Ontario bans spring bear hunt

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

TORONTO, VICTORIA–– Foes
of shooting groggy bears as they awake from
winter hibernation won a round in tough territory
on January 14 when Ontario natural
resources minister John Snobelen announced
a long-sought ban on spring bear hunting.
Snobelen acknowledged that killing
bears in spring had orphaned about 270 bear
cubs per year, few of whom survived.
“We’ve looked at various options
to make sure that bear cubs aren’t orphaned,”
Snobelen said. “The only answer we came
up with was to end the spring bear hunt. It’s
the only acceptable way.”

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Handling hoarders

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Handling hoarders
by Vicky Crosetti, Executive director
Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley

The January/February 1999
ANIMAL PEOPLE feature “Animals
in bondage: the minds of hoarders”
reminded me of years ago attending a
talk on the same subject at a humane
conference.
Trying to describe why we so
often find huge numbers of animals
kept in filth and misery by people who
claim to “love” them, the presenter discussed
“good intentions gone bad” and
“obsessive/compulsive behavior.”
I learned to use her phrases,
when pressed for explanation––but as
the years and cases pass, I’ve decided
that I don’t know why people hoard
animals. Neither am I certain that
motive matters, except as a possible
predictor of who might become a
hoarder.

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LETTERS [March 1999]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Critical mass
Your newspaper has singlehandedly
done more for animal
advocacy around the world by covering
issues that are avoided by others
because the topics are either too
intellectually demanding or too controversial
to handle. For instance,
your January/February 1999 editorial
on how to best deal with China is
probably the best position I have
read on the matter. And your expose
of the bloated compensation paid by
high-profile and powerful groups
likethe Humane Society of the U.S.
et al is courageous and important.
As a college professor for
30 years, I am quite impressed with
how you can do extensive research
on a shoestring budget. Imagine
how much money the HSUS
expended just in terms of travel junkets
to expose the China dog fur
issue, only for ANIMAL PEOPLE
to point out that Russia is still the
biggest exporter of dog fur. And
imagine how the sum of all the
bloated salaries of animal executives
could be used for spay/neuter programs
and no-kill animal sanctuaries.
Their self-aggrandizement is
unconscionable and demoralizing to
those who at the grassroot level
struggle every day to survive.
Your newspaper has done
a lot on behalf of sincere animal
people who see the urgent need to
build a critical mass toward the time
humanity will learn to share this
planet with nonhuman species.
––Ruben Santos Cuyugan
Lenoir, North Carolina
[Cuyugan is retired direc –
tor of the UNESCO project for
International Development of the
Social Sciences.]

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Editorial: Amazing Amazon rainforest reality

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Chugging up the Rio Tambopata, one of the major Amazon tributaries, in a
motorized canoe, we were struck during a January 1999 visit to the Tambopata-Candama
Reserved Area in southeastern Peru by the contrast between the Amazonian rainforest as it
is and the image most people have of it––an image crafted over the past few decades chiefly
by conservation groups.
Funding rainforest research, documentary film-making, lobbying, and even the
start-up of ecotourism, most of these organizations have also rather blindly stumbled down
the tangled trail blazed since 1961 by the World Wildlife Fund.
WWF, as ANIMAL PEOPLE has often pointed out, is not just the world’s
wealthiest and most influential wildlife advocacy group: it also happens to be the world’s
best-disguised lobby for sport hunting and other consumptive wildlife use.
WWF founder Peter Scott was the duck-shooter who introduced the North
American ruddy duck to England; WWF and allies now clamor for an expanded ruddy
duck season and no bag limit, on the bio-xenophobic claim that ruddy ducks are miscegenating
English white-headed ducks into illegitimate hybrids.

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USDA considers calling birds “animals”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The USDA
on January 28 announced that it will take
comments until March 29, 1999 on a petition
from United Poultry Concerns to amend the
definition of “animal” in the Animal Welfare
Act enforcement regulations to remove the
current exclusion of birds, rats, and mice.
“A short letter is fine,” commented
UPC founder and president Karen Davis,
“but the important thing is that the USDA
hears from the public that we want birds,
rats, and mice to be included in the AWA
regulations.”
The opening of the comment period
marks the farthest advance yet toward removing
the exclusion, made initially because
animal experimenters claimed the cost of
complying with AWA regulations in handling
birds, rats, and mice would be prohibitive.

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Clinton declares war on ferals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.—Declaring
war on species not native to the U.S., President
Bill Clinton on February 2 issued an executive
order creating an interagency Invasive Species
Council which within 18 months is to produce a
plan to “mobilize the federal government to
defend against” what Clinton called “aggressive
predators and pests.”
The ISC will be jointly chaired by
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Commerce
Secretary William Daley, and Agriculture
Secretary Dan Glickman. USDA Wildlife
Services, just eight months after the House of
Representatives briefly voted to rescind more
than a third of its funding, would appear to be
the chief beneficiary of $29 million for invasive
species eradication that Clinton included in his
proposed fiscal year 2000 budget, sent to
Congress in late January.

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“I heard a young child scream. I thought he got a deer.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Four kinds of hunting stories involving children reach
ANIMAL PEOPLE with tedious regularity: children killed
while hunting; children killing their own fathers, brothers,
mothers, or sisters in hunting accidents; children using hunting
weapons to commit murder; and adult authorities working to
lower the minimum age for hunting.
Among the child and teen victims of legal hunting
during 1998:
Isaac Earl Reynolds, 13, of Paonia, Colorado,
killed on his first hunt by his father Earl A. Reynolds’ accidental
discharge;
Marvin Olausen, 9, of Oriska, North Dakota, killed
by an adult hunter’s stray shot as he sat with his mother in a
pickup truck;

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OBITUARIES

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Margaret Wentworth Owings,
85, died on January 21 at Wild Bird, her
clifftop home in Big Sur, California, soon
after publication of her collected writings and
art, Voice From The Sea: Reflections on
Wildlife and Wilderness. Remembered by
Mack Lundstrom of the San Jose Mercury-
News as “the most influential woman in the
California environmental movement,”
Owings was “a protector of wildlife from the
day in 1957 when she watched with her
binoculars as a rifleman killed a Stellar sea
lion near her home. For the next 40 years,”
Lundstrom wrote, “she pushed for laws to
stop a proposal to slaughter 75% of the
California seal lion population.” Pushed by
the fishing industry, the proposal survives in
altered form as the National Marine Fisheries
Service recommendation of February 1999
that the Marine Mammal Protection Act
should be amended to allow the killing of sea
lions and seals who interfere with fishing,
invade marinas, or threaten salmon runs.
Owings cofounded the Rachel Carson
Council in 1965, founded Friends of the Sea
Otter in 1968, was founding president of the
Mountain Lion Foundation, and also held
board posts with the Save-the-Redwoods
League, the Big Sur Land Trust, Defenders
of Wildlife, the African Wildlife Foundation,
the Point Lobos League, and the Environmental
Defense Fund. Without Owings,
said Big Sur Land Trust executive director
Zad Leavy, “the California sea otter might
well be extinct.”

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ANIMAL OBITUARIES

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

Jake, 20, a bottlenose dolphin,
died on February 3 at the U.S. Navy marine
mammal center in San Diego, after emergency
surgery for a severe stomach infection. Jake
and two other Navy dolphins, Buck and
Luther, were in 1994 retired to the Sugarloaf
Dolphin Sanctuary in Florida, where a team
led by Dolphin Project founder Ric O’Barry
and Lloyd Good III tried to rehabilitate them
for release. The effort ran afoul of internal
strife, heavily influenced by an individual
calling himself Rick Spill. An ANIMAL
PEOPLE investigation found reason to suspect
Spill was actually Bill Wewer, the attorney
and fundraiser who earlier incorporated
both the Doris Day Animal League and the
anti-animal rights group Putting People First.
PPF identified itself at one point as representing
Norwegian whalers. O’Barry and Good
were in court in mid-February 1999, fighting
federal charges for releasing Buck and Luther
in May 1996 without National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration permission.
O’Barry and Good argued that the dolphins
were illegally captured and held in the first
place. Both Buck and Luther were recaptured
within days by Rick Trout, who was originally
also part of the Sugarloaf project, but was
ousted through Spill’s intervention after clashing
with O’Barry in late 1994. Allegedly emaciated
and wounded from fights with wild dolphins,
Luther was returned to the Navy with
Jake, while Buck remains at the Dolphin
Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida.

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