ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MAY 2004 THE WATCHDOG

HOUSE BILL OPENS FIRE ON MUTE SWANS

WASHINGTON D.C.The House of Representatives Resources Committee on May 5 sent to the full House the so- called Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act (H.R. 4114) and the less controversial Marine Turtle Conservation Act (H.R. 3378). Both bills were introduced by Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans Subcommittee chair Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD).

Both bills are expected to advance rapidly through Congress as two of the major election year Republican gestures toward environmentalists.

The Marine Turtle Conservation Act provides funding for foreign conservation programs.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act would exempt "non-native" species from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, reversing recent court rulings and consent decrees signed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in settlement of activist lawsuits which stipulate that the act covers all migratory waterfowlincluding mute swans and the giant Canada geese introduced across the U.S. by the Fish & Wildlife Service during the 1950s through the 1970s.

The giant Canada geese do not actually migrate, and for that reason have been exempted from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act since 1994 by decree, but they are hybrid look-alikes for the migratory variety, bred and released by the Fish & Wildlife Service in hopes of rebuilding the migratory flocks so that more geese could be hunted.

The Fish & Wildlife Service, state game agencies, the National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and Defenders of Wildlife have long favored exterminating mute swans as an alleged non-native threat to scarce trumpeter swans.

"After 75 years of mishandled and mismanaged efforts to bring back the trumpeters, they are now hunted as a trophy bird," though they still number fewer than 25,000, objected Kathryn Burton, whose efforts to save mute swans in Maryland and Connecticut led to the introduction of the Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act.

Trumpeters, Burton charged, "are touted as 'the ultra swan,' but genetically they are the same bird as the mutes. Fossils show they were living and swimming together in Oregon, Idaho, and Arizona 9,500 years ago. Over the past 25 years trumpeters," like giant Canada geese, "have systematically been placed in states where they never existed prior to European colonization," Burton said.

Fund for Animals president Mike Markarian on April 15 called the Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act "a reckless reaction to unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence" in a statement co-signed by 34 other animal advocacy group heads. "As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently held," Markarian said, "the Fish and Wildlife Service and Maryland Department of Natural Resources," which blames the swans for the loss of marine grasses from Chesapeake Bay, "have not proven their claims.

"Science indicates--and leading environmental organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation confirm--that the biggest threats to the Bay are nutrient runoff from intensive livestock farms and pollution from sewage treatment plants," Markarian continued.

"Mute swans have become the scapegoat. While some environmental and birdwatching organizations have lined up in support of the Migratory Bird Treaty Reform Act, these groups arbitrarily value some bird species over others--an opinion based on aesthetic and recreational values, not science. "

WHY BE KIND TO "TAHRS?"

CAPE TOWN--Twenty-three prominent South African environmentalists on April 4, 2004 published a joint letter urging the immediate massacre of the last Himalayan tahrs on Table Mountain.

Endangered in India, where the goat-like tahrs are native, they are officially deemed "invasive" in South Africa. The Table Mountain herd, culled sporadically for nearly 30 years, is descended from a pair who escaped from the long defunct Groote Schuur Zoo in 1936. A helicopter count recently found 51, but Table Mountain National Park staff say there may be as many as 150.

Fifty-four tahrs were killed in 2000 before an effort to exterminate them was halted at request of former Indian minister for animal welfare Maneka Gandhi and Friends of the Tahr, who hoped to repatriate the survivors to India but have not raised enough money to do it.

"Why be kind to tahrs specifically? Why not a 'Friends of the Norwegian rat' or a 'Friends of the cholera virus'?" asked the joint letter from the environmentalists.

The joint letter was reportedly drafted by Working For Water chair Guy Preston.

The joint letter followed a November 2003 position paper in which World Wildlife Fund South Africa conservation director Rob Little asserted that, "Animal rights is a threat to conservation."

Little warned that according rights to animals "can lead to lack of control of introduced invasive alien species, lack of control of overabundant large native herbivores," i.e. elephants, "in protected areas where their uncontrolled population growth reduces the viability and biodiversity of ecosystems, and opposition to the sustainable consumptive use of native wildlife."

Translated Kalahari Raptor Centre co-director Chris Mercer: "As humans become more concerned with the ethical treatment of animals, this process might even result in hunters having to sell their guns. "

CAT FIGHT AT API PRIMATE SANCTUARY

SACRAMENTO--The Animal Protection Institute took an online beating from feral cat advocates, other sanctuary operators, and supporters of former API Primate Sanctuary director Lou Griffin in late April 2004 after an intern at the sanctuary in Dilley, Texas, circulated an e-mail asking for help in sterilizing 60 to 80 feral cats who dwell among the resident Japanese macaques.

Griffin and Aesop Project founder Linda Howard, a Griffin-era volunteer, agreed that the sanctuary had 19 cats when API fired Griffin in March 2002, and that all of those cats were sterilized. API contends that some cats there then were not sterilized, and that their offspring formed the present colony.

Griffin sued API after she was fired by former executive director Alan Berger, who left API himself in April 2003 and now heads the John Ancrum SPCA in South Carolina. The case is still in court.

An alternate hypothesis is that the cat population grew from abandonees between Griffin's exit, after 22 years, and the arrival of current sanctuary director Nedim Buyuk-mihci, VMD, about 18 months later.

Current API executive director Michelle Thew hired Buyukmihci to run the API sanctuary soon after her own hiring in mid-2003. Raised on the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, founded by his parents, Buyukmihci had just retired from the veterinary faculty at the University of California at Davis, and from the presidency of the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights, which he cofounded with Neill Wolfe, DVM, in 1981.

"We have made the cat issue a priority. As time and resources permit, we are working diligently to resolve this through sterilization and external marking and either re-homing the cats or returning them to a non-monkey environment on the property. The latter cats will be fed so that they will be assured of a minimum level of nourishment,"

Buyukmihci e- mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE. The API Primate Sanctuary was formerly called the Texas Snow Monkey Sanctuary and the South Texas Primate Observatory.

It was scarcely Thew's only primate-related spring headache. The spring 2004 edition of the API membership magazine urged readers to protest "torture" at the Duke University Primate Center. The item was illustrated with a photo of a monkey wearing a brain probe.

However, the Duke Univ-ersity Primate Center keeps only lemur species native to Madagascar, does not do seriously invasive research, and is primarily engaged in onserving captive populations of highly endangered lemurs, mostly in outdoor semi-natural enclosures. Founded in 1966, the most controversial project the center has ever been involved in was the 1998 reintroduction of several captive-bred lemurs to protected habitats in Madagascar. It also became controversial in 1986 when three lemurs died from exposure during an unusually severe winter, while 27 others suffered either frostbite or burns from heat lamps. The Duke Center for Neuro-engineering does do invasive research on monkeys, but is under totally different management. A correction was posted to the API web site.

AWARDS AND HONORS

Humane Farming Association investigator Gail Eisnitz, author of the 1997 expose book Slaughterhouse, is recipient of the 2004 Albert Schweitzer Medal, presented by the Animal Welfare Institute for outstanding achievement in animal welfare. In 1994-1995 Eisnitz had a significant role in exposing illegal veal industry use of the synthetic steroid clenbuterol, leading to the criminal convictions of several prominent U.S. veal producers. In April 2000 Eisnitz obtained videotape documenting extensive but still unprosecuted alleged violations of the Humane Slaughter Act at the IBP meatpacking plant in Wallula, Washington. Eisnitz has been helping Sioux opponents of factory pig farming to fight plans by Sun Prairie Inc. to establish pig barns on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota since 1998. Sun Prairie began raising pigs in 24 barns at two Rosebud sites in 1999. In February 2003, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an April 2002 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals verdict that may evict Sun Prairie from the reservationif Sun Prairie loses a crossfiled case still underway. Meanwhile Eisnitz has submitted 65 pages of employee interviews and photos to South Dakota attorney general Lawrence E. Long, asking him to prosecute Sun Prairie for multiple acts of alleged cruelty.

Lynette Shanley of Portland, Australia, founder of the advocacy organizations Primates for Primates and Wild Cats Plus, is a 2004 recipient of the World League for Protection of Animals Compassion Award. Fighting cancer since 1998, Shanley in a recent interview with Tracy Sorensen of the Australian newspaper Western Advocate mentioned as well as her concern for nonhuman primates and felines of all sorts her disgust with "People leaving dogs chained up all day, and people who deliberately run over lizards and snakes." Sorensen also noted a successful campaign that Shanley led against the use of live ducks to teach "parenting" skills to primary school children.

North Shore Animal League America volunteer and Best Friends Animal Society intern Ariel Morgan Kravitz, 15, of Manhasset Hills, New York is recipient of the first Humane Teen of the Year Award, from the National Association for Humane and Environmental Education. NAHEE is a subsidiary of the Numane Society of the U.S., long intensely critical of the no-kill approach to animal sheltering exemplified by both North Shore and Best Friends. HSUS is also sponsoring a teaching track at the Conference on Homeless Animal Management & Policy this year, organized by North Shore, founded in 1995 as the No Kill Conference.

Zhang Xingguo, 32, of Hulado, Liaoning province, China, was given the honorary title "Green Chef" on April 20 by the China Wildlife Conserv-ation Association. A chef for 13 years, Zhang Xingguo has been fired eight times for refusing to cook hedgehogs, pangolins, and other wildlife.

Lulu, 4, an eastern grey kangaroo, is to receive the Australian Animal Valor Award, the Royal SPCA announced on April 28. Cattle rancher Len Richards, 51, raised Lulu after her mother was killed by a logging truck. In September 2003 Richards was knocked out by a falling tree limb while working alone on his ranch, 100 miles east of Melbourne. Richards told Associated Press that he was apparently out for half an hour before his nephew Brendan Richards responded to frantic activity by Lulu and came to the rescue. "Brendan said she was standing over me with her big hind legs at my back," Richards said. "She looked like she'd rolled me over to keep my airway clear, but we'll never know for sure." Lulu is the second kangaroo listed in the ANIMAL PEOPLE log of heroic and compassionate animals, begun in 1994. The first was an orphan raised by Nigel Etherington, whose remote home is closest to Perth. In March 1997, several years after a kangaroon was released, he woke Etherington by pounding furiously on his door to alert him to a housefire.

ORGANIZATION NOTES

The Humane Society of the U.S. board of directors on April 24, 2004 elected senior vice president for government affairs and media Wayne Pacelle, 38, to succeed Paul Irwin as president and chief executive. Irwin, senior vice president under John Hoyt 1975-1996, and president since then, is retiring. Pacelle joined HSUS in 1994, after five years as executive director of the Fund for Animals. Pacelle was selected over chief of staff Andrew Rowan, who continues in that position, and former Maryland governor Parris Glendenning.

Farmed Animal Watch founder Mary Finelli on April 17, 2004 turned the electronic newsletter over to new editors Hedy Litke and Che Green, after two years and 47 editions. Litke also directs the New York City-based Animal News Center. Green is a longtime member of the Seattle-based Northwest Animal Rights Network. Farmed Animal Watch is jointly sponsored by Animal Place, the Animal Welfare Trust, Farm Sanctuary, the Fund for Animals, the Glaser Progress Foundation, and PETA.

A Market & Opinion Research International survey of 1,977 British adult tourists done for the Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad found in March 2004 that 64% had seen cruelty to animals while traveling overseas. 42% had seen cruelty to dogs and donkeys. A third had seen "distressing scenes" or cruelty involving horses and cats.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy in March 2004 published data from Harris Interactive Inc. indicating that PETA, Greenpeace, and the human rights organization Global Exchange are the three least trusted U.S. charities. The most trusted are Doctors Without Borders, Habitat for Humanity, and the Salvation Army. Harris surveyed 5,000 adults to develop a list of the 20 charities most familiar to Americans, and then surveyed 21,942 adults to find those with the best and worst reputations.

The Neiman Marcus Group, Inc. in a March 4, 2004 complaint to the Federal Communicat-ions Commission challenged the right of the Fund for Animals to use the web site names <www.NeimanCar-cass.com>, <www.NeimanCar-cass.org>, and <www.NeimanCar-cass.net>. The parody web sites attack Neiman Marcus fur sales. Affirming intent to continue the parodies, The Fund filed a defense on April 19.

Executives of the Ottawa Humane Society, Guelph Humane Society, and Hamilton/Burlington SPCA in April 2004 complained to CBC/Ottawa that fundraising solicitiations in their communities by the Toronto Humane Society misled donors into believing that THS provides services in their respective territories, hurting their own fundraising. Responded THS spokesperson Amy White, "Some humane societies are more successful. As a charity we are always looking to be creative."