Fighting fur on the air

March 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

NEW YORK – – U . S . retail fur sales soared 30% 1999, says the Fur Information Council.

Receipts for the year rose to $1.57 billion––the most since 1988, when sales peaked at $1.85 billion. Adjusting for inflation, however, 1999 sales came to only 60% of the 1988 figure.

Other economic indicators hint that the retail surge may have resulted chiefly from heavy discounting to dump a fur glut caused by the 1998 devaluation of the Russian ruble, which brought the collapse of Russian demand for imported pelts.

Illinois wild fur exports to Russia, for instance, fell from $3 million worth in the winter of 1996-1997 to just $1 million worth in 1998-1999.

ANIMAL CONTROL AND SHELTERING

March 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

The Humane Society of Utah, working with Best Friends and other shelters in a concerted drive to make Utah a no-kill state, in 1999 placed 68% of the dogs it received and 61% of cats. Director Gene Baierschmidt told Douglas D. Palmer of the Desert News that the humane society killed 35,000 animals in 1975, but cut the toll to 2,500 in 1999, achieving a 21% reduction from 1998, and aims to go even lower.

The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society on February 1 became the third major shelter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to join a pact to make Pittsburgh a nokill city within five years. The A n i m a l Rescue League and Washington Area Humane Society announced their commitments to no-kill in late 1999. The Alleghany County shelter killing rate is 15.8 animals per 1,000 residents, low enough to suggest that the goal is realistic.

Shelter killing: how low can you go?

March 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

SAN FRANCISCO––”Total dog and cat euthanasias dropped below 3,000 for the first time in San Francisco history,” SF/SPCA president Ed Sayres told ANIMAL PEOPLE on January 20.

The 1999 toll ended at 2,916, Sayres said––2,834 at the city Department of Animal Care and Control, and 82 at the SF/SPCA.

And in San Francisco, “euthanasia” really means what the dictionary says it does: a death administered to relieve pain and suffering. Healthy dogs and cats have not been killed in San Francisco since 1994, when Sayres’ predecessor Richard Avanzino negotiated the Adoption Pact with the SF/DACC, to guarantee a home to every healthy dog or cat whom the SF/DACC cannot rehome or place.

Kindness: where east meets west

March 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2000:

HONG KONG, BEIJING– – Beijing TV electrified China as the millennium changed with a rare western-style investigative expose of pet theft for the dog-andcat meat markets.

Foreign correspondents swiftly amplified the revealed atrocities. Yet, in a nation where man biting dog is scarcely news to anyone, most missed the breaking edge of the story.

“By fair means and foul, predatory traders are getting their hands on Russian dogs and packing them off by the busload across the border to China to supply a booming demand there,” wrote Baltimore Sun foreign staff reporter Will Englund from Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

“Thousands of animals have been taken out of Siberia,” Englund continued, “in a business that is ruthless, dishonest, and violent––and is breaking the hearts of Russia’s dog lovers. Local gangs buy some dogs and steal others.”

Obituaries [Jan/Feb 2000]

January 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

Alice Elizabeth Leigh Coldwell, 104, died November 5 in San Francisco. Born in Oakland, she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1917 and soon afterward married Cedric Sayle Coldwell, son of the founder of the Coldwell Banker real estate empire. A member of the St. Moritz Ice Skating Club, she cofounded the San Francisco Figure Skating Club; won the Women’s California Indoor Skating Championship in 1934, at age 39; and two years later won the California Indoor Figure Skating Pairs Championship. Her athletic energy carried over into her later interest in animal welfare. The Pets Unlimited adoption shelter and animal hospital she founded with her friend Carter Dowling in 1947 was the first no-kill shelter of serious size in San Francisco. It now has annual income of $4.3 million a year and assets of $2.7 million––making it, though only the third largest shelter in the city, larger than the biggest shelter in many other cities of comparable size.

Obituaries

BOOKS: Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home

January 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and other unexplained powers of animals

by Rupert Sheldrake

Crown Publishers (201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022), 1999.

350 pages, $25.00, hardcover

Spend enough time around animals, of any species, and after a while an observant person will discover that they frequently know some things well before humans. Some of this has a simple explanation: most mammals and birds have keener hearing than humans, most mammals also have a sharper sense of smell, and cats and many other mammals have built-in night vision. Rats even see in the ultraviolet spectrum.

But some other phenomena are harder to explain. One is how come many dogs and some cats seem to know when a favorite person is coming home, and occupy a characteristic greeting location not used at other times, even when the person may still be aloft in an airplane or just getting ready to leave work. Even harder to explain is how come such animals are often able to anticipate unusual changes in the person’s schedule.

BOOKS: The Camel’s Nose

January 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

THE CAMEL’S NOSE: Memoirs of a Curious Scientist

by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen

Island Press (1718 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009), 1998.

339 pages. $24.94 hardback.

“It has been said that the primary function of schools is to impart enough facts to make children stop asking questions,” Knut Schmidt-Nielsen opens in a passage quoted by more than just a few of his reviewers. “Some, with whom the schools do not succeed, become scientists.”

In his preface, Schmidt-Nielsen elaborates, “This is a personal story of a life spent in science. It tells about curiosity, about finding out and finding answers. The questions I have tried to answer have been very straightfoward, perhaps even simple: Do marine birds drink sea water? How do camels in hot deserts manage for days without drinking when humans could not? How can kangaroo rats live in the desert without water? How can snails find water in the most barren deserts? Can crab-eating frogs really survive in sea water?

In Kenya, the zoo that isn’t

January 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Nairobi Safari Walk manager Samuel M. Ngethe and naturalist Joyce Engoke are emphatic that the Kenya Wildlife Service animal orphanage between the KWS headquarters and Nairobi National Park is not a zoo.

The term “zoo” has bad connotations for KWS, associated with brutal wildlife captures and exports, and with colonial menageries. Some such menageries in other African nations have been stranded ever since in old-fashioned cement-and-steel cages. Others starved––or were eaten by starving people––during bloody civil wars.

Even as ANIMAL PEOPLE visited, Karl Amman of the Kenya-based Bushmeat Project and Sarah Scarth, from the Johannesburg office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, sought help for an effort to rescue more than 100 animals including 12 chimps from the Kinshasa National Zoo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Scarth told a November 18 press conference that about two-thirds of the Kinshasa collection had already starved or been killed during the Congolese fighting.

Kenya Wildlife Service turns cor-

January 1, 2000 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2000:

NAIROBI––Kenyan foreign minister Bonaya Godana announced on December 23 that Nairobi has been selected as host city for the permanent headquarters of the sixnation Task Force for Cooperative Enforcement Operations Directed at Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora.

The task force was created by the 1994 Lusaka Agreement. The choice of Nairobi as permanent host city amounts to an international vote of confidence in both the stability of Kenya and the capability and integrity of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

As KWS goes, so goes Kenya itself––an economic and historical lesson well known to KWS director Nehemiah Rotich.

Rotich succeeded to his office in July 1999, having previously been among the closest longtime observers and critics of KWS in his former position as founder and director of the East African Wildlife Society. Rotich had also served––twice––on the KWS board of trustees. His 1998 resignation in opposition to former KWS director David Western’s proposal to introduce trophy hunting was reportedly the beginning of the end of Western’s disastrous regime of nearly six years.

Soon thereafter, Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi replaced Western with previous KWS director Richard Leakey. But the second Leakey regime at KWS lasted only six months before arap Moi promoted Leakey to head the entire Kenyan civil service, and appointed Rotich, who never before worked in government, to succeed Leakey.

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