American Jobs Creation Act includes handouts, charity reform

November 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

WASHINGTON D.C.–The most flagrant case of politics making
strange bedfellows in the last days of the 108th Congress may have
been the American Jobs Creation Act.
Combining nonprofit reform with pork barrel politics, the
American Jobs Creation Act was passed by the House of Representatives
on October 8, cleared the Senate on October 11, and was signed by
President George W. Bush just six days before the November 2 national
election.
The act gave $137 million in tax breaks and subsidies to
Republican-favored industries, including hunting, fishing,
greyhound and horse racing, and indigenous whaling.
The framework of the act repealed $49.2 billion in export
subsidies for U.S. goods, held to be in violation of World Trade
Organization rules. This helped Democratic presidential nominee John
Kerry to accuse Bush of subsidizing losses of U.S. manufacturing jobs
to overseas competitors.
To win support for repealing the export subsidies on the eve
of the election, Congress gave the act a misleading title, then
loaded it with giveaways to the point that Arizona Republican Senator
John McCain called it, “The worst example of the influence of
special interests that I have ever seen.”

Ohio Supreme Court partially dumps dog law

November 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

COLUMBUS–The Ohio Supreme Court on September 22 ruled 4-3
that the part of the Ohio law requiring restraint of “dangerous and
vicious” dogs is unconstitutional because it does not allow the
owners to contest the “dangerous and vicious” designation before they
are criminally charged.
“We find it inherently unfair that a dog owner must defy the
statutory regulations and become a criminal defendant, thereby
risking going to jail and losing her property, in order to challenge
a dog warden’s unilateral decision to classify her property,” wrote
Justice Francis Sweeney for the majority.
Janice Cowan, 50, of Mogadore, argued that her German
shepherd and two of the dog’s mixed-breed offspring were unjustly
killed after the two mixed-breed dogs mauled neighbor Margaret
Maurer, on Maurer’s property. The dogs were chained, but the
chains apparently allowed them to range beyond Cowan’s property.
Cowan was subsequently convicted of four misdemeanors for failing to
properly confine the dogs. A three-judge panel from the Ohio 11th
District Court of Appeals rejected two of Cowan’s three claims of
unjust treatment, but agreed 2-1 that Portage County violated her
right of due process.

Hope for no-kill animal control in NYC–but chaos elsewhere

November 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

NEW YORK CITY, TRENTON, PHILADELPHIA, ST. LOUIS,
MIAMI–“The black hats have increased adoptions 99.6%, reduced
euthanasia 14%, and fewer animals died in New York City during the
last 12 months than in any other one-year period in city history,
just 25,000,” Animal Care & Control of New York City director Ed
Boks e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on October 17, 2004.
In Boks’ first fiscal year since coming to New York, after
achieving similar results as head of Phoenix/Maricopa County Animal
Control in Arizona, the city killed 28,980 animals, then an
all-time 12-month low, but already broken.
Boks’ secret of success, he proclaims often, is integrating
the no-kill mission and philosophy into animal control–and then
finding the resources to make it happen.
Just across the Hudson River, a New Jersey state Animal
Welfare Task Force appointed in February 2003 by former Governor
James E. McGreevey–endowed with a $200,000 working budget–wants to
emulate Boks’ approach.
The task force recommendations include escalating
sterilization funding, adopting neuter/return as the officially
favored method of controlling feral cats, adding a trained cruelty
investigator to every police department, requiring every county to
operate an animal shelter, and removing the troubled New Jersey SPCA
network from the constabulary role in humane law enforcemnt that it
has had for more than 100 years.

GlaxoSmithKline joins British firms jobbing safety testing overseas

November 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

LONDON–“The drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline
is moving a third of its clinical trials offshore
to countries such as India and Poland to cut
costs,” Heather Tomlinson of The Guardian
revealed on November 1.
Her report confirmed that break-ins,
arsons, home invasions, and similar tactics by
militant antivivisectionists are combining with
market factors to drive experiments on both human
and animal subjects beyond the reach of British
regulation, believed to be among the strongest
in the world on behalf of either humans or
nonhumans used by science.
“If ending cruelty is really the goal,
not merely achieving a hollow symbolic ‘victory’
by removing torture out of sight and out of mind,
forcing vivisection abroad is moving in the wrong
direction,” ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt Clifton
warned the British activist community in a
mid-2002 guest column for the newsletter of the
Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals.

Animal Obituaries

November 1, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

Kato, 11, the dog of Nicole Brown Simpson whose howling
helped investigators to establish the time of her murder and that of
her friend Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994, died on October 21, 2004
at the home of Nicole Simpson’s parents, Louis and Judith Brown,
in Dana Point, California. Ex-football player and sportscaster O.J.
Simpson, estranged husband of Nicole Simpson, was acquitted of the
killings but lost a civil suit brought by her parents when the jury
found “probable cause” that he was responsible.

Cannelle, 15, the last reproducing female brown bear in the
western French Pyrenees mountains, was killed on November 1 by boar
hunters, whose dogs chased her orphaned cub. The hunters had been
told to stay out of the area. The killing came 10 days after a a
government ranger shot an 18-month-old female wolf near the Italian
border, the first wolf killed in France in 70 years.

Obituaries

Four hurricanes in six weeks stretch rescue efforts from the Caribbean islands to Texas

October 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

ORLANDO–Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne
ripped through the Caribbean, Florida, and parts of other southern
states in August and September 2004 like the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, scything down whatever they met.
In between, tropical storm Alex, Bonnie, and Gaston hit hard too.
More than 3,000 people were killed in Haiti, mainly by mud slides,
and at least 31,000 people lost their homes. The magnitude of the
human disaster tended to obscure the parallel animal disaster.
“An estimated 40,000 animals, including dogs, cats, and
farm animals, are in urgent need of help,” e-mailed Anne Ostberg of
the Pegasus Foundation, who helped to fund and coordinate Caribbean
relief efforts.
“The World Society for the Protection of Animals is working
with the Argentine army and ambassador to get veterinary supples to
Haiti,” Ostberg added, “with an immediate focus on disease control
and treating surviving farm animals. WSPA is also working with two
contacts in Port au Prince.”
Ostberg said WSPA was assisting as well in Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Venezuela, and Panama.

New concept draft of Korean animal protection law eliminates potential exemptions for “meat” dogs & cats

October 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

SEOUL–More than a year of acrimony over
animal definitions in a 2003 draft update of the
1991 South Korean animal protection law appeared
to be resolved on October 5, 2004 when the
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry presented a
new draft of recommendations for legislation
called Comprehensive Measures for Animal
Protection.
Comprehensive Measures appears to
eliminate loopholes in the 2003 draft update that
might have exempted dogs and cats raised for meat
from coverage.

Anti- foie gras activists swallow a promise instead of action in California “victory”

October 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

SACRAMENTO–Farm Sanctuary, In Defense
of Animals, PETA, and the Humane Society of the
U.S. declared victory on September 29, 2004 when
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed
a bill that will purportedly ban force-feeding
ducks and geese to produce foie gras, effective
in 2012. But as the San Francisco Chronicle
reported, “The state’s lone farm engaged in the
practice, Sonoma Foie Gras, also hailed it as a
victory.”
“We supported this bill and thank the
governor and the legislature,” Sonoma Foie Gras
owner Guillermo Gonzalez e-mailed to Andrew
Gumbel and John Lichfield of The Independent, a
London newspaper that covered the issue for
British readers.
The British-based organization Compassion
In World Farming initially applauded the
California bill, but CIWF European Coalition for
Farm Animals campaign coordinator Barbara Dias
Pais on October 7 acknowledged to ANIMAL PEOPLE
that “the news was indeed badly misinterpreted by
many of us here in Europe.”

Greyhound exports to Southeast Asia

October 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

KIDDERMINSTER, U.K.– Greyhound Action International
announced on September 16 that newly obtained 2003 statistics show “a
drop in the number of greyhounds exported from Australia to South
Korea, but an increase in the number sent to Macau.” Greyhound
racing has recently been introduced into Macau, Vietnam, and
Cambodia, and has expanded in the Phillipines.
Greyhound Action International notes that dogs are eaten in
all of these places, and alleges that the exported greyhounds “are
ending their days being butchered in the dog meat industry.”
Australian activist Lyn White inspected the Vietnamese
greyhound racing facilities and dog meat markets for the Animals Asia
Foundation in late 2002 and found no evidence that greyhounds were
being sold for human consumption, or could be, since Vietnamese
consumers prefer fat puppies rather than hard-muscled older dogs.
However, greyhounds were at the time still scarce in
Vietnam. If intensive breeding for competition produced a perennial
surplus, as exists in nations with an established greyhound racing
industry, it is not inconceivable that an entrepreneur might find a
way to sell their remains, perhaps as a pre-cooked canned stew.

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