SNAPPERFEST '12 IS CANCELED!!!

Timothy Sizemore, proprietor of Campshore Campgrounds, with one of many unwilling participants in the "games" at Snapperfest, a "festival" of 15 YEARS DURATION near Rising Sun, Indiana. Contestants vie to be the fastest to yank a snapping or soft-shelled turtle's head out of its shell without losing a finger. In the process, they run, carrying the turtles, usually drop each one several to dozens of times, break its shell and limbs, poke its eyes, and slam it down on a tarp. They also expose themselves to salmonella and a great variety of other waterborne bacteria which are carried naturally in the intestinal tracts of wild snapping turtles.

SNAPPERFEST '12 IS CANCELED!!

This just in:

Today Collette Adkins Giese, the Herptofauna lawyer for the Center for Biodiversity got a call from a
DNR enforcement official who said that they've been told the event is
cancelled and that they are closely monitoring the situation to ensure that
it is actually cancelled.

So a victory for snappers. And on their behalf a big thanks to all the people who created petitions, promoted them, went to the various meetings that resulted in this decision. You know who you are. As Collette said "I was late to the game, everyone else deserves the praise."

But as the DNR says"They are closely monitoring to ensure that it is actually canceled." 

Which to me shows they don't trust their word as much as many of(sic) we do. 

So keep up with your monitoring of advertising, planned visits, whatever. Just do it quietly.

Let's give them a chance to be true to their word.

Allen Salzberg

Publisher/Editor

HerpDigest: The Only Free Internet-Only Weekly Newslettter that Reports on the Latest Reptile and Amphibian Scientific and Conservation News 

Go to www.herpdigest.org to subscribe

Had a rough day here--20 hours without power, chasing all over creation to buy a used generator, and another severe thunderstorm bearing down on us as I write. Opened my email from yesterday to find this. I have to say, there is some seriously good turtle karma coming down right now. First the Return of Shelly, and now this!!

Thanks to all of you who responded to my appeal to write and call Indiana wildlife and county authorities. I'll likely never know if my letters to the Surgeon General and Indiana health department officials made a difference, but I'd like to think they did. Special thanks to my Snapperfest Advisory Board, made up of herpetologists, wildlife disease specialists, public health experts, government insiders and wise men and women, for making me sound smarter and better-informed than I am. Doesn't matter how it happened: it happened. And Snapperfest participants are going to have to find something else to do for fun. Tough toenail. Go play with toys, not native turtles.

Not About Primroses

 

 Evening primrose in my garden. Gratuitous color splash, nothing to do with what's spilling out of me...

Haven't felt much like blogging lately. It's felt more like something I had to do...I had to tell you all about Charlie, and then Snapperfest came up in an anonymous comment on my blog, and I was moved to investigate and then to do something about that. That post continues to draw hits, which delights me because it means people are still ticked off about it. I know I am. I've been working on a strategic angle on the whole mess that has some promise. I honestly think the animal cruelty angle, however obvious it may be to (literally) the rest of the world, is a dead end in the fine state of Indiana. Emails to Indiana's Governor Daniels protesting the event are answered with:


"The common snapping turtle is one of three turtles considered a game species in Indiana. The other two are the smooth softshell turtle and spiny softshell turtle. All three are subject to state laws that regulate their taking from the wild. Those laws include the purchase and possession of a fishing or hunting license for anyone age 18 or older, plus a daily bag limit and possession limit. Furthermore, Indiana law prohibits the sale of all native turtle species.

"Many individuals who have voiced objection to Snapperfest point to the animal cruelty laws found in Indiana Code 35-46-3. However, that law is not applicable in this instance because it provides an exemption for wild animals that are legally taken and possessed under the authority of Indiana Code 14-22.

"Thank you for your active citizenship."

Oh, you're welcome. I'm nothing if not an active citizen.

Which response apparently means that it's OK to be cruel to animals as long as you've taken them legally, in season, with the proper license. So I could torture a fox or a bobwhite quail or a white-tailed deer to death with a toothpick as long as I wounded it legally. Do you see anything right about that? Because I don't. If an animal is declared  a game species, it's left unprotected by animal cruelty laws? God help sandhill cranes if they're ever hunted in Indiana. Maybe you could wing one, then tie it up in your yard for awhile with the chickens. As I think about it, if you're going to hold leghold trapping seasons, you would have to exempt those furbearers from any animal cruelty laws, because they leave this mortal coil in a very bad way indeed.

Hmmm. Must get off that particular train of thought. It's like turning over cowpies, only what you find isn't fun creepy crawlies. Anyway, I'm not done fighting for snapping and soft-shelled turtles in Indiana, and I hope you aren't either. Still channeling grief and anger at myself on Charlie's behalf into something that might make a difference for some turtles and the kids who've been watching them being manhandled. I feel just a little bit crazy, but at least I'm aware of it. Phoebe said last night she'd like to have her fun mommy back. OK, I'm working on that, too.

 Quite the most spectacular evening primrose there ever was, and it volunteered!

Today a big bouquet of daisies and lilies with a teddy bear attached to it arrived from a reader, and her name was familiar, and I saw that she had helped me way back in another dark but memorable time, the Darryl the Bat Rabies Inoculation Event. Liam immediately appropriated the supersoft teddy bear after first cutting the pink ribbon off its neck. It was really something, to have a dazed and confused floral deliverywoman show up at my door, having punched our address into Mapquest and been sent on a wild snipe chase over hill and dale trying to find our place. When she called to say she was coming I warned her not to rely on Mapquest; it had tried to send our friend Jason down a woods road with 8" dbh trees. I gave her directions but she assured me she had them just fine. Oh, yeah, I've heard that before. Google Maps, I told her, Google Maps. Mapquest, no good. Anyway, she eventually made it and now there's this pretty bouquet from dear Ruth, with a little stack of cards from people I've never met and it all makes me cry all over again, but just because it's so sweet, to send flowers and condolence cards for a macaw they'd never seen but loved anyway.

I was reading this evening about the death of Nickolas Ashford, half of the singer/songwriter duo Ashford and Simpson, who left us this week. Apparently he was homeless when he wandered into a Baptist church because he'd heard he might get something to eat there. And there was a woman there playing piano and they struck up a conversation and wound up collaborating on songwriting for ten years before finally getting married and staying married. She wrote the music; he wrote the lyrics to songs like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me." Inside this homeless hungry man was a poet and songwriter wanting out, and what might have become of him if he hadn't met Miss Simpson?

 

Evening primrose and moonrise.

 They're popping open with an audible plup!

It's the human connection that matters; the connection between us, the thing that makes you write back to me when I am hurting. That's the thing. It's clear to me that Charlie is still doing her work of keeping me company, and it seems she's been very busy scrabbling around in your hearts. Chet Baker has been hanging close with me in the studio. There's no bossy green terror kicking him out of his Studio Bed, and he can actually go into REM sleep now. I'm not sure he ever did that while Charlie was around to waddle up to him and say Move Along.  (He's sound asleep as I write.) I watched him today as he chased something, listened to him giving squeaky sleep barks as his legs twitched and galloped through a field of dreams.

 

Chet as a tubesock wearin' winter puppeh, a photo I haven't seen since 2006. Because who doesn't need to see that? It's a wonder that dog gets any sleep at all, as much snorgling as STILL goes on.

 

I'm keeping very busy cutting mats, mounting prints, making signs, and figuring out how to present a bunch of the original artwork for my new book The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds. I'll have a couple of panels of my show booth at the Midwest Birding Symposium dedicated to the new book. And today I made a pre-order form for the book, so people who come to the Symposium September 15-18 in Lakeside, Ohio, can have it before anyone else. It's exactly the kind of thing I need to be doing. And I'm doing all that work in Charlie's sunny little room. The countertop where she played and shredded papers is now my work surface; her view for the last dozen years is now my view. The bird feeders we put outside her window are still full of the goldfinches, cardinals and titmice she loved to watch. It feels good and right to be in there where she lived for so many years.

I'm really looking forward to the Symposium, to writing and giving a brand new talk called "Living With Birds," which is how The Bluebird Effect came to be a book, anyway.  It's about the bonds, it's all about the bonds.

 

My finest work, viewed through a screen lightly.

Thank you for all your kindness. It helps, it helps.

Aftermath

 

All right. It's been two weeks since Charlie died and it should be getting better by now, but it's worse, worse by far than I thought it would be, to live without her. I thought it would be nice not to have to care for her, to start every blessed day changing reams of papers and sweeping the floor of her room, taking two wastebaskets of soiled papers out to burn, fixing a nice breakfast of ravioli, sweet corn, snap peas, carrots and cherries. But it's not nice. It's horrible. Easily twenty times a day I get something she'd like, a sprig of oxalis or a glassine envelope or a whole zinnia flower, and I turn for her room and she is not there and there is no one now who wants this little thing I've got to give.

Chet Baker hangs close and is as sweet as a biscuit with honey but it's her I want, her fusty feathery smell and the soft doeskin of her cheeks, it's her scratchy voice and her golden-eyed crazy glance and her bobbing head, her special bird consciousness, that I want. And nothing in me understands why I can't have that any more, now or forever. It is a grief and loss so specific that there is nothing that will fix it, spackle over it, but time.

Over the last week, I've channeled a great deal of this fiercely focused longing into fighting that hideous travesty of a "festival" called Snapperfest. The one where people feel a need to throw and yank snapping and soft-shelled turtles around in order to have fun. Hundreds of gallons of Bud Light and a good dash of animal abuse. Bring the kids!

And though Monday was one of those rare seventyish days with high puffy white and gray clouds and blue sky and a lulling cricket and katydid chorus, one of those days that starts in the fifties and never gets to the eighties, one of those days that should be spent messing about in a boat, I never looked up, not once, until 3 pm. I wrote and wrote and wrote and researched and consulted with my best herpetological and clear-thinking life experts and came up with a letter I think might give the State of Indiana pause about this awful thing going on down in its southeast groin near the beautifully named town of Rising Sun. Channeling, that's what it was, channeling the pointless, aimless grief and loss toward trying to ease the suffering of some unfortunate turtles that a bunch of people thought nobody would care about.  That nobody did know or care about for fifteen freaking years. Well, wrong. Thousands of people the world over turn out to care about snapping turtles, thousands and thousands more than anyone thought.  Once they know about them, that is. And to me that is a beautiful thing, and it fills my heart. Part of my heart. The part that doesn't include the hole a crazy small green macaw chewed right into it.

Monday morning I spoke with Ann Fisher, my friend who has a lovely program called All Sides on WOSU Columbus. We didn't have a long time, what with a big segment on the possible repeal of our spiffy new law eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, but what time we had we used well. Here is a link to the program, and I come in about halfway through the show. And now for something completely different...from Republican Senator Shannon Jones telling us how great Senate Bill 5 is for teachers and firefighters, to me, barely holding myself together as I remember a quirky little bird. If you want, you can hear me fighting back tears as I talk about what Charlie meant to me, and what it means to enter a lifetime pact with a large psittacine. If you want. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want; if you would rather go outside and look at big puffy white and gray clouds in a clear blue sky.

Snapperfest: The World is Watching

 Today, Saturday, August 20, at Campshore Campground in Ohio County, Indiana (812-438-2135), the 15th Annual "Snapperfest" will take place. Here's Timothy Sizemore, the proprietor of Campshore Campground, holding the unfortunate focal point of the "festival." The highlight of the event is when contestants reach into a horse trough of murky water, pull out a snapping turtle by its tail, slam it on a mat, pound on its shell to further terrify it, then brutally yank its head out without losing a finger. But they're not done yet. A successful contestant wraps the turtle's neck around his wrist and holds it up over his head, asserting his dominance over the terrified and by now perhaps mortally injured turtle. The crowd, composed of families with lots of children, sends up a roar of approval for a successful contestant. What message does that send to the children? Fifteen years of this...how many rural Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky kids have grown up thinking that's an awesome thing to do?

If you can stand to watch, here's the video. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81767472/

Ohio County, Indiana, whose only incorporated town is Rising Sun, is right over the line from Cincinnati. You'd think that this kind of thing would have already gone the way of cockfighting, bull-baiting and Vick-style pitbull fights. But no. Who loves a snapping turtle? Who empathizes with a vicious, dangerous, cold-blooded monster of the deep that eats the fish we like to haul out on our lines? I'm figuring you do. I sure do. People like us move them off the road when they're in peril.

When we first moved to Marietta, Ohio, I went to the Washington county fair. And there was an event called a Turtle Race. Wild-caught box turtles were placed in the middle of a circle drawn in the dirt, and the owner of the first turtle to leave the circle "won." When I saw more than a dozen of these animals, abducted from their woodland habitat and plunked down in the blazing sun for a frivolous competition, Bill had to physically restrain me and carry me from ringside. I couldn't stop it that year, but I damn sure stopped it the next year. I wrote letters, I made calls; I was shouted at, hung up on and accused of spoiling harmless children's fun; of harassing members of the Fair Board. Tough. I kept my eye on the prize, because I knew I had truth and compassion on my side. The box turtle a native wildlife species that is rapidly declining and threatened by habitat loss and human exploitation. It isn't a toy. And the Fair Board had no good rejoinder to that.

 A few years later, when Washington County Fair carnival concessions were offering hatchling red-eared slider turtles and (horror of horrors) baby green iguanas as prizes, I went back into action. This time, my first call was to the Washington County Health Department, which quickly responded to my assertion that both water turtles and iguanas are known salmonella vectors, and hardly suitable as children's prizes at a fair. Shut them down that time, too. A few well-placed, polite calls shored up with factual information go a long way.

Indiana law states that a person who knowingly, intentionally beats a vertebrate animal commits a Class A misdemeanor. 

I note that Campshore Campground's proprietor Timothy Sizemore's favorite saying on his public Facebook profile is "What goes around comes around, do unto others......"  He also describes himself as "honest, straightforward, compassionate, emotional, sincere."

A snapping turtle is not a toy. It is a sentient vertebrate being, capable of feeling fear and pain. This "festival" needs to go the way of bull-baiting, cockfighting and pitbull fighting. We've apparently learned nothing from Michael Vick's example.  

Call the Ohio County Sheriff at 812-438-3636. 

Call the Campshore Campground at 812-438-2135.

Even if you get an answering machine or a busy signal, keep calling. Make it more trouble for them than it's worth to hold this brutal event. Tell them the world is watching.

Here's my letter: 

Dear (insert public official here) 

I am a writer, naturalist, and wildlife rehabilitator who works with turtles in southeast Ohio. I have just become aware of "Snapperfest," and I've viewed video of live snapping turtles being very roughly handled by people in a contest. As one who spends years and quite a bit of my own funds healing turtles that have been hit by cars and mowers, or kept in captivity by people, the notion of using living animals in a contest to subdue them literally sickens me. This is a barbaric thing, which must go the way of bull baiting, cockfighting and pit bull fights. Have we learned nothing from Michael Vick's example? Turtles are not toys, and the regrettable fact that most people hate snapping turtles doesn't make this any less cruel and barbaric. Snapping turtles are native wildlife, and must be treated with respect. This event reflects very badly on Indiana, on Ohio County, and on officials who turn a blind eye to an illegal and extremely inhumane activity.

Looking into Indiana law, we find:

Information Maintained by the Office of Code Revision Indiana Legislative Services Agency
IC 35-46-3
Chapter 3. Offenses Relating to Animals…
IC 35-46-3-8
…Purchase or possession of animals for contests
Sec. 8. A person who knowingly or intentionally purchases or possesses an animal for the purpose of using the animal in an animal contest commits a Class D felony.
As added by P.L.193-1987, SEC.11. Amended by P.L.171-2007,
IC 35-46-3-0.5
Definitions
(2) "Beat" means to unnecessarily or cruelly strike an animal, or to throw the animal against an object causing the animal to suffer severe pain or injury. The term does not include reasonable training or disciplinary techniques.
(3) "Mutilate" means to wound, injure, maim, or disfigure an animal by irreparably damaging the animal's body parts or to render any part of the animal's body useless.

I would be surprised if any of the snapping turtles used in violation of Indiana law in this contest are viable or releasable after such severe abuse. Please stop this event, or be prepared to receive the outrage of many thousands of people who respect native wildlife and will not suffer its torture for fun or profit.

Sincerely,

Julie Zickefoose 

 Compose your own letter and fire it off to:

The Honorable Connie J. Brown
Ohio County Commissioner
yvonnewalton@hotmail.com

The Honorable Todd Walton
Ohio County Commissioner
twalton@cinergy.com

The Honorable Connie Smith
Ohio County Auditor
ohioctyauditor1@earthlink.net

Campshore Campground
812-438-2135 (office)
812-290-5939 (cell)
info@campshorecampground.com

Councilman Pro-Tem Mike Padgett
mpadgett@orvcomm.com
(812) 438-3340

Councilman Steve Slack
sslack@orvcomm.com
(812) 438-3340

Councilman Lynn Graves
lgraves@orvcomm.com
(812) 438-3340

Councilman Bud Radcliff
bradcliff@orvcomm.com
(812) 438-3340

Councilman Roy Powell
rpowell@orvcomm.com
(812) 438-3340


AND: Sign the petition, "Stop Snapperfest" at change.org.

Thank you. Together, we can change the world for the better, one cruelty at a time.