Winter 2009
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Making Headway on Capitol Hill Two of the 12 resident bull sharks from a pinnacle off the coast of Mozambique interact with each other. On Opening day of the 111th Congress, Rep. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam) reintroduced the Shark Conservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 81). A similar measure to strengthen the pre-existing... more...
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Table of Contents ANIMALS IN AGRICULTURE A Broken Food Chain Global Animal Welfare Meeting Noxious Emissions Exempted FDA Caves to Big Ag Pressure Insufficient Oversight at Slaughter A Vote Against Intensive Confinement ANIMALS IN LABORATORIES Random Source Dog and Cat Dealers under the Microscope Studies and... more...
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A Lost Angel When a pit bull, a mothmother and a young child are featured in the same news story, the ending is often predictable, but in November, the NBC headline was quite different. A Floridian woman was leaving a playground with her toddler, when a mugger held them up at knifepoint in the parking lot.... more...
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PIT BULL TAKES BULLET FOR FAMILY "If it wasn't for his hard head, he wouldn't be here," the vet told Roberta Trawick, owner of the lifesaving pit bull, D-Boy. Trawick was sitting on the couch of her Oklahoma City home in early December, when a man broke in through the front door. He pointed a gun in her face and ordered her to... more...
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Parrot Saves Choking Baby To those who think parrots are only capable of mindless mimicry, Willie is certainly no bird brain. According to CBS4 in Denver, the parrot's owner, Meagan, was babysitting two-year-old Hannah Kuusk when she left the child unsupervised to go to the bathroom. It was then that Hannah started... more...
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Greyhounds Beat the Odds Greyhound rescue groups are currently engaged in the most challenging large-scale rescue mission ever attempted: the relocation of 100 racing greyhounds from Guam to the mainland. (Dave Davis) From left to right: Speedo, April, Scout and Purdy of the now defunct Guam Greyhound Park... more...
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Dog Crushed by Illegal Trap Rupert the therapy dog was tragically killed by a Conibear trap late last year. NOVEMBER 15, 2008 is a day that Rich Poska will never forget. While walking his 11-year-old therapy dog—a 55-pound Chinook named Rupert—around the White Deer Golf Course in Vernon Hills, Ill., one sunny... more...
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Life Behind Bars: The exploitation of caged birds While many people are familiar with the inhumane nature of puppy mills—dog breeding operations where animals are overbred, overcrowded and often poorly cared for—most are unaware of mass-breeding bird facilities. The lack of consumer education, coupled with inadequate law enforcement measures to... more...
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Frogs Identify Predators Before Hatching FIGHT OR FLIGHT. They're basic animal responses once considered purely instinctual—or perhaps strictly a natural learning process—but they may actually be a combination of the two. According to www.livescience.com, an experiment conducted at Missouri State University determined that wood-frogs... more...
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Curtailing Mexico's Exotic Bird Trade The long-awaited amendment to Mexico's wildlife law to protect its wild bird populations from exploitation was approved by Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa on October 13. The ban prohibits the commercial or subsistence capture, export and import of 22 Mexican parrot species, half of... more...
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A Promising Proposal for Wild Non-human Primates The European Commission proposed a ban on laboratory use of wild-caught apes and monkeys this past November—just short of asking that primate experiments be phased out altogether. "It is absolutely important to steer away from testing on animals," said European Environment Commissioner Stavros... more...
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EXOTIC ANIMAL SMUGGLERS BUSTED Though they're usually intervening in illegal immigrant and drug trafficking schemes, Chilean officials put the kibosh on a massive illicit shipment of 427 exotic animals en route from Peru to Chile early this year. According to the Associated Press, Chilean authorities detained the yacht... more...
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Hordes of Pelicans Mysteriously Dying SCIENTISTS AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATIONISTS are baffled by the sudden malaise plaguing hundreds of pelicans along the California coast this winter. Californians have been calling rescue centers constantly, having found disoriented, exhausted, ill and dead birds in the most unlikely of places. Many... more...
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WRONGFUL POLICE DOG SHOOTINGS: IS THERE ANY RELIEF? Mayor Calvo and wife Trinity walk Chase and Payton through Berwyn Heights, Md. The mayor says these walks were "a twice daily occurrence, and we walked just like this—them right at our side, Payton on the outside, Chase on the inside. All the children knew their names and would flock to pet... more...
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Studies and Snack Breaks Veterinary technician Evelyn Skoumbourdis and environmental enrichment coordinator Casey Coke Murphy discuss proper feeding of small laboratory mammals DUE TO THEIR SMALLER SIZE and handleability, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs and rabbits are widely used in biomedical research studies.... more...
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International SOS for Serbian Brown Bears By Susan R. Johnson SERBIA, AT THE HEART of former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, is one of the few places left in Europe where brown bears continue to be cruelly abused for profit and human amusement. Despite being internationally recognized as an endangered species, the animals have been... more...
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A Broken Food Chain ACCORDING TO A RECENT REPORT published by the University of British Columbia in Canada, 90 percent of the global small fish catch—which includes anchovies, sardines and mackerel—is processed into fish meal and fish oil and used in animal feed. These forage fish are heavily exploited, since they... more...
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Global Animal Welfare Meeting Held in Egypt THE SECOND GLOBAL CONFERENCE on Animal Welfare was convened by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) last year in Cairo, Egypt, from October 20 to 22. The conference had a dual purpose: assess progress of the 172 member nations in implementing outcomes of the 2004 Conference in Paris... more...
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NOXIOUS EMISSIONS FROM ANIMAL WASTE EXEMPTED The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exempted all agribusiness in December—no matter how industrialized, no matter the animal product produced—from having to declare noxious emissions produced by animal waste. The EPA says that reporting these emissions is unnecessary, regardless of the... more...
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FDA Caves to Big Ag Pressure; Endangers Human and Animal Life IN LATE NOVEMBER, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked its ban on extra-label antibiotics used in rearing farm animals, particularly in intensive systems. The ban was proposed last summer as an effort to curtail the spread of drug-resistant pathogens and public health risks largely... more...
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A CLEAR VOTE AGAINST INTENSIVE CONFINEMENT OF FARM ANIMALS The California referendum to prohibit housing sows in gestation crates, hens in battery cages, and veal calves in crates by 2015 passed in November by a nearly two-to-one margin. AWI supported the measure because of our vehement opposition to the practice of confining animals in a manner that... more...
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Report Finds Insufficient Gov't Oversight at Slaughter Plants IN RESPONSE to the Hallmark-Westland slaughter plant exposé, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) assessed what had transpired at Hallmark, if it could have been prevented, and whether similar problems exist at other plants. OIG evaluated 10... more...
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Protecting the Animals of Cairo By Marlene Halverson WHILE ATTENDING THE OIE Global Animal Welfare Conference in Cairo, I was fortunate to meet Amina Tharwat Abaza, founder of SPARE, the Society for Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt. Colleague Jacqueline Bos and I were able to visit the SPARE shelter, located along a... more...
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Mexico Tries to Crush "Dolphin Safe" Tuna Label Via WTO By Mark J. Palmer The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), Earth Island Institute (EII) and a coalition of supportive groups have been crying foul since the government of Mexico demanded late in October that the World Trade Organization (WTO) overturn U.S. law and federal legal decisions that protect... more...
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Manatee Deaths Rise in 2008 Out of 337 manatee carcasses recovered in Florida last year, 101 were very young calves, compared to the 59 dead calves found in 2007. Though reasons for this increase are unknown, more manatees are also dying from boat collisions—90 perished as a result last year, compared to 73 the year before.... more...
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AUSTRALIA WELCOMES NEW DOLPHIN SPECIES Up until recently, it was thought that only two species of bottlenose dolphins existed—the Indo-Pacific and the common bottlenose. But recent DNA tests performed by researchers at Australia's Macquarie and Monash Universities have revealed a new species. Resembling the common dolphin in... more...
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Compromising the Commercial Whaling Moratorium THE INTERNATIONAL WHALING COMMISSION (IWC) recently held two meetings of the "Small Working Group on the Future of the IWC," which was formed at the last annual meeting in Santiago, Chile. Despite civil society being excluded from these important discussions, Susan Millward and D.J. Schubert... more...
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The Coy Coyote Learning to Coexist with an Adaptable Carnivore by Camilla Fox COYOTES AND HUMANS have shared the same environment since long before European settlers arrived in North America. To many Native American cultures, coyotes were powerful mythological figures endowed with the power of creation and venerated for their intelligence and mischievous... more...
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PYGMY TARSIERS BACK FROM "EXTINCTION" Believed to be extinct, one of the world's smallest and rarest primates had not been seen alive since 1921. But an Indonesian scientist expedition in 2000 proved decades of assumptions wrong. As reported by Reuters, the group was doing research in the Sulawesi highlands of Indonesia, when they... more...
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Good and Bad News for Belugas While the U.S. tootook a leap toward beluga conservation in October by adding Cook Inlet belugas to the Endangered Species List, the animals remain grossly overhunted in Greenland. The country's Environmental Infrastructure Ministry declared the West Greenland subpopulation of beluga whales... more...
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See it through my eyes 2008; Runtime: 7 minutes See it through my eyes is a revealing documentary produced by three Girl Scouts on the horrific practice of "soring." Soring achieves an exaggerated gait in Tennessee Walking horses and other gaited breeds through the application of chemical or mechanical irritants... more...
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Freedom Moon By Animals Asia Foundation 2008 124 pages; $40 For 10 years, the Animals Asia Foundation has made it its mission to rescue and rehabilitate majestic moon bears from cruel bear bile farms in China and Vietnam. In celebration of the many success stories and in memory of the losses, Animals Asia... more...
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Dirt—The Erosion Of Civilizations By David R. Montgomery, University of California Press, 2007 ISBN-10: 0520258061 296 pages; $16.95 Painstakingly, Montgomery, a geomorphologist and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, leads us on a verbal journey spanning millennia and the globe to give us... more...
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Glaring deficiencies in GAO reportort on Wild Horse and Burro Program With the fate of thousands of America's wild horses and burros at risk, there was palpable optimism when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced that it would be issuing a report on the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program to debut in October of last year.... more...
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Random Source Dog and Cat Dealers Under the Microscope ALTHOUGH NO ACTION WAS TAKEN on the Pet Safety and Protection Act in the last Congress, the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill and the FARM bill were adopted; both include language regarding random source Class B dealers who sell dogs and cats for experimentation. They call... more...
