Raptor rescue in Beijing & the Kalahari

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

BEIJING, China; KATHU, South Africa– Eagles, like feral
cats, are potentially fierce yet are sometimes tamed. More
accurately, they may choose to tame themselves. Many are curious
enough about humans to dwell as close to human habitation as they are
allowed, and are appreciative enough of gentle care, especially
when sick or injured, to permit judicious handling.
Though most eagles could quickly shred human flesh, even
through protective gloves, they seldom do. Some seem to consciously
decide to do no harm.
The Beijing Raptor Center has two highly gregarious resident
golden eagles, closely related to the golden eagles of North
America, and one resident steppe eagle. Too imprinted upon humans to
be released, the eagles remain in custody while Scops owls and eagle
owls, Amur and peregrine falcons, kestrels, and sometimes a buzzard
come and go.
The Kalahari Raptor Centre has black eagles, snake eagles,
and crested eagles. Some of them are also too imprinted to release.
The eagles of the Beijing and Kalahari raptor centers look as
strikingly different as everything else about the two rehabilitation
facilities. The premise of the Beijing Raptor Center is that humans
and wildlife can and must co-exist. The premise of the Kalahari
Raptor Centre is that wildlife does best in the absence of humans,
to whatever extent that can be accomplished.

BOOKS: Hunt Club Management Guide & Deer Diary

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hunt Club Management Guide
by J. Wayne Fears
Stoeger Publ. (17603 Indian Head Hwy, Suite 200, Accokeek, MD
20607), 2003. 144 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Deer Diary
by Thomas Lee Boles
Xlibris Corp. (<Orders@Xlibris.com>), 2002. 286 pages, paperback, $18.69.

J. Wayne Fears, involved in leasing land for hunt clubs for
more than 20 years, gives the impression that he lives to kill deer.
Thomas Lee Boles, a vegetarian animal rights activist, has
handreared orphaned deer and befriended deer both in captivity and in
the wild.
Each outlines his perspectives on hunting at about equal
length, allowing for the difference in page size between their
books. Except that Fears writes to perpetuate hunting on property
secured by covenant against the “antis,” while Boles writes against
recreationally killing anything, they appear to be more in agreement
than opposition.
Almost every page of Hunt Club Management Guide tersely
details obnoxious attitudes and behavior among hunters that Fears has
personally witnessed and detests. Without wasting adjectives, Fears
makes plain that in his view, hunters themselves rather than “antis”
are their own worst enemies, chiefly because of inconsiderate and
unsportsmanlike conduct.

BOOKS: Hawk’s Rest

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Hawk’s Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone by Gary Ferguson
National Geographic Adventure Press (1145 17th St., N.W.,
Washington, DC 20036), 2003. 240 pages, paperback. $15.00.

Hawk’s Rest is not about birds, but the joys and trials of
living in wilderness. Here on nine million acres deep in Yellowstone
National Park, granite turrets rise 2,000 feet into the air, giant
boulders tumble into deep gorges, and ice forms endless lakes.
Yellowstone Lake, covering 136 square miles, can switch in minutes
from calm to waves thrashing five to six feet high. According to
park historian Lee Whittlesy, no body of water in the park and
perhaps in all of the U.S. is more dangerous. The water averages 45
degrees Fahrenheit, which gives swimmers about 20 minutes before
they must get ashore.
The weather in Yellowstone varies from sweat-drenched summers
in the Thorofare district to year-round squalls and blizzards in the
Beartooth Mountains.
Since the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, Yellowstone has
had all of the species known to have lived there within recorded
history, making it the largest intact ecosystem in the temperate
world.

Animal obituaries

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Kin, 36, the last wild crested ibis to hatch in Japan, on
October 10 hurled herself headfirst into a door at the Sado Crested
Ibis Preservation Center, 190 miles northwest of Tokyo, and died of
a brain hemorrhage. Removed from the wild in 1968 for captive
breeding, Kin never produced offspring, and had been the last
wild-hatched crested ibis in Japan since her mate Midori died in
1995. Hunted to the verge of extinction, crested ibises won legal
protection in 1934. In 1999 the Sado Center received a pair of
crested ibises as a gift from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
The Chinese crested ibises have now fledged 21 offspring, some of
whom are to be reintroduced to the wild in 2007.

Tammy, 53, one of three elephants deemed surplus by the
Milwaukee County Zoo and housed under allegedly abusive conditions by
the Hawthorne Corporation until a 1994 transfer to the Performing
Animal Welfare Society, died in September at the PAWS sanctuary in
Galt, California.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Monster of God

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Monster of God:
The man-eating predator in the
jungles of history and the mind
by David Quammen
W.W. Norton & Co. (500 5th Ave., New York, NY 10110), 2003.
384 pages, hardcover. $26.95.

Certain to be classified by most librarians as “natural
history,” Monster of God has already been mistaken by many reviewers
as a screed in defense of “sustainable use.”
Monster of God is actually a book mostly about faith,
exploring the influence of the human evolutionary role as prey upon
concepts of religion, and of the more recent human ascendance as a
top predator on our ideas about conservation.
David Quammen is profoundly skeptical that humans and
predators capable of eating us are capable of coexisting for longer
than another 150 years. He presents a strong circumstantial case
that the protohuman concept of God evolved as a psychological
response to swift and seemingly random predator strikes. Sacrifice,
Quammen suggests, began as appeasement of predators, and in some
remote places continues as such.
Others have written extensively about the emergence of
sacrifice as the ritual sustenance of a learned priestly class,
coinciding with the rise of animal husbandry, and have discussed
especially the role of religion in rationalizing slaughter. Without
taking much note of of this, Quammen explores the role of the
earliest monarchs in recorded history as lion-slayers, pointing out
that the dawn of civilization coincided with the emergence of humans
as quasi-apex predators, able at last to do with weapons what
natural predators do with tooth and claw.

Obituaries

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Virginia Gillas, 82, died on October 5 in Hermitage,
Missouri, after an 8-year battle with lung cancer. Born in Orange,
New Jersey, raised in Kansas City, Gillas was daughter of Catherine
Basett Cornwell, R.N., longtime president of the Dade County Branch
of the Florida League for Humane Progress.
Gillas herself began helping animals at about age 12, she
told ANIMAL PEOPLE in 1995, recalling that she first saw animal
hoarding about five years later, when she met a girl her own age who
had accumulated an impossible number of cats.
Gillas showed sufficient talent at ballet that in 1940 her
mother relocated to San Francisco to enable her to perform
professionally. Gillas danced primarily in the Spanish classical
style until the early 1950s, appearing in London and Paris as well
as throughout the U.S., also developing skill as a watercolorist.
A stenographer after her dancing career, Gillas may have
been among the first employees of the Humane Society of the U.S.,
formed in 1954, then worked for the National Audubon Society in New
York City, where in 1959 she founded International Defenders of
Animals. Relocating to Hialeah, Florida, in 1961, after a brief
marriage and divorce, Gillas merged her group into the Florida
League for Humane Progress and rented a dog breeding kennel and
grooming facility that she converted into an animal shelter.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Seal Wars

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

Seal Wars: 25 years on the front lines with the harp seal by Paul Watson
Firefly Books (U.S.) Inc. (P.O. Box 1338,
Ellicot Station, Buffalo, NY 14205), 2003.
248 pages,
paperback. $16.95.

About the only good news for harp seals
off eastern Canada this year is that Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society founder Paul Watson,
Brigitte Bardot, and others of their old
defenders are still on the job.
Watson’s first crusades on behalf of
animals, as he recounts in Seal Wars, was
against sport fishing, during his New Brunswick
boyhood. Soon afterward his mother enrolled him
in The Kindness Club, founded by the late Aida
Flemming, still active under Jane Tarn. Not
long after that, Watson befriended a beaver
family, then avenged them after they were
trapped for fur, by becoming an avid trapbuster.
Watson became aware of sealing, and was
appalled by it, in 1960–at almost the same time
then-New Brunswick SPCA cruelty inspector Brian
Davies became aware of it. But the Watson family
moved to Toronto, and Paul Watson, after high
school, went to sea. While Davies founded the
New Brunswick SPCA Save The Seals Fund, which
eventually went independent and grew into the
Inter-national Fund for Animal Welfare, Watson
helped to found Greenpeace, and won renown for
derring-do against Russian whalers.

Roadkills of cats fall 90% in 10 years –are feral cats on their way out?

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

BALTIMORE, SALT LAKE CITY, MENTOR (Ohio)–Is the U.S. outdoor cat population down 90% since 1992?
The feral cat population might be.
Roadkills of cats appear to have fallen 90% in 10 years, after apparently rising sixfold while the pet cat population nearly doubled during the 1980s.
An eightfold surge in the population of feral cats, mostly descended from abandoned and free-roaming pets, probably accounted for about two-thirds of the roadkill increase during the 1980s, but the trend is now completely reversed.
Current indications are that without continuing replenishment from wandering pet cats, the fast-falling feral cat population would probably stabilize at a thinly distributed level resembling the norms for other small felines such as bobcats, lynx, and caracal.
The large suburban feral cat colonies seen in recent decades may be an anomaly made possible only by the extirpation of street dogs and the temporary absence of native predators capable of eating either rodents or cats. Only in high-rise communities like Hong Kong and inner cities ringed by miles of pavement, like the oldest part of Rome, are large cat colonies likely to persist–and then only if humans supply enough food to sustain them.

North America

Cat-eaters may get, spread SARS

November 1, 2003 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2003:

GUANGZHOU–Laboratory studies of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome directed by virologist Albert D.M.E. Osterhaus of the
Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, published in the October 30
edition of the British journal Nature, demonstrate that cats and
ferrets could potentially carry the disease from filthy live markets
to humans.
Osterhaus said his experimental goal was simply to find out
if either cats or ferrets could be used as a laboratory model for
SARS. His findings imply, however, that cats raised for human
consumption may become a SARS vector–especially if the cats are
caged at live markets near whatever as yet unidentified wildlife
species is the primary SARS vector
It is business as usual again in the notorious live markets
of Guangzhau, China, capital of Guangdong province and also the
reputed global capital of eating dogs, cats, and wildlife.

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