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MONTH: March 2007

Books

Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching

by Michael Greger, M.D.
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York, NY 10003),
2006. 465 pages, hardcover. $30.00.

Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, by Humane Society of the U.S. director of public health & animal agriculture Michael Greger, M.D., is at once a meticulously researched timely warning about the potential threat to humanity from the H5N1 influzenza virus, and a book that will not be read and heeded by nearly enough people--even after a strain of H5N1 apparently jumped from factory farms in Hungary into the facilities of the British turkey producer Bernard Matthews in February 2007, underscoring most of Greger's major points.

Bernard Matthews imported turkeys from a Hungarian farm just 20 miles from a known H5N1 outbreak --and then sent 20 tons of potentially contaminated meat processed in Britain back to Hungary for sale.

Agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry have combined to create conditions which may expose humanity to a pandemic of unprecedented proportions, Greger suggests, if--or when--H5N1 mutates into a form easily transmitted from person to person.

Greger traces how factory farming has produced literally billions of genetically almost identical birds and pigs with severely compromised immune systems, each an incubator for viral mutation. The recent introduction of U.S. and European intensive confinement farming methods to southern China and parts of Southeast Asia multiplied the risk. Live poultry markets, cockfighting, and intensively raising ducks, geese, and quail are contributing factors in the spread of H5N1, but the factor of most concern is simply the proximity of high-risk birds to huge numbers of increasingly mobile people.

Greger reviews the case histories of dozens of disease outbreaks resulting from factory farming, each demonstrating how rapidly H5N1 could spread and how deadly it could become. Having accurately predicted the jump of "mad cow disease" into humans in 1994, two years before the jump was confirmed, Greger has credibility as a prophet of doom. Now as then, governments dither under the influence of lobbyists whose work is in effect to persuade lawmakers that protecting public health is less urgent than protecting profits.

As Greger points out, the U.S. more than any other nation has had the resources and opportunity to set a positive example through prevention and preparedness, but instead still enforces no effective regulation of confinement farming, and has done less by way of preparedness than at least 40 other nations. The current U.S. antiviral drug reserves could protect barely 2% of the human population against an H5N1 pandemic. The common practice of feeding factory-farmed poultry and pigs a diet including their own offal and excrement meanwhile replicates on a vast scale the experiments which in laboratory settings have exponentially amplified the virulence of viral diseases.

"Tragically, it may take a pandemic with a virus like H5N1 before the world realizes the true cost of cheap chicken," Greger concludes, after a chapter of apocalyptic recommendations about storing food and water to survive the pandemic, and an explanation of how limited supplies of the antiviral drug Tamiflu could be extended, if those who cannot get doses drink the urine of others who are dosed adequately.

Taking the discussion into the realm of "Mad Max" movies dilutes rather than strengthens the impact of Greger's arguments. Because most people feel there is little or nothing they can do to avoid end-of-the-world scenarios, from getting nuked to getting hit by a comet, these issues tend to attract less focused concern than such comparatively small threats as the possibility of an aircraft being hijacked by terrorists.

Ultimately, one must wonder whether Greger went into the "Mad Max" stuff simply because he ran out of things to say. Little of substance in Bird Flu is not repeated two or three times. But redundancy is the least of the tedious writing: interesting ideas and good stories can bear some repetition and re-examination.

Much more problematic is Greger's habit of failing to source claims and quotations, stating over and over that "one so-and-so said such-and-such" without providing a hint as to the context. Footnotes sprinkled like chicken droppings after seemingly every other sentence sometimes provide the missing information, but at least as often merely show where someone might go to look for it.

As a 150-page mass market paperback, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching might have reached tens of thousands of people who could have read it within the span of an average air trip. In the present cumbersome format, it might mostly reaffirm Greger's status as a Cassandra, to whom no one will listen until much too late. --Merritt Clifton

Hollywood Hoofbeats:
Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen

by Petrine Day Mitchum
with Audrey Pavia
BowTie Press (3 Burroughs, Irvine, CA 92618), 2006. 205 pages, hardcover. $39.95.

Coffee-table books don't come more lucidly written or thoroughly researched than Hollywood Hoofbeats, a definitive history of horse use in American film making, with frequent emphasis on humane issues.

Horses were still basic transportation when the film industry started, but began to be displaced by automobiles coincidental with the early growth of Hollywood. Film makers took advantage of an abundance of cheap cast-off horses for a time, treating them as expendible commodities.

Chapter 4 of ten chapters, titled "Unsung Horse Heroes and Humane Advances," describes how Errol Flynn led the first vocal effort to reform film makers' handling of horses. Starring with Olivia DeHaviland in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Flynn threatened to bring cruelty charges himself against the producers. An explosion of public outrage over a horse being deliberately galloped off a cliff in the 1940 Tyrone Powers vehicle Jesse James finally brought about American Humane Association supervision of animal use on the sets of Screen Actors Guild productions. SAG has no jurisdiction over off-set handling and care, however, nor over non-union and foreign productions, and the screen industry has resisted all efforts to extend the American Humane role beyond the SAG limits.

Other chapters of Hollywood Hoofbeats, focusing on individual horses, actors, films, trainers, and stables, often include insights into how humane problems were handled, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Allowed access to the archives of the American Humane Association's Hollywood office, authors Petrine Day Mitchum and Audrey Pavia are at their best in detailing how difficult and dangerous stunts were performed, sometimes using still photos to show readers details not readily visible on screen. At least once they show a bad accident just about to happen--which resulted in a serious injury to a stuntman, not the horse who landed on top of him.

Even in the early years of film-making, well-trained acting horses often won a measure of stardom, commanding top fees and preferential treatment. The price of using the most popular horses soon came to include hiring only horses from particular stables. As the best-trained horses tended to come from the stables that treated horses better at all times, the stable system helped significantly to improve movie horse treatment.

However, with the decline of westerns in the 1960s and the beginning of the continuing trend toward making films with large human and animal casts abroad, the stable system collapsed. Relatively few horses and trainers in the U.S. still specialize in film work. Some veteran observers of Hollywood horse use suspect lack of experience, among horses, trainers, and riding actors, is contributing to an increased accident rate--but statistics do not exist to prove it.

Statistics do exist to demonstrate that humans working with horses in film are injured about three times more often than the horses. This appears to have been so for as long as American Humane has monitored film sets, because while people fall off of horses, horses don't fall off of people. --Merritt Clifton

Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus

by Michael Tobias & Jane Morrison
Council Oak Books (2105 E. 15th Street, Suite B, Tulsa, OK 74104), 2006. 213 pages, hard cover. $19.95.

"This book has emerged out of our responses to donkeys: donkeys as a species and donkeys as individuals," write co-authors Michael Tobias and Jane Morrison, longtime partners in producing books and films about nature and animals, and in directing the California-based Dancing Star Foundation wildlife sanctuary.

"The book grazes, feeding on a landscape both real and historical, imagined, desired and underfoot, inspired by a creature that has, strangely, embedded itself into the very fabric of philosophy, religion, art, the environment, human history, as well as in our hearts," Tobias and Morrison continue. "Donkeys did not bray for this attention, but their own subtle beauty and gentleness have attracted our kind, while their utility has brought them loads of woe."

As well as reviewing the interaction of donkeys with humans through history, Tobias and Morrison discuss the individual personalities of donkeys. Chapter headings include "A transcendent reality begins to emerge," "The quiet solace of donkeys," "The secret imagination of donkeys’" and "The genius of donkeys."

Though Tobias and Morrison cover many events in the history of donkeys, and have often endorsed animal advocacy organizations and causes, from Animal Acres to PETA, they oddly omit any reference to the famous wild burro rescues carried out by Cleveland Amory and The Fund for Animals in Grand Canyon National Park, which helped to bring national recognition to the rise of the animal rights movement.

--Bev Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
South Africa

Fox

by Martin Wallen, & Cat, by Katherine M. Rogers
Reaktion Books Ltd. (33 Great Sutton St., London EC1M 3JU, U.K.), 2006. 206 pages each, paperback. $19.95.

Fox and Cat are the most recent editions to a Reaktion Books series now including 21 titles.

Martin Wallen, an English professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, presents not a book about fox behavior by an expert on animals, but rather a study of the relationship between fox and human as gleaned from books, history, and film. Although Wallen offers a taxonomical look at the fox family tree, he mostly deals with myths, folk tales, and allegories.

Perhaps the most unusual belief about foxes is the notion that they can assume human form, occuring in several cultures, apparently persisting today in remote parts of Japan.

Foxes have historically been identified by the superstitious with evil, though evil deeds involving foxes have always been the work of humans, with foxes the victims. For instance, the Biblical warrior Samson is supposed to have burnt 300 foxes alive in order to set fire to Philistine cornfields.

A chapter on fox hunting takes a dispassionate look at the history of foxhunting in England, its ritual importance to the aristocracy and social climbers, and the dishonesty of the pro-hunting arguments.

But Wallen might be stretching the political psychology of the 2005 British ban on foxhunting when he writes that "In banning fox hunting their intention is not to save the foxes, but rather to realign control over the countryside. Just as Oliver Cromwell's soldiers slaughtered the King's stags in order to end Royalist control over the land, so Labour has again stymied the aristocratic regulation of the landscape through the institution of fox hunting."

While there was an element of class struggle in the ban on fox hunting, animal welfare was clearly a central concern; and the ban applies to working class varieties of hunting with dogs such as lamping and lurching, as well as to the pursuits of those who can afford to keep horses.

Wallen reviews the history of how wearing fox fur began, the rise of fur farms, and the present tension between the fur industry and anti-cruelty campaigners.

"But the ubiquity of fox fur," Wallen concludes, "especially as it has come to be disguised as unreal fur, reminds us that, however we condemn them, torment them, trap them and exploit them, foxes live close to human culture by defining the limits of that culture."

What exactly that means is anyone's guess.

Cat author Katherine M. Rogers reviews the cultural history and symbolic meanings of the domestic cat, deified as the Goddess Bastet in ancient Egypt but persecuted with horrifying cruelty in medieval Europe.

In contrast to European attitudes, Mohammed taught that Allah requires kindness to all creatures, and was especially fond of cats. Cat purges in Europe at least twice preceded devastating outbreaks of bubonic plague, carried by the fleas on rodents. Plague also ravaged southern China after cat-eating started circa 1350. The Islamic world, however, remained relatively healthy.

After the last of the major cat purges, in the early17th century, Europeans began to accept cats as house pet, as attested in many paintings by famous artists. In recent decades cats have surpassed dogs in popularity in both the U.S. and Britain, coinciding with female economic emancipation and a surge in the number of female-headed households.

Cats have always been more closely associated with women in symbolic terms, especially in representing seductive traits. And even the street-wise slob tomcat Garfield dominates by wile a mild-mannered man.

Cats have also always been seen as more independent than dogs--and this may suit the times.
Rogers maintains that as we become less comfortable with a hierarchical society, we expect cats (and dogs) to be equal companions more than property, and we have began to use terms such as "guardian’" rather then "owner," to emphasize a cultural shift away from expecting that pet keepers should dominate and control their animals, instead of simply appreciating them.

--Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.com>

Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty:
A Guide for Veterinary & Law Enforcement Professionals

by Leslie Sinclair, DVM, Melinda Merck, DVM,
& Randall Lockwood, Ph.D.
Humane Society Press (c/o Humane Society of the U.S., 2100 L St., NW, Washington, DC 20037), 2006. 262 pages, paperback. $59.95.

Cruelty investigators and shelter veterinarians who take their jobs seriously will read Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty cover to cover, then wear it to tatters re-reading and referencing it. The $59.95 price tag is steep for a paperback book, but the information within it can save the cover cost many times over in resolving even one cruelty case, by saving investigative time, helping investigators to avoid false alarms and dead ends, bringing more perpetrators to justice, and winning more convictions on stronger charges.

Though fluently written, Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty will not be easy reading for non-professionals. Chapters headings include Thermal Injuries, Blunt Force Trauma, Sharp Force Injuries, Projectile Injuries, Asphixia, Drowning, Poisoning, Neglect, Animal Hoarding, Animal Sexual Assault, Occult & Ritualistic Abuse, and Dogfighting & Cockfighting. Each chapter includes detailed discussion of what to expect, what to look for, and how to handle the evidence. Several chapters also review the sociology and demographics of typical offenders.

The discussion of Occult & Ritualistic Abuse offers an especially valuable description of the differences among the practices of the various animal-using religions. The authors rebut the common notion that "witches" and "Satanists" who participate in organized rituals are inclined to harm animals, noting that the number of verified cases is practically nil. Ritualistic animal killing is far more often the work of isolated individuals whom the authors call "self-styled Satanists," and teenagers, whom the authors call "youth subculture Satanists."

Natural predator and scavenger behavior often results in false alarms about alleged ritualistic killings, as ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out in November 1998 and September 2003. Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty provides similar analysis, and adds particulars about "cattle mutilation" cases, which typically result from observers failing to recognize how coyotes, crows, and magpies go about dismembering a cattle carcass. Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty does not quite cover everything useful to know about predator and scavenger behavior when investigating alleged cruelty, especially in cases involving hawks, owls, and eagles--but that material is accessible in the ANIMAL PEOPLE articles, and what the book includes is far more than has previously been included in humane investigation training materials.

--Merritt Clifton

Cats Of Africa

by Luke Hunter
Photography by Gerald Hinde
Johns Hopkins U. Press (2715 N. Charles St., Baltimore,
MD 21218), 2006. 176 pages, hardcover. $39.95.

As well as the well-known lion, leopard, and cheetah, and the less familiar but still reasonably common caracal, serval and African wildcat, Africa hosts the golden cat, jungle cat, sand cat, and blackfooted cat. Cats of Africa author Luke Hunter, a Wildlife Conservation Society carnivore specialist, covers them all--but his volume is not to be confused with the distnguished Cats of Africa by Anthony Hall-Martin and Paul Boseman, published in 1998, now out of print.

We were surprised to read that "none of the big cats purr." This has been alleged by others, but we have personal experience that cheetahs purr, a loud deep purr sounding much like a small motorbike. Lion expert Paul Hart, of the Drakenstein Lion Park near Cape Town, South Africa, advises that lionesses in heat express themselves by what could be described as purring.

Cats of Africa suffers from Hunter's effort to cover everything from taxonomy to animal behavior to the pro-hunting arguments for all 10 species of cat. Much of the detail he presents may be of absorbing interest to biologists, but means little to others, while observations such as "Cheetah have a harder time surviving in habitat where lions are present" tend to belabor the obvious.

Hunter asserts that, "For considerable parts of Africa the only realistic solution" to habitat conservation "is hunting. There is no doubt," he claims, "that hunting makes a substantial contribution to protecting African wilderness. Concessions given to trophy hunting comprise huge areas of many African countries, and the revenue generated by the industry ensures that governments do not consider those areas for alternative uses like agriculture or cattle."

This sweeping statement would not bear serious analysis, even without the example of seven years of government-promoted land invasions in Zimbabwe, which have reduced countless former hunting ranches to degraded pasture.

First, hunting is notoriously difficult to police or supervise, with abuses widespread. Hunting stunts wildlife by reversing natural selection to take out the big and strong instead of the sick and weak. Target species live in a state of elevated stress. Hunting ranches offer a façade of wildlife habitat, but the habitat is often extensively manipulated to build concentrations of target species in accessible areas.

Thus Hunters' statement really amounts to an argument that allowing hunters to terrorise wildlife can be called conservation if the activity keeps out cattle. But often hunting ranch operators keep cattle as well.

Hunter refers with approval to the Ju-Hoan project in Namibia, where a settled Bushman community was given an opportunity to tap into ecotourism. But Hunter fails to mention the experiment failed dismally because the Bushmen would not refrain from killing leopards, no matter how much more money they made from tourists.

This is not a book for animal lovers.

--Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
South Africa

Kinship With The Wolf

by Tanja Askani
Park Street Press (One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767), 2006.
144 pages, paperback. $19.95

The text accompanying this collection of superb portrait photographs of wolves describes the social lives and behavior of a family of wolves living in captivity at the Luneburger Heide Wildlife Reserve in Germany. Author Tanja Askani gives an absorbing account of the emotional lives of wolves, and of their complex social structures and rituals.

Askani mentions that some wolves take an instinctive dislike to a particular person for no apparent reason, and gives a fascinating description of how wolf family life can give leadership lessons to business executives. She includes a particularly interesting chapter on the status of wolves in Europe, reviewing the current wolf population estimates and conservation initiatives in each nation of the European Union. Outside the EU, wolves continue to be viciously persecuted in Norway and Russia. Even within the EU, where wolves are nominally protected, the protections are often not enforced.

About a third of the entire European wolf population, estimated at about 3,000, inhabits the Carpathian mountains of Romania. Another 800 wolves roam parts of Poland. But wolves are hunted in both Romania and Poland--and in Finland, which has fewer than 200 wolves.

The reputed voraciousness of wolves scarcely matches that of the humans who are hellbent on killing them. --Chris Mercer

Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo

by Lawrence Anthony, with Graham Spence
Thomas Dunne Books (c/o St. Martin's Press, 175 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2007. 240 pages, paperback. $23.95.

At the same time that ANIMAL PEOPLE received a web link to a video clip of U.S. troops stoning an injured dog in early 2007, we received a link to another video clip showing lions being released from cages to kill and eat several donkeys, as soldiers cheered.

"Three times per week the zoo keeper buys donkeys to feed the starving lions," the caption said.
This is not how Earth Organization founder Lawrence Anthony taught the Baghdad Zoo staff to operate, after making his way there from South Africa because he thought the zoo animals might need help after the U.S. military invaded Baghdad in May 2003.

Anthony did give staff members money to buy donkeys as lion food, he admits in Babylon's Ark, because no other meat was available. But he also brought the zoo's slaughterman back to work by paying him--and all the staff--long owed back wages.

With frequent help from sympathetic soldiers, Anthony improvised a watering system for the animals, to replace a system damaged by fighting and dismantled by looters. He drove looters out of the zoo, expanded the depleted menagerie by taking in the remnants of the private animal collection of Saddam Hussein's even more murderous son Udai, and added more animals by closing a notoriously substandard private zoo on the far side of Baghdad.

Anthony also encouraged and assisted volunteer zoo veterinarian Farah Murrani in founding the Iraq Animal Welfare Society, which for nearly two years operated from the zoo premises--although Murrani herself was forced to flee death threats in late 2004.

In addition, Anthony led efforts to recover whatever remained of Saddam Hussein's renowned private horse collection. In mid-2005 the horses were returned to the government of Iraq as a national treasure. The last public act of the Iraq Animal Welfare Society appears to have been relaying to the horses' government caretakers funding and equipment for the horses collected by U.S. horse trainer Ed Littlefox, who called his project Tack for Iraq.

Anthony intended for Babylon's Ark to end happily, with the Baghdad Zoo again accommodating the millions of visitors who walked the grounds in better times. He did not expect the conditions to regress to what they were at Udai's facility, where political opponents and rivals for the interest of young women were apparently thrown to the lions--and where U.S. interrogators threatened to feed entrepreneurs Thahe Mohammed Sabbar, 37, and Sherzad Kamal Khalid, 35, to the lions, Sabbar and Khalid alleged in a June 2006 press conference.

Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, Sabbar and Khalid in March 2006 sued the U.S. government for other purported interrogation abuses, but did not mention the lion incident in their court case, which would have occurred before Anthony's arrival.

Anthony anticipated Baghdad returning to civilization. As with other declarations of "Mission accomplished," his hopes were premature. --Merritt Clifton