almost entirely because of
the persistence of practices long opposed by the humane community.
Falconing became implicated when five trained hunting birds
died from H5N1 at a veterinary clinic in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Saudi agriculture ministry officials confiscated and killed 37
falcons who were kept at the clinic.

Crows & parrots outwit exterminators

March 2, 2006 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2006:

DARIEN (Ct.), SAN FRANCISCO –Crows and parrots, believed
to represent the apex of avian intelligence, evolved in an
environment favoring agility and efficiency in the lightest possible
package.
Any air war strategist could therefore predict the outcome in
conflict between the bird brains and exterminators with thoughts of
lead.
Foes of crows with shotguns, fireworks, lasers, and
recorded distress calls took the most murderous toll on crows they
could during the winter of 2005-2006, on battlefields from upstate
New York and the Philadelphia suburbs to the Rocky Mountains.
Most of the crows, however, are still there, or at least
not very far away.
Attempted parrot purges have been no more successful, even
though the entire U.S. wild parrot population is believed to be
probably about 20,000, not more than 50,000 by the highest serious
estimates. About 7,000 parrots, mostly monk parakeets and conures,
live in California, with at least 2,000 monk parakeets in Florida.
USDA Wildlife Services claimed in January that a week of
nonlethal hazing had driven all but 500 crows out of Auburn, New
York, where as many as 33,000 congregated a few weeks earlier.
Complaints about crows meanwhile erupted in Syracuse, Marcellus,
Cazenovia, and Cortland, noted Syracuse Post-Standard staff writer
John Stith.

« 1 … 41 42 43 44 45 … 173 »