Back to putting up noteworthy animal notes. I’m like molasses, a little slow, a little bitter, but food for the soul.
1. January 19 LATIMES
The Catalina Island Fox has made a remarkable recovery from near extinction in 1999 (only 100) to 1542 foxes today. They numbered about 1300 before their population was decimated by distemper probably brought to the island by a pet or some mainland wild animal that hitched a ride over to the island on a boat. The foxes are super-cute: six pounds, gray, pointed noses, reddish ears and feet, black tipped tails. They are omnivorous and have no natural predators on the island.
Their enemies now are pet dogs and feral cats, all of the latter reportedly now gone after the recovery team went after them. The naturalists/scientists that have been working with the foxes continue to trap them and monitor them for diseases, but they are exultant with the results of their dogged (oops!) determination.
2.
Animals in some British zoos are kept in conditions little better than those in former Soviet Bloc countries, it was claimed last night.[three months ago] Targeted zoos: Dudley Zoo in the West Midlands, Drayton Manor theme park in Staffordshire, Exmoor Falconry and AnimalPark.
A major undercover investigation of zoos, wildlife parks, bird of prey centers and aquaria, revealed numerous cases of agitated animals and repetitive behavior.
Other animals were in a state of apathy, while many enclosures were dirty and drinking water was stagnant or dirty.
A Bornean orangutan living in ‘horrendous’ conditions and an Asiatic bear huddled against the wall of a bear pit at Dudley Zoo.
A panther, an elusive and private creature, was pictured in a barren enclosure at the zoo at the Drayton. Although the panther did have access to some inside space, the charity is still concerned about the lack of stimulation for a breed that thrives on swimming, climbing and hunting.
And at a kookaburra was seen housed in a ‘dilapidated garden shed’ at Exmoor.
3.. Things have been tough of late at the Guzoo, one of Canada’s largest private zoos.[this story is three months old also]
Located at the intersection of two unpaved roads about a 90-minute drive northeast of Calgary, Guzoo lacks the frippery of modern, publicly funded zoos. For almost a year, the owner Mr. Gustafson’s attraction has struggled to survive amid a legal limbo sparked by a heated social media campaign. His family has even received a threat in the mail saying “We know where your grandchildren live.”
Because of court-ordered restrictions placed on the facility, Gustafson has been forbidden from bringing in dead creatures to feed his coterie of 500 animals. As a result, he has had to slaughter his own livestock, about $20,000 worth of meat, to feed the beasts. Normally, he says, passersby would bring in road kill, or local dead horses and chickens to help fill out the animals’ diets.
Many of his animals here have names: Jacob the camel; Wallace the African Lion; and the Bengal tiger who paces, rubs her face against the chain-link fence and grunts — Gustafson says that’s like purring — when the owner comes near.
Gustafson says bureaucracy has become so strict that it’s nearly impossible to import flesh from local farms before it rots.
His troubles began in March of last year, when pictures of his zoo began to circulate on Facebook. Hundreds of complaints alleged his animals were poorly treated, goats had bloody horns and water dishes were left frozen in the snow. One of the biggest concerns was the threat of a zoonotic disease outbreak as the free-roaming pet dogs that wander among lions and lemurs could spread a dangerous pathogen.
The allegations began to circulate right around the time Mr. Gustafson had to apply for his annual permit renewal.
The provincial government gave him a two-month permit and said it was going to conduct inspections. Then, in June, the zoo was granted a decommission order along with another two-month permit.
“The public got behind me in June. We held fundraisers,” he said. In July, the family hired a lawyer, who then requested a judicial review of the shutdown order. That was scheduled for the fall, but was later postponed indefinitely.
In the meantime, a court order allows the zoo to operate as long as it meets certain conditions: among them that no living animals be transported on or off Mr. Gustafson’s property.
Wandering the zoo in his rubber boots, jeans and thin-rimmed glasses this week, Mr. Gustafson insists the real victims are the animals in his care.
“The animals really suffer when people don’t come. That’s what they live for, to see people,” he says.
Several conservation groups offered to help the owner find other homes for his animals, but even facing dwindling numbers of visitors, Mr. Gustafson refuses to let his creatures go.
Instead, he threatened to stuff or euthanize them.
“These conditions were meant for a decommissioning order, not for a lifetime,” he says. Whenever the government comes to inspect his attraction, “they always say the animals appear to be in good condition and healthy.”
In addition to visitors, the Guzoo maintained a side business selling tiger and lion cubs. Mr. Gustafson estimates he has sold between 30 and 40 of them over the years, but only to those with the proper permits.
The market for exotic creatures remains steady, he said.
“If you want to buy a tiger or another animal, within an hour I could find one,” he said.
The Guzoo also sold a black and white lemur last year.
4.
Friday, April 06, 2012
PROTESTS are being planned outside a North Somerset zoo farm over Easter weekend to highlight concerns for captive animals.
The Captive Animals’ Protection Society (CAPS) is calling on people to boycott their local zoo and choose another activity for their holiday and to spend their money elsewhere.
CAPS is running “zoo awareness weekend”, a series of peaceful protests across the country outside well-known zoos, where supporters will raise awareness of the plight of animals held in captivity.
Tomorrow activists from the Bristol Animal Rights Collective will demonstrate outside Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Wraxall, from 10am.
More to come later. My website snowmobilewerewolf.com was going anywhere so I’ve let it lapse. Only website I have now is http//:www.reid1000.com C’mon in and check out my music.
The longest blog part deux.
4. January 19 LATIMES
The Catalina Island Fox has made a remarkable recovery from near extinction in 1999 (only 100) to 1542 foxes today. They numbered about 1300 before their population was decimated by distemper probably brought to the island by a pet or some mainland wild animal that hitched a ride over to the island on a boat. The foxes are super-cute: six pounds, gray, pointed noses, reddish ears and feet, black tipped tails. They are omnivorous and have no natural predators on the island.
Their enemies now are pet dogs and feral cats, all of the latter reportedly now gone after the recovery team went after them. The naturalists/scientists that have been working with the foxes continue to trap them and monitor them for diseases, but they are exultant with the results of their dogged (oops!) determination.
5.
Animals in some British zoos are kept in conditions little better than those in former Soviet Bloc countries, it was claimed last night.[two months ago] Targeted zoos: Dudley Zoo in the West Midlands, Drayton Manor theme park in Staffordshire, Exmoor Falconry and AnimalPark.
A major undercover investigation of zoos, wildlife parks, bird of prey centers and aquaria, revealed numerous cases of agitated animals and repetitive behavior.
Other animals were in a state of apathy, while many enclosures were dirty and drinking water was stagnant or dirty.
A Bornean orangutan living in ‘horrendous’ conditions and an Asiatic bear huddled against the wall of a bear pit at Dudley Zoo.
A panther, an elusive and private creature, was pictured in a barren enclosure at the zoo at the Drayton. Although the panther did have access to some inside space, the charity is still concerned about the lack of stimulation for a breed that thrives on swimming, climbing and hunting.
And at a kookaburra was seen housed in a ‘dilapidated garden shed’ at Exmoor.
6. Things have been tough of late at the Guzoo, one of Canada’s largest private zoos.[this story is two months old also]
Located at the intersection of two unpaved roads about a 90-minute drive northeast of Calgary, Guzoo lacks the frippery of modern, publicly funded zoos. For almost a year, the owner Mr. Gustafson’s attraction has struggled to survive amid a legal limbo sparked by a heated social media campaign. His family has even received a threat in the mail saying “We know where your grandchildren live.”
Because of court-ordered restrictions placed on the facility, Gustafson has been forbidden from bringing in dead creatures to feed his coterie of 500 animals. As a result, he has had to slaughter his own livestock, about $20,000 worth of meat, to feed the beasts. Normally, he says, passersby would bring in road kill, or local dead horses and chickens to help fill out the animals’ diets.
Many of his animals here have names: Jacob the camel; Wallace the African Lion; and the Bengal tiger who paces, rubs her face against the chain-link fence and grunts — Gustafson says that’s like purring — when the owner comes near.
Gustafson says bureaucracy has become so strict that it’s nearly impossible to import flesh from local farms before it rots.
His troubles began in March of last year, when pictures of his zoo began to circulate on Facebook. Hundreds of complaints alleged his animals were poorly treated, goats had bloody horns and water dishes were left frozen in the snow. One of the biggest concerns was the threat of a zoonotic disease outbreak as the free-roaming pet dogs that wander among lions and lemurs could spread a dangerous pathogen.
The allegations began to circulate right around the time Mr. Gustafson had to apply for his annual permit renewal.
The provincial government gave him a two-month permit and said it was going to conduct inspections. Then, in June, the zoo was granted a decommission order along with another two-month permit.
“The public got behind me in June. We held fundraisers,” he said. In July, the family hired a lawyer, who then requested a judicial review of the shutdown order. That was scheduled for the fall, but was later postponed indefinitely.
In the meantime, a court order allows the zoo to operate as long as it meets certain conditions: among them that no living animals be transported on or off Mr. Gustafson’s property.
Wandering the zoo in his rubber boots, jeans and thin-rimmed glasses this week, Mr. Gustafson insists the real victims are the animals in his care.
“The animals really suffer when people don’t come. That’s what they live for, to see people,” he says.
Several conservation groups offered to help the owner find other homes for his animals, but even facing dwindling numbers of visitors, Mr. Gustafson refuses to let his creatures go.
Instead, he threatened to stuff or euthanize them.
“These conditions were meant for a decommissioning order, not for a lifetime,” he says. Whenever the government comes to inspect his attraction, “they always say the animals appear to be in good condition and healthy.”
In addition to visitors, the Guzoo maintained a side business selling tiger and lion cubs. Mr. Gustafson estimates he has sold between 30 and 40 of them over the years, but only to those with the proper permits.
The market for exotic creatures remains steady, he said.
“If you want to buy a tiger or another animal, within an hour I could find one,” he said.
The Guzoo also sold a black and white lemur last year.
I’m discontinuing my webpage for my eBook “Bad Moon Rising” http://www.snowmobilewerewolf.com isn’t getting enough hits and I’m trying other ways to get the book onto folks’ radar. If you know of any jr or sen high school boys it’s a book targeted for their age group. It’s also free to librarians: they can email me and I’ll show them the way to download it for free for their libraries and readers.
Glad to get all the feedback about animals and their reserves/news. I wish more of you would leave your message at the bottom so anyone who reads this can see them, but if you want to just email them to me go ahead and I will see that they get into the blog.
I’ll start with my met-online friend Jane Dewar. She has spent almost a lifetime loving, interacting and working with gorillas — in fact, she’s met 450 of the world’s 840 gorillas in captivity. She and her (now ex-) husband started Gorilla Haven, a huge expanse of land in Georgia for gorillas to run free. After so many years of seeing them and being with them she was thrilled to be able to create a reserve for them. Unfortunately, the marriage went south along with the economy, and Jane has been locked out of her own project. This is an ongoing personal tragedy for Jane, as well as the gorillas, with whom she has made deep, personal relations — she has even been prevented from seeing Joe, the gorilla who lives literally yards from her home. It points out one of the saddest truths in the wild animal world: they’re at the mercy of humans and humans are not necessarily merciful.
Another friend, Fred, sent me an email about orphan monkeys in Costa Rica. Seems like the electric companies down there string their power lines without regard to the monkeys’ safety. The result is inevitable: hundreds of electrocuted monkeys. Since a certain percentage of those monkeys killed are mothers, their offspring become orphaned. This website shows the monkey orphanage and its efforts:
Other news: the Santa Ana CA zoo has ended their elephant rides. We’d like to think that the reason is that everyone got together and decided that they weren’t going to use elephants this way anymore, but of course that’s not the case. The real reason is that a lot of folks get injured or killed around elephants. The AZA — Association of Zoos and Aquariums — has guidelines that state that elephants and people are not to share the same space without some sort of protective barrier.
Kudos to the Lockwood Valley Animal Rescue Center in Los Padres CA. Lori Lindner is cofounder and president of this nonprofit sanctuary and she had heard about an “attraction” there named Wolf Country USA which contained 29 “wolf dogs”, cross-bred wolf/dog animals that were often trained as sled dogs. What happens to these dogs when they are no longer useful to humans is that they are given away, turned loose, killed, escape and then are shot, or are chained up, as were these 29. The sanctuary decided to take on these animals and Lori flew up to Anchorage to see to their transport.
Lori and her organization saved the dogs’ lives. The Alaska state attorney told her the animals were going to be shot by state troopers as there was evidence that the dogs’ owners were not in compliance with state laws on wolf dogs. The cost was covered by $5000 donated by the Humane Society and a “very, very large donation” by Bob Barker — yep, that Bob Barker. The animals joined another 20 wolf dogs already there, and $43,000 was donated by International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to construct nine new enclosures with 10 foot fences. The rescue center is trying to buy a nearby 180 acre piece of property to bring in dozens more wolf dogs and wolves. Right now they are operating on a $3000 a month budget for maintenance and $350 a day for raw, day-old meat. A cool program they launched there is called Warriors and Wolves where interactions between the animals and war veterans take place.
On New Year’s Eve day someone cut a hole in the squirrel monkey exhibit fence at the San Francisco Zoo and a 17 year old monkey named Banana Sam escaped. I don’t know what’s worse — the monkey living in a cage or roaming free in a city. In the case of the former, it would be with its troop, get regular care and feeding but be imprisoned; in the latter, it would be free but be a scavenger, reduced to trash can robbing and traffic and dog avoidance. I sometimes side with the fence cutters and sometimes with the fence builders.
A “great news” article that I read came up with a report from the Institute of Medicine where a panel of independent experts judged that the use of chimpanzees to test vaccines, etc would be decreasing and that most current experiments involving our “closest primate relative” would be discontinued. Before I read the article I admit that I’d been pretty ignorant that their use was still so widespread, but it appears that there is a lot of testing — concerning vaccines, viral pathogens and targeted biologic therapies mostly — that will soon end. Lots of groups gave their “Wahoos!” to this news: the National Institutes of Health; Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine; PETA; the Humane Society, etc. It seems that as stupid as humans have been in the past treating animals, the intelligence of humans has led to use of computers, new lab techniques and genetic engineering to reduce the need of chimps as human stand-ins. Of course the question then will be, now that they no longer live in labs, where will they live?
Tailcoating on my blog about elephants, I read that there are now just 3000 Sumatran elephants living in the wilds of Indonesia, one of whom trampled a 60-year old farmer to death when villagers tried to shoo some elephants away from their fields. The bull decided that he wasn’t going to be driven away, so he turned and charged the farmers. The victim stumbled and fell while fleeing, though the rest of the men escaped. The knotty issue of where these large mammals are going to live continues.
Speaking of large animals, some scientists are saying that using DNA from animals trapped in glaciers for thousands of years they will be able to bring mammoths back to life by 2030 or 2040. How dumb is that? We don’t have enough room for current pachyderms, where will animals that are 50% bigger than elephants live? Jurassic Park?
With the internet having taken off as it has, so has the market for rare animals. The trade used to be conducted person-to-person in public places where catching the criminals was relatively easy, and geography would limit the ability of the persons involved to strike a deal. Now, since the photos are transmitted easily and the buyer can know what he’s getting, the trade might exceed $20 billion a year! Undercover agents are still at work — thank God — and they recently netted buyer and seller in a sting concerning a $2800 Asian arowana fish. (I know, I’ve never heard of it either: again, thank God for the undercover agents). The IFAW is going to bat for the animals on this one, like they did on the wolf dogs. It’s a relief to know there are so many organizations fighting the good fight.
A last word which I think I mentioned before: as reported and supported by my sis-in-law, www.elephants.com is a website for The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Another worthy cause and a great effort to relieve the repressive living conditions of captive elephants.
Next blog will be books, and as a lot of you know, I just ePublished a book for teenage boys. Check it out at www.snowmobilewerewolf.com Can you guess what it’s about?
Adios.
One of the threads I’d like to explore in this blog is just what the title of this post says.
My friend Elaine commented upon the death of an elephant at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (it used to be named the Wild Animal Park). It seems that there was a territorial dispute, and one elephant killed the other.
Fights (often to the death) like this happen in Wild Animal Parks (WAPs) simply because there isn’t enough room for each dominant male and his harem. I’m in the process of writing the memoirs of my friend Brian who worked at a WAP for 21 years, and he recounts a battle over territory between a Cape buffalo and a black rhino that was epic, and tragic.
As I’ve been ghost writing these memoirs (and working on a novel that parallels the memoirs) I’ve done a lot of research and what I originally thought about Africa and its ability to sustain a good life for these large animals was wrong — i.e., there really is NOT enough room for them.
One of the books I read in my research was Zoo Story by Thomas French, (excellent), and it begins with the relocation of a large number of elephants to the SD WAP and also to a zoo in Florida (in Tampa, I’m pretty sure). The relocation turned into a battle with several groups weighing in pro and con: PETA for one, Zoological Societies and many many more organizations on one side of the issue or the other. Mr. French pointed out very clearly that the two African parks from which the elephants were being moved could not possibly have sustained even half of the elephants that were there.
This was a total surprise to me. After decades of watching documentaries on elephants in Africa I’d assumed that there was plenty of room. Not even close. There was enough acreage there, even with the incredible encroachment of the massive amounts of people into what was once wilderness. But the park could no longer sustain the elephant population because elephants beat the hell out of the land! They are incredibly destructive: pushing down trees, ripping up the ground, eating or destroying any and all vegetation and pretty much making the land unfit to live on.
So at least half of the animals had to be moved. Zoo Story gives a lot of the details and then goes into a lot more about the Tampa Zoo. Very compelling. And what is going to happen to elephants in the future is anything but clear.
I’ll be writing more about this later and I certainly want other comments here on the blog, so please jump in.
I’m including hereafter in this blog a couple of exerpts from Brian’s memoirs that deal with elephants. There’ll be more to come, and hopefully the book will be out before next June (probably an eBook) but we have to consult with a lawyer first — don’t want to get sued if/when we point fingers.
Exerpt 1
They say that elephants never forget and I saw many, many examples of that while working at the Park. One came home to my partner and me with a vengeance.
It was late spring, the weather nice in the morning but sometimes a bit warm in the afternoon, and the job du jour was cleaning out the moat line around the Asian elephant enclosure. We were there with the track loader and the big five yard dump truck. We’d put the caterpillar [loader] in there the day before, so we threw our lunches and gear into the dump truck and drove over and into the enclosure. The keepers had to let us in because of the two gate system they had over there. The elephants were curious about what was going on and the keepers were holding them back as the interior gate was opened. What the keepers used were these two foot dowels with pointed hooks screwed into the ends – basically a one inch thick stick with a hook. It was amazing to me that such tiny devices could be used to control such large animals, and it shows how tame the animals were: if they had been wild at all those hooks would have been laughably inadequate.
The area was a couple of acres large. I felt like we were inching forward in the dump truck – its speed is OK on paved roads but here it was pretty rough terrain. The exhibit was so rutted that we’d have been scraping our scalps off the roof of the cab if I’d driven too fast. The ground was full of pits because the elephants constantly dug in it when they were looking for soil to throw on their backs. They’d kick at the earth with their feet to loosen it up then use their trunks to gather it in a pile. With the curled end of their trunks they’d surround the little pile of dirt then throw it onto their shoulders and backs with one smooth motion. The dirt acts as a sunscreen, (I don’t know theSPF). Seven or eight elephants constantly relandscaping coupled with the fact that the animals’ grazing had left no grass growing resulted in a cratered surface that was painful to drive over.
Moat cleaning was so routine that I wasn’t expecting any difficulty but I knew enough to be alert – I’d dealt enough with rhinos to know how much damage a large animal can do. I was just poking along when I heard the keepers screaming. I wondered what was up and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and my heart started hammering when I realized it was a big elephant charging right at us! It was such an alarming sight and I didn’t know what to do, so I just stopped the truck. (If I hadn’t stopped, she would have just run us down anyway – they can run over twenty miles per hour and we couldn’t do more than ten on that terrain).
She charged up, her head level with the dump truck’s elevated cab. I thought she was going to bash right into us, but she pulled up sharply at the last minute, dust clouds rising around her. The windows were open so I could see every crease, crack, wrinkle and hair on her gray, leathery skin as clearly as if I were looking through a magnifying glass. Her musty smell filled the cab and she pushed her trunk inside, smelling my crotch right away to identify me. Evidently I passed the smell test because she reached her trunk across me to smell my partner, her mouth filling my window and this huge, wide, angry eyeball level with my head. When she smelled him, it must have pulled a memory lever in her brain. She pulled her trunk back and blew snot all over him, absolutely covering him with snot.
The keepers were attentive and they sprang into action, trying to get her away from the truck by pulling at her with their flimsy hooks. I was pretty calm considering that I was in the center of an intense whirlwind of action: the truck was rocking back and forth as the giant pushed in then backed off; my partner was cowering against the passenger side door, already squirming in discomfort from the snot all over him and scared silly by the elephant’s onslaught; I could see the concentration in the keepers’ eyes as they yelled and jumped about like Lilliputians around Gulliver, brandishing their hooks; the elephant’s shaggy head was so close to me that I could smell her breath and feel the exhalations on my face and arms.
It took a few minutes to get her away from the truck — with an animal that size and with the tools they were using it was really up to her when she’d leave. The upshot was she eventually felt like complying and let them lead her away.
Well of course we had to get my partner cleaned up – he couldn’t work all snotted up like that and the smell was rank besides. We started on back for the shop where the lockers were.
Our drive out of the exhibit was slow and once the adrenaline rush of an encounter with the four ton animal had worn off I turned and took a good look at my partner. I started laughing. Then I started howling. He was sitting there in as sorry a physical situation as a man not hurt could be, but the fact that I didn’t have a speck of snot on me and he was literally covered with it from head to knee was funnier than I could have imagined it to be. I laughed till my sides ached and the tears in my eyes made it hard to drive.
“Why do you think that elephant did that? I asked him when I could catch my breath.
“I know that old elephant,” he spat out. “ Her name’s Carol. I worked her over in some shows a few years back. Our job was to hit ‘em till they obeyed. I guess she was just getting even.”
I couldn’t get much more out of him than that, and for a few minutes we drove in silence. I’d heard stories about elephant abuse. I hadn’t witnessed any myself, but the mental pictures I had were bad enough. But in a couple of minutes, and after a few more glances at my snot-covered partner, my good humor returned. “Payback, Baby, payback!” I thought to myself, and that started me laughing again.
“Shut up!” he snapped, but that made me laugh all the harder.
He got cleaned up, we made the trip back in the turtle-paced dump truck and were let in to the enclosure by the keepers as we’d been earlier in the day. They said Carol was under control, so I got into the 951 Cat [loader] and started scraping out the silt and debris from the moats and loading the dump truck with its big front bucket. [The big shovel-like thing on the front.] My partner was driving the truck this time when – deja vu – he heard the keepers yelling again. I was only on my second or third shovel-full of moat sludge when Carol came charging again. She hit the dump truck with her head right where Justin was, right on the door. The impact was terrific. Then with her massive head down she started pushing and the dump truck actually started to go over! Luckily I was holding the Cat’s bucket in the back of the dump truck, so she was pushing against the combined weight of the truck and the tractor. If the bucket hadn’t been right where it was I’m sure she would have pushed that dump truck right over with my partner inside.
The handlers got Carol under control again, and we decided to get out of the exhibit. By this time it was obvious that she had it in for my partner, and it was to the point where we were concerned for everybody’s safety.
Exerpt 2
For a time, working with elephants was the most dangerous of all zoo jobs. According to Thomas French in his excellent book The Zoo there was an average of a death a year among the trainers and keepers. (The Niagara Center for Animal Rights Awareness says that “It is estimated that over 100 people have been killed by elephants worldwide since 1980). Much of this came about because of a policy known as “free contact”, which is self-explanatory: humans getting in there with the elephants and being very hands-on.
The measure and depth of elephant society is coming more clearly into focus, but during that death-a-year period it wasn’t so well known. The treatment of elephants was changing dramatically: it was a transition from controlling elephant behavior so they could act as performers and workers to allowing them the space they needed to develop herd identity and order. Young elephants had often been beaten with ax handles and chained to already-trained elephant veterans to learn what humans wanted them to do. The brutal handling became a thing of the past but trainers still felt they could interact closely with the behemoths. Obviously it wasn’t safe for the puny humans so a new, “controlled contact” or “protected contact” policy was initiated, wherein the animals would be separated from the trainers and vets and be handled through the bars of cages. With this in mind, the elephant enclosures were completely restructured and new methods of positive enforcement and reward became the accepted training methods.
reid1000 