Hunting dog neglect cases overshadowed by dogfighting

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

CHARLESTON, S.C.–Broad exemptions in humane laws for
standard hunting practices have historically tended to exempt hunting
packs from scrutiny.
Parallel neglect cases in North and South Carolina might now be
challenging lawmakers and public officials to rethink the presumption
that an investment in breeding and training ensures that dogs will be
cared for–but that aspect of at least one case is overshadowed by
crowded shelter conditions resulting from an unrelated case involving
dogfighting.
Responding to an anonymous tip that starving dogs were eating
each other, Citizens for Animal Protection of Warren County
investigator William Roberts on September 10, 2004 visited the
Parktown Hunting Club near Warrenton, North Carolina, and soon
called for help from animal control officer James Solomon,
veterinarian Chris O’Malley, and a sheriff’s detective.
Acting on the erroneous advice of Solomon and Warren
magistrate W.T. Hardy that suffering dogs could be seized without a
warrant, Roberts took 24 of the 60 dogs they found to his home.
O’Malley took the two in the weakest condition to his clinic.

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Three years for using dog to “discipline” kids

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

PORTLAND, Oregon–Washington County Presiding Judge Marco
Hernandez on September 23, 2004 sentenced David E. Hoskins, 46,
of Hillsboro, to serve three years in prison for disciplining his
7-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son for at least two years by
allowing a dog named Nigel to attack them.
After completing his prison term, Hoskins is to have contact
with the children during the next two years only with the written
consent of child welfare workers.
The sentence was widely seen as far too light, especially in
comparison to the 10-year sentence given earlier in September to
dogfighter Carey D. McMillian, 23, of Dallas, Texas, who was
charged with a single incident. (Page 14.)
Hernandez indicated that he would issue an even lighter
sentence on October 14 to the children’s mother, Joyce Hoskins, 47,
“based on the woman’s limited mental abilities,” wrote Holly Danks
of the Portland Oregonian.
Neighbor Voight Barnhardt called police on March 19 in
response to screams from the girl.
“Officers found Joyce Hoskins more worried about the animal
than her daughter, who was bleeding on a bed” from at least 12 bite
wounds that will cause permanent scarring, summarized Danks of
testimony by deputy district attorney Andrew Erwin.

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Education & certification for animal welfare professionals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

MIAMI–Advertised as paying the
successful applicant from $82,403 to $130,446,
depending on qualifications and experience, the
open executive director’s job at the Miami/Dade
County Animal Services Division is among the most
demanding positions in the animal
care-and-control field.
The hiree will supervise 70 people, from
veterinarians to low-wage cage-cleaners. Serving
one of the most culturally diverse communities in
the U.S., the new executive director will be
expected to perform as a top-drawer white-collar
professional.
Yet, like most similar posts, the
Miami/Dade job is described to applicants as a
senior post for personnel of mostly blue-collar
background. Some formal education, is
expected, but the job description anticipates
that most applicants will have worked their way
up through the ranks, like master sergeants,
not graduates of officer candidate school.

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Sending cattle to slaughter by train

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

NEW DELHI–India’s first major animal welfare-related
political confrontation since the Congress Party returned to power in
May 2004 appears to have ended in victory for the ousted Hindu
nationalists.
At issue was cattle transport to slaughter by railway, with
animal advocates on either side of the debate. Cattle slaughter is
legal in only three Indian states, in deference to Hindi religious
sensitivities, but because slaughter is by far the most profitable
means of disposing of surplus male calves and worn-out milk cows, up
to 15 million cattle per year are illicitly sent to slaughter in
those three states plus neighboring Bangladesh.
The 1978 Cattle Transport Act outlawed moving cattle from
state to state or abroad except for use in milking herds or to escape
drought.
Toppling the Congress Party coalition that had ruled India
for 48 of the 49 preceding years in 1998, the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Dal coalition beefed up the Cattle Transport Act by
banning cattle transport by train in March 2001, under the 1960
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. The action had long been urged
by then-animal welfare minister Maneka Gandhi and then-Animal Welfare
Board of India chair Guman Mal Lodha as an essential step toward
ending cattle slaughter, which increased 20-fold between 1977 and
1997 as Indian milk production tripled.

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Lab demand threatens Asian urban monkeys

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

“For lab animals who have died for the health of humans,”
reads the inscription on the front of a newly installed monument in
front of the Wuhan University animal research center, in Hubai
state, China.
On the back it reads, “In special memory of the 38 rhesus
macaques whose lives were devoted to SARS research.”
Both inscriptions were authored by vaccine researcher Sun
Lihua, the Xinhua News Agency reported in early October 2004.
Researchers rarely welcome such public reminders that their
work causes animals to suffer and die.
In 1903, for example, British National Anti-Vivisection
Society president Stephen Coleridge had a fountain built in the
Battersea district of London to mark the life and death of a dog who
had been vivisected at nearby University College. Seven years of
frequent street fighting followed between medical students trying to
smash the fountain and local working class youths who defended it.
The Brown Dog Riots, as the conflicts are remembered, ended
after the city council had the fountain removed in 1910, but
modern-day University College students and faculty objected when a
replica fountain was installed at Battersea Park in 1985.
Opposition to animal research tends to be quiet in China.
Protests of any kind have long been repressed, and there is no
visible antivivisection movement.

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Letters [Oct 2004]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

Fallen stag

The impending merger of the Fund for Animals into the Humane
Society of the United States, unanimously approved by the Fund board
on October 6, 2004, may seem attractive in promising to create a
large, more powerful political voice for animals, but HSUS views on
hunting are in opposition to those of the Fund.
Some activists may remember when an HSUS director actually
supported and voted for a deer hunt in New Jersey, but there is a
more recent example of similar conduct.
Former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey defended his
decision to hold a black bear hunt in 2003 by saying that he was
working with HSUS on a birth control plan. Obviously he was using
HSUS for political cover. I asked Wayne Pacelle, then the HSUS vice
president for government affairs, now the HSUS president, to state
that if the Governor held the hunt, HSUS would not work with him on
reproductive control.
The response I got back was, “We do not want to burn any
bridges.” HSUS did not change their position, and neither did
McGreevey. Carnage followed. I do not know that if HSUS had done
what we asked, it would have changed anything, but to not risk
offending is to capitulate before the battle has begun.

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While monkey use booms, laboratories are retiring great apes

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

In contrast to the expanding laboratory demand for monkeys,
use of great apes in biomedical research has fallen for about 15
years, partly because they are harder to house and handle, partly
because of the success of the Great Ape Project, the lectures of
wild chimp ethologist Jane Goodall, and others who have gradually
persuaded much of the public that great apes are human-like enough to
have moral standing.
The hottest issue in great ape research in recent years has
been how to retire them from lab use.
First, in 1996, the former LEMSIP chimp colony at New York
University was retired to the Wildlife Waystation sanctuary in
southern California. Then many of the former Buckshire Corporation
and NASA chimps went to Primarily Primates in Texas. Wild Animal
Orphanage, nearby, built a “level 2 biosecurity” facility to
accommodate ex-research chimps who couldn’t be kept at other
sanctuaries because of the diseases they had been exposed to during
their lab years.
As existing sanctuaries reached capacity, primatologist
Carol Noon formed the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care and in 2002
bought out the Coulston Foundation, formerly the largest chimp
research facility in the world.

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New Indian lab animal use regs proposed

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

NEW DELHI–The Indian federal Ministry of Environment &
Forests on September 24, 2004 recommended new guidelines on animal
use in laboratories, three years after they were reportedly being
prepared. The proposed guidelines are to be offered as amendments to
the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act.
“All experiments on animals,” reported The Hindu, “will be
carried out for the advancement of knowledge that is expected to be
useful for saving or prolonging human life, alleviating suffering,
and combatting disease, whether of human beings, animals, or
plants.”
“The animals lowest on the phylogenetic scale (i.e. with
least degree of awareness) among those whose use may give
scientifically valid results are to be preferred for experiments,”
The Hindu summary added.
“Experiments will be designed to use the minimum number of
animals needed to give statistically valid results. Alternatives to
animal testing are to be given due consideration, and sound
justification must be provided if alternatives, when available, are
not used…Unless the contrary is scientifically established,
investigators should proceed on the basis that procedures causing
pain or suffering in humans will cause similar pain in animals,” The
Hindu summary continued.
A separate summary published by the Deccan Herald confirmed
details and quoted researchers who favor the proposals.

BOOKS: Animal Rights

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

Animal Rights:
A very short introduction
by David DeGrazia
Oxford University Press
(198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016), 2002. 131 pp., paperback. $9.95.

In just 116 pages George Washington University professor
David DeGrazia reviews the different schools of thought within the
animal rights movement, and then examines three of the more
contentious issues: meat eating, zoos, and biomedical research.
De Grazia presents the concepts, arguments and counter
arguments as well as possible within the constraints of brevity.
morality of animal rights.
–Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan

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