A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) supports the development of third-party certification programs that improve the lives of animals, however, we have serious concerns about the standards of the Global Animal Partnership (GAP) program and the processes by which they are implemented. Since only Step 1 is required of all producers, the program must be judged by this standard. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
BEIJING, HALIFAX--Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea on January 12, 2011 announced to news media by teleconference call from Beijing that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Chinese Administration of Quality Supervision have reached an agreement which will allow Canadian sealers to export seal meat and oil to China for human consumption. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
PETA on December 20, 2010 named former U.S. President Bill Clinton “Person of the Year” for adopting a vegan diet. “”I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit,” Clinton told CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer, crediting the diet with helping him to lose 24 pounds before his daughter Chelsea’s July 2010 wedding. “Bill Clinton won not only because he’s the most prominent person to go vegan this year but also because he used his platform to articulate the reasons why a plant-based diet is the most healthy diet,” PETA senior vice president Dan Mathews told media. “It doesn’t hurt,” Mathews added, “that he has [his daughter] Chelsea’s lead to follow. She went vegan at 10. Her motivation was not wanting to support cruelty to animals.” Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
Iloilo, The Philippines—“Let us learn to be responsible dog owners and once and for all, let us avoid eating dog meat,” pleaded Iloilo provincial governor Arthur Defensor Sr. through the Panay News after the January 8, 2011 rabies death of a 38-year-old mother of two.
The dead woman and her sister were bitten by a rabid puppy on June 22, 2010. The sister and three other family members received post-exposure vaccination, but the dead woman refused the treatment. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
MELBOURNE--“Embassy cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to The Age,” show that Australian diplomats quickly defended the Japanese whalers whose ship Shonan Maru #2 cut the bow off the high-speed anti-whaling vessel Ady Gil on January 6, 2010, reported Philip Dorling of the Melbourne Age on January 8, 2011. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
CHENNAI, Dehrudun–The first weekend of 2011 Pongal harvest festivals in Tamil Nadu, India, brought a drop in reported deaths and injuries in jallikattu, the predominant Indian form of participatory bullfighting–but chiefly because new rules discouraged many communities from hosting jallikattu. Relative to the unrestrained mayhem at Bunkhal village in Uttarakhand state a month earlier, that was major progress.
Where jallikattu proceeded, deaths and injuries continued, despite enforcement of the new rules by the Animal Welfare Board of India at direction of the Supreme Court of India. Injuries to bulls are seldom tabulated, but may be inferred from the counts of human deaths and injuries, chiefly suffered in attempts to tackle bulls. Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
CHENNAI–Disregarding national law prohibiting animal fights, Madras High Court Justices N. Paul Vasanthkumar and R. Subbiah on January 12, 2011 directed public officials to allow cockfights in Santhapadi and Modakoor Melbegam villages as part of religious rites commemorating Pongal. Read more
The Domestic Cat: Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life; Means of Utilizing and Controlling It
by Edward Howe Forbush
Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, 1916. [Free 112-page download from <http://books.google.com/books>.]
The November/December 2010 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE noted on page one that the American Bird Conservancy had on December 1, 2010 issued a media release extensively praising what publicist Robert Johns termed “a new peer-reviewed report titled, Feral Cats & Their Management from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,” which advocated killing feral cats.
“The report began in an undergraduate wildlife management class,” revealed Associated Press writer Margery A. Beck, “with students writing reports on feral cats based on existing research. The students’ professor and other UNL researchers then compiled the report from the students’ work.” Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:
Saving Cinnamon: The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy And the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home by Christine Sullivan
St. Martin’s Press (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2010. 256 pages, paperback. $14.95.
Mark Feffer, a U.S. soldier then serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 2005 befriended a stray puppy he named Cinnamon. Adopting Cinnamon was against military regulations, but Cinnamon quickly became a base mascot anyhow. When Feffer and other members of his unit were due to be rotated back to the U.S., Feffer and his wife Alice arranged for a civilian dog handler who was employed by the U.S. military to escort Cinnamon to Chicago via Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic that borders Afghanistan.