Please help ANIMAL PEOPLE to keep the humane cause on message!

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
What if the U.S. humane community had not made the catastrophic mistakes that it did in response to the Great Depression and the recessions that followed each of the major mid-20th century wars?
What if a strong independent voice had helped humane leadership to cope with financial crunches with a combination of practical help and reminders of the importance of remaining focused on mission?
What if humane work had continued to emphasize outreach, advocacy, prosecuting cruelty, and education, at a time when humane education was forthrightly presented as moral education, when state wildlife agencies were not yet dependent upon funding from the sale of hunting licenses, and when Americans consumed less than half as much meat per capita as today?
We cannot know what might have happened, but we can certainly contemplate the possibilities.

Remembering Marco

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
Remembering Marco by Geeta Seshamani
The September 2008 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE included a photograph of a donkey named Marco, with a memorial for him from ANIMAL PEOPLE artist Wolf Clifton and president Kim Bartlett.
An editor s note on page six mentioned that after rescuing Marco while traveling in India in January 2007, Bartlett funded an equine care mobile unit to help the working donkeys and horses along the heavily traveled Agra/Delhi corridor, and added that the unit is operated by Friendicoes SECA, which already had an equine unit in Delhi.
There was much more to the story.

$75 million offered to further non-surgical sterilization

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
CHICAGO For $75 million, can someone invent a vaccine against canine and feline pregnancy? Or a chemosterilant that will be widely accepted by the humane and veterinary communities?
If an effective immunocontraceptive or chemosterilant for dogs and cats existed, would it be used where most needed?
Might the money be more productively used in extending high volume, low cost, best practice dog and cat sterilization surgery to all parts of the world and in keeping existing low-cost sterilization programs operating, at a time of plummeting donations?
The headline item at the mid-October 2008 Spay USA national conference was the $75 million incentive package offered by Found Animal Foundation founder Gary K. Michelson, M.D., to encourage the development of nonsurgical dog and cat contraception.

RSPCA & Dogs Trust convince the Kennel Club to revise breed norms

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
LONDON The Kennel Club, the world s first and oldest purebred dog registry, is redrafting the show standards for 209 breeds to eliminate rules that favor dogs with extreme and unnatural characteristics which might impair their health.
The Kennel Club, founded in 1873 and regarded in the show dog world as the most prestigious guardian of pedigrees, quietly disclosed the revisions of rules barely six weeks after complaining to the Office of Communication, the British television regulatory agency, that it was unfairly treated by the producers of the British Broadcasting Corporation exposé Pedigree Dogs Exposed, aired in August 2008.
Among the dogs featured in the documentary were boxers with epilepsy, pugs with breathing problems, and bulldogs who were unable to mate or give birth unassisted, reported Associated Press writer Jill Lawless. After the show was broadcast, Lawless added, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Dogs Trust withdrew their support for Crufts, the annual Kennel Club show, begun in 1891.

Editorial feature: The humane community can handle hard times

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)

Writing only for SPCA Los Angeles, SPCA/L.A. president Madeline Bernstein might have spoken for the whole humane community worldwide in an early October 2008 appeal expressing deep concern with the state of our economy, food costs, gas prices, Wall Street woes and its negative trickledown effect.
SPCA/L.A. is struggling to feed and tend to the ever-increasing number of homeless animals in our care, Bernstein said, many a direct result of foreclosures and financial hardship. Worse, fewer adoptions are occurring for the same reasons. This puts us in the untenable position of having to bear higher costs while donations, corporate funding and even the bestowal of in-kind gifts is shrinking. Natural disasters and an expensive presidential election have also put a claim on limited resources. The bottom line is that there is less discretionary and disposable income for charities less funds to give and more difficult choices to make.
SPCA/L.A., with an annual budget of $6 million and estimated assets of $16 million, according to IRS Form 990, is among the most affluent 1% of all humane societies.

Animal Obituaries

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
Scarlett, a calico cat believed to be about 15, was euthanized on October 11, 2008 due to incurably painful conditions of age. Initially a Brooklyn alley cat, Scarlett lived with her kittens in a Brooklyn warehouse until March 29, 1996 when the warehouse caught fire. Firefighter David Giannelli of Ladder Company 175, involved in several other animal rescues of note during his long career, saw Scarlett dash five times into the blaze despite increasingly severe burns to rescue each of her four-week-old kittens. Giannelli took Scarlett and her kittens to the North Shore Animal League in Port Washington. There Scarlett was named in honor of Rhett Butler s line to Scarlett O Hara in the film Gone With The Wind: A cat s a better mother than you are. One kitten died from a virus about a month after the fire, but Scarlett and the others were adopted out after three months of treatment and socialization. Karen Wellen of Brooklyn kept Scarlett for the rest of Scarlett s life. In her prime Scarlett was a regal 19 pounds, with only severely scarred ears hinting at her traumatic past.

Obituaries

Obituaries [Oct. 2008]

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)

Roger Troen, 77, died on April 23, 2008 in Portland, Oregon. Even among fervent animal-rights activists, Roger Troen stood out. He d be the one costumed as a demented butcher with fake blood and cleaver, performing guerrilla theater during an anti-fur protest, or as Colonel Sanders outside KFC protesting factory farming, or chalking the ground outside the Oregon Health Science University primate center, recalled Amy Martinez Starke of the Portland Oregonian. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Mormon convert, and elementary school teacher 1959-1969, Troen left teaching and the Mormon church to become active in gay rights advocacy circa 1970. He took up animal advocacy soon afterward, helping to lead the campaign that in 1977 made Portland the third city in the U.S. to quit killing shelter animals by decompression. Only Berkeley (1972) and San Francisco (1976) quit sooner.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Elephants & Ethics

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)

Elephants & Ethics:
Toward a Morality of Coexistence
Edited by Christen Wemmer & Catherine A. Christen
Johns Hopkins University Press (2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218), 2008. 483 pages, hardcover. $75.00.

We have been defining our relationships with the elephants for as long as we have been people, opens John Seidensticker in his preface to Elephants & Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence. When discussing the ethics of human/elephant relationships, he adds, we should keep in mind a historical reality: In any confrontation, elephants almost always lose.
Seidensticker in the next several paragraphs traces the 3,000-year retreat of wild elephants from Beijing to the Myanmar border. As rice cultivation enabled the rise of civilization in China, the conversion of former lowland forests to paddies steadily reduced elephant habitat.

Indian states act finally on behalf of captive elephants

October 1, 2008 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2008:
(Actual publication date 11-5-08.)
MYSORE, THRISSUR Acting on complaints filed by the Bangalore-based Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilition Centre and by Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, also of Bangalore, Mysore Division deputy conservator of forests Shashwati Mishra on October 28, 2008 seized three elephants from a Great Bombay Circus encampment in Mysore, due to alleged neglect of foot ailments.
Forestry department officials said they had decided to shift the elephants on the basis of a report submitted by veterinarians of the Mysore zoo, who had inquired into the matter, The Hindu said. The elephants were transported to Bannerghatta National Park for treatment.
The elephants were taken into custody 12 days after Kerala principal chief conservator of forests T.M. Manoharan seized a three-year-old elephant named Kannan from the Mavelikara Evoor Sri Krishna temple in Mavelikkara.
The plight of Kannan came to light last week when two youngsters captured on their mobile phone cameras scenes of mahouts brutally torturing the elephant, reported The Hindu. The visuals were passed on to TV channels and forests minister Binoy Viswom issued instructions for an enquiry.

« 1 … 157 158 159 160 161 … 720 »