African wildlife seeks new ways of survival

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

HARARE, KAMPALA, CAPE TOWN, NAIROBI–Competing for prey
and dens with larger and stronger African lions and hyenas, stealthy
leopards, speedy cheetahs, and faster-breeding jackals. African
wild dogs may never have been very numerous.
Now they are critically endangered over much of their range,
and their range is shrinking, between human development and natural
disasters like the January 17, 2002 eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in
the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Care for bears in China

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:
BEIJING, HONG KONG, SHANGHAI–China cares about bears.
That was clear from nationwide outrage erupting in February
2002 after a 21-year-old engineering student poured sulfuric acid and
caustic soda over five bears at the Beijing Zoo “to see if bears are
really stupid.”
International Fund for Animal Welfare representative Zhang Li
offered help to the zoo in treating the bears, who repeatedly all
suffered vision loss, mouth injuries, and badly burned paws. Zhang
Li also appealed for a national law on animal welfare. An existing
law protecting wildlife may not apply to zoo animals.

BOOKS: A Feathered Family

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

A Feathered Family: Nature Notes from a Woodland Studio by Linda Johns
Sierra Club Books (85 Second St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1999.
272 pages, hardcover. $25.00.

Linda Johns is a painter, a sculptor, an author and an
apparently self-taught (she would say bird-taught) rehabilitator of
wild birds. All these elements come together in A Feathered Family.
The book is a series of verbal snapshots of one period in her 25
years of living in an isolated wooded area in Nova Scotia, just
before and after her partner Mack came to share her home.
It is a most unusual home, with an indoor garden for birds
to forage in, complete with two tall dead trees chosen for their
horizontal branches. There are mealworm cultures in an upstairs
closet and more perches than chairs. There is a hospice room for
isolating birds as occasionally needed, and an art studio, but most
of the house is an open design which has become a series of
interconnecting flyways. I found myself wanting to move in, despite
knowing the screen porch tub is occasionally stocked with ants.

BOOKS: Birds of Eastern & Central North America

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Birds of Eastern & Central North America (5th edition)
by Roger Tory Peterson
Houghton Mifflin (222 Berkeley St., Boston, MA 02116), 2002. 427
pages, illus., hardcover. $30.00.

I met Roger Tory Peterson just once, briefly, before a
public hearing at which we both testified against a Connecticut
Department of Environmental Protection plan to kill mute swans.
Peterson was 82, quite ill, and sent someone else to represent
him–but at the last minute he rose out of bed and came to pit his
moral weight against the might of both the hunting and birding
establishments. Native or non-native, Peterson said briefly, the
mute swans were birds, were sentient and intelligent beings,
contributed to human appreciation of all bird-kind, and deserved to
live.

BOOKS: Lives of North American Birds

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Lives of North American
Birds by Kenn Kaufman
Houghton Mifflin Company (215 Park Avenue South,
N.Y., NY 10003), 2001. 704 pages, paperback. $25.00.

The Lives of North American Birds is not a field guide for
identifying birds, though it is organized much like one. Instead it
provides detailed information about the lives of 680 species
occurring regularly in North America, with “shorter accounts for
more than 230 others that visit occasionally.”

Dogs & monkeys

March 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

After three years of nonstop effort, the Visakha SPCA has
sterilized about 80% of the street dogs in Visakhapatnam, we
believe. We are now making special efforts to catch the remaining
20%, who inhabit the beaches and other open areas where they can
quickly run away from the dogcatchers. Our Animal Birth Control
program has now extended our services to adjacent communities and
nearby rural areas.

Shooting animals in the rural South: animal abuse or cultural norm?

March 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:
Shooting animals in the rural South: animal abuse or cultural norm?
by Sue-Ellen Brown, Psy.D.

“Who shot the dog?” I asked.
“I killed him! I shot him right in the face!” the
13-year-old boy boasted, sitting on his 4-wheeler.
“That was cruel!” his 8-year-old female cousin from the
suburbs objected.
“Well, he ate my cat!” exclaimed the 13-year-old.
For a moment I thought that could be a legitimate
explanation. I felt relieved that the next serial killer was not
living next door. But then, he continued, “Well the cat was dead.
The dog dug him up and ate him.”
I asked what happened to the cat.
“My dad shot him.”

Biologists in “missing lynx” uproar didn’t think they saw a puddy tat

March 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

OLYMPIA, Washington–A two-month national furor about
alleged falsification of evidence by seven field biologists studying
lynx range apparently started because several of the biologists did
not believe a feral domestic cat could survive in the Gifford Pinchot
and Wenatchie National Forests.
Almost any experienced feral cat rescuer could have told them
that feral domestic cats thrive wherever they find small mammals or
birds to hunt and adequate cover, from the equator to inside the
Arctic and Antarctic Circles.

Supreme Court of Canada rules for seals

March 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:

OTTAWA–The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 9-0 on February 22
that the authority of the federal government “to preserve the
economic viability of not only the seal fishery, but the Canadian
fisheries in general” gives Ottawa the constitutional right to ban
the sale of whitecoated harp seal and bluebacked hooded seal pup
pelts–as has been done since the 1995 resumption of offshore
commercial sealing, to protect the public image of the hunt. The
verdict allows Ottawa to resume prosecuting 101 sealers for allegedly
killing seal pups in 1996. About 25,000 pelts were seized from them.
Funded by the Fish, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, sealer Ford
Ward, of La Scie, Newfoundland, challenged the federal right to
pursue the case.
The current sealing quotas are 275,000 for adult harp seals
and 10,000 for adult hooded seals–but only 91,000 seals were killed
in 2001, as pelt prices collapsed years ago and Viagra cut into
Asian demand for seal penises.

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