HUNTING, BRAINS, SAFETY, AND SPORTSMANSHIP

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Joseph Berger, M.D., neurology
department chair at the University of Kentucky,
and behavioral neurologist Eric Weisman, M.D.,
also of Kentucky, rattled squirrel hunters in
August with a letter to The Lancet, the journal of
the British Medical Society, warning that all 11
patients they have treated for Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease in the past four years ate squirrel brains.
Berger and Weisman postulated that
eating squirrel brains might be an avenue of
transmission for the rare brain disease––a degenerative,
irreversible, always fatal malady apparently
related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or “mad cow disease,” also resembling
kuru, found among human cannibals.
As hunting season began, brains of any
kind often seemed scarce. Near Chibougamou,
Quebec, a 61-year-old hunter killed an 81-yearold
blueberry picker on August 29, mistaking
him for a bear. Their names were not released.

LETTERS [Nov 1997]

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Greece
Thank you for sending your wonderful paper.
It’s nice to read that animal welfare issues are being
tackled globally!
As chief executive of the Greek Animal
Welfare Fund, based in the United Kingdom, I am
very involved in locating where exotic animals are kept
within Greece, seeing how they are kept, and if necessary,
doing what we can to help.
Early this year we moved 11 apes and two
crowned cranes from the Athens zoo. Last weekend I
managed to get the last monkey out of Iraklion, in
Crete. We have four more monkeys lined up to go,
from the National Gardens in Athens, a bar in Voula,
and a wildlife center in Aegina. We have been very
lucky to gain the support of the AAP Foundation in
Amsterdam [a world-acclaimed primate facility], and
to date all the apes have gone there. After a short quarantine
for tests and treatment, they have been introduced
into family groups. We hope they will eventually
be relocated into an approved venue together.

Letters

Editorial: Living in the House That Jack Built

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Sometimes it seems as if we live in the House That Jack Built, taking telephone
calls several times a day from the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
Narrated as a variety of songs and children’s stories, both “House” and “Old
Lady” go pretty much the same way: one creature is sent to chase another, dog after cat
after mouse and so forth, creating ecological and social chaos.
That’s just about exactly what happened here on Whidbey Island this year.
Gardeners, irate that rabbits ate their crops, released housecats into their yards in hopes the
cats would kill the rabbits. Birdwatchers became irate that the cats ate birds, too, after
depleting small mammals. Already, the gardeners were irate again, complaining now
about deer and raccoons. Commuters objected that the occasional presence of deer on the
roads kept them from driving like bats out of hell after dark. Bats caused a panic, too,
when some people tried to attract them to eat mosquitoes, whom they accused of being
potential carriers of equine encephalitis. The bats were said to be potentially rabid. Then
people who let their housecats and small dogs wander, to have a “natural” life, joined
with hunters in raising a howl against coyotes, who followed nature in locally solving the
alleged rabbit, cat, roving dog, and deer problems.

Seals, whales, ESA and the Willys

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

MONACO, TORONTO, WASHINGTON
D.C. ––Close to losing 25 years of
activist gains through back door politics, the
International Fund for Animal Welfare and
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rallied
opposition to sealing off Atlantic Canada and
whaling in any form as ANIMAL PEOPLE
went to press, while Defenders of Wildlife
used the Internet to assemble resistance to an
Endangered Species Act rewrite apparently
favored by both the Bill Clinton/Albert Gore
administration and the Republican majorities
in the House and Senate.
IFAW sent out an eight-millionpiece
mailing asking members and sympathizers
to call or write Canadian authorities to
remind them that seal slaughter is as offensive
now as in 1984, when three decades of
campaigning finally brought a 12-year suspension
of the offshore phase of the killing.

Orangs in the smoke

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

JAKARTA, Indonesia– – Unidenti-
fied creatures and species long believed extinct
are among the beasts fleeing forest fires that
have ravaged an estimated 4.2 million acres of
Sumatra, Borneo, and Java since mid-July.
Scientific enthusiasm over possible
discoveries and rediscoveries of species is
sobered by the certainty that much and perhaps
all of the rare animals’ habitat may be lost.
“Burning fields and forests is an
annual occurence in Indonesia,” Pat Bell of the
Ottawa Citizen reported on October 8. “But
this year plantations and forestry firms
increased the number of fires in an apparent
attempt to clear as much as they could before
the government was able to enforce a ban,”
which was imposed after fires in 1982-1983 and
1994 destroyed 15.8 million acres of forest.
Environmental law enforcement is
traditionally lax in Indonesia, recently rated the
most corrupt nation among 46 assessed by the
public interest group Transparency International.
In 1994, for instance, after the Forest
Ministry fined two timber firms a combined
total of more than $2 million, and denied
extensions of 43 logging leases, President
Suharto ordered the ministry to make an interest-free
loan of $185 million to the aircraft
maker Industri Pesawat Terbang Negara. The
money was diverted from a reforestation fund.

Barbarians rev up at the gates of Yellowstone

November 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK––As the
first and most popular National Park, Yellowstone could be
seen as the capitol of a wilderness empire as far-reaching as
Imperial Rome.
The 150 snowmobiling wise-use wiseguys who
rallied October 11 in West Yellowstone against limited park
road closures might be seen as the vanguard of the Huns,
hellbent on sacking what they don’t understand.
Looking at a map of North America, one can easily
imagine parks, forests, and national monuments linked
into a continuous set of wildlife corridors from the Yukon to
the Gulf of California. Much of the Mexican terminus is
already protected within a United Nations-recognized
Biosphere Reserve––but another part, the San Ignacio
Lagoon, is both an important gray whale calving area and
potentially jeopardized by salt extraction facilities in joint
development by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government.

BOOKS: Next of Kin

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Next of Kin
by Roger Fouts
with Stephen Tukel Mills.
Introduction by Jane Goodall
William Morrow & Co.
(1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
NY 10019), 1997. 420 pages, hardcover, $25.00.

Chimpanzees’ use of English seems childlike, the tools
they make are simple, and their cultures are somewhat basic.
When these statements are understood they become revolutionary.
What Dr. Roger Fouts explains to us in Next of Kin
is that chimpanzees are us. Whether the public is ready for this
message and will be able to understand what this means about
the way we should treat the great apes remains to be seen.

BOOKS: Generation React: Activism for Beginners

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Generation React:
Activism for Beginners
by Danny Seo
Ballentine Publishing (201 E. 50th St., New York,
NY 10022), 1997. 192 pages, paperback, $10.95.

Activism tends to be a young person’s game––but
Danny Seo, the 20-year-old author of Generation React,
wasn’t just playing when at age 12, in 1990, he quit eating
meat and founded Earth 2000 National. Swiftly winning
media note, Seo hit the bigtime even younger than most star
athletes and rock-and-rollers, converted fleeting attention to
enduring influence, and remains active and effective.

REVIEWS: Henry: One Man’s Way

October 1, 1997 Archivist Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Henry––One Man’s Way
Documentary by Peter Singer
Distributed by The Great Ape Project
(POB 19492, Portland, OR 97280-0492), 1997.
Two hours. $15.00.

Even if Henry Spira had never taken up the animal
cause, he would still have had a formidable career in activism,
as maritime labor organizer, leftist through the McCarthy era,
and muckraking reporter who exposed the peccadillos and perversities
of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover at the height
of Hoover’s power, traveled to Cuba to cover the first developments
after Fidel Castro ousted the CIA-backed dictator
Francisco Batista, and followed the Freedom Riders through
rural Mississippi.

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