|
ANIMAL•PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity. |
This site built and maintained•by: GREANVILLE ASSOCIATES•Rev.12.1.08 Copyright•ANIMAL PEOPLE,INC. 1992--2009
TO LOCATE ANY SUBJECT, DO AN "IN-TEXT SEARCH".
WINDOWS MACHINES:
Press Control + F
MACINTOSH:
Press Command + F
You're looking at the JULY-AUGUST 2009 issue in HTML FORMAT |
THE GOOGLE SUPER ENGINE |
NOTE: THIS IS THE REGULAR JULY-AUGUST 2009 HTML EDITION OF ANIMAL PEOPLE. IT IS PRESENTED IN A "STRIPPED" FORMAT. FOR THE COMPLETE PRINT EDITION (WITH PHOTOGRAPHS), PLEASE SEE OUR PDF AND FLASHPAPER EDITIONS—
PLEASE click the link below to visit our full-format editions:
JULY-AUGUST ISSUE IN PDF AND FlashPaper® —> GO THERE
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July-August 2009:
EDITORIAL: Keeping shelters open when money & time are tight
The good economic news from the nonprofit information-tracking web site Guidestar is that only 52% of U.S. charities reported declining donations during the winter of 2008-2009. This was no worse than the rate of decline during the preceding summer.
Animal charities appear to have enjoyed less severe declines than those serving other sectors, but since animal charities raise only about 1% of total contributions to charity in the U.S., even moderate losses hurt.
Economic analysts now predict that we may have reached a turnaround. Yet even in the most hopeful scenario, fall and winter budgets must be planned conservatively. If more money arrives than is expected, more can be done, but meanwhile it is prudent to avoid becoming over-extended. If we are not yet coming out of the recession of the past two years, the recent stresses on animal shelters will only get worse.
The influx of "foreclosure pets" that many shelters experienced in 2007-2008 has been slowed by a decline in foreclosures, but shelters now have fewer resources to cope with additional intake. Shelters that had reserves to fall back on have often reached legally mandated limits on their ability to draw down endowments, like the Massachusetts SPCA and Pennsylvania SPCA. Still affluent on paper, both have recently turned shelters over to other charities due to constricted cash flow.
Other nonprofit shelters have simply depleted their reserves. Shelters that had good credit two years ago may now have problematic deficits.
Shelters operated by public agencies are typically having to work with less, even when their own revenues have held even or increased, because mortgage defaults, unsold property, and failing businesses have reduced tax revenues in their communities. This has in turn meant reduced animal control allocations.
Shelter directors have already struggled for many months to cut costs in any way possible. Few had funding surpluses even before the recession began. More than half of all U.S. animal shelters operate on less than $300,000 per year. More than 85% of U.S. animal shelters operate on less than $1 million per year: less than the sales volume of almost any supermarket. After seven years of record economic growth, U.S. animal shelters at the beginning of the recession were still only raising about $6.50 per U.S. resident per year, or about $20 per household, and under $100 per active donor.
There just was not much fat to trim out of animal shelter budgets in the first place.
The hardest part of making budget cuts in humane work, especially hands-on animal care, is that almost any cut one makes amounts to deciding which animals will go without help. Budget-cutting may involve only looking at numbers on a computer screen, not looking into the eyes of an imploring animal and people bringing the animal to the shelter in hopes of a happy outcome, but no shelter manager looks at the numbers without knowing the meaning of doing fewer sterilization surgeries, less adoption advertising, or laying off staff, who usually work for low wages and have little or nothing to fall back on.
As last resort before introducing layoffs, shelters often cut back their hours of public access. Remaining open to the public for longer hours requires keeping public service personnel on duty for more hours. This is much more costly than just employing night clean-up staff, who may not be fluent in English and are usually not trained in other aspects of shelter work.
Most large shelters have some night staff, especially those that hold animal control contracts and may be called upon to accept impounds at any hour when police encounter animals who must be taken into custody. Night is often the best time to do cleaning and repairs, and euthanasia technicians tend to believe their work is less stressful to the animals at night.
Yet remaining open to the public is more difficult than opening a door in response to a police call. Night security issues for shelters in out-of-the-way places and rough neighborhoods are already huge, even behind locked gates. Fifteen to 20 years ago shelter break-ins by people trying to steal or recover impounded animals were rare, but shelters in vulnerable locations were frequent targets of break-ins by addicts trying to steal cash, pentobarbital, and ketamine. Those problems have not subsided, but now break-ins to steal or recover impounded animals are so common that ANIMAL PEOPLE has received reports of more than 60 cases in the past three years, probably just a fraction of all those that have occurred. Among them were 18 cases of suspected dogfighters trying to take pit bull terriers from shelters.
To safely remain open after hours, a shelter may need to have multiple personnel on duty who are able to keep track of each other and respond quickly to distress paging.
Then there is the problem of providing the particular service that the public might expect to find after hours.
Having a veterinary technician on duty to receive injured animals is more costly than having a cleaning crew.
Having an intake counselor who is trained to calm irate people and go through a checklist of possibilities for keeping an animal in a home may be more costly still. Offering after-hours adoptions requires having someone on duty with yet another skill set. Sometimes a vet tech can double as an intake and adoption counselor, as is often done at smaller shelters, but if a shelter requires personnel to handle multiple specialized roles in the daytime, it usually doesn't have anyone to work a night shift.
The counter-argument is that after hours are often when humane services are most needed. A domestic crisis that results in a pet being surrendered to a shelter is most likely to occur after hours. Animal abuse or abandonment is more likely to occur when no one is on call to intervene and there is nowhere safe to take the animal, even for an overnight cooling off period. Nights and weekends are also when lonely people are most likely to feel the urge to adopt an animal companion.
None of this is unknown to the humane community. Shelters today are still open to the public. on average, for only the 20 to 30 hours per week that they were open a generation ago, but the distribution of public reception hours has markedly shifted from the "banking hours" that prevailed then to retail hours now. Checking hours at more than 30 open admission shelters in 25 cities, ANIMAL PEOPLE recently found that more than 90% are open on Saturdays, more than half are open on Sundays, and more than half are open to at least six p.m. on three or more weekdays.
Shelter directors are often quite aware that if they could remain open for longer, they could accomplish more program service. Mike Arms, as shelter manager for the North Shore Animal League, demonstrated with the Pet Adopt-a-thon held each May that people will adopt animals 24 hours a day if they know they can. The North Shore Animal League has expanded the Pet Adopt-a-thon into an international event. What works in the New York City suburbs turns out to work in Europe, Japan, and the developing world as well.
Arms, after becoming executive director of the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, California, introduced Home-4-the-Holidays to comparably demonstrate the value of offering adoptions at other times when shelters are normally closed or keeping only restricted hours--and has achieved another global success.
Brenda Barnette, now heading the Humane Society of Seattle, demonstrated as executive director of Pets In Need in Redwood City that night humane education classes for adults could be a big hit, promoted as guest speaker appearances, and could morph into fundraising events.
The San Francisco SPCA, under Richard Avanzino, who now heads Maddie's Fund, more than 25 years ago introduced a 24-hour pet crisis intervention hotline with multilingual counselors on call. Several other humane societies have more recently enjoyed success by partnering with other 24-hour crisis intervention services, so that if a domestic violence crisis involves an animal, someone with appropriate animal expertise can help.
Handling after-hours emergencies is less expensive, on a case-by-case basis, than coping with the consequences of delay until a shelter is again open. Yet there is considerable after-hours down time, and keeping the necessary personnel on duty at the shelter during the down time is prohibitive, even when the shelter has the personnel to put on late shifts.
Coping with a budget crunch, almost any shelter director can look at the numbers and see that cutting hours looks relatively painless compared to the alternatives. Since only about 20% of the animals coming to shelters these days are brought by the public, keeping shorter public access hours appears likely to have little effect on intake volume. Since shelters often do more than half of their total adoption volume on Saturdays, discontinuing adoption hours on Mondays or Tuesdays appears to be reasonable.
But what is economically reasonable and perhaps even essential may not be in keeping with donor expectations, or with the message a humane society hopes to impart to the public about the kind of around-the-clock care that animals need and deserve.
The residential solution
This is not a new dilemma. Ironically, the humane societies of more than 100 years ago and those of today in the developing world were and are well ahead of the present U.S. humane community in confronting and resolving it.
The oldest animal shelter in the U.S. that still operates from the original premises appears to be the Ellen Gifford Home in the Boston suburbs. Ellen Gifford renovated her family's carriage house into a cat shelter in 1881. She lived for the rest of her life in the adjacent family residence, which is to this day the residence of the shelter manager.
The Ellen Gifford Home has thus had resident staff for longer than any other U.S. shelter. What was unusual about that arrangement then was that it had only one resident caretaker, instead of multiple caretakers on rotating shifts--but it was always a very small shelter.
The Mohawk & Hudson Humane Society, in the Albany suburb of Menands, New York, was by contrast among the biggest in the entire U.S. when the oldest part of the present shelter opened in 1913. Operating an orphanage as well as animal care facilities, it housed about 10,000 children and 20,000 animals per year, attended by a resident staff of dozens, and hosted the offices of the American Humane Association for a time, too. The Mohawk & Hudson Humane Society retained some resident staff until 1993, when the last resident staff housing was condemned and demolished.
The advent of the automobile gradually ended the tradition of resident animal shelter staff in the U.S., which persisted only at zoos and sanctuaries for exotic species. Once workers could commute efficiently, few people wanted to reside amid barking dogs and animal smells, on constant call, in a place where for most of the 20th century most of the animals would soon be killed.
But having resident staff is still more the rule than the exception abroad. Dogs Trust, of Britain, is known for attracting employees to shelters in upscale neighborhoods by offering them cottages or townhouse apartments on the premises. The accommodations are much nicer than any that most shelter workers could afford to rent or buy within easy commuting distance. Shelters in India frequently include both "officers' quarters" for senior night supervisors and visiting veterinarians, and "enlisted quarters" for animal care staff, who are often themselves rescue projects.
Shelters in continental Europe--both east and west--commonly include small apartments for residential volunteers.
Many of the overnight residents at foreign shelters are not regular staff, nor even trained personnel. But they are people who can call regular staff if someone arrives with a crisis after hours. A constant human presence is reassuring to donors and the public, and probably to the animals, too. Efforts are made to keep the residential quarters attractive, as well as secure, and because most shelters with residential quarters usually have more than one person staying overnight, backup help is at hand in a crisis.
U.S. shelters are unlikely to retrofit to add residential quarters in the near future, not least because many are not zoned to accommodate humans; but residential quarters are a perk to consider in designing new shelters, especially in communities where housing is hard to find at humane workers' wages. Shelter architecture and operating procedures have improved to the point that a well-managed shelter environment can be a congenial place to live, and many personnel might consider being on call as needed after hours much less stressful than fighting traffic before and after every shift.
B O O K S
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2009:
Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs:
An inside look at the modern poultry industry by Karen Davis, Ph.D.
Order c/o United Poultry Concerns (P.O. Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405; 757-678-7875; www.upc-online.org), 2009. 224 pages, paperback. $14.95.
"The mechanized environment, mutilations, starvation procedures and methodologies of mass murdering birds, euphemistically referred to as 'food' production raise many profound questions about our society and our species," says Karen Davis in this second edition of Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs, an eye-opening book into a major worldwide industry originally published in 1996.
Davis takes us from family-owned farms with free roaming chickens who clucked families awake at dawn to the sprawling factory farms that now dominate the poultry industry.
But factory farming is not new. Assembly line egg production was introduced soon after assembly line car-making, by some of the same people. While farm labor was cheaply abundant, in the 1920s and 1930s, relatively few producers made the investment needed to convert to the industrial approach, but the techniques were developed. Then the World War II farm labor shortage gave industrialized producers a decisive edge.
"Battery cages for laying hens--identical units of confinement arranged in rows and tiers--and confinement sheds for broiler chickens came into standard use during the 1940s and the 1950s," recounts Davis.
The need to feed troops at war, a civilian population increasingly removed from farms, and explosive post-war population growth rapidly expanded demand for poultry and eggs. To meet that demand in the most cost-efficient manner, farmers replaced traditional coops with "cage laying hen facilities" housing thousands and eventually tens of thousands of birds under a single roof.
To that point, poultry killed for meat were mostly surplus roosters and "spent" hens, who were byproducts of egg production. Believing that the market for chicken meat could grow even faster than egg consumption, entrepreneuers Henry Saglio, Frank Perdue, and Don Tyson began raising "broiler" flocks strictly for slaughter, creating and continuing to dominate a whole new branch of animal agriculture.
Layers or broilers, chickens today are mechanically debeaked, live in cramped quarters loaded with excrement and are exposed to contagious diseases. Birds shriek, peck wildly at each other, and get their wings caught inside cage bars. Ventilation tends to be no better than occupational safety laws require.
Lighting is weak, as prevailing belief is that overcrowded chickens fight less in dim red or pink light.
Tyson, Perdue, and a handful of structurally similar corporations maintain their dominance of the poultry industry through "vertical integration," a system where a single company owns the "birds, hatcheries, feed mills, transportation services, medications, slaughterhouses, [and] processing facilities," Davis explains. A successful "vertical integrator" can contract with as many as 25,000 chicken barn operators.
More than nine billion chickens are slaughtered in the U.S. each year. Until relatively recently, chickens were handled for the first time in their lives when workers donned gloves and other protective gear and crammed as many as possible into crates for a ride to the slaughterhouse. Then the chickens were as roughly unloaded. As many as 40% suffered broken bones before they were killed. Human handling has now been replaced in many barns by automated systems that scoop up as many as 150 birds a minute.
Chickens are not protected by the U.S. Humane Slaughter Act. Over the years chickens have been killed by electrocution, neck cutting, gassing, and live hanging.
Chickens also die in transport, from exposure to heat and cold, and in trucking accidents. No federal laws regulate poultry transport, writes Davis. Hatcheries may even send chicks to buyers via the U.S. Postal Service. Many do not survive. Some airlines refuse to haul them.
Factory farmed chickens are force-fed antibiotics and hormones to make them grow abnormally quickly. This stimulates the bacteria they carry to evolve antibiotic resistance. Thus in 2004 an estimated 118,000 people were sickened by eating factory-farmed eggs contaminated with salmonella. Altogether Davis links dozens of human illness outbreaks to factory-farmed eggs and/or poultry.
The U.S. is not alone in factory farming. The former Soviet Union introduced it at about the same time. Davis says it is common in Asia, Canada, Mexico, India, parts of Europe, and Japan. The United States Department of Agriculture has the jurisdiction to impose standards on factory farms, Davis asserts--but the actual extent of federal authority is the subject of several ongoing court cases.
Karen Davis is obviously passionate about chickens on factory farms. Her book is thoroughly researched and meticulously documented.
Unfortunately there are several redundant passages. Forced molting is discussed several times. This is the practice of stimulating hens to begin a new egg-laying cycle by starving them for up to two weeks to simulate winter. When feeding resumes, the surviving hens respond as if to spring.
Davis shows us that chickens are sentient, intelligent beings who feel pain when debeaked or killed. She ends by noting that ever more consumers are demanding cage-free eggs, and are insisting that the animals they eat must be slaughtered without suffering. These are steps forward, Davis believes, though her goal is to end raising poultry for food altogether.
-- by Debra J. White
U.S. Marines may follow Army in banning pit bulls from all bases
CHERRY POINT, N.C.--A draft order excluding pit bulls, Rottweilers, canid/wolf hybrids and mixes of those dogs from being on "any Marine Corps installation, at any time" may be added to the U.S. Marine Corps Housing Management Manual as early as September, Marine Corps Times writer Trista Talton reported on August 2, 2009.
"The rise in ownership of large dog breeds with a predisposition toward aggressive or dangerous behavior, coupled with the increased risk of tragic incidents involving these dogs, necessitates a uniform policy to provide for the health, safety and tranquility of all residents of family housing areas," stated the draft order, posted on a web site operated by Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina, Talton said.
"The draft order includes a waiver process for Marines who already own one of the prohibited breeds," Talton added. "It would require them to pay for the cost of having their dogs undergo a 'nationally recognized' temperament test every two years. Any waivers that Marines may have when- and if-this order is approved will stay valid until Dec. 31, 2011, the end of the grace period, or upon a permanent change of station."
The Marine Corps appears to have decided to follow the U.S. Army in adopting a uniform dog policy for all base housing after residents of some bases ignored restrictions specific to individual bases.
"A newsletter circulated this summer to residents of the Lincoln Housing community at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms says the 'no pit bulls' order there 'has been ignored,' Talton noted. The newsletter asked noncompliant residents of Lincoln Housing to remove pit bulls from their homes."
Camp Lejeune commanding officer Colonel Richard P. Flateau Jr. banned pit bull terriers, Rottweilers, wolf hybrids, and "any other breeds [of dog] with dominant traits of aggression" from base housing in April 2009, 11 months after a visitor's pit bull killed a three-year-old on May 14, 2008. The attack came as the Marine Corps faced a $5 million lawsuit over a 2005 attack by a Rottweiler at Camp Lejeune that cost a child an ear.
Flateau in a written explanation of the order noted that military police responded to twelve more dog attacks at Camp Lejeune while he and other senior staff considered what type of response would best resolve the problem.
The U.S. Army in January 2009 banned pit bulls, Rottweilers, wolf hybrids, chows, and Dobermans from Army base housing throughout the world.
At least six dog attack fatalities in five years and one near-fatal mauling had either occurred in military housing or involved personnel who had lived in military housing. Five of the nine dogs involved were pit bulls, two were Rottweilers, and two were Siberian huskies, who were not included in the Army order.
Kenya SPCA director awarded MBE
Jean Gilchrist, in her 40th year as director of the Kenya SPCA, was in August 2009 named to the Order of the British Empire--the eighth animal advocate named since 1998, following International Primate Protection League founder Shirley McGreal (2008); International Animal Rescue cofounder Alan Knight, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust founder Daphne Sheldrick, and the late Stella Brewer Marsden, founder of the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Association sanctuary in Gambia (all 2006); Care For The Wild founder Bill Jordan, now heading the Bill Jordan Wildlife Defence Fund (2005); Dogs Trust chair Clarissa Baldwin (2003); and Animals Asia Foundation founder Jill Robinson (1998).
Helmsley estate case
NEW YORK CITY--The Humane Society of the U.S., Maddie's Fund, and the American SPCA on August 11, 2009 asked the Manhattan Surrogate Court to overturn a February 2009 ruling by Judge Troy K. Webber that allowed the trustees of the late hotelier Leona Helmsley's estate to allocate about $5 billion to human service charities, instead of for the benefit of dogs, as Helmsley asked in her will. The trustees in April 2009 distributed $136 million to human service charities, $900,000 to charities that train guide dogs, and $100,000 to the ASPCA, the only animal charity named.
Helmsley, who died in 2007 at age 87, wrote her will in 2003. She also set up a $12 million trust fund for her Maltese dog Trouble, but Judge Webber cut that amount to $2 million.
There are few precedents for reinstating a bequest meant to benefit animals, once dismissed by a judge.
"This is a huge hill to climb," Maddie's Fund executive director Richard Avanzino told James Barron of The New York Times. But Avanzino won one of the possible precedents, as then-president of the San Francisco SPCA, when in 1981 an estate required a healthy dog named Sido to be killed, ostensibly for her own good. The positive public response to saving Sido convinced Avanzino to pursue no-kill sheltering as first a local and later national goal.
China completes draft animal welfare legislation
BEIJING, MOSCOW-- China on July 7, 2009 announced the completion of a draft national animal welfare law. To be published for public comment in August 2009, "The proposed draft clearly delineates how animals should be raised, transported, and slaughtered," reported China Central Television, the state broadcasting company. "It also calls for penalties and criminal punishment for animal abuse. The draft law covers wildlife, farm and companion animals."
"Severe violators could be sent to prison, while lighter punishments would include fines and detention of fewer than 15 days," elaborated a report in the English-language Global Times.
"Animals have the right not to be scared, hurt, or killed by human beings," said Chinese Academy of Social Sciences social law research director Chang Jiwen. "Our motivation is to protect animals, while at the same time protecting the sensibilities and interests of humans. We should treat animals humanely. But that doesn't mean we cannot make use of them."
Elaborated CCTV, "Currently only endangered animals are protected. No existing law addresses animal welfare systematically. A comprehensive animal protection law is considered imperative as cases of animal abuse are on the rise. In June 2009 at least 30,000 dogs were culled in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province, following a rabies outbreak which caused 12 human deaths. The cull has triggered harsh criticism from the public.
"A recent survey carried out by the Internet portal Sina.com shows 89% of more than 63,000 people surveyed support the legislation," CCTV continued.
"The draft law will be submitted to the National People's Congress by the end of the year," said CCTV. "The draft must go through the State Council and receive three readings from the National Party Congress Standing Committee before being adopted as law."
Whether the draft law will address cruelties associated with eating cats, dogs, and wildlife was not discussed in the preliminary coverage, but twice in the first two weeks of August police and other public officials in the Shanghai region reportedly assisted rescuers who stopped trucks and saved allegedly stolen cats from transport to live markets in Guangdong.
The Guangdong region, south of Shanghai, is the only part of China where cats are commonly eaten, and as much as 80% of Chinese dog and wildlife consumption also occurs there.
People 4 Chinese Animals issued a public thanks to five law enforcement agencies for their assistance in arranging ransom for as many as 2,000 cats.
Similar incidents, occurring in southern China for the past two years, are believed to hint that the Beijing government is fed up with the more notorious Guangdong practices. Beijing has also repeatedly reinforced regulation of commerce in birds and reptiles, conducted mainly in the south, and of live poultry markets, implicated in frequent disease outbreaks during the past dozen years.
Frustrated Russian animal advocates could only envy the Chinese progress. "Hopes that Russia might at long last pass an animal protection law were dashed on June 5, 2009, Environmental Protection Day," VITA president Irina Novozhilova told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "Animal welfare was supposed to be the theme of a conference scheduled for that day at the State Duma [parliament] under the title 'Humane attitudes to animals: a moral necessity for civil society,' but on arrival animal activists were dumbfounded to read in the official handout that [the participating elected officials] had withdrawn demands for a comprehensive animal protection law, asking merely that the government improve the existing legislation dating from Soviet times.
"For more than a decade VITA in collaboration with other Russian animal protection organisations has been battling for a federal law to protect animals from cruel treatment," Novozhilova continued. "A draft law, the work of Tatyana Pavlova," who died in 2007, "in the 1990s passed three readings in the Duma. There was optimism that Presi-dent Boris Yeltsin would sign it into law early in 2000. Unluckily for billions of animals, Yeltsin resigned, and one of the first actions of his successor, Vladimir Putin, was to send the draft law back for revision. The draft remained in limbo until March 2008, when it was removed from the Duma's legislative agenda."
Shelters in every region are killing fewer dogs & cats
--but just barely
Animals killed YEAR 1,000s Animals
per 1,000 people of people killed
------------------------------------------------
New York City 2.0 2008 8,275 16,489
NEW HAMPSHIRE 2.1 2007 1,316 2,737
------------------------------------------------
NORTHEAST (29%) 1.9 34,444 66,296
TENNESSEE (prjctd) 25.1 2006 6,039 151,329
Knoxville 29.9 2006 405 12,090
Kanawha/Charleston 34.1 2007 192 6,553
------------------------------------------------
APPALACHIA (41%) 25.3 15,144 383,143
NEW JERSEY 4.5 2007 8,682 38,742
Pr. George Cty, MD 7.1 2007 841 6,000
PaSPCA-served sbrbs 18.3 2007 408 7,478
Philadelphia 19.9 2006 1,448 28,774
Camden/Gloucester 21.9 2008 86 1,886
------------------------------------------------
MID-ATLANTIC (41%) 7.2 27,638 197,546
Broward County 5.9 2007 1,788 10,500
Richmond, VA 7.9 2007 193 1,516
West Palm Beach 9.5 2007 1,351 12,820
VIRGINIA 10.8 2008 7,769 83,907
St. Johns Cnty, FL 13.0 2007 169 2,201
Alachua Cty, FL 15.4 2008 240 3,695
Lee County, FL 19.1 2007 571 10,907
Tampa area 19.9 2006 2,489 49,557
Duval County, FL 23.5 2007 838 19,662
Columbia, SC 23.5 2007 468 11,000
Charleston, SC 24.1 2007 332 8,000
NORTH CAROLINA 24.7 2007 8,856 218,350
Clay County, FL 27.3 2007 179 6,542
York county, SC 37.7 2006 199 7,500
Rome/Floyd Cty, GA 42.3 2006 95 4,034
Macon, GA 42.3 2007 94 3,970
Volusia County, FL 42.3 2007 497 21,000
Clay County, FL 44.7 2007 179 8,000
Orangeburg Cty, SC 49.5 2006 91 4,500
------------------------------------------------
SO. ATLANTIC (59%) 18.6 44,716 826,544
San Juan Capistrano 1.3 2007 37 48
San Francisco 1.3 2008 809 1,031
Huntington Beach 2.5 2006 194 485
Los Angeles city 3.7 2007 4,018 15,009
Orange County, CA 4.3 2007 3,002 13,000
San Diego 4.0 2007 2,942 11,700
WASHINGTON 6.6 2006 6,132 40,722
Los Angeles total 6.8 2007 9,503 64,457
Tehama County, CA 6.8 2006 62 421
Portland/Multnomah 6.7 2008 715 4,795
OREGON 8.4 2006 3,641 30,528
Los Angeles County 8.5 2007 5,082 43,373
Anchorage 9.1 2007 275 2,490
San Bernardino Cty 11.3 2007 2,028 22,900
Merced Cty, CA 12.2 2006 246 3,011
Long Beach 13.0 2007 469 6,075
Monterey County, CA 14.4 2006 412 5,912
Visalia, CA 16.4 2006 420 6,896
Spokane 16.8 2008 463 7,824
Kern County, CA 23.3 2006 802 18,669
Stanislaus Cty, CA 23.4 2007 512 12,000
Fresno, CA 40.9 2006 787 32,147
------------------------------------------------
PACIFIC (72%) 8.5 49,070 417,095
Dallas 11.7 2008 2,346 27,355
Austin/Travis Cty. 11.9 2008 921 10,916
Jefferson Parish 16.9 2008 456 7,720
Houston 18.4 2007 3,886 71,395
San Antonio 19.6 2008 1,329 26,000
LOUISIANA 20.1 2006 4,410 92,000
Fort Worth 21.3 2007 682 14,546
MISSISSIPPI 24.8 2007 2,939 73,000
ALABAMA 25.7 2007 4,662 120,000
Conroe area, TX 26.8 2006 378 10,120
Waco/McLennan Cty. 27.0 2008 230 6,204
Mobile 31.0 2008 404 12,516
Tuskaloosa, AL 31.1 2008 178 5,536
Baldwin County, AL 32.9 2008 172 5,664
Odessa/Ector Cty. 71.4 2008 132 9,423
------------------------------------------------
GULF COAST (58%) 21.0 36,338 763,098
Reno 5.4 2008 406 2,186
COLORADO 9.1 2007 4,753 43,000
UTAH 11.9 2007 2,700 32,000
Phoenix/Maricopa 14.8 2008 3,880 57,287
Las Vegas/Clark Cty 22.1 2007 1,997 26,500
Albuquerque 23.8 2007 505 12,029
Tucson 25.3 2008 1,014 25,600
Fallon/Lyon Cty, NV 29.6 2007 43 1,272
NEW MEXICO 33.7 2007 1,978 66,709
------------------------------------------------
WEST (88%) 15.2 19,048 289,530
Mason County, MI 3.9 2007 30 116
Chicago 6.7 2006 2,833 19,000
Porter County, IN 8.7 2007 160 1,384
Macomb County, MI 7.2 2007 833 6,000
Oakland County, MI 8.2 2006 1,214 10,000
MICHIGAN 11.7 2006 10,096 117,919
Sangamon Cty, IL 14.4 2007 194 2,800
Columbus/Frnkln Cty 14.6 2006 1,096 16,000
St. Clair Cty, MI 15.3 2007 170 2,600
Indianapolis 16.7 2007 866 14,470
Oklahoma City 28.0 2007 691 19,365
Shelby County, IN 29.4 2008 44 1,293
Independence, MO 29.7 2006 113 3,361
Tulsa 39.2 2006 383 15,000
------------------------------------------------
MIDWEST (24%) 12.8 70,204 898,611
U.S. TOTAL 13.5 3,079,939 4,157,918
(The regional and national totals appearing in bold are not tallies of the data used to produce them, but are rather estimates proportionately weighted to reflect demography. The percentage figure in parenthesis is the percentage of the human population encompassed within the shelter service areas from which the totals were derived.)
Cat/Dog shelter killing by region
Region Cats Dogs Ratio
NORTHEAST 48,441 17,855 73/27
MID-ATLANTIC 110,625 73,092 56/44
SO. ATLANTIC 446,334 380,210 54/46
APPALACHIA 206,897 176,246 54/46
GULF COAST 412,073 351,025 54/46
WEST 130,460 159,242 45/55
MIDWEST 566,125 332,486 63/37
PACIFIC 262,770 154,325 63/37
U.S. TOTAL 2,494,751 1,663,167 60/40
State data, 2000-2009
State Dogs & cats killed/year Rate
AL 119,021 25.5
AK 9,643 14.0
AZ 123,540 19.0
AR 33,975 11.9
CA 433,733 11.8
CO 43,000 9.1
CT 2,101 0.6
DE 13,793 15.8
FL 278,586 15.2
GA 190,814 19.7
HI 22,797 17.7
ID 27,584 18.1
IL 134,470 10.4
IN 138,870 21.8
IA 49,850 16.6
KS 48,477 17.3
KY 183,054 42.9
LA 92,000 20.9
ME 8,297 6.3
MD 49,016 8.7
MA 38,338 5.9
MI 117,035 11.7
MN 93,438 17.9
MS 124,205 42.4
MO 102,958 17.4
MT 11,279 11.7
NE 22,280 15.3
NV 32,011 12.3
NH 3,027 2.3
NJ 38,205 4.4
NM 66,861 33.7
NY 58,470 3.0
NC 227,783 24.7
ND 11,171 17.4
OH 171,141 14.9
OK 114,276 31.3
OR 31,836 8.4
PA 200,785 16.1
RI 6,930 6.6
SC 127,413 28.4
SD 18,170 22.6
TN 155,997 25.1
TX 469,849 19.3
UT 32,558 11.9
VT 4,968 8.0
VA 98,666 12.7
WA 43,223 6.6
WV 61,892 34.1
WI 27,010 4.8
WY 8,195 15.4
ALL 4,528,700 15.1
Fur sales at 20-year low & falling
LONDON, MILAN, NEW YORK, PARIS--Again fur industry flacks are banging the drums to proclaim that fur sales are making a comeback, but the media echo is distinctly muted. More designers were trying to sell fur in mid-2009 at the London, Milan, New York, and Paris Fashion Week shows, 164 in all, up from 156 in 2008, but more sellers scarcely means more buyers.
Whatever publicity boost fur might have gotten from the participation of eight more designers was upstaged when French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and U.S. first lady Michelle Obama both let the world know that fur is not in their wardrobes.
"I do not wear, buy or own fur," Bruni-Sarkozy wrote to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals senior vice president Dan Matthews, in a letter shared with major media. "Every designer who kindly lends me clothes for public appearances can tell you that I do not accept to wear fur pieces," Bruni-Sarkozy wrote, "even when they are only a small part of the outfit."
"We have never written to Michelle Obama about this issue because we have always known her to be fur-free," PETA spokesperson Amanda Schinke told Stephanie Green and Elizabeth Glover of the Washington Times. Green and Glover checked with Mrs. Obama's press secretary, Semonti Mustaphi.
"Mrs. Obama does not wear fur," Mustaphi affirmed.
Earlier, the fur trade enjoyed mid-May 2009 Gallup Poll findings that Republican Party members rate of approval of wearing fur had increased from 56% to 61% in a year's time--possibly influenced by the fur-flaunting habits of 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. But membership in the Republican Party collapsed parallel to the collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008, and Palin plummeted from prominence following her July 26, 2009 resignation after serving only two and a half years of a four-year term as governor of Alaska. Her gubernatorial approval rating had fallen 39 points in less than a year. A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken just before Palin left office found that only 40% of the American public retains a favorable view of her.
The bottom line for retail fur sales is the bottom line, and with reportedly catastrophic sales results from the winter of 2008-2009 yet to be disclosed, U.S. retail fur sales had already fallen farther since 2005 than at any time since the plunge from $1.85 billion in 1988 to just $950 million in 1991.
Since 1992, U.S. retail fur sales had climbed, parallel to inflation, to $1.82 billion in 2005--which was worth $1.1 billion in 1988 dollars. Then came a 12% drop to $1.61 billion in 2006, and an 18% plummet to $1.34 billion, according to Fur Information Council of America figures. At that level, in inflation-adjusted dollars, U.S. retail fur sales had dropped to a third of the 1988 high.
That wasn't all. After the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the Russian fur market to the outside world, Russian retail fur volume rose to $5 billion per year. In 2008-2009, however, the combination of economic uncertainty and an unusually warm winter cut sales by half, Russian Fur Union Sergei Stolbov spokesperson admitted to Reuters.
Russia, itself a major producer of both ranched and trapped pelts, has never been a big buyer of low to medium-priced pelts from the U.S., but in recent years has been the most lucrative market for high-end trapped pelts. From 2002 to 2006, U.S. trappers tripled sales of bobcat pelts to Russia, for instance, to a peak of 49,700. But just as conservation concern about bobcat trapping begun to emerge in the U.S., sales of any pelts to Russia fell.
U.S. mink farmers produced 2.8 million pelts in 2008, down slightly from 2007, but still a third below the volume of 20 years ago. The average price paid for a ranched mink pelt at auction fell 35% from 2007 to 2008, according to the USDA, to $41.50. This was just 10¢ more than the average price paid in 1996, and in inflation-adjusted terms was $6.00 less the average price paid for mink pelts when the market bottomed out after the 1989-1991 crash.
The current fur sales slump appears to be taking the U.S. alligator hide industry down with it.
"My father was in the fur and alligator business. I started buying fur and alligators when I was 13 years old,"
Vermilion Gator Farm owner Wayne Sagrera told Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey. "I've seen some slowdowns," said Sagrera, 65, of Abbeville, Louisiana, "but nothing to compare to this."
"Instead of taking the half million alligator eggs from marshes and swamps that they had in recent years, alligator farmers are expected to pull in just 30,000 this year," McConnaughey wrote. "State wildlife officials expect the 2009 harvest of adult gators to amount to a small fraction of last year's 35,500." The Louisiana alligator industry netted $71 million in 2007. "Revenue is expected to be closer to $10 million in 2009," said McConnaughey.
The economic decline of the fur trade has helped European anti-fur campaigners to make legislative progress. Seven weeks after the European Parliament on May 5, 2009 prohibited importing seal pelts into the European Union, the Dutch Parliament voted to ban mink farming, effective in 2018, if the ban is ratified this fall by the Dutch Senate. The Netherlands had already banned fox and chinchilla farming, through the efforts of the Dutch anti-fur group Bont voor Dieren.
Producing five million mink pelts per year, the Dutch mink industry is the world's third largest. Only Denmark and China currently produce more.
"The Dutch decision is building momentum for a fur free society," predicted a World Society for the Protection of Animals press release, pointing out that "Denmark recently banned fox farming," while Austria, Croatia, and Britain "already banned fur farming, and Belgium and Ireland show willingness to follow the example."
Decade of adoption focus fails to reduce shelter killing
A decade that began with giddy hope that the U.S. might soon become a no-kill nation is ending with the numbers of dogs and cats killed in animal shelters still stubbornly hovering at 4.2 million, right where it was in 2002, with the average for the decade at 4.5 million, where it was in 1999.
The numbers repudiate the emphasis of campaigns that seek to reduce shelter killing chiefly by increasing adoptions, instead of preventing the births of the cats and dogs who are most likely to enter shelters and be killed.
In fact, dog acquisition "market share" has barely changed in almost 30 years, when shelter adoptions are combined with adoptions of found strays.
The first major study of dog acquisition, by Richard Nassar et al in 1981, reported that about 10% of pet dogs came from shelters; 6.4% were found as strays. Several similar studies done circa 15 years later discovered that the percentage of dogs acquired from shelters had increased to as much as 14%, but the percentage found as strays had dropped slightly, with fewer strays at large to claim.
The most recent studies show that shelter dog adoption market share in most communities is slightly more than 20%, but since strays at large have all but vanished from much of the U.S., adopting strays directly from the street has nearly disappeared as a common source of dog acquisition.
The major change in dog acquisition since 1981 is simply that dogs who used to be adopted from the streets are now passing through shelters before being adopted. The intervention of shelters helps to ensure that these dogs are sterilized and thereby do not contribute to the dog surplus.
However, as a factor in reducing the killing of dogs who have already been born, the net contribution of all the increased effort to adopt out dogs over the past 30 years appears to be effectively zero.
The combined rate of cat adoption from shelters and from the feral population has edged up from about 24% of acquisition market share in 1981 to more than 40% today. At the same time, the pet cat reproduction rate had dropped to less than the numbers needed for replacement by 1994, according to National Council on Pet Population Study data. As of 1994, about 70% of the U.S. pet cat population were sterilized.
The increase in the U.S. pet cat population from circa 60 million then to nearly 90 million now has been driven by adoptions of feral-born kittens and the increased longevity of cats who are kept indoors, now about two-thirds of all pet cats.
The April 15, 2009 edition of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association published a report by Alley Cat Allies-funded researchers Karyn Ch, Wendy M. Anderson, and Micha Y. Rieser that about 80% of the U.S. pet cat population were sterilized, as of 2007, and that 81.2% of the females were sterilized before birthing any kittens. By implication this finding affirmed ANIMAL PEOPLE projections of the rate of adoption of feral-born kittens needed to sustain the U.S. pet cat population and account for an annual rate of pet cat population increase of about 1%: about 3.6 million per year.
If from 70% to 90% of the 2.5 million cats killed in U.S. shelters are also feral, as shelter workers often estimate, the U.S. feral cat population must include at least 5.4 to 6 million reproducing females to produce enough kittens, after pre-weaning mortality of about 50%, to withstand the rate of human take-off plus the effects of predation by coyotes and other wildlife, roadkills, and disease.
Yet the U.S. feral cat population also cannot be much higher than the number needed to maintain itself, since there are no indications of any net increase. The number of cats killed by U.S. shelters dropped rapidly from upward of nine million in 1985 to 3.2 million a decade later, slid to about 2.4 million by 1997, and has hovered between 2.3 million and 2.5 million ever since, except in 2006, when the total dipped to 2.0 million. The economic shocks of 2001-2002 and 2007-2008 appear to account for the only upward fluctuations, as both resulted in less funding being available for neuter/return work.
The rate of shelter killing has dropped gradually from 16.6 dogs and cats per 1,000 Americans in 1999 to 13.5--but this merely returns the U.S. to the rate of 1950, when virtually all pets roamed, none were sterilized, a third of all dogs were still homeless vagrants, more cats were feral than in homes, and little effort was made to collect and kill animals whose presence was not a specific health or safety issue.
As public policy shifted toward zero tolerance of free-roaming dogs, and less tolerance of roving cats, shelter killing increased tenfold--and then fell with the advent of pet sterilization in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the introduction of neuter/return feral cat control in the early 1990s.
In the mid-1990s, however, 25 years of rapid progress to reduce shelter killing appeared to hit limits to what could be done without more effective approaches to controlling the reproduction of the cats and dogs who are most likely to enter shelters, and eventually be killed as unadoptable.
Among the unadoptables in 2009, based on 2006-2008 data, will be upward of 1.8 million cats who cannot be handled, believed to be mostly feral, and as many as 967,300 pit bull terriers who have either flunked behavioral screening or are just too numerous for shelters to accommodate.
Pit bulls have increased from about 40% of the dogs killed in shelters at the beginning of the present decade to 58% now. Yet the percentage of pit bull intake killed in shelters has fallen from upward of 90% at the beginning of the present decade to about 80% at present, through the advent of standardized behavioral testing, in place of policies against adopting out any pit bulls.
The numbers of pit bulls killed have not dropped parallel to the rate of pit bull killing because pit bull intakes have increased to about 1.2 million per year. Pit bulls are the only breed to show a sustained rate of rising shelter admissions throughout the decade.
Of the total U.S. pit bull population of circa 3.5 million, about a third arrive at a shelter in any given year, at an average age of about 18 months. This is the same average age and rate, relative to their number on farms, at which steers go to slaughter.
Two-thirds to 80% of the pit bulls entering shelters are surrendered by their keepers. Most of the rest are impounded, either for behavior or as victims of abuse and neglect.
Adoption promotion
California Governor Arnold Sch-warzenegger on June 19, 2009 released findings about shelter adoption from the California Legislative Analyst's Office which persuaded him to propose repealing the 1998 Hayden Law. The Hayden Law requires that Calif-ornia shelters must hold impounded dogs and cats for at least five days to permit reclaims and provide adoption opportunities, if the animals are not suffering from painful illness or injury. The law also provides state subsidies for holding animals longer before killing them.
Explained the California Legislative Analyst's Office, "That shelters keep animals alive longer increases the supply of animals in shelters on any specific day. It also gives animal rescue organizations more time to transfer animals to their facilities. This can give households greater choice in selecting a pet to adopt. It does not necessarily mean, however, that more households adopt pets," even though "many shelters, animal rescue, and humane groups have taken significant steps towards promoting animal adoption."
The California Legislative Analyst's Office identified a major flaw in the Hayden Law. "Under the mandate's reimbursement methodology," the Legislative Analyst's Office pointed out, "shelters do not get more state funds if more households adopt animals. Rather, shelters that euthanize the most animals receive the most state funds," because holding animals longer does not appreciably increase adoptions, while "Shelters that are the most successful in promoting adoptions receive the least state funds," because they find homes for animals faster.
The California Legislative Analyst's Office recommended that "If the Legislature wishes to give shelters more incentives to promote animal adoptions, we recommend the Legislature try a different approach," such as "an incentive program that gives funding to those shelters that increase the number of animals successfully adopted."
This is the goal of the Shelter Pet Project, a project of Maddie's Fund, announced two days before Schwarzenegger proposed to repeal the Hayden Law.
"There are around three million healthy or treatable dogs and cats put to death in shelters each year," explained the Maddie's Fund press release. "Fourteen million people have adopted shelter pets already, and another 41 million have indicated that they are considering doing so. Of them, 17 million will bring a pet into their family in the next year. We only need to convince three million of those 17 million to do what they are already considering doing, get their new pet from a shelter, and every treatable or healthy cat or dog in America will have found a home.
"America's approximately 4,000 animal shelters currently adopt out more than four million pets per year--between two and three per shelter, per day," continued the Maddie's Fund release. "By simply increasing that by an additional two pets per shelter, per day, the three million healthy and treatable pets who currently lose their lives in shelters will be saved."
This math presumes an equation of "healthy or treatable" with "adoptable."
However, most definitions of "adoptable" do not include cats who cannot be handled or dogs who may be dangerous. About two-thirds of the cats and dogs killed in U.S. shelters are in those categories.
In addition, classified ads for dogs offered for either sale or adoption indicate that pit bulls are not more than 5% of the total U.S. dog population, meaning that they are not the breed of choice for 95% of the people who are acquiring a dog.
Thus, even if all dogs in shelters were adoptable, even if the number of people adopting a shelter pet could be increased by three million, and even if they adopted pit bulls at more than 10 times the rate of acquisition by the public, about 25% of the dogs killed in shelters would still be pit bulls.
Only preventing their births will prevent their premature deaths--and the cost of achieving a shelter adoption is currently three to four times the cost of sterilization surgery.
The ANIMAL PEOPLE projection of regional and national shelter killing tolls each year is based on compiling the tolls from every open admission shelter handling significant numbers of animals in specific cities, counties, or states. The sample base each year is proportionately weighted to ensure regional balance. Only data from the three most recent fiscal years is used. --Merritt Clifton
U.S. shelter killing
Year | Millions of Killed | dogs & cats killed per 1,000 humans
1950 2.6 13.5
1970 23.4 115.0
1985 17.8 74.8
1994 5.5 21.1
1997 4.9 18.3
1998 4.9 18.1
1999 4.5 16.6
2000 4.5 16.8
2001 4.4 15.7
2002 4.2 15.3
2003 4.5 14.8
2004 4.9 17.4
2005 4.4 14.8
2006 4.0 13.6
2007 4.2 13.8
2008 4.2 13.5
Ontario pit ban upheld
OTTAWA--A three-judge panel of the Supreme Court of Canada on June 11, 2009 refused to hear Ontario dog keeper Catherine Cochrane's last appeal in an attempt to overturn the 2005 Dog Owners' Liability Act. The act bans from Ontario any dog who "has an appearance and physical characteristics that are substantially similar" to those of pit bull terriers, Stafford-shire bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, and American pit bull terriers.
Pit bulls already in Ontario when the law passed may be kept if they are licensed, sterilized, and kept muzzled and leashed when in public.
"The total ban on pit bulls is not 'arbitrary' or 'grossly disproportionate' in light of the evidence that pit bulls have a tendency to be unpredictable and that even apparently docile pit bulls may attack without warning or provocation," the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in October 2008.
Cochrane was represented by renowned civil rights lawyer Clayton Ruby.
Border fighting over elephants & tigers
KATHMANDU, Nepal; Jalpaiguri, India--For the second time in two years elephant incursions across the Nepalese/Indian border have inflamed tensions in Jhapa, a Nepalese district north of West Bengal.
"With the Brahmaputra plains in India's Assam state flooded by the monsoons, the elephants began migrating," said the Indo-Asian News Service. Nepalese police wounded six elephants who forded the Mechi river to enter Nepal circa June 11, 2009, and allegedly also shot at Indian forest guards who followed the elephants into Nepal and tried to stop the shooting.
The Nagarik Vernacular Daily of Nepal on June 18, 2009 agravated the situation when it amplified an unsubstantiated allegation by politician Padma Lal Biswokarna that India plans to evict 6,000 Nepalese villages in order to raise 200 to 400 "man-eating tigers" on their land.
Two elephants were killed by police in the vicinity in mid-July 2009. As many as 200 elephants reportedly retaliated by wrecking the homes and crops that the shooting was meant to protect. "In the past, at least 24 people have been killed in Baundangi village alone by migrating herds," said IANS.
Finch fighting busted in Connecticut
DERBY, Connecticut--All 19 defendants in the first finch-fighting case in the U.S. that anyone could remember on August 11, 2009 surrendered title to 150 saffron finches who were seized in a July 26 raid on the home of Jurames Goulart, 42, of Shelton, Connecticut. Goulart, Sebastian Andrade, 37, and Nonato Raimundo, 51, both of Danbury, were charged with organizing a finch-fighting ring that drew gamblers from as far as Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. The other arrestees were charged as spectators.
Police said that some of the finches had sharpened beaks and one had a sharp metal object attached to his beak.
The finches were apparently enticed to fight by the presence of female birds in a cage above the cage where the fights were held.
All 19 defendants were of Brazilian background, but Brazilian animal advocates and journalists told investigators that they had never before heard of finch fighting. On the day of the raid, however, Associated Press writer Cristian Salazar reported that finch singing contests held in the Richmond Hill district of Queens, New York "have drawn increased scrutiny recently from law enforcement, as federal officials target illegal smuggling of finches from Guyana. Authorities also suspect the men place illegal bets on the birds."
Guyana is a small nation on the Caribbean coast of South America, bordering Brazil. Slightly more than half the human population of Guyana are descended from 19th century South Asian and Chinese immigrants who brought songbird competitions and songbird fighting with them.
Songbird contests continue today mainly in major Chinese cities. Songbird fighting continues mainly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other parts of Central Asia, mostly as a marketplace gambling pastime.
In Central Asian-style songbird fighting, freshly captured wild birds held by silk threads are briefly pitted against each other until one quits or escapes. Both birds are released after the fight to avoid violating the Islamic prohibition on caging wild birds.
Songbird fights often occur in the same pits as cockfights, in proximity to domestic poultry. Because the wild-caught birds may have contact with infected poultry before release, songbird fighting is believed to be a vector for spreading avian diseases, including the potentially deadly H5N1 avian flu.
Namibian seal hunt proceeds despite E.U pelt import ban & only buyer's attempt to sell out
BRUSSELS, WINDHOEK, CAPE TOWN--The European Council of Ministers on July 28, 2009 voted 24-0 to implement a ban on importing seal products into the European Union within nine months.
Approved by the European Parlia-ment on May 5, 2009, the ban will take effect before the next sealing season in Atlantic Canada, but might not be enforced in all European Union nations before the end of the 2009 Namibian sealing season.
"The ban was approved without debate," wrote Constant Brand of Associated Press, "although Denmark and Romania abstained from backing the measure, which Ottawa is protesting as an unfair trade restriction. Austria also abstained because it wanted an even stricter ban."
About a third of the global commerce in seal products moves through the EU, though the end markets are now believed to be mainly in Russia and China. The last Russian commercial seal hunt, on the White Sea, was cancelled in March 2009. Indigenous seal hunts continue in northern Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, and are exempted from the EU ban. Norway and Iceland still have small commercial seal hunts.
The Council of Ministers moved their ratification forward from the original scheduled date in September to try to close a window of opportunity during the lag time between approval and enforcement that appeared to have stimulated the Namibian seal hunt. Upward of 300,000 harp seals have been killed in recent years off Atlantic Canada, until 2009, when low pelt prices and anticipation of the EU ban kept many sealers home.
The Namibian Cape fur seal hunt has never been even a tenth as big, but the 2009 Namibian seal hunt opened for 139 days in mid-July with a quota of 85,000 seal pup pelts plus 6,000 pelts from fur seal bulls.
Seal Alert founder Francois Hugo, of Huot Bay, South Africa, charged that the Namibian quota was set so high that it might extirpate fur seals from Namibia. Marine mammalogists not employed by the Namibian government have warned for nearly 20 years that declining fish stocks, shifting ocean currents, and aggressive sealing plus random shooting by frustrated fishers have depleted the fur seal population. The Namibian government asserts that the population is not at risk.
Namibian sealers killed only 23,000 seals before halting the 2008 hunt because they could find no more to kill.
The sole buyer of Namibian seal pelts and oil since 2007 has been Turkish furrier Hatem Yavuz, who also operates in Australia, Russia, and South Africa. The current scale of Yavuz's business is difficult to estimate. Standard references indicate that as recently as 2001 Yavuz had under $1 million in sales, with fewer than 10 employees.
Yavuz reportedly failed to sell most of the Namibian seal pelts and oil he bought in 2008. The start of the 2009 hunt was postponed for two weeks after Yavuz offered to sell his purchasing rights to Hugo for $14 million, markedly more the estimated value of the hunt based on 2008 prices paid for seal products. The Namibian government has claimed that the hunt generates $625,000 per year. Yavuz said he had exclusive rights to buy Namibian seal products through 2019.
Hugo spent about six weeks attempting to raise the $14 million through online appeals, against the recommendation of other animal charities, whose positions he frequently criticized. Hugo later ripped the Namibian SPCA for not prosecuting sealers for cruelty. As off Atlantic Canada, the Namibian government keeps observers away from the seal rookeries, thwarting the opportunity for humane inspectors to link individual sealers to specific illegal acts. This very problem motivated then-New Brunswick SPCA inspector Brian Davies to found the Save the Seals Fund in 1960, which became the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 1968.
A Namibian court on July 17, 2009 convicted Jim Wickens of the British organization Ecostorm, and Bart Smithers, a South African videographer, of "entering a marine reserve without authorization." Wickens and Smithers were fined $1,245 each. They were mobbed and beaten by sealers the preceding day while documenting the hunt for the Dutch anti-fur organization Bont voor Dieren.
Photographer Neil Herman, working for Seal Alert, was detained on August 4, 2009 for allegedly taking pictures of a seal pelt processing facility at Henties Bay.
How often has Sylvester killed Tweety?
By Judith Webster
The summer 2009 edition of B.C. Nature included an article entitled, "Cat licensing: A conservation strategy that can work." As a cat and bird lover, I was inspired to investigate author Sherril Guthrie's claim that cat licensing and confinement bylaws would "protect and restore our bird and small mammal populations, as well as return cats to their rightful place as valued pets and companions."
Guthrie relies on American Bird Conservancy "Cats Indoors!" campaign literature, which includes too many disputable studies, extrapolations, and anecdotal reports to delve into deeply here. However, in her strong opening paragraph, Guthrie discusses a new bird count analysis by the National Audubon Society revealing that 20 of North America's most common birds have lost over half their population since 1967.
But Guthrie was wrong to connect these troubling declines to discussion of invasive species in BirdLife International's 2008 State of the World's Birds report. That report considers invasive species the third most important threat only to "globally threatened" birds. These are birds who are at imminent risk of disappearing entirely from their typically extremely limited habitats, most often on remote islands. BirdLife International identifies cats as the second most important invasive afflicting these species.
The 2008 State of the World's Birds report attributes the population declines of the 20 common North American birds to habitat loss caused by altered human use of land and, in some cases, climate change.
The 2008 State of the World's Birds report does not explicitly deal with the relevance of cats or other introduced species to the population dynamics of "Least Concern" species. However, BirdLife International fact sheets for the 20 common North American birds in decline mention predation from native or invasive alien species for three: the northern bobwhite (mammalian predators); the common tern (mammals and gulls); and the northern pintail (feral cats and rats on islands).
Data sheets for the same birds from the National Audubon Society list cats not once. Global warming will increase
the risk from nest predators, who are not necessarily introduced species, in the tundra breeding grounds of the greater scaup and snow bunting, but feral cats do not live on the tundra. Neither could feral cats invade the tundra, across vast expanses of thawed permafrost, without evolving the ability to swim like otters.
The North American continental bird species who are menaced by invasive threats are most often stressed by alien plants transforming their habitat. Audubon explicitly names an invasive animal threat to just two birds: fire ants plague the northern bobwhite, and zebra mussels impact the greater scaup.
Although BirdLife International considers cats the invasive species of second most importance to "globally threatened" birds, the vast majority of these impacts take place on oceanic islands. Of the 174 species negatively affected by cats, 27 occur on the North American continent but only the Florida scrub-jay, found in six fragmented Florida localities, is actually deemed to be threatened by cats in North American continental habitat. BirdLife International regards cats as a "low" impact threat to this bird, causing a "negligible" rate of decline.
Among the 26 other "globally threatened" birds who land at times in North America, 16 are endemic to Hawaii, nine are seabirds threatened by cats in their island breeding colonies, and one is threatened by cats at a Pacific island winter habitat.
Of the 134 confirmed bird extinctions occurring since 1500, only 15 occurred on continents, only five involved introduced species, and only the demise of the paradise parrot of Australia is attributed in part to cat predation--but the primary causes of the loss of paradise parrots were drought, overgrazing, altered fire frequencies, and the prickly pear.
The other four continentally extinct birds whose loss is attributed in part to introduced species are the passenger pigeon (Newcastle disease), the Carolina parakeet of eastern U.S. (honey bee), the Colombian grebe of Bogota (rainbow trout), and the Atitlan grebe of Guatemala (largemouth bass).
Among 21 bird extinctions, probable extinctions, or extinctions in the wild occurring from 1975 to the present, six occurred on continents but none involved cats. Three of the lost species were impacted by introduced species: the Colombian and Atitlan grebes, and Spix's macaw of Brazil (honey bee).
The other 15 were or are island birds. Six were hunted by cats, among numerous other threats to their survival, both introduced and native. Five of the six had very limited habitats in Hawaii. Cats are said to have had only a "medium" role in the loss of the Hawaiian Crow, a "low" impact on the Ou, and an "unknown" impact on the Po'o-uli. Cats had an "unknown" effect on the sixth species, the Guam rail, known to have been killed off chiefly by brown tree snakes.
Clarification of cat and bird data is never an idle exercise. Guthrie dismisses a "spay/neuter/release" program for feral cats as "expensive" and "a limited approach that is not sustainable," despite evidence from around the world that neuter/return succeeds quite well when a sterilization rate of at least 70% is quickly achieved within a particular habitat.
Instead, Guthrie lauds Calgary's "Responsible Pet Ownership" bylaws as a "comprehensive approach that balances the needs of our birds and wildlife with the needs of cats and their owners." Yet Calgary Animal Services is still receiving and killing approximately the same numbers of cats since the introduction of mandatory licensing and confinement as it did before cat licensing and confinement were introduced. In addition, the MEOW Foundation of Calgary continues to rescue homeless cats in numbers roughly equivalent to those processed by Calgary Animal Services. The Calgary Humane Society, which handles four times the cats as CAS and MEOW combined, has adopted out fewer cats and has killed more.
[Judith Webster is a medical transcriptionist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.]
LETTERS
Lucy elephant
Lucy is a female Asian elephant living alone since 2007 at the Valley Zoo in Edmonton, Alberta. She has lived there for 30 years. Many people feel that Lucy should be moved to a sanctuary because she is socially isolated, Edmonton is too cold for elephants, her enclosure is too small, and she has many health problems that the zoo has been unable to take care of. Two accredited sanctuaries have offered to take her and pay for her transportation. We would like Lucy's story to get more exposure in hopes of continuing to build public pressure so that the zoo may one day let her go.
--Bhavithra Aloysious
c/o Zoocheck Canada
788 1/2 O'Connor Drive
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4B 2S6
Phone: 416-285-1744
Fax: 416-285-4670
<bhavithra@zoocheck.com>
< zoocheck.com/action.html>
Gassing banned
Some good news on the animal front! The Nanaimo city council voted unanimously to ban the use of the gas box to kill cats. I had the chance to address the council before the vote. Until June 15, gas boxes were used on cats and lethal injection on dogs.
--Jean Martin
Lantzville, British Columbia
<pj-mar@shaw.ca>
Remembering the Princess Elizabeth de Croy
It was with great sorrow that I learnt from ANIMAL PEOPLE that my close and much admired friend Elizabeth, Princess de Croy of France, had passed away on May 18, 2009 at her Refuge de Thiernay at the age of 88 years.
For over 30 years I had a steady and affectionate correspondence with her. She visited Chile in 1959 and accompanied me to the horrible perrera where thousands of dogs were cruelly killed. She rescued a little mongrel she called Tribilin, and left him with me until his death, enquiring always about his health. On that occasion she met recently elected President Educardo Frei Montalva and received from him the assurance that bullfights would never be allowed in Chile. Later on I visited her at the Refuge de Thiernay, which impressed me as a model institution. I continued to receive regularly her Nouvelles de Thiernay newsletter, informing me about her wonderful work.
Elizabeth certainly was an outstanding woman and never equalled animal friend. I must be grateful to her to have been her confidante and very close friend.
I am close to my 92nd birthday, and am battling the woes of old age.
--Godofredo Stutzin
Santiago, Chile
What to do about Michael Vick? Dorothy & Toto
Your June 2009 editorial "Has Michael Vick truly hit the road to redemption?" made it impossible for me not to write. At the end, you state that "Dorothy and Toto would have given Vick a chance." I would venture to say that in Vick's universe, Toto would have been stolen for bait! I try to follow Gandhian principles in my life as much as possible, and I do believe in forgiveness as one of the highest forms of reform. But Vick is outdoing my principles. Everything he has said and done publicly since leaving Leavenworth prison, to my eye and ear, is strictly aimed at reinstating his former lifestyle.
It is easier for me to believe that the Wizard of Oz was real than to believe Vick's well-rehearsed shamefaced appeals for forgiveness. I don't believe Vick for a second. He has a very, very long way to go before many of us will believe he deserves a thimbleful of tea and sympathy. And until he truly proves himself, he should not be reinstated into any NFL team to be made a hero to young people, who will see that as "See, he said he was sorry, and he got away with it! What the hell, let's do the same thing!"
Sorry, but Vick gets a thumbs down from me. I truly hope he can overcome his personality traits, but as you pointed out, dogfighters have a high rate of recidivism. Let him stand as a rebuke to others who commit the same crimes he did, and leave it at that.
--Morgana Washington
Welcome Home Sanctuary
868 Martindale Road
Craryville, NY 12521
<myspiritdogs@yahoo.com>
Vick background
I always love what you guys do, but your June 2009 cover feature "Dog bite prevention weak," about dog bites and pit bulls, was exceptional. Just terrific.
The editorial on Michael Vick and his deal with the Humane Society of the U.S. to speak against dogfighting was also incredible and well reasoned. You are right, this is the best option. Only HSUS has the resources to really monitor this guy or to utilize him well. It is also difficult to say that dogs can be rehabilitated but not people. While not all dogs can be, some can. Likely the same with people. One of my students here at the Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine went to high school with Michael Vick and was friends with him then. She is just destroyed by this whole mess as it clashes so with her own values--but also with her experience with him during that time. So maybe he has it in him to become that kind kid again, unless he had them all fooled all through high school. Only time will tell.
--Gini Barrett
Devore Heights, California
<GiniBarrett@aol.com>
Reinstating Vick
I found your June 2009 editorial about Michael Vick very thought provoking. While some people can be rehabilitated, in my opinion Vick is just using his deal with the Humane Society of the U.S. as a way to get back into the National Football League. However, if HSUS can use Vick to help educate a lot of people, especially the emerging generation, this is good.
Maybe the best solution would be to have him do this and only be allowed back into football when he is too old to play.
--Robert Blumberg
Cardiff by the Sea, California
<rblumberg@attglobal.net>
Dog-eater caught in Japan was Korean
The March 2006 ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial "Chinese 'Year of the Dog' begins with good omens" mentioned that "Confirmation that a clandestine dog meat industry persists in Japan, decades after overt dog-eating disappeared, came in mid-December 2005 when an 82-year-old man was arrested for dumping the heads of about 30 butchered dogs."
The man's identity was not disclosed. According to the Kyodo News Agency, he imported dog carcasses from China and sold the meat. ANIMAL PEOPLE has recently learned that while the dog butcher was a Japanese resident, he was a South Korean citizen, whose customers were fellow immigrants.
Watching new Eagle Vick "like a hawk"
PHILADELPHIA--Michael Vick, considered possibly the best quarterback in the National Football League before becoming the most notorious dogfighter ever, is again playing football. Rising to stardom with the Atlanta Falcons before his April 2007 arrest in connection with dogfighting, the 29-year-old Vick is now an expensive backup for the Philadelphia Eagles, behind five-time Pro Bowl quarterback Donovan McNabb.
"I lobbied to get him here," said McNabb. "I believe in second chances and what better place to get a second chance."
Whether Vick was a football star gone bad or a would-be dogfighter who happened to be good at football is among the open questions among observers. Vick set up his dogfighting operation, Bad Newz Kennels, in 2001, the same year he became the first pick in the NFL draft.
"Everything that happened at that point in my life was wrong," Vick said at the press conference called to announce his August 13, 2009 signing with the Eagles. "I had to reach a turning point. Prison definitely did it for me. I want to be an ambassador to the NFL and the community. I won't disappoint," Vick pledged.
Interviewed by James Brown of 60 Minutes, Vick said he feels "some tremendous hurt behind what happened," acknowledged that he should have taken "the initiative to stop it all, but didn't," and when asked if he was more concerned about playing football or his canine victims, he responded, "Football don't even matter."
Vick's remarks on both occasions paralleled a brief statement issued almost immediately after his signing by American SPCA president Ed Sayres.
"The ASPCA expects Mr. Vick to express remorse for his actions, as well as display more compassion and sound judgment this time around than he did during his previous tenure with the NFL," Sayres said. "We hope that Mr. Vick uses his stature for the betterment of the community and the advancement of the issue of animal cruelty,"
Conditionally reinstated as an eligible player by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in July, Vick "will be considered for full reinstatement and to play in regular season games by Week 6 [of the NFL season]," the league said in a prepared statement.
"I accept that you are sincere when you say that you want to, and will, turn your life around, and that you intend to be a positive role model for others," said Goodell in reinstating Vick. "I am prepared to offer you that opportunity. Needless to say, your margin for error is extremely limited," Goodell cautioned. "I urge you to take full advantage of the resources available to support you."
Vick joined the Eagles after making two appearances arranged by the Humane Society of the U.S. The first, at the New Life Community Center in Decatur, an Atlanta suburb, "was largely off limits to the very neighborhood it was supposed to be helping," reported Associated Press sportswriter Paul Newberry, who with a photographer and a videographer was barred from the building.
"In an agreement between Vick's handlers and the Humane Society of the United States, only 55 people and one media crew were allowed inside," wrote Newberry.
"I pushed for his participation at this previously planned Saturday afternoon class for people engaged in our Atlanta program," HSUS president Wayne Pacelle told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "For his first statement, he and his people picked a large platform," the 60 Minutes interview with Brown, whose crew were the only media admitted, "and they didn't want to fritter it away by speaking piecemeal. It was a little uncomfortable for us," Pacelle said, "since we are generally very accommodating to all press requests."
Pacelle hoped that Vick would later "be more open to interviews and to allowing press into the events where he appears."
Four days later Vick spoke at the Liberation Christian Center in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago's South Side. "When the Vick case broke two years ago, I would not have imagined that I'd eventually see Vick share the pulpit with other reformed dogfighters turned HSUS advocates, telling kids from personal experience not to go down this dead-end path," said HSUS vice president Mike Markarian, who attended the gathering.
"Heightened awareness brought by his celebrity helped us pass tougher animal fighting laws in 24 states," as well as at the federal level, Markarian recalled. "We need strong laws against cruelty," Markarian said, "but the laws can only go so far. We also need community-based outreach. Michael Vick served nearly two years in prison, and told the young people at Englewood that he had a lot of time to reflect on the way he had lived his life. He said that he knows what he did to animals was wrong, and that he now wants to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. He said that if he can steer 50, or 100, or 1,000 kids away from dogfighting, then he can help more animals than he harmed."
Testimony from co-defendants in the Vick case indicated that Vick was personally involved in killing at least eight dogs. "Philadelphia is a city of dog lovers and, most particularly, pit bull lovers," said Pennsylvania SPCA chief executive Susan Cosby. "To root for someone who participated in the hanging, drowning, electrocution and shooting of dogs will be impossible for many."
Said spokesperson Dan Shannon, "PETA and millions of decent football fans around the world are disappointed that the Eagles decided to sign a guy who hung dogs from trees, electrocuted them with jumper cables, and held them under water."
Added PETA in a prepared statement, "He has served his reduced sentence, but no child should ever look up to Vick. We are going to watch him like a hawk."
Main Line Animal Rescue founder Bill Smith told Associated Press writer Ron Todd that his organization would rent three billboards near the Eagles' stadium to protest against the Vick signing. "I'm really shocked that he's coming to Philadelphia," said Smith. "He keeps talking about second chances. His dogs didn't have a second chance. There are a lot of people out there who deserve second chances more than Michael Vick."
But Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell endorsed the HSUS perspective.
"I don't have to take a backseat to anyone in my commitment to helping protect all animals, and specifically our dogs and puppies," Rendell said. "I also believe strongly in the tenets of rehabilitation and redemption. I believe Michael Vick has paid a strong and just penalty for his horrific acts, but he has endured that penalty with dignity and grace. He seems to be genuinely remorseful."
Looking at Rendell's record on dog law enforcement, Jon Hurdle of The New York Times noted Rendell's role in reinforcing the applicable state legislation in 2008. "Since last December," Rendell wrote, "officials have revoked or refused 11 kennel licenses. They are in the process of revoking three more. Before the 2008 law was passed, officials had already stepped up efforts to regulate the kennels, revoking 41 licenses in 2007 and in early 2008, compared with only 3 in 2006," under Rendell's predecessor.
"What Vick did was certainly awful," Animal Liberation author Peter Singer told Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Daniel Rubin. "But many people do or participate in things regarding animals that are awful. For example," Singer said, "the kinds of things that are done to pigs to turn them into ham or bacon are awful, but we don't care as much about pigs. And I think there is every reason to believe that pigs are as sensitive and intelligent as dogs. The people who are very quick to jump on Michael Vick maybe could spend some time thinking about how they participate in cruelty to animals just by walking into the supermarket," Singer suggested.
"Fervent animal lovers won't forget just because Vick scores a touchdown," assessed Associated Press sportswriter Dan Gelston. "Devoted Eagles fans won't care if Vick starts every day with a visit to an animal shelter as long as he scores touchdowns.
"About two dozen protesters gathered outside the Eagles practice facility in opposition to the signing," Gelston noted, "one holding a sign that read, 'Hide your beagle, Vick is an Eagle."
Among more than 33,000 Eagles fans who voted in a Philly.com online poll, 51% opposed signing Vick; 49% approved.
"Two years ago," recalled Judy Battista of the New York Times, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie "said he would never allow someone involved with dogfighting on the Eagles. Without naming Vick, he alluded to two former Eagles who were charged with animal cruelty and not convicted."
But pro football and pit bull issues have crossed before in the Philadelphia area. Former NFL running back Todd McNair, later a running backs coach for the University of Southern California, was fined $500 in July 1993 for alleged neglect of pit bulls. McNair was also fined $100 for contempt of court for failing to donate $250 to an animal shelter, as stipulated in his sentencing agreement.
In March 1994 police shot a pit bull whom they believed belonged to McNair, after the pit bull attacked another neighborhood dog, and found six other pit bulls chained in McNair's yard.
In 1996 McNair was charged with 81 offenses involving 22 pit bulls, including 17 who were found chained to trees on his property, plus five puppies. Convicted in October 1996 of 22 counts of misdemeanor neglect, McNair paid fines and restitution totaling $16,226.50. McNair was not penalized by his teams or by the NFL.
Tips relayed to police and the Pennsylvania SPCA after Vick was arrested in 2007 reportedly contributed to apprehending at least four suspected dogfighters in Philadel-phia and surrounding suburbs.
Among them, Sidney Prosser, 37, posing as a rescuer and breeder, had 22 pit bulls. He eventually pleaded guilty to keeping dogs for fighting. A neighbor, Barry White, had 18 pit bulls. White pleaded guilty to related charges, and faced similar charges in North Carolina. Despite the proximity of the defendants, police said there was no direct link between the Prosser and White cases.
The Vick case broke shortly after Henry J. Brotnitsky, 33, pleaded guilty to cruelty in connection with dogfighting. Brotnit-sky, of Winslow, New Jersey, just north of Philadelphia, "admitted in court to killing a dog with an electric shock after the dog lost a fight" in October 2005, summarized Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Troy Graham.
Police found 43 pit bulls on Brotnitsky's premises, plus a 55-minute video of the fight that Brotnitsky's dog lost. Brotznitzky in March 2007 accepted a plea bargain sentence consisting of "five years' probation and a 364-day jail sentence, including 60 days served inside the jail. The rest can be served on house arrest or on a work detail," Graham said.
Philadelphia has been a reputed hub of dogfighting at least since 1992, when the first coordinated multi-state arrests in dogfighting cases nabbed defendants there and in the Detroit area. Two years later the Pennsyl-vania SPCA became one of the first animal agencies to catch an employee in the act of conveying shelter animals to dogfighters, a problem now known to have occurred at shelters throughout the U.S. and Canada.
A June 2006 raid on the Down Low night club in the Philadelphia suburb of Allentown reportedly exposed one of the most sophisticated dogfighting set-ups yet discovered by law enforcement. Eleven defendants were charged, seven with felonies.
Animals are among losers of "War on Terror"
BARSTOW, JACKSONVILLE-- Wars are lost by losing lives and land. Thus whales, burros, pigs, and desert tortoises far from any battlefield are among the losers of the War on Terror, informally declared in 2001 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush.
The Barack Obama administration in March 2009 abandoned use of the phrase "War on Terror" to describe what are now called "overseas contingency operations," and are no longer rhetorically linked, in recognition that U.S. troops are fighting different foes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But changing terminology has not changed the issues. Even before "War on Terror" was used to drum up support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was used to quell opposition to military training exercises that harm animals and habitat. Military projects harmful to animals that began or expanded in the name of the "War on Terror" are still underway, often bigger than ever.
Most controversially and most directly related to the war effort, the U.S. Marine Corps in July 2009 confirmed to Mark Walker of the North County Times in Escondido, California that "1,374 of the 40,000 troops assigned to Camp Pendleton's I Marine Expeditionary Force have undergone or will undergo 'live tissue training' involving the wounding of anesthetized pigs who are later destroyed," Walker wrote.
"Representative Bob Filner, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, signed a letter on July 9 asking the military to stop using pigs in medical training," added Walker. "The letter, by Representative Henry Johnson of Georgia, was sent to Army officials and says that use of medical simulators and placing troops in hospital emergency rooms can readily replace the current practice, employed at various sites around the country since 2006."
"What our soldiers need is repeated practice on realistic mannequins with the correct anatomy," commented Humane Society of the U.S. vice president for animal research Martin Stephens.
PETA in July 2008 campaigned against similar exercises conducted by the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and unsuccessfully sought a USDA investigation after at least 13 pigs died during transport to Hawaii for use in live tissue training. In mid-July 2009 PETA researcher Shalin Gala complained to San Diego County planning director Eric Gibson that the exercises violate the agricultural zoning of the 17-acre avocado grove where they take place.
"The department determined that county regulations do not prohibit this type of medical training," Gibson responded.
Between the 2008 and 2009 PETA efforts, USA Today reporter Tom Vanden Brook disclosed in April 2009 that, "Military researchers have dressed live pigs in body armor and strapped them into Humvee simulators that were then blown up with explosives to study the link between roadside bomb blasts and brain injury. For an 11-month period that ended in December, researchers subjected pigs and rats to about 200 blasts."
Blowing up pigs produced at least seven specific useful findings, according to Army Colonel Mike Jaffee, director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, but New York Times reporter Denise Grady on May 25, 2009 attributed similar findings to brain scans and autopsies performed on the remains of more than 3,000 U.S. military personnel who were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Grady also described life-saving findings resulting from the scans and autopsies which could not have resulted from examining the remains of non-human experimental subjects.
Burros & tortoises
Wild Burro Rescue as the July/ August 2009 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press hoped to rally last-minute opposition to a Bureau of Land Management plan to remove 40 burros from Fort Irwin, adjacent to Death Valley National Park. The BLM also plans to trap 40 to 60 burros at Owl Hole Springs, near the park.
"The burros will be kept at the BLM holding facility in Ridgecrest, where they will be put up for adoption," said Barstow Desert Dispatch staff writer Eunice Lee.
Fort Irwin natural resources program manager Clarence Everly told Lee that burros "roam through live fire training areas on the installation," interrupting operations.
Wild Burro Rescue founder Diana Chontos is skeptical of any pretense that the roundup is for the benefit of burros. National Park Service policy is to purge non-native species. The Park Service has sought to keep burros out of the parts of Death Valley that it controls since 1994. Removing burros from Fort Irwin and Owl Hole Springs serves that end, Chontos told ANIMAL PEOPLE.
Wild burros on BLM land are protected from killing by the 1971 Wild & Free Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act, but have no protection anywhere else.
Desert tortoises are an endangered species, protected anywhere they occur. The Army has been vigorously evicting desert tortoises from the same parts of Fort Irwin as burros, to expand tank training. In early 2008 the Army moved 556 of the endangered tortoises to other public land. More than 90 tortoises died soon after being moved. Most were reportedly killed by coyotes.
"Draft environmental documents released by the BLM said that drought, not relocation, was to blame," wrote Daniel Danelski of the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "Scarce water meant coyotes had fewer rabbits and other normal prey. The coyotes apparently turned to tortoises as a food of last resort."
The Army now plans to move about 90 desert tortoises out of Fort Irwin in September and October 2009, and then move as many as 1,100 in 2010.
Marine animals
The U.S. Navy on August 3, 2009 announced that it will proceed as planned to build a 500-square-mile grid of cable-linked transmitters and receivers on the sea floor off northern Florida and southern South Carolina, to be used in anti-submarine warfare training. The construction is expected to take five years.
"The northern Florida waters are considered the heart of the right whale's winter breeding ground and are travelled by other species, such as loggerhead sea turtles," summarized Bo Peterson of the Charleston Post & Courier. "Conservationists worry that sonar and other man-made noises could be deafening and could frighten whales into fatal beach strandings and rapid surfacing."
The project was opposed in 2007 by South Carolina Natural Resources environmental programs director Robert Duncan. "Intense sound can damage fish's ears, reduce the viability of eggs, harm larvae, and retard growth. Intense sound also can cause changes in fish behavior, and disrupt fish navigation, communication, foraging and schooling," wrote Duncan.
Before the "War on Terror" started, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that use of sonar might have had a part in causing beaked whale strandings during training exercises held in 2000 in the Bahamas.
"The Navy has since agreed to adopt some measures to protect whales, such as having ships turn off their sonar when sailors spot marine mammals nearby," recounted Audrey McAvoy of Associated Press. "But it has strongly resisted more stringent restrictions, saying there is not enough scientific evidence to require them. The Navy is pushing for more research, budgeting $26 million per year over the next five years to understand how marine mammals hear and how sound affects them."
Some of the Navy money funded work by Cascadia Research Collective marine biologist Robin Baird. Baird, founder of the Marmam online information network for marine biologists, studied Cuvier's and Blainville beaked whales off Hawaii and northern bottlenose whales off Nova Scotia.
His findings, published in June 2009 in the journal Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, "provide more evidence that beaked whales found dead in association with naval sonar activities are likely to be getting decompression sickness," Baird told McAvoy.
At least 41 such incidents occurred between 1960 and 2006, according to an inventory published by the Journal of Cetacean Research & Management.
But even though the Navy paid for Baird's research, the Navy paid little evident attention to Baird's conclusions.
Calling the Navy' decision "an obvious dodge of environmental protections for right whales and commercially valuable marine life," Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Catherine Wannamaker signaled that lawsuits against the anti-submarine warfare training range may continue. Wannamaker previously fought the project for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration director of protected resources Jim Lecky defended the training range by pointing out that ""Right whales rely on low frequencies" for their own communications. "They're not as inhibited by high frequency sonar as other species might be," Lecky said.
Lecky noted that the major threat to right whales is from ship strikes, and praised Navy efforts to avoid ramming whales.
Animal Birth Control gains speed
CHENNAI, DELHI, MUMBAI --Indian minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh served notice in July and August 2009 speaking appearances that he means to put wheels under the Indian national Animal Birth Control program.
Now Chinny Krishna, who engin-eered the ABC program, needs to put new wheels under the Blue Cross of India surgical team to keep up with increasing demands for service. "We have been inundated with requests from municipalities asking us to undertake ABC," Krishna told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "In addition to the cost of doing more operations, we are handicapped for want of enough vehicles, since all these new areas are some distance from Chennai," where the Blue Cross of India is based.
"Each vehicle costs approximately $21,000," Krishna said, "and we need at least two most urgently. We applied to the Animal Welfare Board of India for an additional vehicle over a year ago. Our mobile surgery bus is 13 years old and we are using it to pick up and drop off dogs for ABC. Our newest vehicle, of seven, is almost five years old. They have all covered well over 100,000 kilometers, many over 200,000, and are becoming prohibitively expensive to run. We are yet to get reimbursement for last year's operations," Krishna added--a common complaint of ABC program operators. "We have been able to pay all the salaries," Krishna said, "about $6,000 every month," mostly donated by Krishna's electrical engineering business, "but we do not have pockets deep enough" to buy new vehicles.
Chennai mayor M. Subramanian on August 4, 2009 provided two new vehicles to the Chennai city ABC program, operated by People for Animals, but that did not help the Blue Cross of India or the outlying suburbs. Subramanian estimated that Chennai still has about 126,000 street dogs left to be sterilized.
Krishna and the Blue Cross of India surgeons have for 43 years demonstrated that ABC is the most effective way to control street dogs. Also among the engineers of the Indian space program, Krishna first presented ABC as a 1966 concept paper. For the next 30 years the Blue Cross under Krishna's direction tested ABC techniques in Chennai, inspiring the formation of the PfA program and similar programs in other cities. In 1996 the city governments of Chennai and Mumbai adopted ABC in place of electrocuting dogs.
ABC was accepted as Indian national policy in December 1997, in the last days of a Congress Party government, but was implemented by the Bharatija Janata Party government elected in early 1998. The BJP cabinet minister in charge of ABC was for five years People for Animals founder Maneka Gandhi. That made ABC a frequent target of Congress Party politicians trying to return to power.
Paradoxically, Congress Party chair Sonia Gandhi--Maneka Gandhi's former sister-in-law--also endorsed ABC. Equally paradoxically, ABC was and remains opposed by factions aligned with the BJP which have used dog-catching as a source of patronage jobs and favor animal sacrifice, also opposed by both Gandhis. Eventually the anti-dog and pro-sacrifice factions, aligned with biomedical researchers, forced Maneka Gandhi out of the BJP cabinet.
Ramesh, a prominent member of the present Congress government, has been among Sonia Gandhi's inner circle since circa 2004.
"ABC is equally important as other projects of the ministry," said Ramesh on July 10 in New Delhi. Ramesh appeared with Animal Welfare Board of India chair R.M. Kharb to announced publication of Standard Operating Procedures for Sterilization of Stray Dogs under the Animal Birth Control Programme, a new official protocol.
"This is long overdue, in that good intentions are simply not enough. A minimum infrastructure and required levels of hygiene, asepsis and surgical skill plus necessary aftercare are essential to ensure minimum trauma for the dogs," said Krishna, who was in the audience.
Krishna noted that Greater Hydera-bad Municipal Corporation commissioner S. P. Singh had already announced that Hyderabad would implement the Standard Operating Procedures, 24 hours before they were made public. "The Hyderabad ABC program was in a shambles, with unacceptably high rates of mortality and post-operative complications and terribly inhumane pound conditions," Krishna said.
Earlier, on June 9, "The Kerala government directed that all villages and municipalities should stop killing stray dogs and should implement ABC in letter and spirit," reported Animal Welfare Board of India member A.G. Babu.
This followed a ruling firmly favoring ABC from the Bombay High Court in December 2008. Similar verdicts were later issued by the High Courts of Madras and Delhi.
ABC programs have so far mostly been introduced through humane initiative, usually against municipal resistance. As ABC succeeds, cities often set up their own ABC programs, some of them conspicuously corrupt, inept, or mere fronts for traditional dog extermination, as has been alleged in Hyderabad and Thiruvanathapuram, the Kerala state capital.
Sikkim state in April 2009 took a different approach. The Sikkim Anti- Rabies and Animal Health Program, known as SARAH, is now an official part of the state Animal Husbandry, Livestock, Fisheries and Veterinary Services Department. Formed in March 2006 as a partnership among the Sikkim government, the Australian charity Vets Beyond Borders, and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, SARAH had in three years done 16,000 dog and cat sterilizations and administered 29,000 anti-rabies vaccinations, achieving an 85% reduction in human rabies cases.
Rabies-Free India
The initial national ABC target was to eradicate rabies nationally by sterilizing about 10 million street dogs between December 1997 and the end of 2005. That goal was not approached. Funding for prophylactic rabies vaccination was not initially included in the ABC budget, and the Indian humane community struggled to build the capacity to sterilize dogs in high volume.
Even in Delhi, including New Delhi, the national capital, building capacity has taken much longer than was initially hoped. Delhi created the Society for Stray Canine Birth Control to manage local ABC efforts in 2002. The nine humane societies performing sterilizations in Delhi averaged under 1,000 surgeries apiece in their first year of work, and took five years to reach 2,000 apiece, despite modest gains in productivity in each year.
Yet ABC has had some spectacular regional successes.
Combining ABC with prototypes for Rabies-Free India, a new Animal Welfare Board program, Chennai, Jaipur, and Visakhapatnam had all eradicated rabies and achieved marked dog population reductions by mid-decade. Bangalore achieved similar results in the inner city, until a 2007 political backlash exploiting two dog attacks in outer suburbs halted the Banglore programs for months and killed hundreds of dogs who had already been sterilized and vaccinated.
Animal Help showed in Ahmedabad that Indian surgical teams using up-to-date methods could sterilize as many as 45,000 dogs per year. The Ahmedabad program was dismantled by political opposition, then restarted under other operators who fell short of the Animal Help achievements. Ahmeda-bad still has about 200,000 street dogs at large, according to city officials. The Animal Help team is now working in the outer Bangalore suburbs, and is conducting an ABC demonstration project in Bhutan, sponsored by the Humane Society International subsidiary of the Humane Society of the United States.
The net accomplishment of the first dozen years of ABC was to reduce the Indian street dog population by 20%.
The Rabies-Free India campaign will seek to vaccinate every dog in India against rabies, a longtime goal of the Indian humane community and often mentioned by Kharb as a priority. "Ramesh has also promised the necessary funding to start the RFI campaign [nationwide]," Krishna said. "Ramesh asked Kharb for a detailed roadmap to achieve this within 15 days. I left Delhi on the afternoon of the 10th after the meeting," Krishna told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "When I reached home at 9 p.m., I was delighted to find the outline of the roadmap for the RFI campaign in my e-mail."
Attacks challenge
"The dogged battle is won--but the war is still on," cautioned A.G. Babu, welcoming the new official support for ABC, but citing continued resistance from "bureaucrats, ministers, megalomaniac politicians of various hues and colors, and above all the hostile media, hellbent to prove that killing strays is the only way out."
An example of how quickly dog massacres can be incited if the humane community fails to respond effectively to attacks occurred in the first week of August.
Awakening at two a.m., creeping outside, and trying to make his way to his uncle Rohidas Patil's house, five-year-old Avinash Patil of Bhiwandi met a pack of as many as 15 dogs, said the neighbors who rescued him. Losing much of his scalp and suffering deep wounds to his stomach, hands, and back, Avinash Patil was turned away from the first two hospitals he was taken to, after the doctors on duty claimed they had no emergency facilities and no post-exposure rabies vaccine. A third hospital provided post-exposure vaccination and sutured his wounds nearly two hours after the attack.
"This incident took place under the jurisdiction of Thane," a northern Mumbai suburb, reported Lata Mishra of the Mumbai Mirror. "However, in Mumbai more than 50,000 dog bites are recorded each year. The Bombay Municipal Corporation has stepped up sterilization to control the dog population and reduce attacks on humans."
"We sterilized 33,000 dogs in 2008 as compared to 13,000 in 2007. This year, in the first six months, we reached 20,000," said Mumbai health officer Gourish Ambe.
"I was asked by a news channel to comment on the Patil incident," recounted Thane SPCA spokesperson Shakuntala Majumdar. "I was at a loss for what to say. On one side there is this little child fighting for his life, half his face, his thighs and legs chewed away. He could very well have been my child. On the other, there were these dogs, probably hungry and foraging for food.
"In the last three or four years many of us actively involved in animal welfare work have noticed a disturbing rise," Majumdar said, "in cases of stray dogs behaving in a vicious manner, especially in packs."
The Patil attack was misrepresented to some extent in sensational reportage.
"When India TV carried this news," recounted Rishi Dev of Citizens for Animal Rights in New Delhi, "I was shocked to see video of my pet dog, which they took a few years back for some show, being aired as the ferocious dog who bit the child. Within 15 minutes I sent India TV a legal notice by e-mail. The owner of the channel and their all-India wildlife correspondent communicated to me and apologized."
But the tendency for the most dangerous part of a dog population to be the last to be reduced through either sterilization or extermination efforts has been observed for decades, and will have to be addressed by ABC service providers.
ANIMAL PEOPLE guest columnist Margaret Anne Cleek explained the phenomenon in November 1993. "Our efforts have created an overnight change in the evolution of the dog," Cleek wrote. "We are seeing not an across-the-board reduction in the dog population, but rather a restriction of range, skewing the distribution toward larger, more aggressive dogs." This occurs, Cleek pointed out, because the people who keep, feed, and breed large, aggressive dogs tend to be most resistant to having dogs sterilized, and because the least socialized street dogs are the most difficult to catch and handle.
On the streets, as other dogs vacate habitat, the most evasive and aggressive dogs take over the food sources--and those in the largest, fastest-moving packs enjoy an edge that they did not have when resident dogs were plentiful enough to keep roving dogs out of their neighborhoods.
The safest approach to introducing the Animal Birth Control program would have begun with catching the most hostile and elusive dogs first. However, ABC programs have always been pressured to prove themselves by reducing the numbers of dogs as rapidly as possible, so have usually concentrated first on the easiest cases.
Likewise, goondas hired to kill dogs, paid by the head, focus on the dogs they can most easily catch, leaving the most dangerous part of the dog population at large.
Within days of Ramesh's pledge of support for ABC, ANIMAL PEOPLE received reports of goondas hired by local officials massacring dogs in the cities of Chickballapur, Jamalpur, Siddapur, Uppal, Mallikarjuna Nagar, and Peerzadiguda. But the killing was blamed on lack of effective ABC programs, not praised as inevitable.
--Merritt Clifton
The effect of breed-specific bylaws on city pit bull terrier killing rates
This table shows pit bull killing as a share of shelter killing in 11 major U.S. cities--only one of which kills more pit bulls than the national average rate per 1,000 humans.
Cities with legislation either prohibiting pit bulls or requiring pit bulls to be sterilized are shown in boldface.
The first data column shows how many pit bulls were killed either in one recent year or as an average of recent years, depending on what information was available.
The second column shows the numbers of pit bulls killed per 1,000 human residents of each city per year.
The third column shows the contribution that killing pit bulls made to the total city rate of shelter killing of dogs and cats per 1,000 people.
The bottom line states national totals projected from the sum of data gathered for our 2009 shelter killing survey.
City Pits bulls killed/yr Per 1m ppl %
Denver 275 avg. .14 3%
New York City 2,750 .33 14%
San Francisco 304 post BSL .38 29%
452 pre BSL .56 43%
Seattle 411 avg. .68 37%
Los Angeles 13,000 .73 11%
Philadelphia 1,222 .84 4%
Milwaukee 1,438 .85 18%
Cincinnati 1,121 1.34 10%
Houston 8,867 2.28 12%
Indianapolis 2,500 2.89 17%
Phoenix/Maricopa 10,000 3.54 24%
----------------------------------------------------------
U.S. TOTAL 967,302 3.15 21%
Philadelphia appears to kill relatively few pit bulls as a share of shelter killing chiefly because it has the highest rate of total shelter killing on the chart: 19.9 per 1,000 people.
Note that pit bulls are a much smaller part of total shelter killing in Cincinnati than in either Milwaukee or Indianapolis, two cities of very similar demographic profile.