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NEWS-PRESS (Fort Myers, Florida) 28 November 06 Lee hunt for iguana ensnared by protest - Animal-rights activists want humane removal (Jamie Page)
Animal rights activists aren't happy with the plan for ridding Boca Grande of pesky iguana.
It's not because the invasive lizards will be killed, but more about the way they could be killed.
When the island hired Trapper Wildlife Services of Sarasota at $20 a lizard, putting them in a freezer to die was one of the methods the Iguana Control Advisory Committee found acceptable.
The exotic lizards are considered pests by many residents who find them inside their homes, shredding insulation, scratching holes in screens and eating flower buds.
So residents set up a taxing unit in the spring to pay for eradicating them, and a trapper was hired Nov. 16 to catch and kill the more than 10,000 black spiny-tailed iguana thought to live on the Lee side of Gasparilla Island. Meanwhile, Charlotte County officials are considering a similar eradication program.
The Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF) feels freezing them is inhumane and has asked Boca Grande officials to work with them to develop "a humane plan for euthanizing captured animals," said Heather Veleanu, managing director for the foundation.
The largest animal rights organization in the world — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) — also will push the island to use the most humane euthanization methods.
"We are going to challenge them on that (freezing)," said Stephanie Boyles, a PETA wildlife biologist. "That is completely unjustified and unacceptable."
The island's contract with its recently hired trapper says the iguanas must be killed by one of the methods approved by the Iguana Control Advisory Committee, including: barbiturates, inhalants, pellet gun shot, stunning and decapitation, freezing, and bolt and cap — where a large bolt smashes the reptile's skull.
All of these methods, except freezing, are accepted by the not-for-profit American Veterinary Medical Association. The AVMA is widely used by governments and industry as a reputable benchmark for veterinary and animal issues.
The AVMA is also the benchmark for many animal rights groups.
George Cera, owner of the trapping service, believes freezing is humane because a reptile's body temperature drops slowly when the climate cools, just as it adapts in its own environment.
Whether the trapper will freeze them is unclear, but it's likely because that's a method listed in his bid proposal.
Cera wouldn't reveal how he would kill them, and would only say he planned to use "the most ethical and humane methods."
However, at the bid opening he had argued freezing was a proper method. That was because the committee initially ruled it was not acceptable. The committee later got a ruling from Lee Animal Services that it was acceptable.
PETA and ARFF disagree, because it's not one of the methods accepted by the veterinary medical association.
"They don't get to determine what the state animal cruelty statement says; it requires the animals be killed in the quickest and most convenient way possible, and freezing them isn't one of them," Boyles said.
PETA prefers lethal injection as the "quickest, kindest" way, Boyles said. "If they are taxing the people for this service, there is no reason why every animal captured can't be given a kind and painless death. The iguanas are completely blameless in all this."
Boca's trapper will begin work after completing some county paperwork.
Trappers watching the situation from a distance say there's a larger issue at stake — now that a trapper is in place, the iguana population cannot truly be controlled without the Charlotte County portion of Gasparilla Island on board with its own iguana control program.
Libby Walker, director of Lee Public Resources, said Charlotte County is looking into a possible eradication program.
"They'll have to be able to get access to every part of the island; otherwise, everything the committee is doing is in vain," said George Ward. Ward is a partner with Magnum Reptiles, a removal service in Palm Bay.
Lee hunt for iguana ensnared by protest

NEWS-PRESS (Fort Myers, Florida) 30 November 06 Frozen lizards hot topic
How do you kill an iguana?
Let us count the ways: One, two, three.....Oh, come on, there must be a million ways to dispatch a lizard!
How then, we wonder, did a group of professional iguana killers come up with the one way that has the animal rights people all in a tizzy?
The professionals, Trapper Wildlife Service of Sarasota, want to catch the iguanas that are running amuck on the Lee side of Gasparilla Island, making themselves a royal nuisance to local residents and wildlife, and pop them into a freezer. At least that's a method listed in the proposal that won them the contract.
That's right, iguanacicles.
The trappers get $20 for each iguana they kill — under the contract, not a single iguana can leave the island alive — and they hope to do in more than 10,000 of them.
Now comes the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to say that freezing an iguana is inhumane.
The trappers say freezing them is humane because their body temperature just sort of goes down slowly, like during, say, a cold snap.
"If anybody thinks freezing them is humane, let me put you in a freezer and freeze you," offers George Ward, who runs a rival trapping service.
We are not volunteering to be frozen. But, then again, we wouldn't volunteer to be fed a lethal dose of barbiturates, poisoned with inhalants, shot with a pellet gun, decapitated or smashed in the skull with a large bolt, the so-called approved methods of killing iguanas.
You know what needs to be done here? Take the animal rights people's word for it, declare iguanacicles off limits and knock off the hapless, coldblooded critters by other, acceptable means.
And be on the job of sending them to that Great Big Island In The Sky.
Frozen lizards hot topic

SCIENCE DAILY (Chevy Chase, Maryland) 30 November 06 World's Oldest Ritual Discovered -- Worshipped The Python 70,000 Years Ago
A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that man's first rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place.
Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind's oldest known ritual.
The archaeologist made the surprising discovery while she was studying the origin of the Sanpeople. A group of the San live in the sparsely inhabited area of north-western Botswana known as Ngamiland.
Coulson made the discovery while searching for artifacts from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills present for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert is known as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having the largest concentration of rock paintings in the world.
The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the San, who call them the "Mountains of the Gods" and the "Rock that Whispers".
The python is one of the San's most important animals. According to their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.
Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area had a specific ritual location associated with the python. The ritual was held in a little cave on the northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is so secluded and access to it is so difficult that it was not even discovered by archaeologists until the 1990s.
When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her three master's students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python. On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they found three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.
"You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving".
They found no evidence that work had recently been done on the rock. In fact, much of the rock's surface was extensively eroded.
When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the archaeologists wondered about more than when the work had been done. They also began thinking about what the cave had been used for and how long people had been going there. With these questions in mind, they decided to dig a test pit directly in front of the python stone.
At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that had been used to make the indentations. Together with these tools, some of which were more than 70,000 years old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen off during the work.
In the course of their excavation, they found more than 13,000 artifacts. All of the objects were spearheads and articles that could be connected with ritual use, as well as tools used in carving the stone. They found nothing else.
As if that were not enough, the stones that the spearheads were made from are not from the Tsodilo region but must have been brought from hundreds of kilometers away.
The spearheads are better crafted and more colourful than other spearheads from the same time and area. Surprisingly enough, it was only the red spearheads that had been burned.
"Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape." says Sheila Coulson.
Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many people had passed through it over the years.
"The shaman, who is still a very important person in San culture, could have kept himself hidden in that secret chamber. He would have had a good view of the inside of the cave while remaining hidden himself. When he spoke from his hiding place, it could have seemed as if the voice came from the snake itself. The shaman would have been able to control everything. It was perfect." The shaman could also have "disappeared" from the chamber by crawling out onto the hillside through a small shaft.
While large cave and wall paintings are numerous throughout the Tsodilo Hills, there are only two small paintings in this cave: an elephant and a giraffe. These images were rendered, surprisingly, exactly where water runs down the wall.
Sheila Coulson thinks that an explanation for this might come from San mythology.
In one San story, the python falls into a body of water and cannot get out by itself. The python is pulled from the water by a giraffe. The elephant, with its long trunk, is often used as a metaphor for the python.
"In the cave, we find only the San people's three most important animals: the python, the elephant, and the giraffe. That is unusual. This would appear to be a very special place. They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual." concludes Sheila Coulson.
It was a major archaeological find five years ago that made it possible for Sheila Coulson to date the finds in this little cave in Botswana. Up until the turn of the century, archaeologists believed that human civilisation developed in Europe after our ancestors migrated from Africa. This theory was crushed by Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood when he published his find of traces from a Middle Stone Age dwelling in the Blombos Cave in Southern Cape, South Africa.
World's Oldest Ritual Discovered