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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January-February 2009:

Editorial:

Money spent to help animals would not be lost

Parables in every faith warn against hoarding wealth, instead of using it to good purpose. Those who doubt the wisdom of the sages might look instead to the headlines.
The New York Times on page one of the last day of 2008 observed that Wall Street losses during the year had eradicated every gain made since 2001, the most recent previous year of economic downturn.
Another New York Times page one item discussed the losses to charities resulting from the activities of former NASDAQ chair Bernard Madoff, who is charged with bilking investors of $50 billion. Among the victims were many of the wealthiest nonprofit foundations in the U.S., and investment funds that handled the assets of possibly thousands of other charities and individual donors. The extent of the damage will take months to assess.
Both the Wall Street crash and the Madoff scam underscore the wisdom of investing money donated to charity in the work of the charity--and so did the high tech stock crash of 2001, which deeply eroded the reserves of animal charities. Some animal charities whose boards envisioned high tech as a cruelty-free way to get rich quick have now lost their assets twice in less than a decade.
The conventional "conservative" strategy for managing nonprofit assets calls for investing bequests and other large gifts in accounts which will produce dividends or interest, and then using the proceeds to further the work of the charity. The principle furthers the work of the bank or mutual fund or whatever other investment institution holds it.
If a charity keeps too much money invested, and receives more money from dividends and interest than from public donations, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service may reclassify it as a private foundation, meaning that it may no longer issue tax-exempt receipts to donors. Therefore, charities often dedicate all returns from investment to fundraising. The more they have invested, the more fundraising they can do, so they use only part of the money raised directly from the public in support of their mission, and invest the rest.
The net result is that wealthy charities' investment portfolios often grow much more rapidly than their program service. Indeed, if donations slump, some large charities may actually cut back program service in order to avoid using any of the money that deceased donors left to them to actually do the work that attracted the legacies in the first place.
Charities that did this during the past eight years may now be right back where they were in 2001. Years of receipts that might have funded hugely expanded programs have evaporated with only lines of red ink in charities' ledgers to show for it. The element of risk involved in their investments may be less obvious than if they had taken donors' money to Las Vegas instead of Wall Street, but speculative investments offer the possibility of higher returns than bank interest precisely because they are a form of gambling.
Charities that invested in program service, including ANIMAL PEOPLE, may have struggled all along, and be struggling still, as we are, but can point toward years of having used everything received to help animals, in fulfillment of donor expectations.
It is often said that charities should be managed like businesses, and there is much to be said for using successful business strategies where appropriate. The purpose of a business, however, is profit. The purpose of a charity is to solve a social problem so effectively that the charity may move on to another mission or disband. To amass wealth while the social problem a charity was founded to address continues to fester is to disregard the reason why charities enjoy tax exemptions: to encourage investment in work which would not be done if the motivation was to make money.

Lessons from the Great Depression

Pundits and bloggers around the world have remarked on parallels between the economic conditions challenging incoming U.S. President Barack Obama and those that Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted when he began his first of four terms as U.S. President in January 1933. The National Humane Review, published by the American Humane Association, presented economic commentaries throughout 1933 which except for some archaic language might have been written in 2008 or 2009. Then too, huge sums were lost which might have been invested in humane work, but instead were invested as the business people on humane society boards recommended, with no net benefit to anyone.
National Humane Review editors Sydney H. Coleman and Richard C. Craven in 1933 published much else of present relevance, and not just because of historical parallels.
Among Franklin D. Roosevelt's early misjudgments, as The National Humane Review noted immediately, was appointing Kentucky-born cockfighting enthusiast Robert Hayes Gore (1886-1972) to become Governor of Puerto Rico.
Forgotten in recent years, amid successful efforts to abolish legal cockfighting in Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, is that as of 1933 cockfighting was already illegal in all 48 states that were then part of the U.S., and had been illegal in Puerto Rico, as well, for more than three decades. The abolition of legal cockfighting throughout the U.S. during the past 20 years merely recouped losses suffered during the mid-20th century.
James R. Beverley, a Texan who served two terms as Governor of Puerto Rico, undid the Puerto Rican ban on cockfighting as one of his last acts before leaving office.
Robert Hayes Gore in his July 1, 1933 inauguration speech declared his intent to boost the Puerto Rican economy by promoting an annual "great carnival of cockfighting." Less than a week later he attended a cockfight organized in his honor.
Gore was removed from office due to corruption and incompetence within less than eight months. The chief legacy of his tenure was the growth of the Puerto Rican cockfighting industry, which now purports to be of indigenous heritage.
Comparably bastardized history lies behind the U.S. hunting ranch or "canned hunt" industry. "Canned hunt" promoters commonly pretend that shooting captive-reared trophy animals in small enclosures was introduced in Texas in the mid-1930s by World War I fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, as if Rickenbacker's feats as the first U.S. "ace" might somehow make shooting a penned animal seem braver.
However, Associated Press and Time magazine extensively exposed the actual introduction of "canned hunts" to the U.S. in October 1932. The National Humane Review summarized their reports in March 1933.
The actual culprit was one Duncan M. Wright, of St. Louis. "All around him was hostility," reported Time. "In Mississippi County waited a sheriff with an insanity warrant. In Cape Girardeau County waited 800 vigilantes determined that he should hunt no lions there."
But eventually four lions were massacred as result of Wright's exploits. The Humane Society of Missouri and American Humane Association did everything they could to try to stop the hunts, including sending two humane officers to the scene, who "drove all night, 200 miles in a terrible thundering rain storm. The last 14 miles they had to ride on mules in order to get through the gumbo mud," The National Humane Review recounted, but to no avail. There was no law they could invoke to stop the killing, "because no legislature had ever conceived the possibility of a man buying circus lions," as Wright did, "and manufacturing his hunt in the bullrushes of a Mississippi island."
There appeared to be considerable weight of public opinion behind legislation proposed to ban any further hunts of a similar nature, but the bills apparently died because the legislators did not imagine anyone else would be fool enough to emulate Wright. But other landmark humane legislation did advance.
National Humane Review editors Coleman and Craven might have been dismayed to read in the December 2008 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE that the American Veterinary Medical Association has adopted a resolution opposing ear-cropping and tail-docking dogs, because Pennsylvania banned ear-cropping in May 1933, with other states expected to follow. The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society won the first conviction for ear-cropping two months later. The $25 fine was sufficiently daunting that in an unrelated case adjudicated at about the same time, convicted Brooklyn dogfighter Henry Smith, 42, chose to serve 10 days in jail rather than pay $25.
The National Humane Review in 1933 vigorously exposed the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt, which had already been opposed by the global humane community since circa 1900.
On December 27, 2008 the Canadian Department of Fisheries & Oceans sought to evade a proposed European Union ban on imports of seal products by announcing that sealers may no longer club seals who are more than one year old.
"Banning the use of hakapiks," as seal clubs are called, "to kill seals older than one year does little," responded Humane Society International Canada director Rebecca Aldworth, "given that 97% of the seals killed in Canada are less than three months old. Furthermore, the Marine Mammal Regulations, regardless of any amendments, cannot be enforced. For decades, veterinary panels have concluded that adequate monitoring of the commercial seal hunt does not occur and is a practical impossibility."
This was the conclusion of the humane community in 1933 too, in response to offers of similar regulations.
The city of Colorado Springs, effective on January 1, 2009, is the most recent of dozens of communities to introduce cat licensing. Cat licensing proposals are typically promoted as potential sources of income for animal control and as incentives for keepers of pet cats to keep them at home, but tend to be most vigorously promoted by birders who hope to use licensing requirements to cripple neuter/return programs and expedite the capture and extermination of feral cats. The idea is that if animal control agencies think they can make money by rounding up unlicensed cats and holding them for ransom, they will inevitably round up ferals, and kill them when they go unclaimed. Though this does nothing to lastingly reduce the feral cat population, unlike neuter/return, it satisfies the demand of birders that cats who stalk their feeders be terminated now.
There were few animal control departments in the U.S. in 1933, but similar cat licensing schemes were ceaselessly promoted by birders then, too, in alliance with hunters who hoped to be allowed to shoot cats. The Connecticut legislature alone defeated three cat-licensing proposals in 1933. Sixteen years later, a hunter-backed scheme to license cats cleared the Illinois legislature, but was memorably vetoed by Governor Adlai Stevenson. The veto appears to have halted efforts to license cats for about 40 years--until neuter/return began catching on, reducing the feral cat population by about 75% within a decade but increasing the visibility of the survivors.
Animal control in 1933 was still done primarily by private contractors. This practice fell into disrepute after private contractors were repeatedly caught stealing pet dogs to sell to laboratories as alleged unclaimed strays. One such incident brought to light in 1933 resulted in Des Moines, Iowa firing a private dogcatcher who had done the job for 18 years. The Animal Rescue League has kept impounded dogs in Des Moines ever since.
Laboratory animal supply was probably more a national issue in 1933 than at any time recently, partly because of the anti-vivisectionist leanings of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Readers in three nations were horrified in January 1934 when 300 monkeys shipped from Calcutta to New York City suffered from severe cold during a stop at Halifax, en route. Many died. The National Humane Review noted that in view of the experiments that were to be performed on the monkeys, the dead may have been the lucky ones.
India has not exported monkeys for lab use since 1978, and monkeys now are flown to labs, not shipped, but the Animal Welfare Network Nepal and Stop Monkey Business Campaign on December 12, 2008 disclosed that among 310 rhesus macaques raised in Nepal for export to the U.S. during the year, "at least 30 were deemed unfit and euthanized." As many more died a "natural death." Another 133 monkeys were diseased. In short, 75 years has brought little improvement in the monkey business.
As Coleman and Craven wrote, "We protest with all our might against the cruelty involved. Nothing could justify it."
A frequent contributor to The National Humane Review in 1933 was Bhagat Ram, secretary of the Animals' Friend Society in Ludhiana, Punjab, India. Bhagat Ram wrote about the use and misuse of working oxen, horses, mules, and donkeys in India in words closely resembling those of Friendicoes SECA founder Geeta Seshamani in her October 2008 ANIMAL PEOPLE guest column "Remembering Marco."
The column concerned the January 2007 rescue of an injured working donkey from alongside the Delhi/Agra highway by ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett. The donkey spent the remainder of his life at the Friendicoes SECA Gurgaon Sanctuary just outside Delhi.
What has changed since 1933 is that Bhagat Ram could only wish for projects such as Friendicoes, the Gurgaon Sanctuary, and the two Friendicoes mobile equine clinics, one of them funded by ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Bhagat Ram also called for better treatment of Indian street dogs and feral cats, attacked the captive bird trade, denounced animal sacrifice, and exposed the mismanagement of overcrowded and filthy gaushalas and pinjarapoles, as cow shelters are called.
In July 1933 Bhagat Ram objected to traveling exhibitors of "unhappy wretched monkeys and bears." On the same page The National Humane Review approvingly noted that "All licenses for leading performing bears through the country have been cancelled by the ministry of agriculture of Germany," presuming that this was done for the bears' benefit. Eight years later The National Humane Review apologized for failing to recognize that this edict was actually issued as an early act of Nazi discrimination against gypsies, and not so that bears should no longer be led about to "dance."
Coleman, Craven, and Bhagat Ram would be gratified to see the work of Wildlife SOS, founded by Geeta Seshamani and Kartick Satyanarayan.
"Six years after the first rescued 'dancing bear' arrived at the Agra Bear Rescue Center, Wildlife S.O.S has rescued its 500th sloth bear from a life of misery and suffering," Satyanarayan announced on December 23, 2008.
Among the many reminders in 1933 editions of The National Humane Review of how much that era presaged the present, two of the most poignant concern captive elephants.
At the Kapiolani Park Zoo in Honolulu, elephant keeper George Conradt resigned in protest over the miserable conditions that the zoo elephant, Daisy, had to endure. For the next two and a half months Daisy stood shackled to a tree. Hawaiian Humane Society president Gertrude M. Damon recommended that Daisy should be shot, rather than being left out like that, in all weather. This generated controversy that enabled the zoo to raise $8,000 toward the cost of building an elephant stockade. Conradt returned to work with Daisy--but she killed him.
"Latest reports indicated that the money subscribed toward the stockade would be turned over to the widow of the deceased keeper," The National Humane Review concluded. "The entire story will cause many people to ask themselves if zoos are worth the price."
Three months later The National Humane Review reported the death of Tusko, 42, at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle--reputedly the largest elephant in captivity. Acquired by the A.G. Barnes Circus in 1922, an ancestor of the Carson & Barnes circus of today, Tusko finished his circus days with a rampage at Sedro Woolley, Washington, in which he destroyed 20 cars and a house. Thereafter he was exhibited in Portland before being sold to the Woodland Park Zoo.
Editorialized the Portland Journal, "He was a vivid example of inhumanity. He was the product of the jungle. He belonged to the jungle. And there could be no place for him in civilization. To keep him as he was kept, by chains, hobbles, enclosures, and other implements of force and tyranny, was cruelty, brutality, inhumanity. He was untamed and untamable. He had a right to resist fetters and shacklesŠIn his own heaven, if elephants have a Valhalla, Tusko is back in the jungle, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
These words may sound as if taken directly from the current campaign literature of In Defense of Animals, in the U.S, or Compassion Unlimited Plus Action, in India, among other organizations now waging prominent campaigns on behalf of captive elephants. But this appeal for elephant rights came from an anonymous writer for a mainstream newspaper in the depths of the Great Depression, who could scarcely have imagined the animal advocacy movement of today--and may not have imagined that it would ever be necessary.
The humane movement of 1933 was broke but optimistic. Entering 2009, still confronting so many of the same issues, we must wonder what if all of the funding donated to help animals but lost to bad investments in the interim, or remaining in investment accounts, had been put to work as the donors intended.

Animal obituaries

Lelani, 13, a German shepherd adopted from an animal shelter who became foster mother to the orphaned bear cubs rehabilitated by Idaho Black Bear Rehab in Garden City, Idaho, died on December 28, 2008. "Until LeLani," recalled Idaho Black Bear Rehab founder Sally Maughn, "single cubs would bawl and pace when they were left alone in our outdoor enclosures. I couldn't be with them all the time, so LeLani was a blessing to both the cubs and me. Now comes the decision of trying to get another 'bear dog' or not, and will I ever find one as good with the cubs as LeLani was."

Joseph 'Levi' Travis, 15, companion to realtor and Best Friends Network regional coordinator Carmel Travis of Pullman, Washington, died of complications from melanoma on November 26, 2008 in Moscow, Idaho. Losing a leg at age seven, Levi became an ambassador for special needs dogs as well as for mutts, greeting many and perhaps most of the 660-plus attendees at the Best Friends "No More Homeless Pets" conference in Las Vegas in October 2008.

Bamm-Bamm, seven months, a deer found as a newborn on Mother's Day 2008 by Patricia Sears of Gaston County, North Carolina, was confiscated and killed by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission as contraband captive wildlife on December 30, 2009.

India, 18, the White House cat throughout the tenure of former U.S. President George W. Bush, died on January 4, 2008. A present to the Bush twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, when they were nine years old, India was named after then-Texas Rangers outfielder Rueben Sierra, whose nickname was "El Indio." George W. Bush co-owned the Rangers at the time.

Izan, 8, "a male western lowland gorilla who became an international symbol of illegal trade as part of the so-called Taiping Four, died on December 26, 2008 at the Limbe Wildlife Center in Cameroon following a lengthy illness," reported Pan African Sanctuary Alliance coordinator Doug Cress. "The Taiping Four," Cress explained, "were illegally captured as infants from the wild in Cameroon in 2001, smuggled to Nigeria, and transferred under forged permits to the Taiping Zoo in Malaysia. After the deal was uncovered, the government of Malaysia confiscated the gorillas and sent them to the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa despite repeated requests from Cameroon for their return. A consortium of animal conservation and welfare organizations lobbied aggressively for the
repatriation of the gorillas, and the Taiping Four were sent to the Limbe Wildlife Center in late 2007."

Cinci Freedom, 13, a Charolais cow who escaped from a Cincinnati meatpacking plant in 2002 and became a folk heroine while eluding capture in a city park for 10 days, was euthanized on December 29, 2008 at the Farm Sanctuary location near Watkins Glen, New York, after losing the use of her hind legs due to spinal cancer. Eventually tranquilized by the Cincinnati SPCA, Cinci was ceremonially presented with a key to the city, then transferred to Farm Sanctuary at request of artist Peter Max, who sponsored her transportation. At Farm Sanctuary she lived with several other cows who made renowned escapes from slaughterhouses, named Queenie, Maxine, and Annie Dodge.

The Hog Heaven Pack, 19 wolves who inhabited the Brown's Meadow and Niarada regions southwest of Kalispell in northwest Montana, were massacred by USDA Wildlife Services during the first week of December 2008 for repeatedly attacking livestock. Eight pack members were killed earlier in the year. Fifteen of the last 19 were not yet hunting on their own, said Suzanne Asha Stone, Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife.

Obituaries

Phyllis Jean Stoner Clifton, 79, mother of ANIMAL PEOPLE editor Merritt Clifton, died on December 19, 2008 at home in Bellingham, Washington. Becoming a vegetarian in 1949, upon marriage to Jack Clifton, who survives her, she remained vegetarian during long hospitalizations in the 1950s and 1960s, when hospitals rarely accommodated vegetarian patients. A schoolteacher in parts of four decades, she reviewed 29 biographies, novels, and books about cats for ANIMAL PEOPLE, 1992-1997, and contributed to many other periodicals until the onset of her terminal illness inhibited her ability to write.

Gavin Best, "an experienced and well respected handler of captive elephants used in their tourist elephant-back safari rides, was killed earlier this week by one of the elephants in his care," reported Zimbabwe Wildlife Conservation Task Force founder Johnny Rodrigues on December 18, 2008. Best and his wife Shaylene had managed the Wild Horizons Wildlife Sanctuary & Orphan-age near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, since 2000. They previously managed the Imbabala Safari Camp for 12 years. Earlier, Gavin Best spent 10 years with the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks & Wildlife. Gavin Best told Earthyear magazine that elephants should never be forcibly removed from wild herds. He worked with orphaned elephants who would not survive without human care. He recommended using only reward-based positive reinforcement to train elephants, and emphasized the importance of elephants trusting their handlers. Wild Horizons "suspended their elephant tourism interactions whilst the incident is investigated," Rodrigues said.

Kuni Raman, 70, of Kerala, India, mahout for a logging elephant employed by a coffee plantation, was killed by the elephant on December 18, 2008 when the elephant became "wild" and Raman tried to shackle him, reported the Deccan Herald.

Prasad of Manimala, 39, a mahout who was walking alongside a logging elephant, was killed on January 2, 2009 at Perinad-Vayaranmaruthi, Kerala, India, when the elephant fell on top of him. A second mahout, Manoj of Ranni, 30, was riding the elephant and was hurt, but survived, said The Hindu.

D. Carleton Gajdusek, 85, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for medicine for discoveries about prionic diseases, died on December 12, 2008 in Tromso, Norway. Gajdusek in 1957 recognized ritual cannibalism of the brains of dead ancestors as the cause of transmission of kuru, a disease similar to "mad cow disease," among the Fore people of New Guinea. In 1966 Gajdusek confirmed his theory by transmitting kuru to chimpanzees. Neurologist Stanley Prusiner of University of California at San Francisco won the 1997 Nobel Prize for medicine for identifying rogue proteins called prions as the actual mechanisms of transmission. This led to laws now in effect in most developed nations against recycling the remains of slaughtered cattle in cattle feed.

Amy Samuels, 57, died of cancer on December 9, 2008 at her home in West Falmouth, Massachusetts. Samuels studied dolphins in California and Hawaii, baboons in Kenya, "and later was a behavioral biologist at the Brookfield Zoo," near Chicago, recalled Bryan Marquard of the Boston Globe, before joining the staff of the Woods Hole Oceano-graphic Institution." Samuels also studied dolphins at the Monkey Mia Research Foundation in western Australia. She wrote a children's book, Follow That Fin: Studying Dolphin Behavior (2000), and investigated the effects of dolphin-watching boats on dolphins, but her best known contribution to animal behavioral research was discovering how dolphins resolve conflicts. "Others had noticed the fights among animals, but hadn't noticed the more subtle way they reconciled," Woods Hole senior scientist Peter Tyack told Marquard. "Amy noticed gentle touching between animals after those kinds of fights and realized they seemed to be a reconciliation behavior."

Joe Bergeron, 58, died of an apparent heart attack on December 20, 2008 in Prince Edward County, Ontario. Bergeron and his wife Pat operated Bergeron's Exotic Animal Sanctuary for more than 20 years, often conflicting with neighbors and the Ontario SPCA. Seasonally open to visitors, Bergeron's Exotic Animal Sanctuary experienced escapes by pigs, cattle, a peacock, and a Japanese macaque named Julian. A second macaque who escaped with Julian in September 2008 was reportedly killed when he jumped within a paw-swipe of a caged puma.

Margaret Molnar, 86, died on December 23, 2008. Settling in Taylor Township, Michigan, in 1960, Molnar kept as many as 150 peacocks, chickens, pheasants, and quail in her backyard pens, assisted by two adult special needs sons. Though licensed to raise birds by the state Department of Natural Resources, she often clashed with local officials after the township became the city of Taylor in 1968. The Michigan Humane Society charged her with neglect, confiscated her birds, and killed them in 2000. The city bulldozed her pens. But Molnar was acquitted. Fellow bird breeders helped her to build new pens. Her flock had increased to 80-90 birds when she was charged again in July 2008. In November 2008 she was ordered to keep no more than 16 birds, to allow city inspections of her property, and to show proof of monthly visits by an exterminator. The remaining birds were to be removed upon her death.

Safari Kakule, a gorilla ranger at Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was killed near Tshiaberimu on January 11, 2009 in a firefight with Mai Mai rebels. Kakule and six other rangers were reportedly attacked without warning while on patrol. Far outnumbered, they captured a Mai Mai officer. "More than 150 rangers have been killed in the line of duty in Congo over the past decade due to the ongoing war," said Wildlife Direct.

BOOKS

Arctic Fox: Life At The Top Of The World

by Garry Hamilton, with photographs by Norbert Rosing
Firefly Books (P.O. Box 1338, Ellicot Station, Buffalo, NY 14205), 2006. 239 pages, hardcover, illustrated. $39.95.

To be familiar with foxes and then meet an Arctic fox is to be profoundly surprised. Most foxes, even raised in captivity for generations, are shy and nervous, reluctant to be seen except when a red fox is attempting to decoy a perceived threat away from a vixen and kits. Then, brazen though the red fox will act for a moment, he will vanish just as soon as his family is safe.
An Arctic fox will walk right up with two questions in her eyes. First, do you have something to eat? If not, can you play? Arctic foxes love to play peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek, chase games, and even tug-of-war--but they will be off in a flash if they capture anything they think might be edible.
Most closely related to the swift foxes of the U.S. west, Arctic foxes are among the fastest of mammals, and among the widest-ranging, sometimes meandering thousands of miles from wherever scientists managed to tag them.
Able to withstand the coldest temperatures of any mammal, Arctic foxes have been seen just 37 miles from the North Pole, where even polar bears are not known to venture. Arctic foxes do not amicably share food with siblings, even as kits, but otherwise seem cheerful and sociable, if only to find a chance to steal edibles.
In November 2006 I noted in reviewing The World of the Polar Bear by photographer Norbert Rosing that, "As well as capturing almost every aspect of wild polar bear life, Norbert Rosing provides many memorable shots of the creatures who share their habitat, especially Arctic foxes, who along with ravens are polar bears' frequent sidekicks. Rosing even caught one Arctic fox in the act of nipping at a polar bear's heels-- perhaps, Rosing speculated, to urge the bear to go hunt a seal for both of them. The bear shows no sign of inclination to harm the fox."
Fewer Rosing photos appear in Arctic Fox: Life At The Top Of The World, but author Garry Hamilton provides substantially more text. Though the format is that of a coffee table book, I found it a page-turner.
Much like their distant coyote kin, Arctic foxes have endured intensive hunting and trapping with scant harm to their population, rapidly recovering to the carrying capacity of their harsh habitat. Seen as pests and quite cruelty treated by early Arctic explorer Wilhelm Stellar and his marooned crew in 1741, Arctic foxes were pets and rat-catchers for several British expeditions, including the doomed crew of the Franklin in 1848.
Arctic fox fur came into vogue among Parisian prostitutes circa 1870, Hamilton recounts, but was not worn much by other women until after World War I. Then fox fur of all kinds came into style. The traditional Inuit culture collapsed as Inuit quit subsistence hunting to trap foxes--but after World War II, fox farming supplanted trapping as the chief source of fox fur. Eventually fox fur fell out of fashion. Inuit raised during and after the fox fur boom found they could no longer live as their forebears had.
Iceland from the 13th century until late in the 20th century tried to extirpate Arctic foxes as purported threats to sheep. Icelandic fox biologist Pall Hertsteinsson, hired circa 1980 to head the fox eradication program, instead demonstrated through studies that even if Arctic foxes hunted sheep in ancient times, they no longer do, and in 1994 won the repeal of bounties on foxes. The Icelandic fox population has since increased tenfold.
Though Arctic foxes are no longer persecuted, either for pelts or as predators, they are now particularly challenged by global warming. Polar bears are the iconic endangered species most at risk from the retreating Arctic ice pack, but Arctic foxes share the same habitat. Just as polar bears are superbly adapted to ice and ocean, but not to compete with grizzlies on dry land, Arctic foxes tend to be rapidly driven out by larger red foxes wherever their territories meet.
Unfortunately, Hamilton writes on pages 158-159, "Researchers know little about what kind of toll rabies takes on arctic foxes. On the one hand, there is evidence that rabies may at times be present in as much as 75% of a given population. But the presence of the virus doesn't always lead to death or even disease, so what percentage of the population suffers during an outbreak remains unknown."
Authenticated rabies in any species is so close to invariably fatal that the rare possible nonfatal exposures reported in widely separated studies are generally believed to have other explanations, such as sampling or testing errors. The incubation time for rabies in most species may vary from two weeks to 90 days, depending on the infection site, and occasionally is longer. Clinical experiments on Arctic foxes found incubation times ranging from eight days to six months.
Questioned about his claims concerning rabies, Hamilton sent three studies, none either demonstrating or asserting that Arctic foxes are immune carriers of rabies. One noted that testing the remains of 619 Arctic foxes who were killed as suspected rabid between 1971 and 1998 found that 307 actually were rabid. Among 99 Arctic foxes trapped for a later study, five were rabid.
--Merritt Clifton

The Atlas of Endangered Species
Revised and Updated
by Richard Mackay
University of California Press
(2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704-1012), 2009. 128 pages,
paperback, illustrated. $19.95.

If the entire content of The Atlas of Endangered Species were to be redrawn into a single huge map, the central portion would be a succinct summary of current knowledge about endangered species issues.
In the foreground, however, and in several other prominent regions, unwary readers might be warned "Here be flying bulls," never seen but known from bull feathers.
The back cover, for instance, warns that "20% of the Earth's species" are "facing extinction by 2030," a scant 21 years from now. Atlas of Endangered Species author Richard Mackay is far from the first to make that claim, but Mackay provides an unwitting demonstration of how it might happen, strictly through exercises in modeling.
On page 14 Mackay writes, "Although 1.8 million living species have been named by scientists, this is but a small fraction of the estimated 10 million to 100 million species thought to be alive on Earth. Most of these are likely to be destroyed by humans before they have even been identified."
On page 88, Mackay asserts, "There are probably about 10 million species in the kingdom of animals. About 1.3 million of them have been named and described," along with about 300,000 plants, plus 200,000 species which are neither plant nor animal, "but the total number can only be estimated because much of the world has not yet been properly surveyed."
Most of the estimated nine to 90 million unidentified species are believed to be micro-organisms, insects, and deep sea creatures. More than 90% might vanish just by citng the low end of the unverifiable estimate instead of the high end.
Most of these unknown species are so small that probably no one will ever be able to count them, or even confirm that they exist, while deep sea creatures potentially have habitats larger than twice the sum of dry land.
Further, most of the species that have been identified are also too small to count, and can so easily drift hither and yon that they could be nearly ubiquitous without anyone knowing about them, unless they transmit a deadly disease. There is no cause, however, to believe that many small species are declining. Some, including problematic bacteria and viruses, have been spread by human activity from isolated niches in remote places into new hosts, including our own bodies, and may be thriving as never before.
Among animals who can be counted, mammals are the phylum believed to be fewest in number, and most mammals are more recently evolved than the majority of birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects.
Not surprisingly, the phylum including the newest and fewest species includes the most species deemed to be at risk by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature: about 21% of all known mammals. Adding to that the 4% of mammal species whose population status is unknown, one might claim, as the IUCN does, that 25% of all mammals are in decline.
But just as many mammals are apparently increasing in number. What the IUCN believes, in other words, is about what one would find if the whole projection was done by double coin flips, with two "heads" being up, two "tails" being down, and one "head" plus one "tail" being no change.
Mammals are actually the only phylum among whom as many as 20% of species are believed to be at risk. The IUCN estimate for bird species, who are about twice as numerous as mammal species, is that about 12.5% may be at risk of extinction.
The IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species, updated in 2008, includes 44,838 species, or about 3.5% of all the known species. Among these, 16,928--barely more than 1% of all known species--are considered to be at risk. Just 3,246, .0025% of all known species, are critically endangered.
The IUCN estimates that 76 mammal species, 1.4% of all mammals known to exist at any time since 1500, have gone extinct. This is by far the highest known rate of extinction among the phylums.
Yet Mackay asserts of all phylums in a graphic on page 15 that, "In the 20th century the rate of extinction increased to about 1% each year--about 10,000 times higher than before human technological society."
If that rate had prevailed for the whole century, Doomsday came and went. But Mackay writes on page 88, "While the rate of extinction through natural processes is estimated as less than one species a year for every million species, habitat destruction has led to a current annual extinction rate of between 1,000 and 10,000 per million species." Thus 1% is the extreme upper end of his projection. The current extinction rate, as Mackay reckons it, may be one tenth of 1%.
And maybe this whole hypothesis is really no more scientific than adding up the stated ages of all the generations in the Bible to identify the exact moment of Creation. In the end, The Atlas of Endangered Species differs from tomes on "creation science" chiefly in which articles of faith it asserts.
A page of The Atlas of Endangered Species captioned "Evolution" begins with Charles Darwin and concludes with the insight that, "In the 20th century scientists studying life at the molecular level recognized that natural selection occurs only indirectly between whole organismsŠat a more fundamental level it is occurring between genes."
Yet this understanding is not linked to recognition that many of the gravest challenges to species, such as global warming, are the engines driving evolution, altering habitat to force adaptation, and sometimes giving immigrant species an edge over those whose specialized niches are shrinking, so that more species come to share each habitat, bringing net gain in biodiversity
Few rational people would want to accelerate global warming, or cause extinctions, but the case for more considerate behavior toward habitat and other beings need not be supported by bogus Doomsday scenarios any more than the case for treating others as one would be treated requires that this rule of conduct be enforced by the threat of literal damnation to an eternal fiery hell. --Merritt Clifton

Colorado Humane Society in receivership

DENVER--The Colorado Humane Society, operating since 1881, was on December 16, 2008 placed in receivership.
"The motion, filed by Colorado Attorney General John Suthers in Arapahoe County Court, immediately removes executive director Mary C. Warren, her husband Robert Warren," who was development director, "and Mary Warren's daughter, Stephenie L. Gardner," who was director of operations, "and bars them from any control of the charity's assets," reported Howard Pankratz of the Denver Post.
"The society has a shelter and clinic in Englewood and provides dog and cat housing services for that city and Littleton," Pankratz wrote. "A second shelter in Lakewood closed in October 2007 after donations fell when it was discovered that animal carcasses were disposed of in a dumpster."
The Warrens and Gardner admitted no wrongdoing as part of the receivership agreement, but Suthers alleged in a lawsuit filed a week earlier that they falsely represented the Colorado Humane Society as "no-kill," while killing up to 29% of the animals they received; raised about $3 million since 2003 without being properly registered as a charitable agency; co-mingled personal money with society funds; illegally operated the society's veterinary clinic; and did not fully document spending $66,155 in donations received to help animals affected by Hurricane Katrina.

IRS to crack down on non-filing nonprofits

Half a million U.S. charities, including hundreds of small animal rescues, may lose their federal nonprofit status in May 2010, after failing for three consecutive years to file either Internal Revenue Service Form 990, 990-EZ, 990-PF, or 990-N.
Form 990 is the standard reporting form for charities that solicit funds from the public. Form 990-EZ is used by charities raising between $25,000 and $50,000 per year. Form 990-PF is used by private foundations.
The IRS formerly exempted charities with annual income of less than $25,000 from any filing requirement, but the Pension Protection Act of 2006 created Form 990-N, which all charities must file if they do not file any of the other versions of Form 990. The requirement applies to all tax years ending on or after December 31, 2007. Revocation of nonprofit status is automatic if the filing requirement is not met. Charities that lose nonprofit status for not filing will have to petition the IRS for reinstatement.

Senior Ragunan Zoo curator speaks out for orangs

JAKARTA, Indonesia--Ragunan Zoo senior curator Ulrike Freifrau von Mengden on December 30, 2008 for the second time in three years put her unpaid job and her home inside the zoo at risk by speaking out on behalf of the orangutans she has looked after ever since the zoo opened.
Prompting von Mengden's concern each time were the implications for nearly 50 orangutans of a long-evolving deal whereby the Ragunan Zoo is reportedly to acquire a female gorilla from the Howletts Wild Animal Park in Britain in early 2009, in trade for 12 primates of Indonesian species.
Brokered by Gibbon Foundation director Willie Smits, a Dutch-born Indonesian resident, the exchange was disclosed in February 2006. Five silvery gibbons and several Javan langurs were sent to Howletts. Smits credited Howletts with curing the gibbons of diseases and getting them out of small cages.
Preparations to receive the female gorilla are still underway, Ragunan Zoo spokesperson Bambang Wahyudi recently told Mariani Dewi of the Jakarta Post.
The female gorilla is expected to arrive after a Ragunan Zoo veterinarian, a senior keeper, and a data base administrator complete three months of training at Howletts. Their training started in October 2008.
The series of animal swaps that are to culminate in the Ragunan Zoo acquring the female gorilla began coincidental with the opening of the Puck Schmutzer Primate Center in 2002, when Howletts sent four young male gorillas to the Ragunan Zoo. Only three of the gorillas have been mentioned in recent Ragunan Zoo announcements and media coverage. The International Primate Protection League has received a report that the missing gorilla died from head injuries, but has not been able to confirm it, IPPL founder Shirley McGreal told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Schmutzer, the Swiss patron of the Liechtenstein-based Gibbon Foundation, and longtime sponsor of von Mengden's position at the Ragunan Zoo, funded the primate center in 2000. A longtime friend of Howletts founder John Aspinall, who died in 2000, Schmutzer died in 2006. The Gibbon Foundation appears to have subsequently collapsed.
Von Mengden has contended since soon after Schmutzer's death that Schmutzer would not have approved of the subsequent actions of Ragunan Zoo director Sri Mulyono. Hired in 2004, Sri Mulyono is the eighth Ragunan Zoo director von Mengden has worked under. A German-trained medical technical assistant, von Mengden emigrated to Indonesia in 1952, and soon became a volunteer at the former Cikini Zoo in Jakarta.
"Forty years ago the then-Jakarta Governor Ali Sadikin, Cikini Zoo director Benjamin Galstaun, his biologist wife, and I moved the zoo from Central Jakarta to Ragunan," von Mengden recalled in 2006. "Since then I have lived in a part of the zoo not open to the public, rearing young orangutans, babies of killed mothers, and animals who have been confiscated from people keeping them illegally as pets. We prepare them to be released into their natural habitat," a goal that Aspinall, Schmutzer, and Smits all favored.
The primate center had semi-autonomy under the previous directors, but Smits' "critical remarks and public protest against the wide destruction of the rain forests in Indonesia and clashes with the departments in charge, created high tension," von Mengden charged in 2006.
When the Gibbon Found-ation was no longer able to fund the primate center, von Mengden said, "In May 2006 the city government handed over the management centre to the zoo director. This resulted in the dismissal of a number of qualified employees. The well-equipped workshop with good technicians was closedŠNow I don't have much left from my old age pension for food for the neglected animals, repair of old cages, for medicine, and for salaries of many workers.
"The original plan was to keep animals only from Southeast Asia to promote knowledge of them among the people, especially children, but was abandoned," von Mengden alleged.
"The original aim of the center catering to the poor was diminished," von Mengden added in her December 2008 statement, "since entry into the primate center requires a separate fee, prohibitively expensive for poor Indonesian children. The center currently houses a variety of primates," she noted, "including chimpanzees, three African gorillas, gibbons, siamangs, lorises and a few fortunate orangutans."
But the Primate Center does not house the whole Ragunan Zoo orangutan collection, von Mengden wrote to the Jakarta Post.
"Unbeknownst to most visitors," von Mengden said, "there are close to 50 other orangutans living at the zoo. These orangutans could not be accommodated in the primate center, but were promised new enclosures. That promise has been unfulfilled. For more then 10 years," von Mengden added, "I have been waiting for the release of several eligible orangutans back into the wild. Currently, they are waiting patiently in rotten dark cages, some of which were built for bears and cats, and were used for quarantine areas. Many times full-grown orangutans have tried to escape. One managed to lift a piece of iron fence from the concrete walls, so desperate was that orangutan to see sunlight.
"My hopes quickly turned to bitter tears," von Mengden said, "when I learned that [construction at the zoo] would become a new gorilla enclosure! How can Indonesia's beloved national treasures sit and rot while the zoo builds a beautiful enclosure for an African animal? Who will care for Indonesia's red-haired children," she asked, "if not the Indonesian people themselves?"
Commented McGreal, "IPPL fails to understand how exhibiting gorillas will help Indonesia's unique red apes, who are in desperate straits. England often has dismal dreary weather, totally unsuitable for rainforest primates. It seems that a lot of money has been spent on this questionable animal deal, including plenty on travel. This was money better spent on protecting Indonesia's forests and wonderful animals."

Funds raised for fake sanctuary

PALM BEACH--The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission and Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office on November 18, 2008 arrested Heather Southworth, 26, for allegedly unlawfully soliciting funds for an unregistered charity called Rescue: Big Cat Organization--which appears to have existed entirely in cyberspace.
The Rescue: Big Cat Organization web site, still active on December 27, 2008 but taken down soon afterward, claimed to represent a charity founded in Pennsylvania in 1985, also operating sanctuaries in New York, North Carolina, and Florida. The site included photos and stories about many purportedly rescued animals, and listed 18 supposed staff.
"Those are not real people. They are made-up names," Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesperson Gabriella Ferraro told Jason Schultz of the Palm Beach Post.
"The commission received a tip about the charity soliciting donations in April 2008," recounted Schultz. "When the state agency investigated, it found that the location given for the sanctuary is actually the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge headquarters. The commission did aerial surveys and found no big cat sanctuary anywhere in the federally managed refuge. When confronted by commission officials, Southworth admitted making it all up, the commission said."
"This would be amusing if it weren't so pitiful," Big Cat Rescue founder Carole Baskin told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission claimed officials spent eight months figuring out who Heather Southworth is and that she was running a fake big cat charity, but the fact of the matter is that they knew who she was and where she lived since July 8, 2008," when Baskin sent them all the particulars, in response to an inquiry from a USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service inspector. "It just took them five months to do anything about it," said Baskin.
On the same day, Baskin found photos of several Big Cat Rescue animals on the Rescue: Big Cat Organization web site, and wrote to Southworth demanding that they be removed.
Baskin also filed a formal complaint with the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, she said.
"Consumer Services boasts that they can charge $1,000 per day for every day that someone illegally solicits charitable contributions," Baskin noted, "but over the years a number of complaints have been filed against traveling big cat photo booths that solicit donations, and the only action the state has been known to take against these big cat exploiters is to tell them to stop. The next day they are right back at it again."

Best Friends announces leadership change

KANAB, Utah--The Best Friends Animal Society on January 13, 2009 announced that "by mutual agreement between the board and Paul Berry, Mr. Berry would no longer serve as chief executive officer, a position he has held since the spring 2006. The board is in discussion with Mr. Berry about a possible future role with the organization."
Best Friends cofounder Gregory Castle told ANIMAL PEOPLE that Berry's exit would not mean any significant change in the policies, philosophy, or modus operandi of Best Friends, the largest no-kill animal sheltering organization in the world, and the fastest-growing major U.S. animal advocacy organization since reincorporating as a 501(c)(3) charity in 1996.
Best Friends was previously incorporated as a ecumenical religious service order. While many smaller animal shelters and sanctuaries start on that basis, most find that 501(c)(3) reincorporation is necessary when they expand operations beyond what the founders and volunteers can personally do.
Best Friends laid off staff for the first time in late 2008, in anticipation of slumping donations, but instead "actually received record amounts and signed up a record number of new members," Castle said. Some of the laid-off personnel were promptly rehired.
Castle and another cofounder, John Fripp, agreed in separate statements that Berry's departure as chief executive was part of the final stage of a four-year leadership transition begun when some of the surviving 22 cofounders reached 70 years of age, when all of them were at least close to 60. As part of the process, each Best Friends cofounder turned over day to day managerial duties to younger successors. The last cofounders in routine managerial posts, Michael Mountain and Steve Hirano, stepped down in mid-2008.
Castle said Best Friends expected to announce the appointment of a transitional board of directors on January 24, 2009. The transitional board is to include cofounders Fripp as president, Castle as vice president, and Fripp's sister-in-law Celeste Fripp and Francis Battista as other members, along with five members of the Best Friends staff and five persons who are neither cofounders nor Best Friends employees. None are well-known in the animal welfare field. The transitional board is to serve for one year. The results will be reviewed before the changes become permanent.
Berry, who previously cofounded the Southern Animal Foundation in New Orleans, "led Best Friends' massive animal rescue efforts during Hurricane Katrina in 2005," remembered Fripp, and "was instrumental in Best Friends saving the lives of 22 pit bulls from the Michael Vick dog fighting case by bringing them to Best Friends."
The Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the focal project of the organization, celebrated a 25th anniversary on January 1, 2009.

"No whales killed" during 18-day Sea Shepherd pursuit of Japanese fleet

HOBART, Tasmanic, Australia-- The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's fourth consecutive winter campaign against Japanese "research" whaling off Antarctica ran out of fuel--but not before chasing the multi-vessel whaling fleet for more than 2,000 miles through the southernmost waters claimed by Australia and New Zealand.
"No whales were taken," said Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson, during the pursuit, between December 20, 2008 and January 7, 2009.
The Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin expected to dock for refueling in Hobart, Tasmania, on January 15. Japanese officials reportedly asked Australia to refuse landing privileges to the Steve Irwin. As prime minister Kevin Rudd was on vacation, acting prime minister Julia Gillard ruled that, "The Steve Irwin will be permitted to dockŠThere is insufficient reason to prevent the Steve Irwin from doing that."
Sailing from Brisbane on December 4, the Sea Shepherds caught up to the whalers on December 20, "the earliest we have ever found the fleet," recalled Watson. Direct confrontation came later that day. Encountering the whale-catching ship Yushin Maru #2, the Sea Shepherds "chased it into heavy ice where it received damage to its prop and had to retreat to Indonesia for repairs," Watson said, "knocking it out of whaling operations until early February or a month and a half.
"The Sea Shepherd Cons-ervation Society would like to thank Jakarta Animal Aid," Watson added, "for organizing a demonstration in Surabaya to protest the presence of the Yushin Maru #2," after it docked on January 5. "Sea Shepherd has offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who can non-violently prevent the ship from departing the harbor," Watson added. "The longer we can keep the Yushin Maru #2 away from the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, the greater the impact on whaling profits and kill figures."
As the Yushin Maru #2 was caught in Australian territory, Watson "officially called on Aust-ralian Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith," he said, "to order the Japanese fleet to comply with the orders of the Australian Federal Court," which ruled against the whale hunt in 2008, "and to cease and desist from killing whales in Australian waters."
Six days later the Steve Irwin came alongside the Kaiko Maru. "There was not a soul on the decks," Watson e-mailed. "Just one man on the flying bridge staring straight ahead. We were alongside and half a length of the ship away when he turned and saw us. We were close enough to see his eyes widen as he stumbled out of his chair and scrambled below to the wheelhouse.
"As soon as the man disappeared below decks," Watson continued, "my crew threw a barrage of rotten butter bombs and bottles of slippery methyl cellulose mixed with indelible dye onto their decks: 25 direct hits, leaving the ship a slippery stinky mess. As we came along her starboard side, the Kaiko Maru suddenly steered into us and the suction between the two ships began to pull us towards her. The two ships touched lightly without any significant damage. They lost some paint and we had a crushed helio-deck railing.
"Jeff Hansen, an Australian citizen from Perth, Western Australia, then ordered the ship to leave Australian Territorial Waters, and informed them that they were operating in contempt of an Australian Federal Court order that specifically prohibits whaling in the Australian zone. The message was relayed in Japanese over the VHF radio by Kaori Tanaka, our Japanese interpreter."
As the Steve Irwin is Dutch-registered, the Japanese government asked the Netherlands to de-register the ship.

Man overboard

On January 5, reported Andrew Darby of the Sydney Morning Herald, "Hajime Shirasaki, 30, an oiler who worked in the engine room, disappeared from the spotter ship Kyoshin Maru No. 2 in icy waters too distant to mount an aerial search."
"It would take about 12 hours' flying time to reach the site," explained Maritime New Zealand Rescue Coordination Centre spokesperson Christi McMillan. "Survival time in waters of zero degrees and a four meter swell is about one hour," McMillan said.
Shirasaki was the third Japanese whaler lost to an accident at sea in three years.
"We responded to the search-and-rescue call and we radioed the Japanese fleet to offer assistance, including the use of our helicopter and boat crews, and we notified the New Zealand authorities," said Watson.
The Sea Shepherd helicopter was the only helicopter within more than 1,000 miles of the scene.
The whalers alleged that the Sea Shepherds interfered with the search, and released photos purportedly showing the Steve Irwin close to a whaling vessel, without navigation lights. Watson said the Steve Irwin had kept its navigation lights on at all times.
"We were certainly not hiding. We were in plain view," Watson said. "We offered assistance in the search, and their response was that they did not want any help from eco-terrorists."
Watson anticipated that the Sea Shepherd mission had significantly inhibited the ability of the "research" whaling fleet to kill the 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales that it claimed as a self-assigned quota.
"A second trip of intervention will increase the impact," concluded Watson, hoping to refuel and resume the chase.

Bad dog food in Taiwan

TAIPEI--Moldy corn imported from Pakistan and made into dog food killed more than 1,000 dogs at animal shelters in four Taiwan counties, the Taiwan Council of Agriculture disclosed on January 5, 2009.
The lethal ingredient was aflatoxin, a form of naturally occurring mycotoxin, produced by fungi that grow on grain. Aflatoxin is usually neutralized by cooking at high temperatures, a normal part of pet food manufacturing, but since 2005 aflatoxin incidents have also killed 17 dogs in New York state, 23 in Israel, more than 600 in Venezuela, and an unknown number in China, where the Shanghai Yidi Pet Company halted distribution of a contaminated dog food line in early January 2009. Company spokespersons agreed that the contaminated food was imported, but disagreed as to whether the source was Taiwan or Australia.
The Taiwanese maker, Ji-Tai Forage, recalled and composted 29 metric tons of "Peter's Kind-Hearted Dog Food," produced only for shelter consumption. About 20 metric tons appeared to have been eaten by dogs without incident, and 1,450 metric tons of pig feed made from the moldy corn contained no aflatoxin, according to spot checks--but some dog food samples contained many times the known lethal dose level.
Taiwanese public shelters were notorious in the 1990s for refusing to kill impounded dogs, in keeping with Buddhist belief, but allowing the dogs to starve instead. This was banned in 1998 as part of a new national humane law, along with selling dogs to dog meat restaurants, which was believed to the fate of up to a third of all impounded dogs. The law banned selling dog meat altogether.
ANIMAL PEOPLE last received reports about Taiwanese shelters violating these provisions of the 1998 law in 2002, but still receives frequent complaints about overcrowding and lack of veterinary care.

Bombay High Court upholds ABC programs

MUMBAI--The Bombay High Court, in the most legally influential judicial ruling yet on dog population control in India, on December 19, 2008 upheld the legal validity of the national Animal Birth Control program, with two amendments to ensure that dogs whose behavior imminently threatens human life will be killed.
The verdict was widely misreported. Wrote Swati Deshpande for the Times of India, in one of the most broadly distributed accounts, "The fate of lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of dogs was sealed when the Bombay High Court ruled in a majority verdict that stray canines who 'create a nuisance' by, say, barking too much, can be killed. The verdict applies not only to an estimated 70,000 stray dogs in the city, but to canines in all of Maharashtra and Goa."
In truth, the Bombay High Court specifically stated that barking is not a canine offense which may be legally punished by execution.
"The verdict, however, has been stayed for six weeks, and no dogs will be killed until then," Deshpande added. The stay was to allow time for the Animal Welfare Board of India and individual animal welfare organizations to pursue an appeal intended to establish definitions and procedural rules for deciding when a dog can be killed.
"The ambiguity over what is a 'nuisance' dog is over as far as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is concerned," wrote Sudhir Suryawanshi of the Mumbai Mirror. "The BMC," as the Mumbai government is officially known, "said that dogs who bark continuously and create a disturbance will be termed 'nuisance dogs.' So too will dogs who chase vehicles. Dr Jairaj Thanekar, chief health executive, said that they have set a two-year target to end the stray dog menace."
"All complaints registered will be forwarded to a monitoring committee to decide whether the dog should be killed or not. We will not kill strays indiscriminately," pledged BMC joint executive health officer G.T. Ambe, MD. But Ambe believed that "The HC decision will enable us to kill nuisance dogs without opposition from animal activists. We will activate all seven dog-catching vans," he told Suryawanshi.
"Too many news reports have appeared in full ignorance of the details of the judgement, with some suggesting that municipal authorities can start culling or even shooting stray dogs. These reports are wrong," responded Animal Welfare Board of India member and attorney Norma Alvares, who represented the animal welfare organizations from Goa before Bombay High Court.
"For any municipal council or members of the public to believe that the days of stray dogs are 'numbered,' or that culling of stray dogs can commence shortly, as has been reported by some sections of the press, is a gross misreading of the judgement," Alvares warned. "Such fallacious thinking will only land any municipality that acts on such basis squarely in contempt of court.
"All three judges unanimously agreed that stray dogs cannot be killed simply or merely because they are stray, i.e., homeless, ownerless," Alvares explained in a detailed written statement. "The judges were also unanimous in their opinion that mass destruction of stray dogs or random killing of stray dogs is neither permissible nor acceptable. Such practices are in fact totally prohibited.
"The judges also took a common view that when the authorities decide that they are required to kill a stray dog, it will have to be done by humane methods," Alvares continued. "Shooting and poisoning dogs are strongly condemned in the judgement.
"All three judges have upheld the World Health Organization-supported scientific and holistic scheme to reduce dog population by sterilization and immunization through the participation of animal welfare organizations, followed by municipalities across the country as a sound long-term method for controlling the dog population. Only in the case of specific 'nuisances' that may be caused by individual stray dogs have two out of the three judges taken the view that such dogs may be eliminated, if necessary," Alvares stipulated.
"In short," Alvares said, "stray dogs found a sympathetic bench in the Bombay High Court, supremely conscious of the fundamental duty cast on all citizens of this country by the Constitution of India to show compassion to all living creatures. The judgement firmly upholds the concept of animal welfare. It recognizes that stray dogs too, like all other animals, must be treated with compassion and it appreciates the progressive and humanitarian Animal Birth Control rules that were introduced in 2000 by the central government.

PEST vs. street dogs

The Bombay High Court ruling originated out of a 1994 policy decision by the Bombay Municipal Corporation to quit gassing dogs and instead sterilize the street dog population. Rules governing the street dog sterilization program, carried out by animal welfare societies as subcontractors, were published in 1998.
The Goa bench of the Bombay High Court banned shooting healthy stray dogs in 1999 and directed that the stray dog sterilization program be emulated in Goa, a state south of Mumbai which was formerly a Portuguese colony. The federal Animal Birth Control rules introduced in 2000 extended similar programs nationwide, in compliance with a December 1997 recommendation by the Animal Welfare Board of India.
"In 2001," recalled Alvares, "an organization called People for the Elimination of Stray Troubles pleaded before the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court that municipalities should be permitted to eliminate all stray dogs, and that animal welfare organisations should be prohibited from assisting the municipal councils with implementing the ABC Rules. As there was already a judgement of the Bombay High Court on the issue, the court decided that this matter ought to be considered afresh by a larger bench. Hence it was placed before the 3-judge bench," who issued the December 19, 2008 ruling, based on five points of Indian constitutional law.
"PEST pleaded that all stray dogs should be killed, and that the municipal authorities should be directed to do their duty of eliminating dogs who have no owners," summarized Alvarez. "PEST also submitted that the ABC program could not help solve the stray dog problem, and that the ABC Rules were unconstitutional.
"The Government of India, the Animal Welfare Board of India, and the animal welfare organisations" whom Alvares represented "submitted that euthanizing certain categories of stray dogs," such as those believed to be rabid or incurably suffering, "was specifically permitted under the ABC Rules. However, all strays could not be eliminated merely because they have no human owners. We also produced statistics to show the efficacy of the ABC program in areas where it had been adopted."
"In their judgment," wrote Alvares, "all three judges have concurred that mass killing of stray dogs is not permitted under the Municipal Acts. Neither the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act nor the Municipal Acts cast any mandatory obligation on the authorities to perforce kill stray dogs who are unclaimed, but only confer discretionary powers on the respective authorities to kill animals if it is found necessary to do so. Discretion is not unbridled discretion, nor an absolute power to destroy stray dogs. The ABC rules are valid and must be implemented. There is no conflict between the ABC rules and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, and between the PCA Act and the Municipalities Act.
"On the killing of individual stray dogs, the three judges agreed up to a point," Alvares explained. "In the ABC Rules only three classes of stray dogs are permitted to be euthanized: those who are incurably ill, mortally wounded, or rabid. Further, the decision to euthanise such dogs has to be made by a qualified veterinary doctor.
"While accepting these three categories, all three judges agreed that habitually violent dogs may also need to be euthanized. Hence, the term 'incurably ill' has been expanded in the judgement to include dogs who are found to be 'perennially violent.' However, two of the three judges were of the opinion that even with this inclusion, the categories as enumerated in the ABC Rules are insufficient to deal with all types of nuisance caused by dogs. Hence it was necessary," in their verdict, "that the municipal authorities be permitted to exercise their powers to eliminate individual dogs."

Barking is not capital offense

The Bombay High Court verdict decrees that "No hard and fast rule can be laid down as to the circumstances or the acts or the omissions which could constitute nuisance. Every case is required to be decided on its own peculiar facts."
But the verdict adds, "Dog barking is common, whether by stray or pet dogs. It may or may not cause nuisance, but undoubtedly such nuisance cannot lead to destruction of the dog." By contrast, the verdict continues, "There are instances where dogs in a particular locality or street invariably chase every two-wheeler," meaning bicycles or motorcycles, "which has resulted in fatal accidents. Such nuisance of the dog cannot be ignored and will have to be treated as public nuisance causing injury or damage to human life."
Assessed Alvares, "Thus, while leaving the decision to eliminate nuisance dogs to the discretion of the municipal authorities, the judges have made clear that "a public nuisance in the context of stray dogs means anything that endangers life or is injurious to the health of public at large. The expression 'nuisance' used in the municipal acts refers to nuisance of a public nature, and not nuisance caused to an individual."
Further, the Bombay High Court judgement explicitly states, "The Commissioner [of a city] should exercise the discretion within the four corners of conscience and it has to be just and proper. The Commissioner cannot indiscriminately decide to destroy all the dogs. He cannot enter any building or locality, indiscriminately capture all the dogs, keep them in the municipal kennel, and then after waiting for three days, kill all the dogs who are not claimed by their owner."
"The judgement is undoubtedly pro-animal welfare," Alvares concluded. "It has upheld the ABC Rules and the stray dogs control program, both of which PEST wanted to kill. It has appreciated the work of animal welfare organisations. It has rejected outright the arguments of those who wished that all stray dogs be eliminated from public places, and that the sterilized healthy dogs not be returned to society."
The Bombay High Court verdict is not binding beyond Maharashtra and Goa, but has been cited as a precedent in Karnataka, where the Bangalore charity Compassion Unlimited Plus Action is reportedly pressing charges against the Hoskote Town Municipal Corporation for allegedly killing hundreds of dogs and burying them on a dry lake bed.

Dairyland disaster

KENOSHA, Wisconsin--Three greyhounds broke their legs running on the frozen Dairyland Greyhound Park track on December 19. 2008, despite a warning from track veterinarian Jenifer Barker that she could not approve the surface. Dairyland cancelled 11 races the next day.
Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel used the Wisconsin open records law to get Barker's e-mails to Wisconsin Gaming Division chief Robert Sloey and Dairyland chief steward Dan Subach, expressing her concerns.
Dairyland officials reportedly expected to lose as much as $2.8 million in 2008, after losing similar amounts in each of the preceding several years. The Menominee tribe of Wisconsin and the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut jointly hold an option to buy the track, the last in the state, for $40.5 million, if they can obtain permits to add a casino and convention center to the property.

Rescuing greyhounds from the most remote track in the world

HAGNATA, Guam; BOSTON-- Between the depressed U.S. economy and the passage of an initiative ban on greyhound racing in Massachusetts after January 1, 2010, greyhound rescuers expected a winter of tracks closing and ex-racing dogs needing homes.
But few expected to be coordinating a major rescue on the Pacific island of Guam --among the most remote of U.S. territories, and until November 6, 2008 the most isolated outpost of greyhound racing in the world.
Like the Wonderland and Raynham tracks in Massachusetts, the 32-year-old Guam Greyhound Track was killed at the ballot box--but indirectly. The Guam Greyhound Track drew 250 to 300 people per night in recent years, down from 800 per night in 1990, reported Steve Limtiaco of Pacific Daily News. The track on November 4, 2008 asked Guam voters to approve a proposition which would have enabled the facility to build a $30 million convention center and expand into casino gambling. When the proposition was defeated, track owner John Baldwin halted dog racing and listed the property for sale at $15.9 million.
Guam Animals in Need, founded in 1989, took in 39 greyhounds during the next month. Eleven were reportedly adopted locally. Another 104 greyhounds remained at the track. Others turned up here and there.
"Today we adopted one greyhound to a very caring and loving family, but we rescued three in poor condition," e-mailed rescue volunteer Noni Davis on December 29. "We received a call from a passer-by about two dogs tied to a boat in Umatac, down at the very southern part of the island. I spoke to the owner and he said he got them from the race track in the first week [after the closure] when they started giving them away. He took a male and female to breed and to guard his fishing boat. They were both emaciated. I convinced him to sign them both over to GAIN. He wanted to be assured that we won't use them to race and then 'make money out of them.' I informed him that they are now officially retired and will never race again. I was also told that there are more greyhounds around the track, as people are using the area as a dumping place for unwanted greyhounds."
Louise Coleman, founder of Greyhound Friends in Hopkinton, Massa-chusetts, was already coping with dogs left by the seasonal closures of Wonderland, Raynham, and three tracks in New Hampshire, plus the bankruptcy of the Hinsdale track in New Hampshire. The Greyhound Friends kennels can only accommodate 35 greyhounds at a time, and usually Coleman has a waiting list of up to 200 dogs awaiting the opportunity to be offered for adoption through Greyhound Friends. But Coleman has previously helped to coordinate mass greyhound rescues in Quebec, Ireland, and Spain, and knew what had to be done.
"We are very happy to work with the Guam track to help them transition these retired racers into the community in a thoughtful and responsible manner," Coleman diplomatically told Philip Leon Guerrero of the Pacific News Center.
Joan Eidinger of Greyhound Net-work News publicized the ensuing evacuation.
Greyhound Protection League founder Susan Netboy, of Penn Valley, California, was point person for getting the Guam greyhounds into the U.S.
"We have been in crisis mode for the last six weeks," Netboy told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "trying to save dogs and jump through unimaginable obstacles in trying to get them to the states. The first two arrived safe and sound at Los Angeles International Airport this morning," she said as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press. That leaves 138 to go," unless the GAIN volunteers find more at large, also needing rescue.
The Massachusetts greyhound racing ban may not result in large numbers of greyhounds going to rescues all at once.
"According to the state racing commission," wrote Katy Jordan of the Boston Herald, "the 2,066 racing dogs in Massachusetts are owned privately by 336 individuals, 80% of whom live out of state." After the ban takes effect, industry sources told her, "many dogs will race elsewhere."
Grey 2K USA board member Paul LaLamme told Susan Morse of the Portsmouth Herald News in November 2008 that after winning the Massachusetts ballot initiative, Grey 2K will seek to ban greyhound racing in New Hampshire as well--but New Hampshire does not have a ballot initiative process.
The Hinsdale track opened in 1958 as a harness racing facility. It added greyhound racing in 1973, dropped harness racing in 1985, and offered only 50 days of racing in 2008.
"In October, after the racing season ended, the park gave its greyhounds to several independent nonprofits," wrote Concord Monitor staff reporter Shira Schoenberg.
It filed for bankruptcy and surrendered its racing license in December.
"The track pulled in $5.9 million" in 2008, "a decline of $2.6 million compared to the same period last year," wrote New Hampshire Union Leader staff reporter Garry Rayno. "The state's other tracks also have posted drops of more than $1 million in revenue each."

Dogs among the heroes of the Mumbai attacks

MUMBAI, India--Among the most popular heroes of the three-day terrorist rampage through Mumbai that started on November 26, 2008 are the street dog Sheru, the sniffer dog Jessica, and the therapy dogs Goldie and Onet.
At least 170 people were killed and 230 were wounded by 10 heavily armed men believed to be Pakistanis, who are believed to have hijacked a boat to reach Mumbai, killing the crew. On arrival, they shot up the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi-Trident hotels, a Jewish outreach center, and a restaurant, and left bombs in two taxi cabs.
Sheru was among the first victims. "Sheru was a stray dog hit by an errant bullet," recounted Washington Post Foreign Service correspondent Emily Wax. "Plump, easygoing and almost 10 years old--a senior citizen in dog years--Sheru often slept near the pastry case of the Re-Fresh restaurant, a popular eatery in Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Com-muters would feed him leftover fried veggie puffs or sips of milk, workers said."
Elaborated Mumbai blogger Harish Iyer to the Times of India, "Sheru kept barking at the terrorist Azmal after he opened fire at CST. All the other dogs ran away, but Sheru stood his ground until he was killed."
But Sheru was not killed. He was rescued by newspaper photographer Shripat Naik, 28. "I was clicking photographs when I saw the dog, bloody, dazed and looking so horribly afraid and traumatized," Naik told Wax. "My dog died a year ago. My heart went out to this poor quivering animal."
Naik rushed Sheru to the Bai Sakarbai Dinshah animal hospital, on the central Mumbai campus of the Bombay SPCA. "The bullet luckily cleared Sheru's shoulder and didn't puncture his heart or lungs. It was like a small miracle," said hospital manager Yuvraj R. Kaginkar. The hospital staff gave Sheru his name, which in Hindu means "Lion Heart."
Summarized Wax, "The survival of the aging Sheru has become an uplifting and soothing symbol of Mumbai's recovery to many of the city's anxious and angry citizens."
Agreed retired Indian army veterinarian J.C. Khanna, who is now the Bai Sakarbai Dinshah hospital chief surgeon, "Some may ask why a dog is saved when so many human lives were lost. But saving all creatures big and small shows the love and affection for all life that Mumbai has shown again and again. Sheru's life stands for something, for all of us getting back on our feet."
The terrorists met the sniffer dog Jessica and her handler at the back entrance to the Taj Mahal Hotel, fatally shooting both.
Two other police dogs were killed in the ensuing siege, and received funerals attended by police and firefighters, reported Raymond Thibodeaux for VOA News.
Goldie, a golden retriever, and Okret, a St. Bernard, became involved after the shooting stopped. Both are therapy dogs trained by Minal Kavishwar of the Animal Angels Foundation, the first Indian animal therapy program certified by the Delta Society.
Based in Renton, Washington, the Delta Society has promoted animal therapy worldwide since 1977. The Animal Angels Foundation previously helped victims of train bombings in Mumbai that on July 11, 2006 killed 229 people and wounded more than 700.
While dogs worked to help humans, In Defence of Animals/India looked for opportunities to help the pigeons who lost their homes as the Taj Mahal hotel burned.
Founded independently, In Defence of Animals/India is now affiliated with the U.S. organization In Defense of Animals.
"As the night [of November 26] progressed and bombs and grenades exploded, it was distressing to see the pigeons fluttering against the flames in TV coverage," e-mailed IDA/India founder Goodicia Vaidya. "For nearly three days we could only watch their distress. However, on the 29th, when the last terrorist was killed, the 'all clear' was given, so a volunteer and I took the opportunity to drive down. Before setting out, we contacted Mr. Vora of Paras Hardware, who is a trustee of the Dadar Kabutar-khana, a place designated for feeding pigeons, who on hearing our mission, very generously gave us a 50-kilo sack of grain. When we reached the heavily guarded destination, we were not allowed to park," but finally found a parking space some distance away. Carrying as much grain as they could, they were initially excluded from the immediate vicinity of the Taj, "but when we showed them the grain, they allowed us entry," Vaidya said.
"We received such a welcome from those hungry pigeons! They flew onto our heads, shoulders, and the bag of grain. We then picked up the ones who were sick and injured --one had his neck feathers singed--and took them to the Bombay SPCA," Vaidya added.
IDA/India fed the pigeons again the next day. While feeding pigeons in public places is usually discouraged to avoid encouraging large flocks to congregate, weary troops avidly participated in the feeding, and in providing water for the pigeons, perhaps relieving some post-traumatic stress.
Bombay SPCA chief surgeon J.C. Khanna told Thibideaux that at least 25 pigeons were killed at the Taj, and dozens more were injured by explosions and smoke. A wounded fruit bat was also recovered at the scene.

"Mice are lousy models," says leading scientist

STANFORD--Many people have asserted that mouse studies are poor models for human disease research. But few have had the stature within the biomedical research field of Stanford Institute for Immunity, Trans-plantation and Infection director Mark M. Davis, Ph.D., and few have said so in a leading medical journal.
"We seem to be in a state of denial, where there is so much invested in the mouse model that it seems almost unthinkable to look elsewhere," Davis wrote in the December 19, 2008 edition of Immunity, in an essay deemed noteworthy enough that both Immunity and the Stanford University Medical Center issued press releases to publicize his statements.
"The mouse has been incredibly valuable," Davis acknowledged. "That's part of the problemŠIn humans it often takes years to find out anything. There are a lot more regulatory, financial and ethical hurdles," but "Mice are lousy models for clinical studies," Davis bluntly concluded.
Summarized Stanford University Medical Center publicist Bruce Goldman, "Experimental manipulations that are commonplace with lab mice, such as genetically engineering them to express a foreign protein or to be deficient in the expression of one of their own, would be unthinkable in a human. Because experimental mice can be used to get quick answers, Davis argues, researchers look to the mouse to tell them everything."
Wrote Davis, "We can't depend on the mouse for all the answers, because in some cases it's not giving us the right answers. But think about what we can do with people. People come to hospitals, get vaccinations, give blood and tissue samples for routine lab tests and clinical trials. We're not learning nearly as much as we could from these samples. As with the recent history of human genetics, we could be much bolder."
Davis pointed out that mice and humans last had a common ancestor at least 65 million years ago, but the divergence is wider than that where immunology is involved. The numbers of mouse generations raised in laboratories during the past 100 years are approximately equal to the numbers of human generations who have lived since the dawn of civilization. The mice have been inbred for specific traits and isolated from exposure to diseases other than those that scientists deliberately give them.
By contrast, Davis wrote, "We've been selected by urbanization, with plagues such as the bubonic plague and smallpox that routinely killed huge numbers of people, and modern scourges like HIV and malaria that still infect and kill millions each year. Most humans are infected with six different herpes viruses, and who knows what else. And while we're suffering away, getting colds and flu, the mice are living in the lap of luxury in miniature condominiums, with special filters on the cage tops to keep bad things out."
In effect, Davis argued, lab mice have been reverse-engineered to respond less and less like humans who have been exposed to disease in real-world environments, where early or low-level exposure to some illnesses may confer immunity to others.
The Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection is among the users of an ultra-secure animal research complex opened in 1985, at cost of $11 million and years of controversy. As many as 50,000 mice and rats were used in experiments there in 1986 alone. Activists opposed to building the complex alleged that the planners had used the hypothetical possibility of break-ins by would-be animal rescuers to rationalize security precautions that would actually be used to conduct dangerous experiments involving recombinant DNA and deadly diseases.
Considered state-of-the-art then, the complex represents the emphasis on mouse study that Davis termed obsolete.
Davis recommended an approach to immunology research based on "high-throughput" studies of clinical data, similar to the studies that decoded the human genome.
Explained Goldman, "The Human Genome Project, which has radically accelerated the pace of human genetic research, was conducted as a large industrial operation carried out mainly in a small number of large centers, including one at Stanford."
Said Davis, "Although the small academic labs as we know and love them are great for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, some problems in biology, particularly those that involve a great deal of repetitive assays and data collection, are much better suited to a larger-scale organization and execution. The data are both more uniform and considerably cheaper."
Davis' recommendations paralleled those issued in the February 15, 2008 edition of the journal Science by National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis S. Collins, EPA research and development director George M. Gray, and National Toxicology Program associate director John R. Bucher. Collins, Gray, and Bucher announced in their paper that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Toxicology Program, and the National Institutes of Health had signed a memorandum of understanding to promote developing non-animal alternatives to the animal tests now required to meet U.S. federal regulatory standards.
"Historically toxicity has always been determined by injecting chemicals into laboratory animals, watching to see if the animals get sick, and then looking at their tissues under the microscope," Collins explained to reporters at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. "Although that approach has given us valuable information, it is clearly quite expensive, it is time-consuming, it uses animals in large numbers, and it doesn't always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans."
Besides, Collins added, "We are not rats and we are not even other primates."
Collins, Gray, and Bucher revealed their memo of understanding nine days after the National Toxicology Program Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICETAM) and the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM) published a five-year plan for helping U.S. government agencies to phase out animal testing.
The March 2008 ANIMAL PEOPLE cover feature "U.S. to phase out animal testing" detailed the NICETAM and ICCVAM strategies.

U.S. issues rabies advisory for Bali visitors as control effort stumbles

JAKARTA, DENPASAR--The U.S. embassy to Indonesia on January 12, 2009 issued the outbreak notice that the Bali tourism industry had feared would be coming since mid-November 2008, when reports first circulated about four human rabies deaths resulting from dog bites in two villages on the peninsula south of the Denpasar airport.
"Rabies has been confirmed in dogs from at least two villages near popular tourist destinations on the southern tip of Bali," the outbreak notice advised. "At this stage rabies has been identified in only one district, but the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention advises travelers to take precautions on the entire island," the notice added.
The outbreak notice was distributed two days after Bali governor Made Mangku Pastika announced, "We are closing the seaports and airport to any dog trade."
But the dog trade most likely to spread rabies throughout Bali continued unabated. Dani Stokeld of the Bali Animal Welfare Association forwarded to ANIMAL PEOPLE photographs documenting how BAWA personnel followed a private dogcatcher as he captured as many as 10 street dogs from the area where rabid dogs have been found: of the first 50 dogs tested, nine were reportedly confirmed rabid. The dogcatcher then hauled the dogs in gunny sacks to a dog meat restaurant in Singaraja, on the far side of Bali, beyond the central mountains.
"They followed this guy all the way to a woman's house, who said she makes dog satay and sells it at her restaurant, where local police often eat," BAWA founder Janice Girardi told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "They know there is no law against this, and were quite open about what they are doing. I mentioned it to the head of the Bali animal husbandry service and he didn't even show concern. I offered him the license plate number" of the dogcatcher's motorcycle, "and he just was not interested."
That was scarcely Girardi's only frustration with Bali animal husbandry chief Ida Bagus Ketut Alit. "He is following the Indonesian protocol book for dealing with rabies," Girardi explained.
The book, when Girardi obtained copies of it from the national capital in Jakarta on January 5, turned out to be "Dutch laws written in 1926," when Indonesia was a Dutch colony.
"They will continue to cull all unvaccinated dogs, and will only vaccinate owned dogs," Girardi summarized. "They only have a total of 20,000 vaccine doses," to serve a dog population officially estimated as about 550,000, but believed by ANIMAL PEOPLE to be about half that, "and maybe they will get more, maybe not."
The director of animal husbandry "doesn't care if the animals are not being euthanized humanely," Girardi continued, describing how officials were killing dogs with magnesium sulfate, a method listed as "unacceptable" by the American Veterinary Medical Association at least since 1993.
"He wants the streets cleaned up. He gets too many complaints from tourists about the bad condition of street dogs, so his answer is to kill them all. End of story," Girardi said, after trying to introduce Ida Bagus Ketut Alit to current rabies control literature from the World Health Organization, World Society for the Protection of Animals, the Alliance for Rabies Control, and U.S. National Association of Public Health Veterinarians.
"I asked if I could buy vaccines for East Bali and our clinic, and he said no, they are only for use by the government. I asked about prevention for East Bali and he refused to listen," Girardi continued.
Girardi reported similar results from meeting with Bali Directorate Center for Disease Control chief Wilfred Purpa. "He told us that strays are illegal in Indonesia, but we can't get a definition of 'stray,"" Girardi recounted. "Ninety percent of Bali's dogs live on the streets, owned or unowned. His plan is to cull all the stray dogs. He is not concerned with incidental deaths of non-target species, and does not feel there are any human health concerns with distributing baited meat around the beaches and populated areas."
More than half of the human population of Bali is in the southeastern quadrant of the island, just north of the Denpasar airport, near the BAWA headquarters and also the head office of the Bali Street Dog Foundation.
The rabies control strategy recommended by WHO, WSPA, the Alliance for Rabies Control, and the National Association of Public Health Veterinarians calls for vaccinating the entire dog and cat population if possible, 70% at minimum, to create a vaccinated barrier between infected animals and other animals and people. Enlisting animal welfare societies to help vaccinate is part of the protocol. But BAWA, trying for weeks to volunteer, reported mostly getting the runaround.
Girardi eventually learned from Dewa Dharma, DVM, who helped to legally incorporate BAWA, that "The government purchased rabies vaccines produced in Java which only provide immunity for six months. The government purchased 20,000 canine vaccines about a month ago and is intending to purchase another 30,000. However," two months after the first four rabies deaths, "they have only used 2,000 of the 20,000.
"The government has now released some canine rabies vaccines to our vets," Girardi at last e-mailed on January 5. "However we are only permitted to use these on dogs within the infected area."

Monkeys

Meanwhile, reported Jakarta Post Denpasar correspondent Luh De Suriyani, "The Denpasar-based Bali Badung Veterinary Main Office has called on local administrations to closely monitor monkey colonies in their respective areas to help contain the rabies outbreak."
The veterinary authorities expressed concern about monkeys becoming infected at any of the 48 sites on Bali where troupes live, four of which "are major tourist attractions."
"In countries such as India and Pakistan, rabies among monkeys has never been reported," a veterinarian identified only as Soegiarto said. "But that doesn't mean we can be complacent about it. The main thing is to monitor the monkey colonies and educate people, particularly in tourist spots, about the danger of rabies."
Responded U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention rabies program director Charles Rupprecht, "Why would one be concerned about monkeys when dogs are not even being vaccinated?"
"There has been great delay in responding according to international recommendations to this outbreak," fumed globally recognized rabies control expert Henry Wilde, of the Chulalongkorn University faculty of medicine in Bangkok, Thailand. "Thus rabies is surely by now present in other parts of Bali," besides the locations of the first known outbreaks. They will have to vaccinate at least 75% of all dogs and cats on Bali or learn to live with endemic canine rabies.
"This is a mess," Wilde continued. "It is a repeat of what I experienced at Flores," where Indonesian officials killed more than 500,000 dogs a decade ago, while more than 100 people died of rabies, and the outbreak remains uncontained.
"You have total knuckleheads there in government," Wilde assessed. "Bali would be an ideal place to make a major effort to vaccinate all dogs on the island, combining this with testing immunological population control technology, which is now known but needs to be tested in the real world. It could be combined with testicular zinc injection for the males," Wilde suggested. "We have at least one veterinary scientist in Bangkok who could assist in such a project, together with staff from WHO and the U.S. CDC. I must, however, admit that I am sceptical that local officials are interested. It never happened in Flores, and they still have canine rabies."

"Use Thai example"

Said the veterinary scientist Wilde mentioned, Chulalongkorn University faculty of medicine colleague Thiravat Hemachudha, "Here in Thailand, although we have reduced human rabies deaths down to fewer than 10 from 300 a year, we still have to give post-exposure prophylaxis to 500,000 persons per year, reflecting how bad it has been as the result of not controlling dog population. We also have spent several hundred millions per year for vaccinating dogs, mostly owned. Please do not follow our bad example," he pleaded. "Use our example," which looks very good compared to the Indonesian record, "as a bad example, to develop a new action plan involving the public, quick humane methods of sterilzation, and attractive ways to convince public to bring the public dogs in for sterilization and vaccination."
If leadership is not coming from the government, wondered Rupprecht, "Are there no prominent public figures in the country to serve as a rallying point? Outside international pressure causes a bunker mentality," he warned. "We are all here to help, not to force. This has to begin with an 'of the people, by the people, for the people' philosophy. There is only one earth and one rabies from a global perspective," Rupprecht explained, "not a center to the infectious disease universe. The solutions to dog rabies elimination are clear. While human prevention is vital, this is not HIV, flu, etcetra--this is a zoonosis in which homo is secondary."
Meanwhile, updated Luh De Suryani of the Jakarta Post, a four-year-old boy became the probable fifth human victim of the Bali outbreak.
"The Badung health authority did not inform the press about the boy's death," Luh De Suryani wrote. "The Jakarta Post learned about it from a source who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to journalists. The boy was a resident of Kutuh village, South Kuta, which has been classified as a rabies-prone area. Kutuh village chief I Wayan Litra confirmed that he was bitten by a dog six months ago. The dog who bit him died a week later.
"Soon after the boy came down with a high fever but was nursed back to health. Then last week he began convulsing uncontrollably, so his parents took him to Sanglah Hospital, where he died," the chief said.
Noted Luh De Suryani, "Banners and billboards have been put up in the area to warn people against transporting dogs, cats, or primates into and out of Bali. Also, 503 dogs have been culled from South Kuta."
But the outbreak appeared to be farther than ever from control. --Merritt Clifton

What Iraqi shoe-tosser really said about dogs

BAGHDAD--Did Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, 29, insult dogs on Dec-ember 14, 2008, or just U.S. President George W. Bush?
According to The New York Times account of the incident, as Bush spoke at a Baghdad press conference, Zaidi "rose abruptly from about 12 feet away, reared his right arm, and fired a shoe at the president's head while shouting in Arabic: 'This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!'"
Bush ducked and the shoe missed him. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, missing again, shouting "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"
Zaidi was then subdued and taken into custody. He was still jailed, facing up to seven years in prison, as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.
Most media published in English used the same translation of Zaidi's words as The New York Times. But ANIMAL PEOPLE questioned whether he really used the word "dog" in the generic sense, and whether he really mentioned giving a dog a farewell kiss, in a society where dogs are rarely kept as pets and are almost never kissed.
Inquiries of Arabic speakers confirmed that what Zaidi actually said would be more accurately translated as, "This is your kick in the butt, you son of a bitch!"
Zaidi threw his shoes and shouted about a month after endemic rabies blamed for causing 13 human deaths in Baghdad in August 2008 alone prompted the Baghdad provincial government to begin killing dogs, following a five-year hiatus.
"Teams of veterinarians and police officers used poisoned meat and rifles to kill the animals," reported Sameer N. Yacoub of Associated Press.
The entire street dog population of Baghdad, a city of seven million humans, was officially estimated at only 1,000.

LETTERS

Use it, not lose it

Regarding the Animal People November/December editorial "How hard times affect animal rescue," the recent "Ponzi " scheme executed by financier Bernard Madoff was responsible for charities losing billions of dollars--about 20 times more than the sum of all money raised for animal welfare and advocacy, according to some estimates. The question that should be asked of the victims in the charitable sector is why they kept so much money in the trusts Madoff managed, when their purpose is to do good works with their money, not just accumulate more money to sit in their trusts!
How many appeals do we all receive from charities that already have vast reserves, not disclosed in their appeals? Charities have no business keeping more money than they need to fund programs and management costs, and should start new projects that are in accord with their mission statements if they come by any extra money. Perhaps charities can now be encouraged not to sit on their money, or invest it unwisely, but instead use it for its intended purpose--to do good deeds.
If any charities have run out of projects, let them give the money they have in their trusts to other charities who can surely use it.
--Eileen Weintraub
Help Animals India/VSPCA
19215 32nd Avenue N.E.
Seattle, Washington 98155
<www.vspca.org>

"Obama circuit" bullfight cancelled

Your November/December cover article "Pending White House dog adoption upstages Obama cabinet picks" mentioned that the Kenyan government has begun promoting tourism to Kogelo, the western Kenya town where U.S. President Barack Obama's father lived, and that a private promoter was trying to attract the visitors to a bullfight.
The bullfight, scheduled to have been held at the Moi International Sports Center in Kasarani on December 13, 2008, was cancelled. The government moved in to officially stop it following a beehive of activities by animal welfare organizations, including our court case (thanks to the World Society for the Protection of Animals/Africa for supporting it), letters to relevant government offices, lodging an official complaint with the police, a press conference, press releases and several media interviews.
--Josphat Ngonyo
Africa Network for Animal Welfare
P.O. Box 3731-00506
Nairobi, Kenya
Phone: 254-20-606-510
Fax: 254-20-609-691
<jos@anaw.org>
<http://www.anaw.org>

Street dogs who refused kibble

Glad to see you're making a difference for Third World dogs and cats!
We were just on a cruise last month, visiting Belize City, Belize and Roatan, Honduras. Unlike most of the tourists, we didn't take the scuba diving trips, etc. that they offered. Instead, we jumped on local transportation to get out and see reality!
It was shocking to witness the conditions of the strays in the streets. There were few cats. Some of the dogs were dying in the gutter right in front of us. We were running around with bags of dog food we were able to buy, to try and feed the starving, but they didn't even recognize the kibble as food when it hit the ground.
What could that be about?
--Susan Roghair
Tampa, Florida
<EnglandGal@aol.com>

Editor's note:

Sporadic attempts have been made for more than 70 years to start street dog sterilization, vaccination, and mange treatment projects in Belize and Honduras. Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Brandy Warren in May 2007 described a two-week series of free clinics in Belize offered by a team of visiting veterinarians, including Ray Schaff, DVM, and family, of the Bullitt County Veterinary Center in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.
The paucity of cats that Susan Roghair noted is typical of the developing world. Street dogs tend to monopolize the food sources and keep cats on the rooftops-- and are often quite well-fed in places where lack of refrigeration and reliable refuse collection means that food waste and rats are abundant. Without street dogs, these communities would have 3-4 times as many cats as there are dogs, plus far more rats, or would have monkeys and/or feral pigs in about the same total number as dogs.
All of these species can be vastly more problematic than dogs to capture, sterilize, vaccinate, and live with.
The street dogs whom Roghair tried to feed may have recognized kibble, but in places where "animal control" often consists of poisoning dogs, including Belize and Honduras, dogs typically learn soon that kibble may come mixed with strychnine. Pet dogs or former pet dogs who are familiar with kibble as their daily rations will eat it, and if they eat some and don't die in convulsions, true street dogs may creep out to get some too. Meanwhile, pets and the fed "community dogs" who would be the easiest to vaccinate and sterilize are the most frequent victims of poisoning, while truly feral dogs become warier and raise wary pups.
Susan Roghair forwarded photos from Belize and Honduras showing an apparently quite representative sample of a typical street dog population, ranging from relatively prosperous "community dogs" to dogs suffering severely from a variety of conditions other than simple lack of food.
Most had untreated mange. Sarcoptic mange can be treated with cheap and simple malathion dips, at a ratio of one part malathion to 1,000 parts water, repeated once a week to 10 days after the first dipping--but someone has to catch the dogs and dip them. There are better mange treatment products, but malathion is readily and inexpensively available wherever there are mosquitoes, and works until the better products are available.
Oher dogs in Roghair's photos appeared to have severe problems with internal parasites, common to most street dogs.

Killing not the answer

Just where to start I know not, but I am convinced that you are unique individuals with your ANIMAL PEOPLE publication. My immediate concern is the continual killing of millions of felines and canines who are unwanted surpluses and just wasted, costing millions of taxpayer dollars. The problem is the lack of control at the grass roots. All life comes programmed to propagate and cats and dogs have no choice, until each gets neutered. Killing the surplus is not the answer and we can't neuter all of them either, but we can neuter enough so we have no surplus, and the answer is to make everyone responsible for the cats and dogs they keep. My web site <http://www.texas-no-kill.com> is telling the truth and when enough citizens want a change, we can have it.
--Bruce Dailey
Willis, Texas
<daileyb1@suddenlink.net>

Estrogen supplements double cancer risk

SAN ANTONIO--New data from the U.S. federally funded Women's Health Initiative, presented at the December 2008 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, promises to further erode the popularity of estrogen supplements derived from pregnant mares' urine.
Taking the supplements for five years doubles women's risk of contracting breast cancer, reported a research team headed by Rowan Chlebowski, M.D., of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
"The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts," explained Marilynn Marchione of Associated Press. "In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro," combining estrogen and progestin, "or dummy pills. This part was halted when researchers saw a 26% higher risk of breast cancer among those on Prempro. But that was an average over the five and a half years that the women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.
"They saw a clear trend," Marchione summarized. "Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended, and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others."
The findings were announced on the same day that Duff Wilson of the New York Times disclosed that "Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, paid ghostwriters to produce medical journal articles favorable to Prempro, according to letters sent electronically by Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seeking more information about the company's involvement in medical ghostwriting. At least one article was published even after a federal study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer. The letters ask Wyeth and DesignWrite, a medical writing firm, to disclose payments related to the preparation of journal articles and the activities of doctors who were recruited to put their names on them for publication.
"Grassley's staff on the Senate Finance Committee released dozens of pages of internal corporate documents gathered from lawsuits showing the central, previously undisclosed role of Wyeth and DesignWrite in creating articles promoting hormone therapy for menopausal women as far back as 1997," wrote Wilson.
"The documents show company executives came up with ideas for medical journal articles, titled them, drafted outlines, paid writers to draft the manuscripts, recruited academic authors and identified publications to run the articles-all without disclosing the companies' roles to journal editors or readers."
Grassley's staff "were given the documents about a month ago by James F. Szaller, a personal injury lawyer in Cleveland," reported Wilson.
Estrogen drugs made from pregnant mares' urine have been marketed for more than 60 years, and were the basis of the first commercially distributed human birth control pills. The humane community voiced two major concerns about the industry from inception. One was that it involves keeping large numbers of pregnant mares artificially closely confined, to collect their urine, with little opportunity for normal movement and exercise. The other was that impregnating the mares year after year to collect their urine creates a surplus of foals, most of whom were and are sold to slaughter after a few months at pasture.
Prempro is the most recent popular drug based on Premarin, the longtime top-selling estrogen supplement. Under boycott by animal advocacy groups worldwide since shortly after ANIMAL PEOPLE published investigative findings by the Canadian Farm Animal Concerns Trust in April 1993, Premarin was still the top-selling prescription drug worldwide in 2001, with sales of $3 billion. Sales began to fall after the Women's Health Initiative in July 2002 reported that the Premarin component of Prempro appears to be associated with increased risk from heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots forming in the lungs.

Did Christmas bring the end of the Strausstown club pigeon shoots?

STRAUSTOWN, Pennsylvania--"Christmas came a day late, but our present was well worth the wait," said SHARK founder Steve Hindi, calling ANIMAL PEOPLE on December 29, 2008 to announce the apparent end of pigeon shoots at the Strausstown Rod and Gun Club--perhaps the most openly defiant among the last several places in the U.S. where legal pigeon shoots were held.
"Neither a heavy thunderstorm nor the activities of an animal rights group silenced the gunfire Saturday at the Strausstown Rod & Gun Club's weekend pigeon shoot," wrote Steven Henshaw of the Reading Eagle back in August 2008, when representatives of the Humane Society of the U.S. and Humane Society of Berks County spent eight hours trying to document prosecutable cruelty at a shoot.
On that occasion the humane investigators did not get the evidence they needed, but their effort renewed Hindi's notice.
Beginning 15 years earlier, Hindi protested and videotaped at Strausstown Rod & Gun Club captive bird shoots on several occasions between leading demonstrations and collecting videotaped evidence of wounded pigeons suffering at the annual Hegins pigeon shoot, formerly held each Labor Day.
The Hegins shoot, the last public pigeon shoot held in the U.S., ended after 63 years in 1998, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in July 1999 that pigeon shoot promoters and participants could be charged with cruelty. The organizers did not attempt to challenge the law, in the last state in which pigeon shoots remain legal even in theory.
Private shoots at Strausstown and three other Pennsylvania gun clubs continued, apparently beyond reach of humane prosecutors because of the difficulty of gathering evidence from private property without a search warrant, which local judges balked at issuing.
But a March 2007 "no contest" plea entered by the Elstonville Sportsmen's Association of Rapho Township in response to eight cruelty counts pertaining to a September 2006 turkey shoot demonstrated that the private gun clubs were not invulnerable.
The SHARK team made their first attempt to document the proceedings at the Strausstown Rod & Club on November 23, but "While we still setting up our video equipment on the public easement," Hindi recounted, "we were harassed and forced to leave by Pennsylvania police corporal Kenneth J. Winter. Fortunately, Corporal Winter's misbehavior was so outrageous, it not only made for a very illuminating YouTube video, but caught the attention of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU warned the Pennsylvania State Police in no uncertain terms that further violations of our rights would result in court action."
SHARK returned to Strausstown on December 7. A man driving a pickup truck loaded with crates of pigeons told the SHARK team to leave. "As before, the state police were called," said Hindi. "But after the officer informed the driver of the truck that we did not have to leave, the truck left, still loaded with live pigeons. We waited for a long time to see if it would return, but it didn't."
The Strausstown year-ending pigeon shoot was to be held on December 26. SHARK brought a 31-foot "Hi-Pod" to be able to videotape the shoot from an elevated vantage point, but all the team captured on camera were pigeon supplier Don Bailey and other workers dismantling the pigeon shooting facilities. "For two more mornings we monitored the gun club, Don Bailey's house," about a mile from the Strausstown Rod & Gun Club, "and another gun club called Wing Pointe used for pigeon shoots. Nothing was happening," Hindi concluded. Local activists continue to monitor the scene.

Trying to help animals in Gaza

GAZA--Networking with animal rescuers near Gaza, in both Palestine and Israel, collecting money for animal relief in the combat zones, ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett helped to start a rescue effort less than 10 days after the shooting began on December 27, 2008--long before there was any clear sign of when the fighting might end, despite rumors that Israel would pull back troops from Gaza before the January 19, 2009 inauguration of new U.S. President Barack Obama.
"We are now working with the Israeli charity Let The Animals Live to help us get medicine and supplies into Gaza," reported Palestine Wildlife Society executive director Imad Atrash. "There some of our friends with the ministry of agriculture, the veterinary department, and with other nonprofit organizations will help us," Atrash hoped.
Atrash was also trying to arrange for Egyptian veterinarians to visit Gaza, if a safe way could be found to get them to where they were needed. Many international relief charities had mobilized to help the human victims, but at least one relief worker was killed, prompting the United Nations to halt aid distribution to Gaza on January 10, 2009. Through January 11, at least 898 Gaza residents and 13 Israelis had been killed, at least 3,695 Gaza residents had been injured, and two Egyptian children and two Egyptian police officers had been hit by shrapnel flying over the border, according to CNN sources. Among the dead humans, 45% were women and children, the CNN sources said.
No one counted the animal victims. Television news reports showed dead and injured donkeys near at least one scene of aerial bombardment.
"The situation is very hard for both the animals and the people," Atrash wrote, mentioning "donkeys, goats, dogs, cats, birds, and many others."
Reports from human welfare organizations indicated that thousands of chickens had died from lack of food, water, and ventilation, resulting from lack of electricity and lack of fuel for generators.
Reported Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals founder Mona Khalil, "I have two family members in Gaza. Our friend Hana had saved two cats from along the border but troops did not allow her to take them into Gaza, and she had to take them back to Cairo. Now they are with ESMA. Now, from Gaza, Hana reports to me that she has seen at least 50 cats who have been killed. Many stray dogs too are dead--that was her last conversation with me. There are no animal groups who have been able to do anything to my knowledge," Khalil said. "The situation is very devastating: no water, no electricity, no medicine--simply nothing--and it is impossible for any animal groups even if they were ready to help to know how to enter."
E-mailed Ahmed Sherbiny of the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends, "I also discussed the possibility to send some medical supplies with our colleague Margaret Ledger of the Humane Center for Animal Welfare in Jordan, through the King Hussein Bridge. She stated that the situation in the West Bank is even worse. No one is allowed to travel from one place to another without permission and inspection by Israeli soldiers. For this reason it is almost impossible to send any aid."
"We are trying to help Imad pass the supplies into Gaza," affirmed a spokesperson for Let The Animals Live. "Let The Animals Live is also taking care of all the animals who were abandoned by Israeli families who left the bombed south," as result of the Hamas rocket attacks that prompted the Israeli military to invade Gaza--for example, 12 dogs rescued from Shederot on January 8, 2009.
The oldest no-kill animal rescue charity in Israel, Let The Animals Live also led animal relief efforts in the line of rocket fire during the Israeli pursuit of Hezbollah militias into Lebanon in mid-2006.
"I have not heard anything from Gaza yet. The situation is too critical," e-mailed ANIMAL PEOPLE reader Ellen Moshenberg from Arad L'hai, Israel, who has often tried to help animals on either side of the lines during previous conflicts, "but meanwhile there have been requests for help from Ashkelon, which is constantly being rocketed. Fleeing citizens are leaving animals behind. SOS Pets Ashkelon is doing everything it can."
A shelterless foster/rescue charity, SOS Pets Ashkelon just formed in 2008. "All society members are volunteers--we have no paid employees--and are from different professions including medicine, veterinary care, education, law practice and high tech," said the SOS Pets Ashkelon web site, which had not been updated to keep pace with events.
Booby traps near zoo
The Israeli newspaper Haaertz reported on January 11, 2009 that "Israel Defense Forces troops this week uncovered a school in the Gaza Strip rigged by Hamas militants with a large amount of explosives. The school, located next to a Gaza zoo, was entirely surrounded by a fuse connecting to the explosives."
The two-acre Gaza Zoo, also called the Heaven of Birds & Animals Zoo and the only zoo known to be in Gaza, is located between the Rafah and Brazil refugee camps near the border of Israel and Egypt.
Israeli tanks smashed the zoo at 3:00 a.m. on May 20, 2004, during a previous attempt to stop Hamas militants from firing rockets into Israel. Many animals were killed, but founder Mohammed Juma eroded the sympathy of some of the Europeans and Americans who expressed interest in helping him to rebuild by telling Chicago Tribune staff reporter Bill Glauber that he wished he had a live rabbit to throw to his surviving python.
The Gaza Zoo did reopen in October 2005, with a sibling pair of young African lions. Sabrina, the female, was soon afterward stolen at gunpoint. Sakher, the male, resisted the gunmen and was left behind.
For nearly two years Sabrina's whereabouts were a mystery, Gaza being a small, crowded, thoroughly unlikely place for hiding a lion--but then she was seen in July 2007 at a photo studio, malnourished, declawed, defanged, and missing part of her tail. Hamas militiamen reportedly rescued her after a shootout with her captors, who were described as members of a notorious drug ring.
Just a month later the Al-Aqsa TV program Tomorrow's Pioneers showed a man swinging cats by their tails and throwing stones at one of the zoo lions as a purported lesson in humane education.
Gaza Zoo veterinarian Saoud al-Shawa told Corinne Heller of Reuters that he had not been consulted before the episode was videotaped, but said he favored teaching children not to harm animals.
"Even at the zoo, we sometimes complain about the aggressive behavior of some of the children," al-Shawa said. "But we do not blame them. We blame the violent environment--Israeli violence and Palestinian-Palestinian violence too."
Associated Press writer Diaa Hadid in August 2008 described the zoo as "a sign of Gaza's ever-expanding tunnel industry."
Explained Hadid, "Gaza's commercial trade was literally forced underground after the Hamas seized the coastal territory last summer, prompting neighboring Israel and Egypt to restrict movement through commercial crossings." The lions, Hadid said, "were purchased as cubs from Egypt for $3,000 each, drugged, and dragged through a tunnel in sacks," as were the zoo's monkeys.
"Two monkeys were bought together as babies. So were three spindly legged gazelles, one of whom bit several tunnel smugglers when they forgot to sedate her," zoo manager Shadi Fayiz told Hadid.
"A parrot was slipped through a tunnel in a cage," Hadid wrote.
However, animals of all of these descriptions were already at the Gaza Zoo, according to earlier reports, before the border was closed.

"Here is Catty the miracle dog," writes Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals founder Mona Khalil from Cairo, Egypt. "Her puppies were snatched from her and she was dropped in a busy street so that she probably would get killed by cars. With her are the three kittens we found nursing from her, as they too were snatched from their mum and dropped in a box in the same area." Discovered by a gardener who feeds animals in the vicinity, Catty and the kittens, five other abandoned kittens, and another dog were picked up from amid the traffic by Khalil and her father. "They are all now at the ESMA shelter," Khalil said. "We will keep Catty and the kittens together, and will look to get them adopted together too."
Though rare, the case is not unprecedented: ANIMAL PEOPLE has since 1992 collected 23 other authenticated accounts of dogs cross-fostering kittens, plus five accounts of cats cross-fostering puppies in similar rescue situations.

"First dog" may be last Obama pick

WASHINGTON D.C.--The identity of the new First Dog remained unknown as the January/February 2009 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, a week before the inauguration of incoming U.S. President Barack Obama--but the Obama family leans toward either a Portuguese water dog or a Labradoodle, Obama told the ABC News show This Week With George Stephanop-oulous on January 11, 2009.
Portuguese water dogs, usually pedigreed, are rarely seen in shelters. Labradoodles are a "designer hybrid" of Labrador retriever with poodle, not recognized by the American Kennel Club as a breed, but now commonly produced by commercial breeders, often found in raids on alleged puppy mills, and widely available from shelters and rescue groups.
Obama has repeatedly promised since July 2008 to acquire a dog for his daughters, upon moving into the White House, and has often stated his preference for a shelter dog. He announced the Obama family's preference for a Portuguese water dog or a Labradoodle about six weeks after controversy blew up over vice president-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s choice of a new dog.
Biden was not known to be thinking about getting a dog--but on December 6, 2008, Biden bought a six-week-old German shepherd from breeder Linda Brown of Spring City, Maryland. "Brown, 63, who advertises as JoLindy's German Shepherds," licensed as Wolf Den Kennels, "has been a breeder for 40 years," reported Amy Worden of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "She was referred to the Bidens by Delaware police dog trainer Mark Tobin," coordinator of the New Castle County Police K-9 division, "who will have the task of house training the new pup."
"Tobin, who also owns and operates a police K-9 camp, does personal dog training and police dog training, running 32 canine units in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania," added the Pottsdown Mercury.
"I searched the kennels in the area and Brown has a decent history with the German shepherd blood line and her paperwork was in order," Tobin told the Mercury.
But only four days after the Biden entourage took the dog, the Maryland Department of Agriculture cited Brown for allegedly failing to keep records and provide adequate proof of vaccinations.
"We went in there and cleaned everything up and I didn't even think about it," Brown claimed, saying she must have accidentally thrown away the paperwork. "How many times does the vice president visit? Maybe once in a lifetime?"
But Maryland Department of Agriculture spokesperson Chris Ryder told the Mercury that the alleged violations were found during the kennel's second scheduled inspection of 2008, much earlier.
Brown said she promptly obtained copies of the missing documents and sent them to the state agriculture agency.
"We're going to have more than one puppy," Biden told This Week With George Stephanopoulous on December 17, 2008, steering for middle ground.
"I've had German shepherds since I was a kid, and I've actually trained them and shown them in the past," Biden said. "So I wanted a German shepherd, and we're going to get a pound dog, which my wife wants, hopefully a golden" retriever.
"There are plenty of dogs to rescue," commented Judy Holmes of Delaware Valley Golden Retriever Rescue. The rescue has reportedly placed two dogs with Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who has pushed throughout his tenure for stricter regulation of dog breeders.
Observed Humane Society Legislative Fund president Mike Markarian, "The Bidens have a rescued cat, Daisy, who was adopted from an animal shelter. Biden fell short of the highest standard of adopting all of his companion animals from shelters or rescue groups, but he is one of only seven senators to receive the highest score of 100+ on our most recent Humane Scorecard."
Markarian reminded Biden's critics that as a U.S. Senator, Biden introduced a resolution opposing the annual Atlantic Canada seal hunt, co-authored legislation to protect dolphins from being netted by commercial tuna fishers, and pushed a bill to prohibit hunting exotic mammals in fenced enclosures.

Commerce Secretary

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who was among Obama's most problematic cabinet picks from a pro-animal perspective, on January 5, 2009 withdrew from consideration as U.S. Commerce Secretary, because "a pending investigation of a company that has done business with New Mexico state government promises to extend for several weeks or perhaps even months," Richardson said in a prepared statement.
"Let me say unequivocally," Richardson added, "that I and my administration have acted properly in all matters and that this investigation will bear out that fact. But I have concluded that the ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process."
The Commerce Secretary has authority over several international treaties involving animals, including some of the enforcement provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Richardson promised while running for New Mexico governor in 2002 that he would not ban cockfighting, but in March 2007 signed into law a cockfighting ban pushed for 18 years by state senator Mary Jane Garcia. Earlier, Richardson poured as much as $16 million in state funding and tax incentives into schemes to promote rodeo. In July 2007 Richardson boasted about shooting an oryx at media magnate Ted Turner's New Mexico ranch.
Obama did not name his next choice to become Commerce Secretary before ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.

Agriculture Secretary

The cabinet members whose actions most affect animals are the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior.
Agriculture Secretary nominee Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, was immediate praised after Obama named him by leaders of the American Meat Institute, the National Turkey Federation, the National Chicken Council, the National Pork Producers Council, the U.S. Meat Export Federation, and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
Vilsack was rapped by some environmental groups for promoting the use of corn-based ethanol biofuels and for supporting agricultural use of genetic engineering. He founded and formerly chaired the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership and was named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
But Mark Neuzil of MinnPost.com pointed out that Vilsack has consistently favored stricter regulation of animal agriculture. "In Iowa," wrote Neuzil, 'the state regulates the siting of factory farms; cities and counties have virtually no say. This removes the not-in-my-back-yard factor from factory farm placements and has allowed, critics say, big pig lots to land wherever they please. Vilsack's attempts at local control were consistently blocked by the state legislature," Neuzil added.
Said Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne Pacelle, "We've always liked Vilsack, and we endorsed him for the post. The former Iowa governor had a strong record on many animal protection issues that came up in Iowa--everything from cracking down on animal fighting to vetoing legislation that would have classified puppy mill dogs as 'farm products' and allowed mourning dove hunting in the state. In his new post, Vilsack will have to confront major food policy issues, and we'll be advocating strongly for a fresh new perspective at the agency," Pacelle pledged.

Interior Secretary

National Audubon Society president John Flicker praised both Vilsack and Interior Secretary nominee Ken Salazar, 53, a former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and fifth generation rancher who has served since 2004 as a U.S. Senator from Colorado.
Safari Club International president Merle Shepard was also quick to endorse Salazar. "Senator Salazar's pro-hunting votes over the past four years in Washington, and his support for access to federal lands for hunting throughout his entire career in Colorado will prove to be invaluable for sportsmen and women during this Administration," said Shepard.
Salazar scored 85% from the League of Conservation Voters for his performance in the 110th Congress, and has scored 81% during his entire Senate career.
"As a Senator, Salazar supported legislation that would increase the tax incentives for landowners to conserve habitat," explained Defenders of Wildlife senior vice president for conservation programs Bob Irvin. A Defenders media statement praised Salazar for "an increasingly strong environmental voting record."
"I think he is a lot better than the rape-and-pillage approach we've had for the last eight years," Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Sharon Buccino told Associated Press writer Judith Kohler.
"I think at best Salazar is not interested in Endangered Species Act implementation and at worst, he might object to some of the more important listings that need to occur," said Nicole Rosmarino of WildEarth Guardians.
"Ken Salazar will not fit in with any environmental green team," agreed Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He has taken many bad positions on global warming and fuel efficiency, and has been weak on endangered species."
Prairie dog advocates recalled that Salazar in 1999 threatened to sue the federal government if black-tailed prairie dogs were protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Proponents of strong Endangered Species Act enforcement also remembered that Salazar endorsed the appointment of former Colorado attorney general Gale Norton to be Interior Secretary under President George W. Bush. Norton hired Julie MacDonald as her deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks. MacDonald resigned in April 2007 "a week before a House congressional oversight committee was to hold a hearing on accusations that she violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," summarized Matthew Daly of Associated Press.
Obama nominated marine scientist Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. HSUS president Pacelle praised Lubchenco as "a strong voice for science-based management of fisheries and oceans."
NOAA "is responsible for enforcing a variety of laws related to the protection of marine mammals and oceans," and "plays a key role in representing the U.S. at the International Whaling Commission, where officials from Iceland, Japan and Norway are pressing for expanded whaling," Pacelle noted.

Appointee edited AR law text

Other Obama nominees for senior administrative positions of potential note to animal advocates include Sanjay Gupta, named to become Surgeon General, and Cass R. Sunstein, named to head the White House Office of Management & Budget.
Gupta, 39, is a part-time practicing neurosurgeon at the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and health commentator for CNN who has reported sympathetically, albeit not uncritically, about vegetarian and vegan diets.
Sunstein may be best known for his books Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle; Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment; Worst-Case Scenarios; and Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America.
Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum in 2004 co-edited the anthology Animal Rights: Current Debates & New Directions, extensively reviewed in the October 2004 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE. The 338-page volume includes contributions by many of the most prominent pro-animal legal thinkers and philosophers.
Wrote Sunstein, "It would not be a gross exaggeration to say that federal and state laws now guarantee a robust set of animal rights," but he acknowledged that these rights exist mainly on paper, and argued for expanding the ability of humans to sue on behalf of animals.
Undoing rules changes
The Obama appointees are expected to mobilize as rapidly as possible to undo the effects of numerous last-minute administrative rule changes imposed by the exiting George W. Bush administration. Many of the rule changes weaken enforcement of the Endangered Species Act and other wildlife protection laws.
One rule change allows federal agencies to issue permits for mining, logging and other projects that may potentially disrupt habitat without review by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and/or the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Another rule change instructs that agencies may not consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on ecosystems when reviewing projects such as new roads or coal plants on federal land, and may not use the Endangered Species Act to obstruct projects that may result in greenhouse gas emissions.
California attorney general Jerry Brown ensured that these rules will receive immediate high-priority attention by suing the George W. Bush administration on the last day of 2008 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence meanwhile sued the Bush administration to try to reverse a rules change that allows visitors to carry concealed loaded guns in most U.S. National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges.
The new rule "jeopardizes the safety of park visitors in violation of federal law," alleged Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke. "We should not be making it easier for dangerous people to carry concealed firearms in our parks."
Many wildlife law enforcement personnel see the rules change as a boon to poachers. Formerly, finding a National Park or National Wildlife Refuge visitor in possession of a firearm was sufficient to make an arrest, before the suspect could shoot an animal. Now a poacher must be caught in the act or in possession of a carcass.
The Government Accountability Office reported in early January 2009 that under Bush, the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to issue regulatory protections for 14 of the 30 marine mammal species it is required to protect under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Among the unprotected species are Hawaiian pseudorcas and humpback whales in the central North Pacific region, between Hawaii and Alaska.
Observed Hope Yen of Associated Press, "The GAO report came a day after Bush designated what he called 'three beautiful and biologically diverse areas of the Pacific Ocean' as national marine monuments in what was the largest marine conservation effort in history. Bush used his announcement to broadly defend his environmental record."
Protected--on paper--were 195,000 square miles including the Mariana Trench and northern Mariana Islands, the Rose Atoll in American Samoa, and a remote island chain in the Central Pacific. The proclamation prohibits fishing within the protected region, but no immediate provisions were made for enforcement.
"Collectively, the three areas will nudge out the Phoenix Island Protected Area, established in 2008 by the South Pacific nation of Kiribati as the world's largest protected area," noted Kerry Sheridan of Agence France-Presse. "They also top Bush's last such announcement of a marine protection area in 2006--the 140,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean near the northwestern Hawaiian islands."

New Congress' first actions

The last-minute Bush administration move to designate protected marine habitat did not prevent western Republican complaints when the newly sworn-in U.S. Senate, in a rare Sunday session, approved a bill held over from the 110th Congress to protect two million acres in nine states as wilderness. Approved 66-12, with some Republican support, the Senate bill consolidated about 160 items originally introduced as separate bills.
Among the other first bills introduced as the 111th Congress convened "were two important measures to protect wildlife, both of which passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly last year and should be on the fast track" to passage, observed Markarian of the Humane Legislative Fund. "The Captive Primate Safety Act seeks to ban interstate commerce in primates for the exotic pet trade. The Shark Conservation Act would protect vulnerable shark species from the cruel and wasteful practice of 'finning,' in which tens of millions of sharks worldwide have their fins cut off at sea and are then thrown back overboard to die a lingering, painful death. Although shark finning was banned in the U.S. in 2000," Markarian said, the new bill "would close a major loophole that currently permits a vessel to transport fins that were obtained illegally, as long as the sharks were not finned aboard that vessel. It also requires that all sharks be landed with their fins naturally attached to their bodies, strengthening enforcement in the oceans."
Markarian is hoping that both bills will be among the first that Obama signs into law. --Merritt Clifton

149 dogs saved from meat market

CHENGDU--The last day of 2008 brought the first known mass seizure of dogs from meat traders in mainland China in almost 70 years. "The 149 dogs were confiscated from the trading station in Pengzhou, 30 kilometres north of Chengdu, by the local Animal Husbandry Bureau, after it discovered that the trader was operating without a licence," announced the Animals Asia Foundation.
"The officials were notified of the situation by Qiao Wei, operator of the Qiming Rescue Centre in Chengdu, who had received a tip-off about the dogs," the Animals Asia Foundation release continued.
Best known for operating the China Bear Rescue Center near Chengdu, "Animals Asia recently built the spacious quarantine area at the Qiming Rescue Centre to shelter dogs rescued from the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake," the release explained.
"Most of those dogs have been adopted or reclaimed by their families," said Animals Asia Foundation founder Jill Robinson, "so we have room to house these new dogs while they recover and await adoption. The dogs were in an appalling condition, many of them very thin and clearly in shock," Robinson told media. "I hate to think how long they had been in those cages, many of them packed in so tightly that they were piled on top of each other."
Photos showed that many of the dogs wore collars and were possibly stolen pets, but others appeared to be street dogs.
Robinson asked families in Pengzhou whose dogs were missing to contact the Qiming rescue centre.
The dog rescue followed a string of other incidents in which Chinese law enforcement and state-controlled news media either encouraged opponents of dog and cat eating or conspicuously did not interfere with rescues and protests.
Among the most publicized was a December 18, 2008 rally by about 40 people outside the Guangdong government's Beijing delegation office. Said rally leader Wang Hongyao, "We are very angry because the cats are being skinned and then cooked alive. We must make them correct this uncivilized behavior."
"The protest was apparently in response to Chinese media reports that carried pictures of furry felines peering out through bamboo crates and metal cages, apparently en route to Guangzhou, Guang-dong's capital," reported Gillian Wong of Associated Press. "Other pictures showed cats being skinned in restaurant kitchens."
Elaborated William Fore-man of Associated Press, "The Southern Metropolis Daily--a Guangdong paper famous for exposes and aggressive reporting--ran a story that said about 1,000 cats were transported by train from Nanjing to Guangdong each day. Some people in Nanjing spend their days 'fishing for cats,' often stealing pets, the report said."
In Guangzhau, the Guang-dong capital, animal advocates held protests similar to the one in Beijing at the central train station, and stormed trains trying to rescue cats.
Their efforts inspired Barbara Demick, Eliot Gao, and Nicole Liu of the Los Angeles Times' Beijing bureau to investigate the cat meat trade by purchasing a cat at a Guangzhau market. They then released the cat at "A row of apartment houses next to an empty lot," where a women told them mice were plentiful. "Her accent indicated that she came from northern China, and many of the people around the neighborhood were migrant workers from outside Guangdong. They don't eat cats. We can only hope for the best," Demick wrote.
Previous Chinese actions of note on behalf of cats included the September 2006 storming of a cat meat restaurant in Shenzhen by about 50 activists; a rescue of about 415 cats by more than 100 activists who stormed a cat meat market in February 2007; and an August 2008 episode in which six members of the Shanghai Animal Protection Associ-ation caught up with a convoy of trucks hauling 1,500 cats to Guang-dong at Jiaxing, near Shanghai. A 15-hour standoff followed. Police eventually allowed the truckers to leave with about 700 cats, wrote Fei Lei of the Shanghai Daily, but only after their condition was extensively exposed by news media and about 800 cats were allowed to escape when activists broke cages.
The Shanghai SPCA in September 1939 won convictions of two men for misrepresenting dog meat as rabbit--a time when eating dogs and cats appears to have been much less accepted in China and in nearby nations than in recent times.
The Italian explorer Marco Polo noted with disgust that dogs and cats were eaten in Guangdong circa 1350, but five pre-World War II humane societies serving other parts of China and Korea seldom mentioned either dog eating or cat eating occurring in their regions in their reports to U.S. donors.
Trying to abolish dog eating was, however, a focal concern of the Philippine SPCA from 1902 on. Closed by World War II, the Philippine SPCA and the Hong Kong SPCA reopened almost a decade after the fighting stopped. Wartime meat shortages had encouraged dog eating in both the Philippines and Hong Kong.
The Philippine Animal Welfare Society, founded in 1954, rallied international support that in 1996 helped to win passage of a law against killing dogs for human consumption. The Philippine SPCA remains active on the issue, housing 70 dogs who were seized from a dog meat trader by the Quezon City police anti-car theft unit on December 4, 2008, in response to a tip from the Network for Animals.
The Hong Kong SPCA won a ban on killing or selling dogs for human consumption more than 40 years ago, but efforts to fully suppress dog eating in Hong Kong continue. The first jail sentence for killing dogs in order to eat them was issued in June 2007. In October 2008 the Hong Kong SPCA followed members of the Animal Life Guard Action Group of Hong Kong to the site of a suspected dog slaughterhouse. "About 20 group members found choppers, meat knives, air pistol pellets, animal traps, hooks, a wok and bones around the house," wrote Colleen Lee of the South China Morning Post.
For more than 40 years after the war closed the Seoul and Chosen SPCAs there was no humane society in Korea.
For more than 50 years, until the Animals Asia Foundation began rescuing bears from bile farms in southern China, there were no humane societies in China between Hong Kong and Beijing.
Eating cats appears to have boomed in Guangdong in the interim, stimulated by rising affluence resulting from proximity to Hong Kong. Also within the past 20 years eating cats began to be reported in South Korea.
Eating dogs appears to have spread up the Chinese coast and into both North and South Korea after World War II, and to have spread south with Chinese military influence during the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam and Laos.
In parts of Southeast Asia that remain staunchly Buddhist, including the former South Vietnam, dog-eating is much less conspicuous.
The traffic in dogs and cats for meat has been economically boosted since the mid-1990s by the sale of items made in China with dog and cat fur to mostly unawares buyers in the west. Effective on January 1, 2009 the 27-nation European Union followed the U.S. and Australia in prohibiting dog and cat fur imports, leaving Russia as the largest remaining buyer.
"I urge the Chinese authorities to ban this trade and in particular to close down the export of cat and dog skins to Russia," said Struan Stevenson, the Scottish member of the European Parliament who authored the EU ban.
As with the U.S. and Australian legislation, the EU law may prove hard to enforce, since dog and cat fur is typically used in small amounts, on mislabeled items.
But the Chinese government tolerance of protests against eating dogs and cats may signify that Beijing increasingly recognizes the value of pets in an era of obligatory one-child families, and may see the dog and cat meat and fur industries as more trouble than they are worth.
Recurring rabies outbreaks in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Yunan provinces kill more than 3,000 people per year. The outbreaks are officially blamed on pet-keepers failing to vaccinate, but these are the provinces in which dogs are most often eaten and farmed, factory-style, for human consumption. "Meat dogs" are not vaccinated.
Responding to a July 2008 rabies outbreak in Yunnan, officials vaccinated 84,000 pet dogs and killed 11,500 during the next three months, said the Beijing News. Those who were killed included street dogs, strays, and any dogs believed have been exposed to rabies. --Merritt Clifton

Rodeo without mayhem?

DENVER--If rodeo doesn't kill, injure, and torture animals, will people still pay to watch it?
With rodeo attendance, TV audiences, and sponsorship in freefall, and activist opposition to violent events intensifying, major rodeos throughout the west are making gestures toward trying to reduce the mayhem.
For example, "New policies in place at the 2009 National Western Rodeo will focus on much restricted use of electric prods and stronger fines for jerk downs in the tie down roping," announced National Western Stock Show president Patrick A. Grant on the eve of the stock show, held from January 7 to January 25, 2009.
The Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and Greeley Stampede announced similar policy changes earlier. The Chicago-based animal rights group Showing Animals Respect & Kindness (SHARK) has repeatedly videotaped electroshocking and jerk downs in roping competition at all three events in recent years.
Long prohibited by Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association rules, "jerk downs" occur when a roped animal is pulled backward.
"This can result in broken necks, backs, legs and other injuries," and sometimes kills the animal outright explains SHARK founder Steve Hindi. More often, as Hindi has documented, severely injured animals are dragged out of rodeo arenas to die elsewhere. Some are euthanized; others merely succomb to their injuries.
The SHARK exposés of the major Colorado rodeos, posted on YouTube, influenced singer Carrie Underwood and the band Matchbox 20 to cancel scheduled performances at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo in 2006 and 2008. Drummer Rikki Rockett of the band Poison upstaged his own appearance in July 2008 by apologizing for being there.
"I had no idea that this gig included a rodeo," Rockett told Alan Gathright of the Rocky Mountain News. "I am blown away that I missed the description of this show on our touring schedule. I have a huge problem with animal cruelty at rodeos."
Hindi was pleased by the Denver, Cheyenne, and Greeley rodeo announcements, but with qualification, he told ANIMAL PEOPLE. Most use of electroshock at rodeos already violates PRCA rules and local anti-cruelty laws, Hindi has contended in more than 15 years of anti-rodeo campaigning--and the makers of electric cattle prods do not recommend using them on horses at all.
The PRCA and local law enforcement have rarely agreed, though some suppliers of bucking stock to rodeos whose electroshocking Hindi has documented have been fined.
"Finally they are going to abide by their own rules, adhere to the city animal cruelty ordinance, and follow the prod manufacturer's directive," Hindi assessed.
The PRCA rules allow the use of electric prods on horses in bucking events only if the horses stall in the chute through which rodeo contestants ride to start the eight seconds during which they try to stay on the bucking horse. But, as result of repeated electroshocking when the gate opens, many horses learn to associate the gate opening with pain, and become habitual gate-stallers. Then their gate-stalling becomes a pretext for continuing to electroshock them.
Binion Cervi of Cervi Championship Rodeo, who supplies the National Western Rodeo bucking stock, "has been told not to bring horses to the rodeo who have been known to stall in chutes," wrote Ann Schrader of the Denver Post.
"We have plenty of horses," Cervi told Shrader. "This should not have any impact."
Hindi worried that rodeo promoters' words about curtailing the most abusive rodeo practices might be encouraging some sponsors who had withdrawn to put more money into rodeo, regardless of whether the new rules are enforced.
"When horses were being abusively shocked at the 2008 National Western Rodeo," Hindi recalled, "we took our evidence to Marriott Hotels--one of the rodeo's sponsors. Marriott was considered a 'Major Sponsor,'" meaning that it contributed between $50,000 and $100,000 to the rodeo. "Marriott's response at the time was that they would no longer sponsor the rodeo. However, Marriott has done a flipflop. Marriott now claims 'It is up to the discretion of local properties to choose their sponsorships,'" Hindi said.
Hindi also noted with concern that that Hayward Area Recreation & Park District in November 2008 rescinded a 20-year-old ban on electroshocking at the Rowell Ranch Rodeo, held in Castro Valley, California each May since 1900. The ban was lifted despite testimony from Action for Animals founder Eric Mills and In Defense of Animals founder Elliot Katz that it had been successful and remains necessary.
The ban was originally imposed under pressure from Mills and Katz, and was among the first ordinances to restrain violence to animals at rodeos passed anywhere in decades, since a flurry of local restrictions on bucking straps were passed a generation earlier. But enforcement was apparently neglected after the first few years that the ban was in effect.
At the May 2008 Rowell Ranch Rodeo, SHARK investigator Mike Kobliska videotaped an employee of the Flying U Rodeo Company electroshocking at least five horses. Flying U owner Cotton Rosser was eventually fined $2,500 by the Hayward Area Recreation & Park District, of which $2,000 was structured as a donation to the Sulphur Creek Nature Center for wildlife rehabilitation.
The 2008 Cheyenne Rodeo already demonstrated that a major rodeo can do without electroshocking, Hindi pointed out. "Cheyenne Rodeo promoters made good on their promise to ban shocking rodeo animals to make them perform," Hindi said afterward. "We didn't see a single prod during the entire 12-day event. Cheyenne also took significant steps to stop the dragging of animals by ropers. Also, contestants were stopped from continuing to stress their victims once the allotted time for a run was over. All of these steps resulted in less animal injuries than inprevious years. We were also given assurances that animals were not being used more than once a day. "But there were still numerous injuries," Hindi noted, "and this is unacceptable. Issues that persist include calf jerk downs," and "The rodeo still has the indefensible 'steer busting' and misnamed 'Wild Horse Race'."
"Steer busting," the PRCA event believed to result most often in serious injuries to animals, is often separated now from other rodeo events, and held in separate arenas before smaller audiences, or none. The Cheyenne "Wild Horse Race" is not a PRCA event.

Chuckwagon racing
Rodeo has historically escaped regulation through appeals to tradition, but that approach failed in Phoenix in November 2008 when the city council banned horse-tripping, a traditional part of charreada, or Mexican-style rodeo. A similar bill stalled in the Arizona legislature earlier in 2008.
Effectively regulating some of the most violent rodeo events without altering them beyond recognition may not be possible. Chuckwagon racing, for instance, a non-PRCA event often included at major rodeos, "involves wagons with teams of four horses that race around a dirt track," explained Bill Graveland of Canadian Press during the 2008 Calgary Stampede. "They also must maneuver around barrel obstacles on the infield without losing their cook stove, tent pole, or outriders following behind on horses," Graveland continued. "Drivers can bump into each other. Riders can be thrown from horses and horses can go down. Sometimes one animal will go down, dragging its horsemates with it, or sending other rigs and their horses tumbling down the track in a horrific chain reaction of tangled hooves and wooden wheels.
"Over the last decade or so, two outriders have died when they were thrown from their horses," Graveland recalled. "A crash last year badly injured Tyler Helmig of Leduc, Alberta, who broke an elbow and needed reconstructive surgery on a broken hip. Three horses died in the accident." Two horses died in a 2006 incident.
The Calgary Stampede introduced "stiffer penalties, fines and suspensions for wagon interference, and a code of conduct for participants," Graveland wrote. Racers who were judged to have caused accidents resulting in the deaths of horses were formerly required to pay the owners of the horses $2,500 for each horse lost. That amount was quadrupled.
But the 2008 Calgary Stampede featured the 23rd horse death in 22 years. Driver Rae Croteau Jr. was assessed $10,000 for the horse, a $2,500 penalty for interference, and a 10-second time penalty, a virtual disqualification from winning the $100,000 first prize.
Cloverdale shows the way
While traditionalists wonder if a less violent approach to rodeo can succeed, the 62-year-old Cloverdale Rodeo & Country Fair in Cloverdale, British Columbia, Canada abolished steer wrestling, tie-down roping, team roping, and wild cow milking after the death of a calf incited protest in 2007--and drew a record 100,000 spectators in 2008.
"Dropping the events meant the loss of sanctioning by the Canadian Professional Rodeo Association," reported Kent Spencer of the Vancouver Province. But "With the new format and increased prize money of $360,000," second in Canada only to the Calgary Stampede, "the rodeo attracted 24 of the world's top cowboys," Spencer wrote.
Making rodeo less violent may prove essential to PRCA ambitions of expanding into Australia and New Zealand. Auckland, the capital of New Zealand, banned rodeo in July 2008, in response to complaints about the treatment of animals at a rodeo held in 2007 in Christchurch. Later in 2008 the Australian Professional Rodeo Association was embarrassed by video taken by Wendy Parsons of Animals Australia and Jeannie Walker of the anti-rodeo web site www.norodeo.com.
Documenting multiple alleged abuses of animals at APRA rodeos since 2004, Parsons and Walker released their video evidence to news media just ahead of the August 2008 Mount Isa Rodeo in Warwick, Queensland. --Merritt Clifton

Merritt Clifton
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