A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
MUMBAI, LONDON–The most ambitious dog
and cat surgical sterilization training program
in India has rapidly expanded into the most
ambitious rabies eradication program in India.
The multi-directional project began with
a 2009 visit to the India Project for Animals &
Nature by Luke Gamble, founder of Worldwide
Veterinary Service, to film the pilot for Vet
Adventures.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
JAKARTA, BANTUL, UBUD–Amid rumors that
the Bali government will reinstitute aggressive
dog-killing when a new fiscal year begins in May
2011 came two hints from Jakarta that Indonesian
authorities may be starting to realize that only
high-volume vaccination lastingly reduces rabies
transmission.
More than 150 people have died from
rabies on Bali since October 2008, more than 90%
of them infected before the Bali government
authorized the Bali Animal Welfare Association to
vaccinate dogs throughout the island, funded by
the World Society for the Protection of Animals.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
Climate change has more than doubled the
risk of flooding since 1950, two new studies
agreed in the February 16, 2011 edition of
Nature.
“For years scientists have said that
global warming would likely cause extremes in
temperatures and rainfall. But this is the first
time researchers have been able to point to a
demonstrable cause-and-effect,” assessed
Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press writer
Seth Borenstein.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
The Lady & Her Tiger by Pat Derby with Peter S. Beagle
Performing Animal Welfare Society (P.O. Box 849, Galt, CA 95632),
1976; reprinted for PAWS. Paperback, 263 pages. $10.00.
Performing Animal Welfare Society cofounder Pat Derby did not
see the modern animal rights movement coming 35 years ago, when her
memoir The Lady & Her Tiger became one of the books that launched it.
Published by E.P. Dutton in May 1976, six months after Peter
Singer’s Animal Liberation, and 20 months after Cleveland Amory’s
Man Kind?, The Lady & Her Tiger won an American Library Association
award and was a Book of the Month Club selection. Reissued as a
Ballentine paperback in 1977, The Lady & Her Tiger ensured that the
treatment of performing animals was prominent on the nascent animal
rights agenda–but Derby remained a Hollywood animal trainer, albeit
in the doghouse with much of her profession after exposing their
methods, for another eight years.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
A New Name for Worthless: A Hero is Born
by Rocky Shepheard, illustrated by Tamara Ci Thayne
c/o Dogs Deserve Better (P.O. Box 23, Tipton, PA 16684), 2011.
Hardcover, 16 pages. $17.97.
A chained dog named Worthless craves human companionship. In
the winter a shabby doghouse barely protects the old dog from the
brutal winters. There is not much shade from the sizzling summer sun.
A New Name for Worthless means well. Author Rocky Shepheard
presents it as a tribute to Tamira Ci Thayne, founder of Dogs
Deserve Better, and her devotion to freeing dogs from the misery of
chains, a most laudable goal. But the book conveys mixed and
confusing messages to its intended audience of young readers.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
What Every Horse Should Know
by Cherry Hill
Storey Publishing (210 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams,
MA 01247), 2011. 192 pages, paperback. $19.95.
“Horses are wonderful already,” begins Cherry Hill in What
Every Horse Should Know. Her book is wonderful too.
Hill, horse trainer extraordinaire, begins the book with a
chapter on fear. Fear, she says, is the single most dangerous and
destructive force in a relationship with a horse. “Eradicate fear
and you begin to develop trust,” Hill writes. Fearful horses often
panic and try to flee. Wild or undomesticated horses, suddenly
cornered, feel trapped. Attempting to escape can harm the horse or
anyone standing close by.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
Major General (Retired) Rammehar Kharb, chairing the Animal
Welfare Board of India since 2006, was honored with a lifetime
achievement award in January 2011 by the Federation of Indian Animal
Protection Organizations. Kharb was saluted for advocacy on behalf
of street dogs, pushing municipalities to share the cost of Animal
Birth Control programs, standardizing ABC surgical and dogcatching
procedures, expelling corrupt organizations from the AWBI,
initiating the national Rabies Free India program, and lobbying for
the first major update of the Indian national humane law since 1960,
recently introduced in the Indian Parliament.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
Kaankata, 35, an Indian rhino who lost an ear to a
poacher’s bullet and afterward charged humans on sight, died
peaceably in Orang National Park on February 16, 2011. Kaankata
once destroyed a forestry official’s car, and another time chased a
poacher for two kilometers, division forest officer Sushil Daila
told The Telegraph, of Kolkata.
Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do
lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
–William Shakespeare
Dick King-Smith, 88, died in his sleep on January 4, 2011
at his home near Bath, England. Smith turned to writing after World
War II military service, 20 years of farming, stints selling
firefighting equipment and working in a shoe factory, and finally
teaching, after he completed a degree in education at Bristol
University at age 53 in 1975. King-Smith’s first of more than 100
books, The Fox Busters, appeared in 1978. Concerning three
chickens who repeatedly foil the efforts of foxes to eat them, The
Fox Busters inspired a 26-episode Cosgrove Hall animated TV series of
the same name, aired in 1999-2000. King-Smith’s books, mostly
about talking animals, sold more than 15 million copies in all. The