Just In May 14, 2008: Press Releases from Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife

Environmental Groups Win Protection for Polar Bear
Faced with Scientific Evidence on Global Warming, Court Order, and
Public Pressure, Government Grants Polar Bear Endangered Species Act Listing
Due to Global Warming.... (read more)

Polar bear listed as threatened but protection uncertain

Defenders of Wildlife welcomes decision to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, points out Bush administration still unwilling to address global warming... (read more)


Posted May 14, 2008 by Colleen



The Center for Biological Diversity needs 60,000 petition signatures on a petition urging the Secretary of Interior of the U.S. to list the polar bear as an endangered species and to protect its habitat.  The deadline is tomorrow so please sign and cross post.

The Bush administration stalled on protecting the polar bear due to a desire to push forward on Arctic oil and gas leases. A federal judge has ordered the administration to make a final decision by the May 15.

Due to climate change, the arctic is melting rapidly and polar bears are in big trouble. Some are starving and drowning.

Read more and sign (click here).

Related Blog Entries
Climate Change: Accomplish the Impossible or Experience the Unthinkable, May 9, 2008
The Year of the Polar Bear, December 31, 2007

Posted May 13, 2008 by Colleen

Sanctuary Song

The reunion of Shirley and Jenny, two Asian elephants who had been briefly together in a circus, then separated and reunited 23 years later at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, touched the hearts of thousands across the globe. You can read about it by visiting this page or click here and scroll down to Shirley and Jenny’s reunion to watch video coverage.
 
Their story has inspired the creation of a beautiful opera. I know it’s beautiful as I saw the workshop version last year. It was, in fact, spectacular. Bring tissues. I won’t say kleenex as Greenpeace will tell you that Kimberly Clark is busy destroying the boreal forest, but bring your Cascades or Seventh Generation for sure.
 
...From  Tapestry & Theatre Direct in Toronto and in partnership with Luminato, Toronto's Festival of Arts & Creativity
 
The world première of

SANCTUARY SONG
Composed by Abigail Richardson
Written by Marjorie Chan
June 7 - 14, 2008 at the Berkeley Street Theatre
26 Berkeley Street. Toronto, ON
Preview June 6, 2008

"Sometimes the most beautiful friendships come in unusual sizes… "
 
From the Sanctuary Song site
 
"Inspired by a true story, Sanctuary Song is the result of a dynamic collaboration between two award-winning Toronto companies, who come together to tell a story from the point of view of a most unusual protagonist. An unforgettable opera for all ages.
 
A remarkable 22-year friendship between man and creature culminates in a promise of freedom fulfilled and a joyful reunion when, after decades in captivity, an Asian elephant is brought to sanctuary.

Along the journey, her memories of childhood in the jungle, circus life and her solitary days in the zoo come alive through the emotional power of opera, evocative dance and stunning design.

“No more circuses. No more zoos.... You will be free!”"

Read more from Sanctuary Song and order tickets!

Note: Luminato will also be screening The Urban Elephant
 

Take a Roll in the Hay for Farm Animals

photo credit: Farm Sanctuary
 
A Scent of Scandal, a Los Angeles-based company celebrated for its clever and classy cruelty-free candles, has unveiled a new creation: a candle called "A Roll in the Hay," launched to raise funds for and awareness about Farm Sanctuary, the leading farm animal protection organization in the U.S. Fifteen percent of every "A Roll in the Hay" sale will be donated directly to Farm Sanctuary.

Read more from Farm Sanctuary's Press Release

Go to the order page

"Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war." There is no set end point for this experiment. Where we end up in this potentially suicidal, indeed geo-cidal, experiment depends on when governments around the world act decisively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. << MORE >>

Update: May 7, 2008
Hope has recovered from parvovirus and was flown back home last night, so happy to be with her new family who will shower her with love and care.

Hope at the park with her new family

Posted May 6, 2008 by Colleen (please sign petition)

I received a request to post about the bleak situation for abused and neglected animals living in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada's far north (see map).

HOPE is a six-month-old female dog in Hay River, NT who has endured a life of horrific neglect. She was found starving to death, infested with mites, open, oozing rotting flesh, severe malnutrition, festering open sores (her collar buckle embedded in the infected flesh below her chin) and festering flesh on her flanks and hips.



Hope at time of rescue

Currently, the NT and Nunavut have no animal protection acts. Dogs and cats are routinely dropped off in the middle of nowhere and only if they are lucky enough to be found do they get help. This is wild country, remote and open.

In some communities in the NT, dogs are rounded up and shot because negligent owners allow them to roam loose.

In another instance when the SPCA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrived to remove dogs due to neglect, they found the owner sitting on 59 corpses. He had shot each dog, dragged their bodies into a pile and was sitting on the pile when they arrived. This event prompted the Yukon Territory, which already had a Protection Act in place, to make amendments with stricter penalties and protection to ensure that this type of incident would not ever occur in the Yukon.

The abuse and neglect must end. An Animal Protection Act must be put into effect in the NT. Pressure on the Territories’ government MUST be made in order to do this.

A petition has been created to push for legislation. Please sign and circulate. (Click here)

Help build a shelter in Hay River, NT.
If you can help out the Hay River SPCA with its ongoing needs (click here), that would be greatly appreciated. Funds are desperately needed to build a shelter in Hay River. Had one been established already, perhaps Hope would have been surrendered and not allowed to suffer as she has.  Currently, individual SPCA volunteers foster any new arrivals in their own home.

As for Hope, she has spent the last month undergoing extensive care in Yellowknife and thankfully she may be returning to her newly adoptive family, the individuals who found her. She had spent three weeks in hospital, and was greeted on her return home a week ago at the airport by her new family and many who TRULY care. Unfortunately Hope fell very ill within a few days and was flown back to Yellowknife where she received treatment to fight Parvovirus. Last word is that if she tests negative after undergoing the newest treatment, she will be returning to her new family once again.


Hope on her recent visit with her new family

Updates will be posted on both Hope's condition and the campaign for legislation.

For other abuse and rescue cases in the north (click here)

Articles concerning abuse and legislation issues in the north

Dog deaths bring laws into question, June 27, 2006
Yukon proposes tougher animal protection laws, April 22, 2008
Dawson City-area dog shootings interview, June 27, 2006

Posted May 6, 2008 by Colleen

"How pitiful and what poverty of mind, to have said that the
animals are machines deprived of understanding and feeling."
Voltaire, (1694 - 1778)   (photo credit: factoryfarming.com)

Last week, Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a report about factory farming called Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America.

You can download it here, either the full report or the summary.

The Washington Post covered the report release on April 28, 2008, Report Targets Cost of Factory Farming, and the article provides a good summary of the findings:

“..fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock..”

“The "economies of scale" used to justify factory farming practices are largely an illusion, perpetuated by a failure to account for associated costs.”

“…costs are human illnesses caused by drug-resistant bacteria associated with the rampant use of antibiotics on feedlots..” (see MRSA links below marked with **)

“…degradation of land, water and air quality caused by animal waste too intensely concentrated to be neutralized by natural processes.”

“…modern agriculture is responsible for about 20 percent of the nation's greenhouse-gas production…”

Read more....

This letter to the Vancouver Sun sums it up nicely. "The report is long overdue. For the past 60 years, animal agriculture has been devastating North America's vital natural resources, including soil, water and wildlife habitats. It has been generating more greenhouse gases than transportation. It has been abusing billions of sentient animals."

Barbara Gowdy, author of the internationally acclaimed novel, The White Bone, said in a recent interview on Animal Voices, that you can try and influence people to cut down or cut out meat by addressing the horrific cruelty or the health issues or the environmental degradation but then added that unfortunately for the majority of people, the only thing that would make them give up any meat is if it interfered with their television reception.

A bleak thought but probably pretty dead-on at this point. Still, the message is getting out there for those who are willing to hear it and more people appear to be listening, eating less meat and buying it from more sustainable and humane sources or going veg.

Links of Interest
**A transcript of the report's page on Methicillin (Antibiotic)-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
Rethinking the Meat Guzzler, New York Times, January 28, 2008
**Our Decrepit Food Factories, New York Times, December 16, 2007
Union of Concerned Scientists
Factoryfarming.com
Life Behind Bars

Related Blog Entries
Darkness Shall Cover the Earth: The Dire Consequences of Factory Farming
The True Price of Bacon: The Miserable Lives of Pigs
**MRSA: The Evolution of a lethal new microbe
**Superbug found in Canadian Pork
Update on Horrific Animal Cruelty at California Slaughter Plant
The Dark Art of Denial

News Alert Posted May 5, 2008

From Care for the Wild International (CWI)

“An investigation on behalf of Care for the Wild International (CWI) reveals that the U.S. is one of the world's leading ivory markets and fails to comply with both CITES regulations and its own domestic laws. There is more worked ivory for sale in the United States than anywhere else in the world, except for China. Large quantities of worked ivory from China are illegally imported to the U.S. by individuals and through the Internet. The U.S. also maintains a largely unregulated ivory crafting industry.”

Download the CWI summary report
Download the CWI full report

National Geographic has also just published a detailed article based on this report:
U.S. One of Largest Ivory Markets, New Study Says

from the article..
"There are two loopholes here," said Martin, who worked on the report with Daniel Stiles, an anthropologist and wildlife trade investigator.
"One is that tusks come in from Africa as trophies and are sometimes sold within the U.S., which is illegal. The second problem is that people often declare worked ivory items to be antiques when in fact they were made after 1989," Martin added.
"Nearly one-third of the items we found, about 7,400 pieces, likely had been smuggled in into the U.S. since the 1990 ivory trade ban.

Also discussed is the major escalation in the illegal ivory trade since 2005, as well as the recent Virunga killings.

Read more...

Related Blog Entry
The New Threat to Africa's Elephant Population, May 3, 2008
Ivory for Arms, April 26, 2008
Militias and warlords using poaching of endangerd species to fund death, March 1, 2008

"Dear Santa: I hope you are sitting down. The Toronto Zoo is killing baby boy reindeer. Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now Prancer... The first was dispatched shortly after his birth April 8. His mom, Hayzel, bellowed mournfully for two days. You could hear her from Meadowvale Rd. The second met the same fate at the point of a hypodermic on April 22. His mom, CUPE, is named for the zoo staff's union. Both little gaffers were chocolate brown and gangly cute. They had barely begun to nurse. Both were perfectly healthy. "Euthanized due to being male," says the keepers' report, terse and angry..."<< MORE >>

Update May 4, 2008
3 more elephants killed in Virunga today, (total dead now 17) from Baraza's blog, click here


Posted May 3, 2008 by Colleen


Patsy, Toronto Zoo

We’ve all heard a great deal lately about the illegal ivory trade funding rebels, militias and armies and I posted a few days ago about Zimbabawe’s exchange of ivory for weapons with China.

Hot on the heels of that story was the depressing news about 14 elephants poached in the Congo. There is an excellent article that gives a great deal of insight into this situation published in Voice of America, May 2, 2008, Fueling World Ivory Trade Spells New Threat to Africa's Elephant Population.

Wildlife Direct's Emmanuel de Morode, who has worked to try and save Virunga National Park's gorillas and quell the bushmeat trade in eastern Congo is quoted putting the elephant deaths into context:

"There's a belief that the ivory market is going to open up. As a result, certain groups are going in to kill elephants. This isn't limited to Virunga. It is believed to be pretty widespread across the Congo Basin. There's been a massive reduction reported in (Congo's) Garamba National Park in the last few years. And this is a park that recently had 12,000 elephants and is now estimated to have less than half of that number."

He also talks about the recent killings coinciding with South Africa lifting its 13-year moratorium on elephant culling and of China's rising presence in the region stimulating the ivory market.

You can listen to an interview and discussion with Emmanuel de Morode by clicking on the links below. It includes a discussion of this crisis for elephants including the potential impact of South Africa's possible resumption of culling on the entire elephant population in Africa.

Wildlife Direct's Emmanuel de Morode - Download (MP3)
Wildlife Direct's Emmanuel de Morode - Listen (MP3)
Wildlife Direct's Emmanuel de Morode - Download (Real)
Wildlife Direct's Emmanuel de Morode - Listen (Real)

These links are also embedded in the article.

Related Blog Entries
Ivory for Arms
How our Gadgets Cause Death in the Congo
Militias and Warlords use poaching of endangered species to fund death
South Africa to sanction killing of elephants

Related Article
From the BBC dated April 28, 2008,
Congolese saw U.N. peacekeepers arming militias, refuting U.N. probe findings (read more)
an excerpt: "Peacekeepers from Pakistan and India smuggled gold and ivory — and gave arms to militias fighting in eastern Congo in return, the British Broadcasting Corp. alleged Monday, saying it had new witness accounts refuting U.N. claims that no weapons transfers had taken place."

Posted April 30, 2008 with permission from Baraza Blog

by Dipesh Pabari

In a world of Information, Communications and Technology overdrive, it is very rare that a unique concept can survive for very long without being adopted, or adapted, replicated or cloned and in some cases corrupted. This imaginary space that so many of us have learnt to exist within and become incapable of living without has like everything else the ability to create and destroy. The embodiment of opposites is one of the oldest concepts known to humankind. Shiva is one such deity worshipped by millions in India and elsewhere as destroyer and benefactor. Despite him being considered a God, I can’t imagine anything more human.

In the same space, there is a thin and transparent line between what is real and what is not. Phantasmagoria - a concept invented in the 18th Century to project images on to a wall using a lantern which give you the illusion of a non-existent reality.

“The TV screen makes you feel small…no life at all…”
 
Picture this:
 
This is not a shark…
 
It’s a shark in captivity (for somebody’s pleasure).

And Picture this:
 
This is not a snake…

It’s a snake in captivity (for somebody’s survival).

And finally picture this:
 
These are not gorillas…

They are dead gorillas (for…)

FOR WHAT?

We are blasted with images like this all the time. Starving children, bombed villages, dead wildlife, dead people. In Kenya, we have recently become very complacent about the latter compliments of our politicians.

And then there are the living (or once were living) creatures behind those pictures, behind that image that is splashed across your screen. There is life there - tucked away in the matrix of atoms that blasts our sensories. This is the space which the blogger inhabits and the space which I truly believe WildlifeDirect is manifested itself through the vision of Emmanuel de Merode and Richard Leakey.

There are 72 million blogs and more coming each minute that passes by. Just about each one of those little cubicles below has a human being reaching out to connect to some other living creature. We stumble upon one another and stumble upon something we care about and reach out in any way we can to touch that particular thing we care about.


What do you see below?
 
Yes, there’s a giraffe in the background and the silouette of a person in front. That is the person on the other end of the keyboard desperately trying to upload their blog before the electricity goes or crossing their legs in anxiety hoping the connection does not drop before the post is uploaded. These are the people that the vision of WildlifeDirect is built upon - rangers who get beaten, stoned, and often murdered. It’s in the line of duty - so nothing to be too sensationalist about but there is something just below the surface that deserves a mention; these are also people that have had shadows cast upon them by a brand just like so many in the west to have lost their identity to the corporate cogwheel of capitalism.

I bid you farewell from this particular word document editor but happy and proud to know that I am now also one of those 72 million bloggers…
 


To read more by Dipesh Pabari, visit:
Sukuma Kenya
Pambazuka News
AfricaNews
Kabissa, Space for Change in Africa

Dipesh Pabari is a Kenyan writer and freelance education and communications consultant. He sits on the Editorial Board for Awaaz Magazine (a journal for South Asians in diaspora) and Wajibu (a journal of ethical and social concern). In addition to publishing poetry, short stories and articles, he recently edited a short story book for children entitled, "The Unlikely Burden and other stories." But above all he is most proud of being a blogger!

Related Article
Equality for All
Masai return to their hunting grounds as tourism collapses

Lake Ontario Cormorants
"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things,
man himself will not be free."  Dr. Albert Schweitzer

Update: May 8, 2008
Cormorant Cull Finished from The Windsor Star

....this will go on for five years unless we all act together to stop the carnage.
Take Action for Cormorants - Boycott Point Pelee National Park

April 30, 2008
The Windsor Star, Cormorant Cull Begins

"In just three short years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have shot over 56,000 cormorants. In Ontario, an additional 10,000 birds were shot – a total of over 66,000 birds killed by gunfire."


double crested
cormorant

The slaughter of another 7,000 started yesterday at Point Pelee National Park in Ontario. Parks Canada has scheduled 4 days - April 30, May 1, 2, and 5 to complete the slaughter. The Harper Government and Parks Canada plans to reduce the vibrant and historical colonial waterbird colony by 90%, destabilizing the ecological integrity of both the island and the Lake Erie aquatic ecosystem.

Take Action for Cormorants - Boycott Point Pelee National Park

Learn more about this from Peaceful Parks Coalition (click here) and boycott Point Pelee National Park.

Related Blog Articles:
Cormorants in the Great Lakes, Dispelling the Myths