BOOKS: Cats For Dummies

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

Cats For Dummies
by Gina Spadafori
and Paul D. Pion
IDG Books Worldwide
(919 E. Hillsdale Blvd., Suite 400,
Foster City, CA 94404), 1997.
360 pages, paperback, $19.99.

“Care killed a cat,” Shakespeare
warns us in Much Ado About Nothing. The
best way to avoid that dire fate is to learn
proper cat care, and an excellent starting
place would be this latest entry in the For
Dummies series.
The 22 chapters of this user-friendly
textbook should be required reading for
would-be cat companions. A veterinarian,
Paul D. Pion, has joined syndicated pet care
columnist Gina Spadafori, the author of
Dogs For Dummies, to educate the curious
about the pleasures and problems inherent in
caring for a cat. For example, what you
might assume to be the opening section––
”Choosing Your Feline Companion”––does
not appear until Chapter Four, following a
cat-alogue of sensible advice about the kind
of cat to choose. My favorite section, however,
lists the top ten cat myths, including
“Cats need to drink milk,” and systematically
debunks every one of them.

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BOOKS: Greyhound Tales: True Stories of Rescue, Compassion & Love

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

Greyhound Tales: True Stories of Rescue, Compassion & Love
Edited by Nora Star
c/o Nora Star (9728 Tenaya Way, Kelseyville, CA 95451), 1997. 128 pages, paperback, $15.95.

Only 10 years ago many humane
societies considered themselves successful in
fighting the ills of the greyhound racing industry
if they even got breeders and trainers to
bring culls in for death by needle, instead of
just shooting or clubbing them. The greyhound
industry reputedly killed as many as
50,000 dogs a year, mostly young and healthy
but too slow to win races. National organizations
from time to time attacked the use of rabbits
and other small animals in live lure training,
but as a whole, gambling on greyhounds
was considered too big and too dangerous a
business to tackle head-on.

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BOOKS: Dog Adoption

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

Dog Adoption
by Joan Hustace Walker
ICS Books, Inc. (1370 East 86th Place,
Merrillville, IN 46410), 1997.
130 pages, $12.95, paperback.

Subtitled “A guide to choosing the
perfect ‘pre-owned’ dog,” Dog Adoption
champions the adoptability of the rescued or
shelter dog as pretext to author Joan Hustace
Walker’s apparent main interest: promoting
greyhound adoption––and greyhound racing.
Not even the industry’s own well-paid public
relations people as easily dismiss decades of
eyewitness-and-media-documented greyhound
abuse as, in Walker’s own words,
“fiction, false rumors and hogwash.”

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BLM may kill captured horses

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

RENO––Bureau of Land
Management director Patrick A. Shea on
February 9 told the newly convened
nine-member Wild Horse and Burro
Advisory Board that while he would
“Oppose the wholesale slaughter” of wild
equines, he would accept a recommendation,
if the board makes it, that unadoptable
horses should be euthanized.
BLM Wild Horse Program head
Tom Pagacnik explained that horses over
age 9 are rarely placed because they resist
gentling, yet might live to age 40 on a
refuge––at cost of about $900 per year.
A three-member fact-finding
panel told the board that some wild horses
lose 200-300 pounds from transport stress
as they are hauled around the U.S. to
adoption events where they repeatedly go
unclaimed––but the BLM has no way to
identify such so-called “frequent flyers.”

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Jaded humpmasters turn to women

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

SYDNEY––Australian Camel Racing
Association president Kevin Handley on February
5 reportedly failed to win an exemption from the
Equal Opportunity Act which would have allowed
ACRA to recruit “young attractive female riders”
to race camels in the United Arab Emirates––at
invitation, Handley said, of the UAE ambassador.
According to Manika Naidoo of the
Sydney Morning Herald, UAE embassy officials
had “hand-picked” 20 Australian women, most
with no previous camel-riding experience, and
hope to recruit up to 40 more within two years.
“Handley told the Anti-Discrimination
Tribunal that applicants had to be attractive and
female because the idea behind the scheme was to
promote women jockeys and counter camel racing’s
male-dominated image,” Naidoo wrote. “He
said if spectators saw pretty young females riding
camels, it would destroy the popular view of the
animals as ‘untrustworthy, stinking, and arrogant,’
and of riders being ‘bearded and backward
beer-drinking boozers.’”

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BOOKS: Goodbye, Friend

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

Goodbye, Friend
Healing wisdom for anyone
who has ever lost a pet
by Gary Kowalski
Stillpoint Publishing
(POB 640, Walpole, NH 03608), 1997.
159 pages, paperback, $11.95.

Gary Kowalski, a Unitarian minister,
advises acknowledging the death of a pet
much as one would the death of any other
family member. Services, including eulogies
tailored to the individual comfort level, are
recommended as part of grieving.
The topic of children dealing with a
pet’s death is covered. Significance is given
to even the smallest of companions, as the
author describes his own children’s year-long
series of memorials for a goldfish who had
lived a very short life. He gives advice to
calm children’s fear of death, and on how to
allow children to cope on their own level.

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Regeneration breakthrough in mice

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

PHILADELPHIA––The key to human
regrowth of lost or injured limbs and organs may
have been found by accident in connection with
genetically modifying mice for disease research,
immunologist Ellen Heber-Katz of the Wistar
Institute indicated in a February 16 address to the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
Heber-Katz was studying multiple sclerosis
using the fairly common MRL strain of custom-bred
research mouse, she said, when she
found that ID holes punched in her subjects’ ears
quickly healed over without a trace. Removing
bits of their tails and livers brought similar
results: new parts grew, matching the old.

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CLINTON BUDGET BOOSTS NIH, NPS

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – The
U.S. budget for fiscal 1999 announced by
President Bill Clinton on February 2
includes a record $170 billion for civilian
research and development over the next
five years. The National Institutes of
Health would get an immediate funding
increase of $1.15 billion, giving it a 1999
budget of $14.8 billion, and would be
scheduled to get $20 billion in 2004.
NIH head Harold Varmus told
media that the money, if allocated by
Congress, would be divided among studies
of cancer, diabetes, brain disorders,
asthma, and AIDS.

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BOOKS: The Lessons of St. Francis

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1998:

The Lessons of St. Francis:
How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality into Your Daily Life
by John Michael Talbot with Steve Rabey
Dutton (375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014), 1997.
255 pages, hardcover, $21.95.

A member of the 1960s country/ rock
band Mason Profitt, John Michael Talbot
either reinvented or rediscovered himself after
the band broke up––first as an admittedly
obnoxious evangelical “Jesus freak,” and then,
as the zeal of the newly converted gave way to
recognition that he still didn’t like himself
much, a lay Franciscan.
Bible-thumping hadn’t brought
Talbot inner peace, but working to emulate St.
Francis did. Still a professional musician,
Talbot eventually founded the semi-communal
Missouri-based Brothers and Sisters of Charity,
and became a respected Franciscan scholar.

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