A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:
Credit scientific discovery. Credit
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Credit Finding Nemo, the latest pro-animal
animated production in a 64-year string from Walt
Disney Productions.
Whatever the reason, humans around the
world are suddenly talking about the suffering of
fish as never before.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:
SAN FRANCISCO–Alleging “trademark infringement, unfair
competition, and related claims arising from the unauthorized use”
of the phrase “Don’t breed or buy while homeless animals die,” the
International Society for Animal Rights on April 29, 2003 sued In
Defense of Animals in U.S. District Court.
ISAR trademarked the phrase in January 2001, the suit
states, objecting that “IDA has incorporated the confusingly similar
slogan ‘Please don’t breed or buy while millions of homeless animals
die’ into posters, flyers, and other products featuring gruesome
images of dead and/or dying pets.” ISAR contends that this confuses
“prospective and actual donors and members about a perceived
relationship between the organizations.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:
Animal Advocates and Indigenous Peoples: The Survey Results
by Lee Wiles
In a survey conducted during the winter of 2002-2003, 1,000
randomly selected U.S. readers of Animal People were asked various
questions about, among other things, their attitudes toward
indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, indigenous
peoples’ use of animals, and the animal advocacy movement’s
interactions with indigenous peoples. A total of 358 ANIMAL PEOPLE
readers responded.
The survey discovered that approximately equal numbers of
animal advocates are sympathetic and unsympathetic toward the
indigenous rights movement. This split appears to be due to the
ambivalence many animal advocates feel toward indigenous peoples
after several disputes over hunting and trapping.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:
We are still alive and barking after a 10-month fight for our lives.
As explained in the article beginning on
page one, the fundraiser Bruce Eberle and his
company Fund Raising Strategies sued ANIMAL
PEOPLE in July 2002 for “libel” and “interfering
with a business relationship.”
Eberle’s “libel” claims were so unclear
that for months we could not even figure out what
he claimed we got wrong. We have always promptly
corrected errors, when informed what they are,
and the corrections we have now published could
have been made at any time, for the asking, if
the evidence of error had been presented to us.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2003:
Via e-mails, telephone calls, articles and our web site the
impression may have been created that Bruce Eberle and his company,
Fund Raising Strategies (FRS) operate with less than integrity.
It was stated:
1) That Eberle was involved in the distribution of a fake
photo of an American POW in Laos. We accept the sworn statement by
Mr. Eberle that he had “Nothing whatsoever to do with the staging,
printing, or distribution of the fake photo of an American POW.”
Our previous statements to the contrary are incorrect.
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.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:
PRETORIA, NEW DELHI, NAIROBI, SAN DIEGO, BANGKOK,
COLOMBO–Pretoria Regional Court magistrate Adriaan Bekker on April 7
found African Game Services owner Riccardo Ghiazza of Brits, South
Africa, guilty of cruelty to 30 young elephants in 1998-1999. The
verdict reportedly took Bekker four hours to read.
Convicted with Ghiazza, but on just two cruelty counts, was
student elephant handler Henry Wayne Stockigt.
Charges were dismissed against another handler, Craig
Saunders, and another company, African Game Properties Inc.
Captured in the Tuli district of Botswana during July 1998,
the elephants were transported to Brits for training and sale to
overseas zoos.
Global outrage erupted first over the separation of the
elephants from their mothers, and then over alleged rough treatment
of the elephants by trainers hired from Indonesia. The South African
National SPCA began the long effort to convict Ghiazza after
videotape surfaced that reportedly showed Stockigt and others beating
the chained elephants.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:
“Tourists visiting wildlife sanctuaries in Orissa state will
now have to turn vegetarian for the entire duration of their trip,”
Times of India News Network correspondent Rajaram Satapathy reported
from the Bengal coast city of Bhubaneswar in February.
“Concerned with rampant poaching, the state government has
banned cooking and eating non-vegetarian food in all 18 sanctuaries
in Orissa,” Satapaty elaborated. “The order, issued by the chief
conservator of forests, is being strictly implemented. Recently
more than 125 tourist vehicles, on a single day, were refused entry
into the Similipal Tiger Reserve because they were found carrying
meat and chicken for consumption.”
Taking an opposite view of diet on the opposite coast, South
Mumbai leaders of the neo-fascist Shiv Sena political party in
mid-April threatened to retaliate against Jain and Hindu vegetarian
housing cooperatives by opening stinking fish or chicken stalls
beside their buildings, wrote Haima Deshpande of the Indian Express.
Shiv Sena is a “party, movement and gang at once,” wrote
Julia M. Eckert in The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics
and the Shiv Sena, recently published by Oxford University Press.
Build-ing a power base among disaffected Hindus of the meat-eating
middle classes and military castes, it was once the second strongest
faction within the Hindu nationalist coalition government headed by
the Bharatiya Janata party, but fell from influence after alienating
the Jains, Brahmins, and other vegetarian classes, along with the
Dalits, who are the poorest of the poor.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:
DELHI–Gautam Grover, president of the Delhi chapter of
People for Animals, has “started a shelter for monkeys called
Hanuman Vatika,” he recently wrote to ANIMAL PEOPLE.
“We get monkeys from research labs,” Grover explained.
“Most are old and deformed [from experimentation] and are incapable
of survival in the wild. We also have infants who have had a
terrible past,” Grover added. “For example an infant came to me
whose mother was killed by dogs. The infant was clinging to her,
crying. We called the infant Chiku. He now has a new mother, named
Basanti, and a new father, called Dharmender.”
Hanuman Vatika now has more than 100 monkeys, attended by a
human staff of 12, Grover said. But it does not yet have adequate
funding to ensure stability and permit expansion. Ahead is the long
task of educating people who are sympathetic to monkeys about the
distinctions among sanctuaries, zoos, and Hanuman temples.