Author’s Blog
All proceeds from the sale of the book go to the Campaign Against Canned Hunting, a registered Sec 21 Non Profit. http://www.cannedlion.org
This book has been reviewed by the prestigious New York Journal of Books. Read the review here: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/kalahari-dream
I think we are on to something exciting here. Our new book is a movie book, a new concept entirely, one which takes book illustration to the next level. Sprinkled throughout the book are the URLs for sixty video clips of Kalahari wildlife. As you read about the animals, you will be able to click on the URL and see them as they were. You do not merely read about Snooky the catatonic jackal who had been kept in a small cage all his life, and continued after release in to a large 6 acre piece of natural bush, to pace back and forth in his imaginary cage. You watch him on video.
See also, for example, Tripod the three legged caracal at www.kalahari-dream.com/video-clips/
So we are presenting something that is unprecedented, designed to use all the latest technology, especially tablets, ipads and the new colour Kindle which is due out soon. Reading a movie book with e-readers will be a seamless experience. If one buys the hard copy, then the list of videos must be downloaded in to the readers PC or laptop.
Please post your blog in the comment box below.
at last have some time tomyself to take alook at your creation, it looks amazing, I will be ordering books for gifts soon!!!lots of love cuz
HUNTING, SEX AND DRUGS
This little exchange of emails is so comical that I just had to share it.
Friends from England, perhaps inspired by our book Kalahari Dream (http://design-a-webpage.com/node/103) decided to visit the Kalahari. They found on the Internet a tourist Lodge that looked appealing. The reservation process was going fine until our friends – call them tourists – discovered that the lodge was on a hunting farm (of which there are more than 9000 in South Africa. The following email exchange then took place:
Tourist to Lodge: ‘It looks really beautiful – but we could not stay there as we support
animal welfare, and could not consider booking into anywhere that supported hunting.’
Lodge to Tourists: ‘Sorry to You, but in the Kalahari, hunting is part of our life as drugs and
sex is part of your life in the City!’
Tourist: ‘By the way I am 70 years of age and sex & drugs are not part of my every
day life!!
After we had picked ourselves up from the floor and recovered from our mirth, Bev and I decided that our friends had missed the chance to exploit the implication that, in the Kalahari, hunting is the substitute for sex and drugs. We would have responded to the lodge: ‘We are sorry to hear of your inability to enjoy sex or drugs, and suggest that a course of Viagra would resolve both problems, and might be more effective than hunting.’
Chris and Bev,
I am so awed by your work for this planet. According to the aboriginal elders in North America (Hopi, Navajo, Cree, Ojibway and others) we have now entered the time of great transition and earth change. They tell us we can “cushion” these events by our love for all that sustains us, human, animal and evironment. You embody this in your guardianship of the animal kingdom. When the earth begins to shake herself your efforts will sustain you and those under your care for “those who are at peace in their hearts are already in the great shelter of life.”
-Hopi Prophecy
Steve Tyler from California read our book Kalahari Dream and commented on it on Amazon.com. He noted the strong anti-hunting theme of the book and drew our attention to his letter to The American IRS about the charitable status of the Reno-based hunting association Safari Club International. It is so good that we got his permission to post it here.
Commissioner Douglas Shulman March 22, 2009
Internal Revenue Service
Fresno, CA 93888
Dear Commissioner Shulman
Safari Club International/Wrongful Exemption
I would like to address Safari Club International (SCI henceforth) whose mailing address is 4800 West Gates Pass Rd, Tucson, AZ 85745-9490, by asking that you review their current tax status. In 1985, after several pressured appeals by SCI and politically high profile SCI members including the Bush and Cheney families, the Internal Revenue Service decided that it is an entity organized for exclusively charitable and educational purposes, thus granting it 501 (c) (3) status.
SCI’s main purpose is to promote trophy hunting; the mounting of (oftentimes endangered animal) heads above fireplace mantels and skins adorning hardwood floors. This is advocated not only to adults but children as well. When a person lists SCI as a beneficiary in their will, the proceeds, as SCI literature states, will “Provide a source of revenue to further the goals and mission of SCI.” This would include their broadening of such programs as “sensory safaris” for the blind where children are ushered through their museum to stroke the soft fur of mounted animals in order to ‘explore the wonders of nature.’ The hunters who have killed these animals are allowed to write off their hunting expenses and SCI actually has lawyers to assist, in this, what I deem outrageous. There’s more, but I believe this bit of information provides a starting point.
It is illogical that SCI be granted inclusion with organizations such as Sisters of Charity, the Humane Society and others that promote goodness and help people and teach them to be decent and caring.
Respectfully,
Steve Tyler
2564 Franki St
Orange, CA 92865
Persecution and loss of habitat are thus the major threats to wildlife and wilderness. In Southern Africa, persecution of wildlife has been institutionalised. This starts right at the top with regional government policy; it is enshrined in the Constitutions; it contaminates the law and government administration, and it runs rife through human society in the form of hunting and poaching. Even the wildlife conservation charities have fallen into the trap of aiding and abetting this evil.
Time has always been running against the survival of wild Africa, but now the clock is racing. The death-knell for collapse of wild Africa has been sounded. For the Southern African states have all adopted a common policy for wildlife utilisation.
The Policy of Sustainable Use may be summed up as follows:- There is no policy to preserve wildlife or other biological assets for their own sakes or for any moral or ethical imperative. All governments agree that wildlife is a ‘natural resource’ and must be ‘utilised in a sustainable manner’. The policy is sometimes referred to flippantly as ‘if it pays, then it stays ‘.
How was such a heartless doctrine ever drafted, let alone adopted? It seems that the WWF hatched this Bushmeat Traders licence with the UN. More specifically, with its Environment Programme. The whole basis of the policy is that wildlife should primarily be used to alleviate human poverty. That is obviously unfair to the wild animals. The animals did not cause the poverty. The humans did that to themselves.
Let us spell out the policy in plain words so that people may more clearly understand the enormity of it.
1. Any notion of animal rights is decisively rejected. Sentient, living, intelligent wild people are categorised as a resource, like tin or copper. These children of Nature have no more rights than a piece of cardboard.
2. Not only have they no rights, but they have had a duty imposed upon them. They must make themselves useful; i.e. they must make money for the voting public – or else they must be ‘harvested’. They must all become entrepreneurs. Only then may they expect any protection from the gun and the snare.
3. The same duty – to be useful or die – is not imposed by the humans upon themselves. (If it were, one wonders nervously which of us would escape the noose!) . So, a higher duty is imposed on the poor animal to conform to the laws of economics than on humans, who at least have choices which the animals do not enjoy.
Let us look now at those who call themselves ‘conservation hunters’. They say that hunting stimulates the growth of game farms and that makes them conservationists. We would analyse the logic of that argument as follows:
All cats have four legs.
My dog has four legs.
Therefore my dog is a cat.
We believe that Africa has a spirit which is unlike any other place on earth; that this spirit is infused into everything indigenous and natural and that when we destroy these things, we are destroying the spirit of our own after-lives. For when there is no cosmic and brooding spirit left around us, where will our spirits go when we die? In fact, we will confound the rocket scientists by bringing Mars back to Earth, creating a lifeless, barren desert occupied now only by the harsh scouring winds and the marching ranks of sand dunes which they drive before them, with only the dried-up watercourses to betray that our Mars continent was once a rich, bountiful and spiritual Eden.
* * *
Can you feel through all this static
This void within your dreaming.
An empty house of bleak neglect
For a life that has no meaning.
Turn to walk through cardboard dreams
A drab landscape with no depth.
Laugh with all your damaged toys
The pain behind each breath.
The veils of doubt your only friends
Embrace you in their sadness,
And speak of things that fade with time
Whispered through this madness.
– Andrew Mercer
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IEA8LTLguVdLieAzxhBv5s6rBcu5fRuOMaG4oF9bLUk/edit?pli=1
How to write and publish an ebook.
Who’d believe that a bat eared fox who eats scorpions and spiders would also love noodles. Here is Bonnie enjoying her noodles. https://plus.google.com/113295924833137559344/posts/f6ErouLFGur
Meerkats may be small but they are fierce little animals. See how rough they play. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhtDfgVDLb4