Category: Wild Animals

BOOKS: The Ivory Markets of East Asia

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

The Ivory Markets of East Asia by Esmond Martin & Daniel Stiles
Save the Elephants (POB 54667, Nairobi, Kenya), 2003. 112 pages,
paperback.

A week-long meeting of the 50th Standing Committee for the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species concluded on
March 19, 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland, without authorizing South
Africa, Namibia and Botswana to sell 60 tons of stockpiled elephant
ivory.
CITES in November 2002 approved the sales in principle, but
required that the ivory not actually go to the auction block before
May 2004, and not then unless a control system called Monitoring the
Illegal Killing of Elephants could be shown to be working properly.
The goal of MIKE is to prevent elephant poaching by identifying and
intercepting sales of ivory other than from the authorized stocks.
Uganda, Ethiopia, Mali, Cameroon, Tunisia and Ghana joined
Kenya in successfully resisting pressure from South Africa, Namibia,
and Botswana to allow the sales. Among the many Kenyans who had a
distinguished part in the successful outcome for elephants were
Esmond Martin and Daniel Stiles. Martin has been investigating
illegal wildlife trafficking in Kenya and Tanzania for nearly 40
years. The Ivory Markets of East Asia is at least his fifth book
about the rhino horn and elephant ivory traffic. Stiles’ relevant
experience spans more than 30 years.

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REVIEWS: A World of Butterflies

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

A World of Butterflies
by Brian Cassie, with photos by Kjell Sandved
and extended preface by Robert Michael Pyle
Bulfinch Press (c/o Times Warner Book Group,
1275 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020), 2004.
420 pages, hardcover. $22.50.

A World of Butterflies is an odd hybrid of field guide and
coffee table book, pocket-sized and consisting chiefly of
illustrations, but having the feel of being something to be paged
through indoors, not a quick reference to be packed along on hikes.
It comes with a dust-jacket, sure to be shredded on any field
expedition, and locating any particular butterfly seen on the wing
without already knowing the name of it will be slow going, since the
specimens are not grouped in any manner lending itself to quick
reference.
The girdled silk moth and the giant silk moth appear next to
each other, for example, with some superficial logic, but since
they live on different continents and look nothing alike, there is
little risk of them being confused in observation. What they have
most in common is frequently meeting their demise in boiling water,
the most common method of separating their silken cocoons from the
insect larvae within. Waiting until the larvae have hatched and left
is perfectly possible, but few producers exercise that much
patience, because few buyers insist that they must.

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Conservationists seek to bring back banned Compound 1080 poison

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

KATHU, South Africa; SACRAMENTO, Califonia–Thirty-two
years after then-U.S. President Richard Nixon outraged ranchers by
partially banning sodium monofluoroacetate to protect wildlife, a
year before signing the Endangered Species Act, some leading
conservation groups are aligned with ranchers worldwide to expand the
use of the poison, better known as Compound 1080.
The conservationist arguments are that nothing else is as
effective in killing “invasive” species, and no other poison is as
easily used to kill only those predators who actually attack
livestock.
“The Poison Working Group of the Endangered Wildlife Trust,
the National Wool-growers Association, and Cape Wools have over the
last three years combined to try to legalize and promote the use of
this poison in South Africa, to exterminate or control black-backed
jackals and caracals,” charged Kalahari Raptor Centre co-director
Chris Mercer in a March 2004 position paper. Compound 1080 is to be
applied to baits hung one meter above the ground, Mercer said.
“The theory is that only the larger jackal [and caracal] could reach this bait, and that the smaller Cape fox and bat-eared
fox could not,” Mercer continued. “Working daily with small
mammals,” including experience with jackals, caracals, and both
fox species, “we know that the poisoned baits will be easily reached
by all of them. The foxes will jump for them, and striped polecats,
meerkats, and mongooses will climb to get them. The Endangered
Wildlife Trust war on our wildlife will wipe out our small mammals.

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Horse advocate Ewing testifies for slaughter

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois–Donna Ewing, 69,
founder of the Hooved Animal Humane Society in
1971 and the rival Hooved Animal Rescue &
Protection Society in 2001, recently testified
to an executive committee hearing of the Illinois
House of Representatives that horse slaughter for
meat should not be banned.
“Humane societies became involved with
wild horses and stopped ranchers from killing or
culling the wild horses, and the consequence has
been that animals have been kept in concentration
camps at tremendous expense… billions of
dollars, because the humane people said you
cannot kill our wild horses,” Ewing said. “They
need to be controlled to a certain degreeŠIf we
don’t have a place where these animals, the
unwanted horses, the old horses, the sick …
well, they can’t take the sick ones for human
consumption ŠThere’s going to be a glut on the
market. People will be turning their animals
loose and I will be finding dying, starving
horses more than I have been now.

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Wildlife

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Nature Conservancy, often criticized for use of cruel
tactics in killing non-native species on its holdings, in early
February 2004 testified before the Hawaii House Water, Land Use,
and Ha-waiian Affairs Committee in favor of a bill to allow USDA
Wildlife Services to shoot feral animals from the air.

Uist Hedgehog Rescue is again trying to rescue hedgehogs from
the Western Isles off Scotland, quadrupling the bounty offered to
residents for safe captures ahead of a cull funded by Scottish
Natural Heritage. Scottish Natural Heritage considers hedgehogs to
be a non-native menace to birds’ nests. UHR saved 156 hedgehogs in
2003.

The 15-nation European Union on January 19 suspended imports
of grizzly bear trophies from British Columbia, six months after
warning the B.C. and Canadian governments that scientific review
indicates the present hunting rules are insufficient to protect
grizzlies from extirpation. The B.C. government estimates that
17,000 grizzlies live in the province, but other investigators
believe there are as few as 4,000. The EU ban is largely symbolic,
as only seven of 228 grizzlies killed by hunters in B.C. in 2003 were
killed by EU residents.

True Grizz: Glimpses of Fernie, Stahr, Easy, Dakota, and Other Real Bears in the Modern World

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

True Grizz:
Glimpses of Fernie, Stahr, Easy, Dakota,
and Other Real Bears in the Modern World
by Douglas H. Chadwick
Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St.,
San Francisco, CA 94105), 2003.
176 pages, hardcover. $24.95

Meet the bears: Fernie with her two cubs swim the Hungry
Horse Reservoir looking for food. Stahr opens a door to a screen
porch and, surrounded by 50-pound bags of dog food, naps on the
couch. Dakota hangs out on a street corner in Whitefish, Montana so
often she is named for it.
A few years ago these grizzlies would have been killed. No
questions. No second chances. Douglas Chadwick in True Grizz tells
how Montana is now trying to save the bears with creative and
innovative new methods.
Long gone is the era when grizzlies roamed from Kansas to the
California coast, finding plenty to eat on the way: elk, bison,
mule deer. Males may have weighed close to 1,000 pounds and females
600.
By l975 an estimated 99% percent of the grizzlies in the
Lower 48 had been killed. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the
remaining bears would barely have covered a used car lot. Because
the public demanded that these fabled giants should survive,
grizzlies were among the first species added to the U.S. endangered
list. There were then 750 to 1,000 bears left in the U.S. outside of
Alaska. Today there are 1,000 to 1,300.

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BOOKS: The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
by David Baron
W. W. Norton & Company (500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110),
2004. 277 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

This amazing book explains how wild pumas near Boulder,
Colorado came to view humans as prey. The intriguing story,
however, is only the frame that David Baron uses to painstakingly
piece together a gigantic puzzle.
When a puma killed Boulder high school student Scott
Lancaster in 1991, “everyone knew” that healthy pumas did not view
people as prey–but Lancaster’s killer proved to be both wild and
healthy. Baron explains the factors that caused this dramatic change
in puma behavior.
When wild animals came to town in the Old West, they were
shot. If they survived, they learned to avoid people.
Baron relates many sad stories about the wholesale slaughter
of predators in the United States as humans increased in population,
moved out into the wildernesss, and altered the natural landscape.
Baron tells us that author Michael Johnson labeled newcomers
to western cities “New Westers.” “Old Westers believe the West was
won. New Westers are concerned with how it was lost–or will be.”
New Westers passed laws to prevent or limit killing predators.

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Where wolves, bears and people live together

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

“People and wolves can live together,” says Carpathian Large
Carnivore Project director Christoph Promberger. “What we have found
is that carnivores can cope extremely well with people.”
Promberger has spent the past 10 years studying large
carnivores in the southern Carpathian mountains and teaching
livestock herders and beekeepers to use nonlethal techniques to
control predation. Since 1995 Promberger and the CLCP have also
introduced eco-tourism to a region which previously economically
benefited from wildlife only through hunting by the Communist ruling
elite–and not benefiting much, at that.
Promberger is now building the Carpathian Large Carnivore
Center, to further establish the idea that the Piatra Craiului
National Park region in the southern Carpathians can become to Europe
what the Yellowstone National Park region is to the U.S.–both a
critical wildlife habitat and the chief economic engine in an area
with few non-extractive industries.
The Carpathian mountains are home to one third of Europe’s
large carnivores west of Russia. There are 3,500 wolves in Romania,
a nation the size of Michigan. This is almost as many wolves as
exist in the entire U.S. There are 5,500 brown bears, nearly five
times as many as there are of their cousins, the grizzlies, in the
U.S. Lower 48. Lynx are seen as often in the southern Carpathians as
anywhere.

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Thai gibbon sanctuary survives killings of staff

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2004:

Phop Phra, Tak, Thailand– The William E. Deters Foundation
For Gibbon and Wildlife Conservation Projects, founded in 1996 as
the Highland Farm & Gibbon Sanctuary, is recovering from perhaps the
most violent transition of leadership any sanctuary has ever endured.
On May 10, 2002, cofounder William Emeral Deters, 69,
housekeeper Ratchanee Sonkhamleu, 26, her three-year-old daughter,
Hmong worker Laeng sae Yang, and a Thai worker known only as Subin
were massacred during a botched robbery. Of the key personnel, only
cofounder Pharanee Deters, 60, remained.
But the animals still needed to be fed.
“My mind was in a dark hole for a long time,” Pharanee
Deters told ANIMAL PEOPLE in a recent update e-mail. “Very sad,
upset, suffering, depressed, angry–you name it, I had it all. I
even thought about eliminating myself. But every day I would think,
“If I am gone, who will take care of the 37 gibbons, six monkeys,
the birds, the dogs, the cats, the geese, the turkeys. So here I
am, still alive and working harder to keep these creatures alive and
happy.
“When Bill was alive, he was the creator and I was the doer.
Now I have to do both,” Pharanee Deters continued, with words of
appreciation for Edwin Wick, director of Wildlife Friends of
Thailand, and Roger Lohanan, director of the Thai Animal Guardians
Association. Wick and three volunteers helped maintain the sanctuary
for about two months after the murders. Lohanan and eight volunteers
helped for two weeks after Wick’s team left.

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