Talk is abundant when it comes to climate change. But actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the Safari Club International have been downright despicable.
Of all the committees in the U.S. Congress, the House Committee on Natural Resources has perhaps been the most active for animals this year. This important panel handles almost all bills dealing with wildlife and the environment, and under the strong leadership of Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and Subcommittee Chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam), it has already advanced several major reforms to protect wild animals during this session.
It has been a theme on this blog that passing good laws is not enough. We need aggressive enforcement of those laws, which requires adequate funding, training, and public awareness.
I received a heart-wrenching letter last week from Brooke and Cliff Everest of Bozeman, Mont., and I’m reprinting it below in its entirety. Their beautiful dog, Bea, suffered a terrifying death during a hiking trip on public land in Utah, when she sniffed and licked a sheep carcass that had been laced with Compound 1080 poison.
The radical leaders of the National Rifle Association are at it again. This time they’ve set their sights on the National Park Service and have triggered a reckless about-face on the agency’s policy, seeking to allow park visitors to carry loaded weapons in national parks for the first time in a quarter-century.
When professional baseball players were accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs, it was a national scandal. When steroids are used in horse racing, it’s business as usual.
As The New York Times wrote in an editorial today:
I was delighted this week to see that a group of middle schoolers from my hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., was honored for the anti-dogfighting rap song they entered in The Humane Society of the United States’ Hip Hop for Hounds contest.
Last week, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed a bill that will help animal shelters in the Free State treat dogs and cats more humanely. Maryland’s previous law gave shelters access to the drugs used to euthanize animals, but not the drugs needed to sedate animals prior to euthanasia. The federal government yanked the licenses for shelters to obtain the sedatives last year, which left some animals seizing and partially awake during painful deaths, and made the process more dangerous for shelter workers.
It was a hectic week in Congress leading up to the Memorial Day recess. The House voted 316 to 108 and the Senate voted 82 to 13 this week to override President Bush’s veto of the massive Farm Bill. The bill was not without its controversy, and there was even an inadvertent error in omitting 34 pages of the bill, which the Congress will have to remedy after the break ends.
Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it will close a gaping loophole in its regulation on processing sick and crippled cows for human consumption.
