Endangered “invasives” killed

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

CAPE TOWN, MELBOURNE––With rare Himalayan tahrs and grey-headed flying fox bats already under fire at Table Mountain and being trapped and killed in Fern Gully of the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Domestic Animal Rescue Association of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Victorian Scientific Advisory Committee in Melbourne, Australia, were seeking last-ditch means of pursuing injunctions to stop the killing as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.

Each massacre raised the issue of an endangered species in native habitat being seen as invasive elsewhere, despite showing no hint of expanding beyond a narrow range.

Descended from two escaped zoo specimens, the tahrs thrived on Table Mountain after native klipspringers were poached out. They proved so much better at evading human hunters that though the herd, once up to 600, has been reduced to between 70 and 100, they have eluded extermination by Cape Nature Conservation since 1976. CNC believes it must kill all the tahrs before it can successfully reintroduce klipspringers–– who reportedly have already been reintroduced unsuccessfully several times.

INVASIVES IF HUMANIACS HAD THEIR WAY

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – The 32-member Invasive Species Advisory Committee appointed in January 2000 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt may have excluded humane representatives because Invasive Species Council members Babbitt, Commerce Secretary William Daley, and Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman feared that concern for preventing animal suffering might interfere with their mandate to kill all ferals.

Prevailing belief among mainstream conservation biologists and wildlife managers is that if socalled “humaniacs” had their way, the whole of North American would be overrun by even more feral species than it has now in no time.

But a look at actual species introductions tells a different story. Most would never have come if hunting, meat-eating, animalfighting, vivisection, and other cruel practices had been adequately proscribed by public policy.

Feds find out that force-feeding white phosphorous to mute swans kills them

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

LAUREL, Md. – – “ T h i s has been proclaimed the year that mute swans will be eliminated from North America,” warns swan defender Kathryn Burton of Old Lyme, Connecticut. “A directive to get rid of all mutes on federal property came from the Interior Department in 1997,” endorsed by many state wildlife agencies as well, “with the goal being total eradication in 2000,” Burton adds.

Eradicating mute swans could become a symbolic first victory for the Invasive Species Council, created by executive order of President Bill Clinton in early February 1999 with a mandate to destroy all wild animals and plants not native to the U.S.

Mute swans are easy targets because they are few, are large, are conspicuous, remain together as pairs even when one partner is gravely wounded, and are hated by wildlife managers who blame them for 13 years of failures to re-establish huntable populations of native trumpeter swans.

NZ DOC vs. rainbow lorikeets

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

AUCKLAND, N.Z.; SAN FRANCISCO; MIAMI––The New Zealand Department of Conservation has budgeted $245,000 toward all-out eradication of feral rainbow lorikeets, including $18,000 for the use of alpha chlorolase poison, but the brightly colored Australian birds have an influential defender in Rex Gilliland, 61.

A life member of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a leading member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, Gilliland is no reflexive friend of ferals. His curriculum vitae states that he “previously assisted the DoC by eradicating the Norway rat from Saddle Island in the Hauraki Gulf at his own expense.”

Also to assist the survival of indigenous New Zealand birds, Gilliland has for many years sponsored kaka exhibition and research at the Auckland Zoo, and planted more than 400 trees to help the birds and other wildlife of Tiri Tiri Island.

Golf: Facing nature with a club

June 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

SEAL BEACH, AUBURN, SANTA BARBARA, California; LAKEWOOD, Colorado––Already poisoning cottontail rabbits at the Leisure World golf course in Seal Beach, the exterminating firm California Agri-Control in early May asked the Seal Beach Police Department for permission to shoot rabbits as well. Seal Beach police chief Mike Sellers on May 9 refused to waive the city policy against firing guns within city limits––which meant that the poisoning would continue.

In Defense of Animals offered to relocate the rabbits to a privately owned 40-acre site near Lake Elsinore, without much hope that the offer would be accepted.

“In 1992, an offer to relocate rabbits” from Leisure World “was rejected by the California Department of Fish and Game,” IDA representative Bill Dyer said. “Yet for $40,000, the cost of building one green” claimed by Leisure World, “all of the rabbits could be trapped, sterilized, and released.”

British fight for bird habitat

May 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

LONDON––English Nature, entrusted with protecting endangered species in England, has hung hundreds of hawk silhouettes over 80 third-floor windows at its headquarters, hoping to deter smaller birds from swooping into the “trees” they see reflected in the glass.

Protected species including firecrests, robins, blue tits, blackbirds, kingfishers, and a pallas’s warbler had all recently been killed there. The pallas’s warbler, native to Siberia, was a species so rare it had never previously been seen by any of the 250-member English Nature staff.

“It’s not the shape that matters,” spokesperson Sue Ellis told Jonathan Theobald and Paul Brown of The Guardian. “It has more to do with breaking up the reflective surface. The building is going to look very odd, but it will give the public some idea of what we are trying to do. One of the messages we’d like to send out is the need for better-designed buildings.”

WILDLIFE AGENCY UPDATES

May 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

A December 1998 training exercise came back to haunt the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement data base (LEMIS) when Tennessee activist Don Elroy in March 2000 found a data entry indicating that 1,012 orangutans valued at $850,000 had come through Miami on a single day, en route from the fictitious firm “Quong’s Orangutans” to an address which turned out to belong to a real-life leather goods importer in Hershey, Pennsylvania. USFWS Office of Law Enforcement Branch of Technical and Field Support chief Circee Pieters told ANIMAL PEOPLE that the alleged deal was one of 29 included in the exercise, with hidden red flags indicating that they were to be deleted when the exercise was done––and they were, she said, but were later restored to the system when a power failure obliged LEMIS to restore files from a backup tape.

The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters in March 2000 sent to secondary schools across the province a 300-page hunter education manual produced in 1982 by the Ontario Natural Resources Ministry and the U.S.-based National Rifle Association. It includes about 50 pages showing how to load, aim, and fire weapons including handguns. “If the schools don’t like it, they can just send it back,” said OFAH spokesperson M a r k Holmes, denying that it might help students to commit murder.

GeesePeace vs. USFWS

May 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

GeesePeace president David Feld, of Fairfax County, Virginia, on April 14 accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of sabotaging volunteer efforts to control Canada geese by oiling eggs so that they do not hatch.

The Fish and Wildlife Service appears to prefer controlling geese by sport hunting or by USDA Wildlife Services roundups of geese for donation to soup kitchens.

“They have required that permit applications be processed on pink paper, declared corn oil––the recommended oil for egg treatment–– to be a pesticide which can only be used by a certified applicator, and required nest sites to be identified 60 days in advance, which they know is impossible,” Feld told Washington Post staff writer William Branigan.

Feld said the Fish and Wildlife Service also barred volunteers from oiling eggs on private property, even with landowner permission.

Added Doris Day Animal League executive director and GeesePeace member Holly Hazard, “This is a problem that the Fish and Wildlife Service itself created. Egg-oiling is something they should lead the charge on. They are not even in the army.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service introduced nonmigratory Canada geese to most of the sites where they are now problematic, beginning more than 40 years ago.

Introductions continue. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, for instance, recently confirmed that it is trying to double the Iowa population of Canada geese, despite public complaints.

Why is Wendy Rhodes kissing this shark?

May 1, 2000 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:

Education and Action for Animals president Wendy Rhodes [above], of Redondo Beach, California, is kissing this formerly captive nurse shark––about to be released––to make observers ask questions, she admits.

Rhodes wants people to question their attitudes toward sharks, toward keeping captive sharks, and toward keeping any animals captive for entertainment.

The nurse shark in the photo, previously kept at a San Jose pizza restaurant, is one of six Rhodes has rescued within the past year from tanks they have outgrown. They were returned to the sea with the help of more than 50 sympathizers.

« 1 … 79 80 81 82 83 … 173 »