Three for the Animals

> A Texas surveyor looking for a boundary marker tugged at a mysterious pipe protruding from the ground. The pipe, a "coyote getter," designed to shoot cyanide into any animal that disturbs its wick, fired a cartridge into the surveyor's hand. An hour later he was dead. Such incidents have become increasingly common as sheep growers and federal agents have used more and more poisons to kill predators. In some areas, foxes, weasels, eagles and a number of other species have virtually disappeared. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency has banned 19 products containing cyanide, thallium sulfate, strychnine and sodium monofluoracetate. These poisons, said Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus, "represent a hazard to the public welfare through the indiscriminate destruction of our valuable wildlife resources."

> Brazil's jaguars, tapirs and howler monkeys won a new lease on life last week when the government banned professional hunting. The law means that a dozen major skin exporters will have to close down. The authorities also issued a tough set of new regulations concerning amateur hunting, including a list of permissible game. Notably absent: all of the big cats, monkeys, toucans, manatees and all endangered species.

> The gray whale, once considered virtually extinct, is alive and multiplying in the lagoons along the coast of Baja California. That news was reported last week by Carl Hubbs, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Hubbs credited the whale's comeback to Mexico's ban on hunting and its designation of a large lagoon as a whale sanctuary. According to Hubbs, four other supposedly doomed species are also winning the fight against extinction. The northern elephant seal and the Guadalupe fur seal are both doing well on the tiny remote island of Guadalupe off Baja. The sea otter now numbers "several thousand" in the Pacific coastal area. The Juan Fernandez fur seal is up to a population of 500 on the islands off Chile--mainly, says Hubbs, because nobody knows it is there.

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