Plants and Animals

Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen is apparently in Canada and enjoying her recent purchase of a new fur coat. She also explains in her column that last weekend “Canada’s National Post reported on an advertising campaign launched at the end of last year by the Fur Council of Canada, which represents 70,000 of the nation’s fur traders. These sassy new ads feature gorgeous women draped in fur, one under the heading ‘Environmental activist’. The ads explain that buying a fur coat is the ecologically correct thing to do because fox stoles and mink coats are natural, renewable and sustainable. By contrast, synthetic furs are no more than by-products of the petro-chemical industry. Making a single faux fur coat can chew up 19 litres of petroleum, a non-renewable resource, says the council. Ergo, buying a fur coat is good for the planet.”

Even before the marketing campaign started, there had apparently been increasing demand for fur products in Scandinavia and China.

Meanwhile, and also according to ABC Online, Belgium has apparently already banned fur from what they consider the inhumane killing of Canadian seals while Germany, Italy and Austria have drafted the legislation, and law makers in Britain, France and Spain are considering it.

“Brown bears, the most widespread ursid, are not listed as threatened globally because large numbers still inhabit Russia, Canada, Alaska and some parts of Europe. Nevertheless, very small, isolated, and highly vulnerable populations exist in southern Europe and central and southern Asia.

“Several brown bear populations are protected under national or provincial laws. Grizzly bears – brown bears living in interior North America – are considered Threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act outside of Alaska.”

Brown Bear ( Ursus arctos ) photograph by Ivan Seryodkin

Photograph by Ivan Seryodkin with permission via Ann Novek.
Text from the IUCN via Ann Novek.

I’ve done a rough translation of an insightful article from the Icelandic Minke Whaler’s Association which suggests the Japanese never intended to hunt Humpback whales in the Antarctic:

The Japanese spectacle continues…

During the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Anchorage in May 2007, the Japanese were tough negotiators. They wanted permission to kill humpbacks in the Antarctic, held press conferences and wanted to withdraw from the IWC if their proposals weren’t accepted.

Therefore the decision to hunt humpbacks this Austral summer didn’t come as a surprise and the entire whale discussions was now focused on the humpback hunt and not about the 950 minkes and 50 Fin whales.

The Icelandic whalers now state that the Japanese are very smart and cunning. The Japanese have now declared that they will halt the humpback hunt (a hunt that the Japanese actually never have had an intention to carry out) and now the Japanese stand out as Mr. Nice Guys.

Now the Icelandic whalers want that their esteemed Minister of Agriculture to announce at the beginning of 2008, that Iceland has an intention to increase their whale hunting quotas substantially, 600 minkes, 300 Fins and 50 humpbacks. This would cause an international outcry from “environmentalists”. We would defend ourselves with all kinds of arguments but finally cave in, and half the quota and completely ignore the humpbacks (but this would depend on how the discussions did carry out).

Cheers,
Ann Novek
in Sweden

The world’s smallest species of bear, the sun bear ( Helarctos malayanus ), was classed as ‘Vulnerable’ and accepted for inclusion in the IUCN Red List in November 2007.**

The international organisation that regulates trade in endangered species, CITES, had already listed sun bear as threatened with extinction and notes that there is a trade in sun bear ‘body parts’ including for traditional medicines as discussed at a previous blog post Sun Bears (Part 1).

The sun bear lives in mainland Southeast Asia, Sumatra and Borneo and was previously listed as Data Deficient byt the IUCN, meaning that not enough was known about the species to give it a status on the Red List.

This picture of a sun bear is published with permission from Gabriella Frediksson (via Ann Novek).

Rob Steinmetz, co-chair of the IUCN Bear Specialist Group’s sun bear expert team, said in November that: “We estimate that sun bears have declined by at least 30 percent over the past 30 years (three bear generations)…
Deforestation has reduced both the area and quality of their habitat. Where habitat is now protected, commercial poaching remains a significant threat.”

[Thanks to Ann Novek for the picture and link to the IUCN media release.]

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** The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species classifies species according to their extinction risk. It is a searchable online database containing the global status and supporting information on more than 41,000 species. Its primary goal is to identify and document the species most in need of conservation attention and provide an index of the state of biodiversity. The IUCN Red List threat categories are the following, in descending order of threat:

1. Extinct or Extinct in the Wild;

2. Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable: species threatened with global extinction;

3. Near Threatened: species close to the threatened thresholds or that would be threatened without ongoing specific conservation measures;

4. Least Concern: species evaluated with a low risk of extinction;

5. Data Deficient: no evaluation because of insufficient data.