Letters [June 2004]

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

Anti-veggie ad?

The following ad ran this morning of WBIG/FM in Washing-ton D.C.:
“I’m a hypocrite. No, I’m not a vegetarian who wears
leather shoes. You see, I used to smoke pot, and when I found pot
in my kid’s room I confronted him about it.”
Why is the Office of National Drug Control Policy singling
out vegetarians for criticism?
I am an animal protection advocate, and a vegetarian, and I
don’t wear leather shoes. But I suspect that if everyone in the U.S.
stopped wearing leather, it wouldn’t save the life of a single
animal, given that millions of animals are slaughtered every year
for food production.
Picking a fight with vegetarians is a really poor method of
discouraging drug use.
–Frank Branchini
Edgewater, Maryland

Letters

Petco settles neglect & overcharge cases

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

SAN DIEGO–The 655-store Petco Animal Supplies Inc. chain on
May 27, 2004 agreed to pay $661,754 in fines and investigative costs
for allegedly neglecting animal care and overcharging customers.
“The company also will spend $202,500 to install better
equipment in its California stores to eliminate overcharging,”
reported San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Mike Freeman of the
settlement reached with district attorneys in San Diego, Los
Angeles, Marin, and San Mateo counties. Petco also agreed to pay
$50,000, formally train staff in animal care, and allow inspection
by independent veterinarians to settle a separate case brought by the
city of San Francisco.
A PETA boycott of Petco will continue, said spokesperson
Christy Griffin, until Petco quits selling birds, reptiles, fish,
and small mammals. Petco, like larger rival PETsMART, does not
sell dogs and cats.

BOOKS: The State of the Animals II

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

The State of the Animals II: 2003 edited by
Deborah J. Salem & Andrew N. Rowan
Humane Society Press (c/o Humane Society of the
U.S., 2100 L. St. NW, Washington, DC 20037),
2004. 253 pages, paperback. $38.95.

Having arrived in early February 2004,
The State of the Animals II: 2003 has already
had ample time to demonstrate strong utility as a
desk reference, including at two major
conferences to which I took it while reading it.
Thus, while The State of the Animals II
is discussed in ANIMAL PEOPLE much later than it
deserved, it is praised from a perspective of
certainty.
The opening chapter, by soon-to-retire
Humane Society of the U.S. president Paul G.
Irwin, is “A Strategic Review of International
Animal Protection.”
An accompanying table shows that the U.S.
and Canada now have 21 animal protection
organizations per million humans. Australia,
New Zealand, Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany
have 9-10. India, misleadingly lumped together
with several other Asian nations, should be in
the same category. The U.S. and Canada may have
twice as many organizations per million people
chiefly because the U.S. and Canadian human
population is much more broadly distributed.

Reviews

Haiti says no to dolphin captivity

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

PORT AU PRINCE–Six dolphins caught for exhibition in mid-May
by a Haitian firm with Spanish backing swam free on June 3 through
the intercession of Haitian environment minister Yves Andre
Wainwright and agriculture minister Philippe Mathieu.
Wainwright and Mathieu intervened at request of Dolphin
Project founder Ric O’Barry, whose 35-year-old effort to liberate
captive dolphins has operated since the beginning of 2004 under the
auspices of the French organization One Voice.
With a U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat maintaining security,
O’Barry and Guillermo Lopez, DVM, of the Dominican Republic Academy
of the Sciences dismantled the sea pen holding the dolphins.
Wife Helene O’Barry and Jane Regan of Associated Press snapped
digital photos from the beach.
The liberation marked the rejection of dolphin capturing as a
commercial enterprise in one of the poorest nations in the world,
even as entrepreneurs from other island nations rush to cash in on
the boom in marketing swim-with-dolphins tourist attractions.
The liberation also demonstrated the resolve of the present
Haitian government to start enforcing conservation laws that long
went ignored by their predecessors, as a succession of shaky regimes
have struggled to uphold any law and order at all.

BOOKS: Canine Courage: The Heroism of Dogs

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

Canine Courage: The Heroism of Dogs by Tiffin Shewmake
PageFree Publishing, Inc. (109 S. Farmer St., Otsego, MI 49078),
2002. 199 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Since the January/February 1999 introduction of the Lewyt
Award for Heroic & Compassionate Animals, sponsored by the North
Shore Animal League America, the inside back covers of ANIMAL PEOPLE
editions announcing the awards have become the pages probably most
often clipped and posted on the walls of humane societies.
Although the awards occasionally honor heroic cats, most of
the winners are dogs.
But is there really such a thing as canine heroism,
involving dogs who consciously choose to go “above and beyond the
call of duty,” or are heroic dog incidents explicable by ordinary
canine behavior such as instinct, pack cohesion, or a desire for a
person’s approval?
Tiffin Shewmake seeks traits to explain the origin of canine
heroism, and speculates that although the extent of heroic potential
may vary from one dog to another and one breed to another, it
probably grew out of a number of allied traits such as altruism,
empathy and helpfulness, all traits selected through long
interaction with humans. As people favored the puppies of dogs who
were loyal, helpful, selfless, or brave, over time the traits
producing these qualities came to become in effect a genetic
predisposition toward heroism.

Human Obituaries

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

Ronald Reagan, 93, U.S. President 1980-1988, died on June
5, 2003 at home in Los Angeles. Recalled Best Friends Animal
Society cofounder Michael Mountain, “Dwight Eisenhower put in the
White House putting green, and had the squirrels trapped and removed
because, he said, they were ruining it. Jimmy Carter also tried to
relocate them because they were damaging the trees. But Ronald
Reagan would squirrel away acorns that he collected from Camp David
and keep them in his desk drawer, and the squirrels would sit
outside the Oval Office waiting for a handout. Some would eat the
acorns right out of his hand. George H. Bush scrapped the Reagan
policy and announced that the squirrels were “history,” sending his
dog Millie to chase them away. Bill Clinton continued the Bush
policy. The current President Bush has allowed his dogs to chase
them, too.” Reagan introduced 25 years of White House antipathy
toward the Endangered Species Act, which he considered an intrusion
on private property rights, but endorsed the Doris Day Animal
League, in honor of his co-star in several films, near the end of
his years in public life.

Obituaries

Animal Obits

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

Jo-Bars Maggie Mae, 8, died on March 10, 2004. A black
Labrador retriever purchased by Joe Maringo of Plum, Pennsylvania,
as a breeding bitch and duck dog, Maggie hated to swim, but raised
four litters in five years before Maringo found out about pet
ovrpopulation and had her spayed within a week. Maringo went on to
found the Southwest Pennsylvania Retriever Rescue Organization. “It
was Maggy’s love that has caused me to save over 250 unwanted
companions and place them in happy homes,” Maringo wrote. “I hope I
can live up to being just half the man she thought I was.”

Beethoven, 2, & Cujo, 1, father-and-son St. Bernards kept
by Walter Smith and his daughter Elizabeth, were on June 16
euthanized by Macomb County Animal Control under the rarely invoked
1919 Michigan livestock protection act. The dogs killed two llamas,
a sheep, a pig, and a 600-pound steer, and raided a henhouse, in a
series of attacks ranging over miles of countryside between October
2003 and April 2004, before a county roadkill collector saw them
returning home from one of their raids.

Obituaries

Saving dogs from– the Vampires of Bucharest

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

BUCHAREST–Bram Stoker (1897) and Bela Lugosi (1931) got Romanian vampires all wrong. Real Romanian bloodsuckers resemble neither the fictional Count Dracula nor the historical Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476), whose deeds inspired Stoker.
“Vampires” hostile to street dogs may vacation in Transylvania, but they keep their offices in Bucharest.
Real danger in Romania, for both dogs and humane donors, comes through the actions of bloated ex-Communist bureaucrats and bribe-seeking politicians, assisted by freebooting friends from the west who rushed in to help them loot what remained of the country after the December 1989 fall of the Nicolai Ceaucescu dictatorship.
Figurative vampires and their henchmen preying upon Romanian animal control and humane work hide not in the ruined castles and medieval villages that dot the countryside, where work horses may still outnumber tractors, but rather behind the guards and closed gates of some of the worst canine concentration camps that ANIMAL PEOPLE ever saw.
The vampires are seldom seen. Some may not have inspected their canine concentration camps in years.
The vampire slayers are an inspired and talented younger generation of animal advocates whose chief weapon is their hope of introducing their traumatized nation to the joy of happy dogs.

Europe

BOOKS: Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover & The Vegan Guide to New York City

June 2, 2004 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2004:

Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover by Rynn Berry
Pythagorean Publishers (P.O. Box 8174, JAF Station, New York, NY
10116), 2004. 81 pages, paperback. $10.95.

The Vegan Guide to New York City, 9th edition
by Rynn Berry & Chris Abreu-Suzuki (with Barry Litsky)
Ethical Living (P.O. Box 8174, JAF Station, New York, NY 10116), 2004.
70 pages, paperback. $9.95.

Just from the titles of Rynn Berry’s two most recent books,
one may surmise that he is a vegan and animal lover who loves going
to dinner, especially with Cristina Abreu-Suzuki (who calls herself
Chris) and Barry Litsky, but would never have eaten with Adolph
Hitler even if they had been contemporaries in Vienna, back when
Hitler was still just a struggling artist who had yet to commit or
advocate mass murder.
Neither would Hitler have wanted to eat the multi-ethnic and
highly varied menu of plant food that Berry, Abreu-Suzuki, and
Litsky pursue at more than 100 restaurants of all kinds. Hitler
craved meat, especially pork and squab.
Berry, now designated historical advisor to the North
American Vegetarian Society, established his reputation as a
meticulous historian of vegetarianism and veganism with Famous
Vegetarians & Their Favorite Recipes (1989). He followed up with
Food For The Gods: Vegetarianism and the World’s Religions (1998).

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