ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

January 1, 1999 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel
on December 31, 1998 rejected a suit filed by
the Mountain States Legal Foundation,
Colorado Cattlemen’s Association,
Colorado Woolgrowers, and Colorado
Outfitters Association, which sought to keep
the Colorado Division of Wildlife from reintroducing
lynx by contending that the state is
improperly managing a federal species recovery
program. Mountain States Legal
Foundation attorney William Pendley said he
would take the case on to the 10th Circuit
Court of Appeals, and would seek an emergency
injunction against any lynx releases
while the matter remains in litigation.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt
continues to tout the so-called “no surprises”
Multiple Species Conservation Program his
office negotiated in 1994 with San Diego
developers as a model for endangered species
conservation on privately owned habitat, but
the California Native Plant Society, San
Diego Audubon Society, and San Diego
Herpetological Society in a December 27
lawsuit claim the Multiple Species
Conservation Program is not adequately protecting
habitat. They cite as case in point the
recent bulldozing of a wetland which included
about 60 vernal pools, home to endangered
San Diego fairy shrimp.

LETTERS [Jan/Feb 1999]

January 1, 1999 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

Cyprus zoo feeds hunt
Thanks for sending us ANIMAL PEOPLE.
You might think much of it is irrelevant to Cyprus, but
often articles about other countries are of value.
One of our ongoing campaigns focuses on the
Limassol Zoo. We won commitments to stop importing
large exotics, stop breeding, and enrich cages–– but
soon afterward, the leopard was pregnant, more mixed
Asiatic-African lion cubs were born, the substrate was
removed from cages, and kangaroos were to be
imported from Australia. (We got that stopped).
The latest was that eight lion cubs were sent
off to “freedom,” the zoo told us, in South Africa.
Who, I thought, would pay to transport and
feed eight tame lions born to tame parents? They could
never be released. They were of no use for conservation
purposes, being hybrids.

Letters

Editorial: How to help animals in China

January 1, 1999 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE has received many heartfelt appeals for a boycott of all goods
from China and/or all tourism to China, in response to the recent Humane Society of the U.S.
disclosures pertaining to the use of dog and cat fur by some Chinese garment makers, whose
customers include U.S. retailers.
The dog and cat fur traffic was overdue for exposure, HSUS is to be commended
for doing it, and expressions of outrage are also in order.
But a broad boycott of China would be unfair, ineffective, and self-defeating. The
dog and cat fur traffic is not uniquely Chinese; neither is China the largest supplier. The
largest supplier, our files indicate, is Russia, along with other nations formerly belonging to
the USSR, where animals killed by city pounds have been pelted and the pelts sold since
Czarist times. As ANIMAL PEOPLE has reported, the killing and pelting is often done by
prisoners. The proceeds underwrite both the animal control agencies, such as they are, and
the prisons. Neither have ever approached internationally accepted humane standards.

Newfoundland asks to kill 2 million seals

January 1, 1999 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

OTTAWA––With Canadian fisheries
minister David Anderson imminently
expected to announce the 1999 seal-killing
quota, Newfoundland fisheries minister John
Efford on January 5 recommended a “onetime
cull” of two million harp seals and grey
seals––almost half the total population, by
government estimates.
Should Anderson prove unwilling
to authorize such a slaughter, Effords said he
would favor increasing the annual sealing
quota to 400,000––68% more than were
legally killed in either 1997 or 1998.
Known for his furious assertions
that seals rather than overfishing are responsible
for the economically catastrophic depletion
of Atlantic Canadian cod, mackerel,
salmon, and skates, Efford buttressed his
recommendation with a 32-page report
authored by former Canadian Department of
Fisheries and Oceans head research scientist
George Winters.

Even scavengers reject pelts

January 1, 1999 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1999:

NORTH BAY, Ontario; WASHINGTON
D.C.––Fur industry bravado about
making a comeback was cut short on December
14 at the North Bay Fur Harvesters auction in
North Bay, Ontario. The first major North
American pelt sale of the year offered the pelts
of 167,107 wild animals––but sold just 23%, a
record poor showing.
A day preceding public disclosure
that the Humane Society of the U.S. had caught
the Burlington Coat Factory chain selling garments
trimmed with dog fur, none of the
world’s major fur buyers felt confident enough
about the longterm prospects of the industry to
scoop up pelts that almost couldn’t be given
away, and warehouse them in speculation.
Even when fur sales were in free fall
during the late 1980s and early 1990s, North
Bay auctions usually sold 95%-100% of often
much larger consignments.

BOOKS: The Whole Horse Catalog & The Horse

December 1, 1998 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

The Whole Horse Catalog
(REVISED AND UPDATED)
Steven D. Price, Editorial Director, with Barbara Burn,
Gail Rentsch, and David A. Spector. Illustrations by Werner Rentsch.
Fireside Books (Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020), 1998. 351 oversized pages, paperback, $20.00.

The Horse: The Most Abused Domestic Animal
by Greta Bunting
(POB 12195, St. Petersburg, FL 33733-2195), 1998.
68 pages, paperback, $13.86.

I write a lot about horse protection
issues, especially pertaining to wild horses,
and have for many years, but I don’t ride,
never have, never wanted to, and will freely
admit that what I know about the practical
aspects of horsekeeping is chiefly jackdookey––i.e.
the stuff I shovel each morning.

OBITUARIES

December 1, 1998 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

Charles “Goat Man” McCartney,
97, died on November 15 in Macon,
Georgia. Recounted New York Times obituarist
Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “According to
research by Darryl Patton and Jimmy
Hammett, who collaborated on a 1993 Goat
Man video and a 1994 Goat Man book,
McCartney grew up on a farm outside
Sigourney, Iowa, where he was considered
such an odd child that the family goats were
about his only true friends. That helps
explain why he took off at 14, married a 24-
year-old Spanish knife-thrower, served as
her exhibition target for a couple of years,
then returned to Iowa and married at least
twice more. The last marriage ended when
he sold his goat-weary wife for $1,000 to a
farmer she’d already grown sweet on.” He
was by then already making frequent long
treks with 30-odd goats and a goat-drawn
wagon, selling postcards of himself and
passing himself off as the Second Coming for
a time in north Georgia until skeptics tarred
and feathered him. He continued preaching
and herding goats along rural roads between
Iowa and Georgia until 1968, when a gang
severely beat him and cut the throats of eight
of his goats at Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
He spent most of the rest of his life living
with his goats and a son, Albert Gene, who
predeceased him, in an old school bus near
Jeffersonville, Georgia.

Obituaries

“Born to be wild” tiger kills again, and is killed

December 1, 1998 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

NEWBERRY, Florida– – Jupiter,
the three-year-old tiger who on October 8
killed trainer Charles Edward Lizza, 34, as
described on page one of the November ANIMAL
PEOPLE, struck again on November
13, killing co-owner Doris Guay, 58.
Guay and her husband Ron Guay,
61, exotic cat handlers for 40 years, were
unable to hold Jupiter back as he pounced and
savaged Lizza, who had raised the tiger
almost from birth. Neither was Ron Guay able
to save his wife, who reportedly rarely ventured
outside during the six weeks after
Lizza’s death.
The Guays had performed together
as Ron and Joy Holliday since he was 14 and
she was 11. Lizza joined them in 1992, after
they had shared billings for about four years
with the Tommy Hanneford Circus.

British ALF hunger striker Barry Horne at the verge of death

December 1, 1998 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:

YORK, U.K.––Convicted Animal
Liberation Front arsonist Barry Horne, 46, in the
62nd day of a hunger strike, was on December 8
in critical condition and reportedly close to lapsing
into a terminal coma.
Medical authorities said he had passed
the point of being able to make a full physical
recovery several days if not weeks earlier, and
that even if he broke the hunger strike this late,
his prognosis for survival would be shaky.
Horne undertook the strike, he said, to
protest the refusal of the Labour government led
by Prime Minister Tony Blair to call a Royal
Commission inquiry into laboratory animal use.

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