NJ scores high with animal protection laws

Describing itself as “the nation’s largest animal protection organization,” the Humane Society of the US (HSUS) has released its 2010 ranking of state animal protection laws – and lo! New Jersey is second. Our state has the second highest number of laws dealing with pets, animal cruelty and fighting, wildlife, animals in research, horses and farm animals.

The other animal protection issues also counted in the survey of state laws were puppy mills, factory farming, fur and trapping, exotic animals and companion animal laws.

This year’s top four states are California, NJ, Illinois and Massachusetts. South Dakota is at the bottom of the list, with Alabama, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota and Ohio joining it in the bottom seven.

Use the link that follows to see the full story.
http://www.humanesociety.org/about/state/humane_state_ranking_2010.html*****

Wishing non-human animals everywhere a happy, healthy new year -- largely dependent on human animals smartening up, gaining compassion and going vegetarian (at least)!
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Vick: could he be a changed man?

He’s back, and bigger than ever. First was the gradual comeback in pro football with the Philadelphia Eagles. And then the recent phone call from President Obama, putting him more in the spotlight.

Michael Vick, convicted dog abuser and killer, is back in the limelight. The question – besides why did Obama ever choose him to talk about – starts with, is he credible? Is he really reformed? Could he ever be trusted with an animal again?

Vick may become this year’s MVP (thanks in part to his declaration that he’s the one), but . . . do we trust him? do we forgive him?

Here’s one opinion: http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/michael-vick-debate-re-opened-by-obamas-odd-call.
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An owl's Christmas story

Twas the night before Christmas . . . and shortly before closing on that dark winter day, staff members at the Mercer County Wildlife Center were presented with a new patient, one needing quick, emergency medical attention.

(follow the link below for the rest of this story – a place worth knowing about)

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/science-updates/mercer-county-wildlife-center-hospital-for-patients-with-fur-or-feathers
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ComBATting ‘white-nose syndrome’

Bats are in grave danger from a lethal white fungus that’s found on the wings and snouts of those infected by “white-nose syndrome.” Their main hibernation site in New Jersey, Morris County’s Hibernia Mine, is now described as more of a morgue than a wintering haven for bats.

Since it was detected in a New York cave in 2006, the disease has killed more than 90% of the wild bats in the Northeast, hitting especially hard in NJ, with nine bat species. (Altogether, there are about 45 different bat species in the continental US.)

Once up to 30,000 bats gathered in Hibernia Mine to hibernate for the winter; now just a few hundred hang on the walls. A state biologist with the Endangered and Non-Game Species Program reports that “last spring, before they left hibernation, we found only about 1,715 bats” there.

Worse yet, fewer than 650 returned this fall to hibernate – so the syndrome is affecting them even after they leave, he added. Those who survive hibernation are weakened and leave the hibernaculum later than others. Some die at that point because “the fungus created holes in their wings and they cannot fly to feed.”

A study now underway will test whether bats who have recovered from the disease will remain immune to it. Since they were rescued from sure death last April, in the throes of white-nose syndrome, six little brown bats were hand-nursed back to health at a rehab center. About a month ago, they were returned to Hibernia Mine for this winter’s hibernation.

The question: after catching it and being cured, will these bats have developed any kind of resistance to white-nose syndrome, or will they become just as infected when returned to the environment where they first contracted it?

Hoping for good news next spring.
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Orangutan ‘quieted by . . . something else’

(The following is a complete movie review [“A Meditation on Captivity, Featuring an Orangutan”] by Jeannette Catsoulis that appeared this week in the NYTimes.)

A child’s voice whispers “Nénette!,” and immediately we are in the patient and curious world of the French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert. Best known in the United States for “To Be and to Have” — his captivating 2002 portrait of a rural schoolteacher — Mr. Philibert has switched his gaze to a primate with rather less agency: a 40-year-old female orangutan in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

That gaze never wavers. “Nénette” is a film devoid of human faces, the camera merging with the more than half-million visitors who traipse past the orangutan’s cage every year. We hear their voices, these mothers and children and couples, their words revealing the complexity of our relationship to caged wildlife. Is Nénette depressed, they wonder, or just lonely?

Quiet and watchful, the object of their fascination leans on her gnarled knuckles, straw clinging to her mat of ginger hair. She arrived from Borneo in 1972, has survived three mates and produced four offspring. Once she was lively (“The bane of the place,” says an older zookeeper); now she looks passive and glum, quieted by age and arthritis. Or something else.

Beautiful in its minimalism, “Nénette” is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity. Nénette may be better off than her endangered kin, but as we watch her delicately pour tea into the yogurt container that holds her contraceptive pill (she lives with her son, and the zoo is keen to avoid procreative embarrassment), that knowledge gives us small comfort.

Yet Nénette is loved, with some people stopping by every day. A keeper likens them to those visiting a relative in prison — which, when you come to think of it, is exactly what they are doing.
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The way of (most of) the world

“I was taken on a drive around . . . this morning. It seems a pleasant enough town. I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here. They must be. They simply do not advertise themselves. They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them.

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

-- Elizabeth Costello (Lesson 3, The Lives of Animals: ONE: The Philosophers and the Animals). J. M. Coetzee, c. 2003.


The NYTimes food section this week included recipes for “a progressive slant on rack of lamb,” “roasted lamb, fresh ham, lasagna and other main courses for the big holiday meal,” a restaurant review of “a shrine to steak” and “recipes for health” including various uses for turkey.
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Almost 'Finnegan's wake' -- a happy story

Finnegan, a "beloved Springer spaniel," was saved from a cold death in Rosedale Lake last week. The story is almost too good to be true, but the letter to the editor of the Trenton Times from Finn's person must be for real.

Finn broke away from Stephen Maybury's grip on his leash to chase geese onto the partially frozen lake. He plunged through thin ice into the frigid water, then swam for nearly an hour trying to escape and steadily growing more tired.

Bystanders had called 911 and police, fire and rescue personnel arrived from Pennington, but rescuing the dog from land proved impossible. One firefighter raced home and returned with his fishing boat. He and two others chopped through ice to launch the boat and reach Finn.

Once Finn was out of the water ("his barely breathing, hypothermic body," as Maybury put it) , he was rushed to the vet clinic, where he was brought back from the "brink of death."

This happened on Saturday, Dec. 11, and Maybury's letter appeared on Dec. 18, so it was probably written a few days after the crisis. Maybury's report that Finnegan is "now fully recovered" seems reasonable given that elapsed time.

What a happy story -- or "Christmas miracle," as Maybury described it.
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