Activist court calendar

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Sealer walks

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland–A three-judge Newfoundland Court
of Appeal panel on March 12 overturned the conviction of sealer Jason
Penny for allowing a wounded seal to suffer unnecessarily long from a
bullet wound in early 1996, by ruling that the prosecution failed to
submit adequate evidence establishing that the video used to convict
him had not been “altered or changed” by the International Fund for
Animal Welfare before it was turned over to the Crown.

Factory-farmed chicken sets U.S. up for bio-terrorism

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002–
MACHIAPONGO, Virginia–Seeking links to Al Qaida terrorist
funding, about 150 officers of the U.S. Customs Service and other
federal law enforcement agencies on March 20 executed 14 search
warrants at sites in northern Virginia plus the Mar-Jac Poultry
slaughterhouse in Gainesville, Georgia.
The subject of investigation was reportedly Yaqub M. Mirza.
Mirza, reported Associated Press, heads a company called
Sterling Advisory Services, registered at the Mar-Jac address, and
is “listed as the registered agent for Mena Investments Inc. in
Herndon, Virginia.” In addition, said Associated Press, “Mirza
was an officer of the Saar Foundation, started in the 1970s by
members of a wealthy Saudi family to raise money for education and
technology projects in developing Islamic countries. It was
dissolved in December 2000.”

Felony convictions and six-figure fines as courts say, “Cut the crap.”

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002–

SACRAMENTO, California–Masami Cattle Ranch owner Masami
Ishida, 70, of Corning, California, was fined $1 million on
March 20, 2002 and was sentenced to serve six months in home
detention for allegedly polluting tributaries of the Sacramento River
with manure from the ranch and a slaughterhouse.

BOOKS: A Feathered Family

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

A Feathered Family: Nature Notes from a Woodland Studio by Linda Johns
Sierra Club Books (85 Second St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 1999.
272 pages, hardcover. $25.00.

Linda Johns is a painter, a sculptor, an author and an
apparently self-taught (she would say bird-taught) rehabilitator of
wild birds. All these elements come together in A Feathered Family.
The book is a series of verbal snapshots of one period in her 25
years of living in an isolated wooded area in Nova Scotia, just
before and after her partner Mack came to share her home.
It is a most unusual home, with an indoor garden for birds
to forage in, complete with two tall dead trees chosen for their
horizontal branches. There are mealworm cultures in an upstairs
closet and more perches than chairs. There is a hospice room for
isolating birds as occasionally needed, and an art studio, but most
of the house is an open design which has become a series of
interconnecting flyways. I found myself wanting to move in, despite
knowing the screen porch tub is occasionally stocked with ants.

BOOKS: Birds of Eastern & Central North America

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Birds of Eastern & Central North America (5th edition)
by Roger Tory Peterson
Houghton Mifflin (222 Berkeley St., Boston, MA 02116), 2002. 427
pages, illus., hardcover. $30.00.

I met Roger Tory Peterson just once, briefly, before a
public hearing at which we both testified against a Connecticut
Department of Environmental Protection plan to kill mute swans.
Peterson was 82, quite ill, and sent someone else to represent
him–but at the last minute he rose out of bed and came to pit his
moral weight against the might of both the hunting and birding
establishments. Native or non-native, Peterson said briefly, the
mute swans were birds, were sentient and intelligent beings,
contributed to human appreciation of all bird-kind, and deserved to
live.

BOOKS: Lives of North American Birds

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Lives of North American
Birds by Kenn Kaufman
Houghton Mifflin Company (215 Park Avenue South,
N.Y., NY 10003), 2001. 704 pages, paperback. $25.00.

The Lives of North American Birds is not a field guide for
identifying birds, though it is organized much like one. Instead it
provides detailed information about the lives of 680 species
occurring regularly in North America, with “shorter accounts for
more than 230 others that visit occasionally.”

Animal obituaries

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Inky, 5, a black Labrador retriever trained for Craig
Steven Miller, 41, by Leader Dogs for the Blind, was allegedly
kicked to death by Miller on February 8 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.
Miller, who ran for mayor of Lansdale in November 2001, but was
defeated, was charged with cruelty. On February 11 his wife Brenda
obtained a protective order against him on behalf of herself and
their children, while Miller was undergoing psychiatric evaluation
at Norristown State Hospital.

Obituaries

Rabies makes bad Zimbabwe situation worse

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002–

HARARE, Zimbabwe–If Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabwe
responds to the mid-March death of a Mhondoro boy from rabies at
Harare Central Hospital as faltering dictators usually do, his next
move will be to put troops on the streets to shoot stray dogs
wherever his hold on authority is weak.
Four other people were believed to have been bitten by the
dog who infected the dead boy. But a week after the death, only
three of the other bite victims had been found.

Human obituaries

April 1, 2002 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2002:

Amy Nichols, 18, a British student employed by the Taita
Discovery Centre in Kenya, was killed on March 8 by a Madagascar
dwarf crocodile during a swim with friends in Lake Challa, along the
Kenyan border with Tanzania, below Mt. Kilimanjaro. Madagascar
dwarf crocodiles were introduced to Lake Challa in the 1930s by
British adventurer Ewart Grogan, best known for walking from Cape
Town to Cairo in 1898. The dwarf crocs were thought to have been
exterminated circa 1990 by fishers who were tired of having their
nets torn.

Karl Mattson, 60, of Foxboro, Massachusetts, drowned on
March 8 while trying to rescue his poodle mix from thin ice on Lake
Sebago, Maine.

Chantal Vincelli, 38, a longtime cat rescuer first in
Montreal and later in New York City, was killed on September 11,
2001, while setting up a trade show at the World Trade Center.
Friends found homes for all of the 17 cats she left behind.

Obituaries

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