Category: Wild Animals

Canadian sealers kill at record speed

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

MONTREAL–Authorized by Ottawa to kill 350,000 harp seals in
2004, Atlantic Canadian offshore sealers killed so aggressively that
the Department of Fisheries & Oceans on April 14 closed the
large-vessel hunt only 48 hours after it started, suspecting that
the large-vessel quota of 246,900 had already been reached.
Again this year, as in each of the past five years,
International Fund for Animal Welfare observers led by Newfoundland
native Rebecca Aldworth obtained extensive video of sealers skinning
seal pups who were still thrashing and dragging live seals on hooks.
Again this year DFO denied that the writhing seals were still alive.
Sealers and DFO spokespersons boasted of rising global demand
for seal pelts, reportedly wholesaling at about $50 Canadian apiece.
But the evidence was ambiguous–and $50 in Canadian money has only
about half the buying power today that it had more than 20 years ago,
when seal pelt prices last were in that range.
“The landed value of last year’s seal hunt accounted for less
than one tenth of 1% of Newfoundland economy, nowhere near the
figures claimed by the sealing industry,” IFAW president Fred
O’Regan wrote to The New York Times. “Lasting solutions to the
economic challenges facing Atlantic Canada require more than
subsidizing the slaughter of nearly a million seals in the next three
years.”

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Neuter/return works for Alaskan wolves

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

FAIRBANKS–Animal advocates who sterilize and release feral
cats and street dogs had the right prescription for wolf predation
control all along, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists are
discovering.
Clamoring to shoot and trap wolves to reduce predatory pressure on
the depleted Fortymile caribou herd, the Alaska DFG in 1997
grudgingly agreed to sterilize the alpha pairs in 15 wolf packs under
pressure led by Friends of Animals.
“The idea was that the sterilized pairs would defend their
territories against other packs, which they have done quite
successfully,” wrote Fairbanks Daily News-Miner staff writer Tim
Mowry on March 28.
As with feral cats and street dogs, sterile wolves hunt much
less than animals with young to feed. Therefore the caribou herd
would increase.
DFG biologists performed the sterilizations amid prophecies by
hunters and politicians that the experiment would neither work nor
shut up the opponents of wolf-culling, and therefore should never
have been started.

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BOOKS: Mammals of North America

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Mammals of North America
by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers
and Kenn Kaufman
Kaufman Focus Guides (c/o Houghton Mifflin, 215
Park Ave. S., New York, NY 10003), 2004. 352
pages. Flex binding. $22.00.

Reviewers inevitably liken Mammals of
North America editor Kenn Kaufman to the late
Roger Tory Peterson–with reason.
Peterson, editor and chief illustrator
of more than 50 field guides, was introduced to
birding in 1924, at age 11, by a Junior Audubon
Club. The members were taught to shoot birds and
study their corpses. Horrified, Peterson saved
his earnings as a newspaper boy to buy a camera,
at a time when shutter speeds were believed to be
too slow to capture clear images of birds on the
wing, and soon became the first distinguished
bird photographer, hand-tinting his prints
because color film had not yet been invented.
Peterson produced his first Field Guide to the
Birds in 1934.

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Baby seals & bull calves bear the cruel weight of idolatry

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

The 350,000 baby harp seals who were clubbed or shot and
often skinned alive on the ice floes off eastern Canada this spring
had more in common with the thousands of bull calves who were
abandoned at temples in India during the same weeks than just being
days-old mammals subjected to unconscionable mistreatment.
Unlike the much smaller numbers of seals who were killed off
Russia, Norway, and Finland, and unlike the somewhat smaller
numbers of bull calves who were shoved into veal crates here in the
U.S., Canadian harp seal pups and Indian surplus bull calves are
victims not only of human economic exploitation, but also of their
roles as icons and idols.
The words “icon” and “idol” have a common origin in the
ancient Greek word that means “image.” Yet they mean such different
things–and have for so long–that two of the Judaic Ten
Commandments, about setting no other God before the One God and not
worshipping graven images, sternly address the difference.
An icon is a physical image representative of a holy concept,
usually but not always depicting a person who is believed to have
exemplified the concept in the conduct of his or her life. Icons may
also depict animals, abstract symbols, supernatural beings, or
deities. A icon may be venerated for being symbolic of the holy
concept, but to venerate it for its own sake is considered idolatry,
and therefore wrong in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths,
as well as in some branches of other major religions.

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USDA puts Hawthorn Corp. out of the elephant business–Clyde-Beatty Cole Bros. quits, too

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

RICHMOND, Illinois–Hawthorn Corporation owner John F. Cuneo
Jr., 73, on March 7, 2004 agreed to a 19-point consent decree in
settlement of 47 Animal Welfare Act charges that requires him to
divest of his remaining 16 elephants and have them removed from his
property near Richmond, Illinois by August 15. Cuneo is also to pay
a civil penalty of $200,000.
The consent decree, finalized on March 15, marks the first
time that the USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service has
ordered a circus to cease exhibiting elephants.
Hawthorn Corporation will be allowed to keep 60 white tigers,
27 conventionally colored tigers, and an African lion.
None of the elephants’ destinations have been determined.
Dehi, 57, whom the USDA removed from the Hawthorn premises in
November 2003, was sent to the Elephant Sanctuary at Hohenwald,
Tennessee. A 200-acre facility with seven Asian elephants and three
African elephants at present, the Elephant Sanctuary plans to expand
up to 2,700 acres soon, divided between Asian and African elephant
habitats.
The most recent arrival, in March 2004, is Flora, the
17-year star performer of the single-elephant Circus Flora, for whom
circus owner David Balding tried unsuccessfully to found the Ahali
Sanctuary in South Carolina.

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Tibetans take up “direct action”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2006:

 

KATHMANDU–“Large numbers of troops and police are patrolling
the streets of Rebkong, Quinghai Province, Tibet, to prevent a
bonfire of skins originally scheduled for February 12, 2006. It
appears that the Chinese government has banned the public burning of
chuba costumes trimmed with tiger, leopard and otter skins,” the
Wildlife Protection Society of India posted on February 15, based on
information received from Tibet Info Net.
Fiery protests resembling western-style “direct action”
continued in Tibet into March 2006, despite the military presence,
according to Nepal-based Radio Free Asia, and have occurred for at
least eight months, contrary to previous belief that they began with
fur burnings in January 2006.
Radio Free Asia on February 1, 2006 reported that in August
2005 at Manikengo, “Tibetans, some of whom said they were angry
because they had been pressured to sell their animals for slaughter
at below-market prices, broke into a Chinese-owned slaughterhouse
during the annual Tibetan horse race festival, which attracts
thousands of people. They found what they described as a large
number of animals, including dogs and horses, sources said.

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Canadian seal hunt underway

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island–“The Inter-national
Fund for Animal Welfare is out on the ice to monitor sealing and
document hunting violations,” IFAW communications coordinator Kerry
Branon e-mailed on March 24, the first day of the 2004 Atlantic
Canada offshore seal hunt.
The sealing season opened on November 15, 2003, but the
killing does not start in earnest each year until a new generation of
seal pups become accessible on the Gulf of St. Lawrence ice floes.
“The hunt, which is heavily subsidized by the Canadian
government, is expected to take as many as 350,000 seals over the
next few weeks,” Branon continued. “Seals may be killed once they
begin to moult their fluffy white coats–as young as 12 days old.
Ninety-five percent of the seals killed in the hunt are under three
months of age.
“In the last five years,” Branon charged, “IFAW has
submitted video evidence of more than 660 probable violations of law
to the Department of Fisheries & Oceans. Not one has been
investigated. These abuses include skinning live seals, dragging
live seals across the ice with hooks, and shooting seals and leaving
them to suffer.

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Tiger sanctuary updates

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

Return of Long’s lost tiger ordered

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio– Mahoning County Common Pleas Court
Magistrate Eugene Fehr on March 25, 2004 ruled that the Noah’s Lost
Ark sanctuary in Berlin Township, Ohio, must return a lion cub
named Boomer-ang to animal advocate Bill Long, of Upper Arlington,
Ohio.
Helping New York Post reporter Al Guart to develop an expose
of exotic cat trafficking, Long on October 11, 2003 bought
Boomerang from a breeder in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Long and Guart
planned to take the cub to the Shambala sanctuary near Los Angeles,
operated by actress Tippi Hedren, to dramatize why the “Shambala
Bill” Hedren was then pushing through Congress was needed. Formally
called the Captive Wildlife Protection Act, the bill is now in
effect.
American Sanctuary Association director Vernon Weir on
October 15, 2003 wrote to the New York Post that when the
eight-day-old cub turned out to be “too young and fragile to
transport, ASA suggested to Guart that perhaps Noah’s Lost Ark would
be willing to provide temporary care. We had no reason to believe
that Noah’s Lost Ark would decide that they wanted to keep this cub,”
as happened, soon after Noah’s Lost Ark enjoyed a publicity bonanza
from taking in a tiger named Ming who had attacked his owner,
Antoine Yates, in a Harlem apartment.

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Arizona, New Jersey, and Alaska governors & wildlife

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

TUCSON, TRENTON, FAIRBANKS–Arizona Governor Jane
Napo-litano asked the Arizona Game & Fish Department to stop hunting
four pumas in Sabino Canyon, near Tucson, even after the department
agreed to live-trap instead of kill them, refused to authorize use
of a National Guard helicopter to help in the hunt, and told media
that she might ask the legislature to authorize her to hire and fire
the Game & Fish Department head, to make the agency more
accountable. Currently the head answers only to the five-member Game
& Fish Commission. Naming one member per year, newly elected
Arizona governors are in the last year of their first term before
they have named the majority.
Two weeks after closing Sabino Canyon on March 9, 2004
because the pumas purportedly posed a threat to hikers, the Game &
Fish Department had yet to bag a puma, but nabbed convicted Animal
Liberation Front arsonist Rod Coronado and Esquire writer John H.
Richardson for allegedly trespassing in the canyon while the hunt was
underway.
New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey, via environmental
commissioner Bradley M. Campbell, meanwhile asked the New Jersey
Fish & Game Council to refrain from authorizing another bear hunt,
after 328 bears were killed in the first New Jersey bear hunt since
1970. Wildlife officials had estimated that there were 3,200 bears
in New Jersey. Further study found that there are fewer than 1,500.

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