NIH makes permanent chimp breeding freeze

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
WASHINGTON D.C.– The U.S. National Institutes of Health on
May 24, 2007 announced that for financial reasons, it will make
permanent a moratorium in effect since 1995 on breeding chimpanzees
kept by the National Center for Research Resources.
The center is responsible for about 500 of the 1,200 chimps
who remain in U.S. laboratories.
Only nine U.S. labs still use chimps.
“NCRR’s prudent decision is timely,” said New England
Anti-Vivisection Society president Theo Capaldo, “since not only
U.S. but world sentiment is growing in support of the day when no
chimpanzees will be used in lab research.”
The NIH escalated chimp breeding in the early 1980s,
anticipating that many chimps would be used in HIV-AIDS research.
However, chimpanzees proved to be extraordinarily resistant
to the human forms of HIV-AIDS.

70 years of missing the link

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
CHENNAI–Non-recognition of the
relationship between Indian street dog purges and
monkey invasions is no new phenomenon–and not
only Indians have failed to observe it.
Separate articles on page 22 of the July
1938 edition of the National Humane Review,
published by the American Humane Association,
detailed both a dog pogrom in Chennai, then
called Madras, and the industry of shipping
monkeys to U.S. laboratories that had emerged in
several leading Indian cities. Neither the
British correspondents who furnished the
information nor the Americans who wrote the
articles appeared to be aware that one practice
might be fueling the other.
“Stray dogs are a problem in India, as
in our own country,” the editors observed, “and
city handling in India is as revolting as in many
American cities. Through the endeavors of the
Madras SPCA, electrocution has taken the place
of clubbing dogs to deathŠThat the practices of
city dog catchers are much the same the world
over is indicated by a complaint that the dog
catchers were taking only healthy dogs and
passing up the diseased ones.”

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Monkeys may swing elections, but Delhi doesn’t want them

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
DELHI–“Marauding monkeys and the chaos they spread across
New Delhi” were “an important issue” in the April 2007 municipal
elections, reported Rahul Bedi of The Daily Telegraph.
But the outcome for monkeys was not apparent in the election
results, because no party really seems to have a politically viable
and popular solution.
Members of the Congress Party most flamboyantly campaigned against
“the monkey menace.” The Congress Party recommended raising a
“monkey army” of chained languors, to roust the smaller and much
more abundant rhesus macaques who cause most of the monkey trouble.
Indeed, chained languors are at times employed successfully
to guard specific locations for limited times–but apart from the
humane issues involved in capturing and training them, they are
often the losers when troupes of macaques gang up and counter-attack.
Few politicians other than former federal minister for animal
welfare Maneka Gandhi advocate leaving street dogs alone, to chase
off monkeys as they have for centuries. But several Delhi citizens
gave testimony to Bedi suggesting that urbanized macaques have become
a much bigger threat than street dogs ever were, except possibly in
potential for carrying rabies, and macaques can transmit rabies too,
if infected.

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Will Taiji again capture orcas?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
“The town of Taiji plans to capture orcas in order to secure
financial resources,” charges Sha-Chi JP, a Japanese-based web
site “dedicated to the Taiji-5 orcas captured on February 7, 1997.”
The site is posted by volunteers Seiji Inagaki, Nanami Kurasawa,
Yoshiko Nagatsuka, Yoshimi Takahashi, and Carla Hernandez, with
the help of OrcaLab, the British Columbia-based project of
anti-captivity marine mammologist Paul Spong.
Taiji is globally notorious as the site of dolphin massacres.
Herded into shallow water by boat, the dolphins are confined with
nets, then hacked to death. The toll exceeds 1,000 dolphins per
winter. Most are of small species. The 1997 orca captures were
unusual.

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Dolphin captures planned in Panamanian waters

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
“The dolphin brokerage operation formally known as Wildlife
International Network is moving closer to capturing 80 dolphins in
Panama,” In Defense of Animals warned in a May 2, 2007 “Action
Alert,” based on findings by Panamanian activists and Dolphin
Project founder Ric O’Barry, who began exposing the operation in
March.
“WIN is now known as Ocean Embassy,” IDA said.
“If Ocean Embassy is successful,” O’Barry told ANIMAL
PEOPLE, “they will be able to supply dolphins to just about any
place that wants them.

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Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak orders report on street dog shooting & poisoning

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:

 

CAIRO–Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak has asked the
Ministry of Agriculture to “prepare a report about stray dogs in
Egypt, and to open an investigation into reports published by
various press and animal welfare organizations who have been appalled
by the practice of shooting and poisoning dogs,” the Al Masry-Al
Youm newspaper reported on May 19, 2007.
Unnamed Ministry of Agriculture sources reportedly told Al
Masry-Al Youm that Mubarak “called for applying humane international
measures in dealing with stray animals, instead of shooting and
poisoning, which detracts from Egypt’s status as a land of culture
and center of tourism.”

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ENPA gets ex-Mafia farm

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
ROME–Fourteen years after the late American SPCA president
Roger Caras issued a tongue-in-cheek appeal to Mafioso to leave their
estates to animal welfare, the Italian national animal charity ENPA
has received one–in a manner of speaking. Confiscated from the
Sicilian Mafia, the small farm near Palermo was judicially awarded
to ENPA for use in teaching humane and moral education. The farm
will produce honey, beeswax, and natural silk by methods that do
not harm the insects.

Singapore Zoo to keep green polar bears

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
SINGAPORE–Wildlife Reserves Singapore, operators of the
Singapore Zoo, on May 3, 2007 announced that it has reversed a
September 2006 decision to relocate the polar bear Inuka, 17, who
is believed to be the only polar bear ever born in tropical habitat.
“Transporting a full-grown polar bear to an institution in a
temperate country would be stressful, and carries its own share of
risks, the most extreme being that Inuka might die during
transportation or during the introduction process in the new
facility,” Wildlife Reserves Singapore stated.
Singapore Zoo spokespersons reaffirmed that the zoo will no
longer exhibit Arctic and Antarctic animals after the eventual deaths
of Inuka and Sheba, 29, his now quite elderly mother. Few polar
bears live much beyond age 30. Intending to move Inuka to a more
congenial climate upon Sheba’s demise, Singapore Zoo director Fanny
Lai had asked the Rostock Zoo in Germany to help her find a new home
for him. The Rostock Zoo runs the global captive polar bear survival
plan.

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Marin County HS names Neil Trent

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:
Novato, Calif.–The Marin County Humane Society on May 14,
2007 announced that Neil Trent, 56, will succeed Diane Allevato as
executive director. Allevato is retiring after heading the society
since 1980.
Trent spent 21 years in law enforcement, shelter management,
and overseas training with the Royal SPCA of Britain. After five
years as a field officer and regional director for the World Society
for the Protection of Animals, he moved to Humane Society
International in 1997, where he has been executive director since
1998.

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