Category: Editorials

Editorial: Conferences build movements

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

Education, persuasion, fundraising,
and political organization all begin with getting
to know somebody.
Futurists have predicted since the
invention of book-printing that this ancient
truism would soon be amended by the advent of
mass media, which permit ever more rapid and
far-reaching distribution of ideas. Yet this has
not happened any more than the evolution of
advanced noses enabled dogs to give up their
eyesight. The actual major effect of each new
development in communication is simply to extend
human sensory input capabilities, and the most
frequent use of our extended input is always to
facilitate more human-to-human contact.
Thus book-printing stimulated the growth
of universities. Radio and television stimulated
travel. Use of the Internet exploded when
people discovered that it eases and expedites
meeting others with common interests. The
single most frequent specific use of e-mail is in
finding conjugal partners. Finding or placing
companion animals also ranks among the top dozen
uses, according to Internet researchers, some
of whom estimate that from a third to half of all
pet adoptions are now Internet-assisted.

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Editorial: Fighting the fur-clad spectre of Attila the Hun

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

The importance of fur-wearing, apart
from the lives of up to 40 million animals killed
for fur each year, is that after meat-eating it
is the most visibly conspicuous public symbol of
attitudes toward animals. Mass media and the
general public began to view animal advocacy as
an authentic socially transformative force after
fur garments abruptly vanished from the streets
of much of the U.S. and Europe in 1988-1989-and
perceive the cause as waning if they see more
fur, whether or not fur is actually the focus of
much active campaigning.
Today more fur is visible, and that should be cause for worry.
U.S. retail fur sales fell from a high of
$1.85 billion in 1987-1988 to $950 million in
1991-1992. In 2000 and 2001, sales recovered to
$1.69 billion, then dipped to $1.53 billion.
Adjusted for inflation, the real increase from
the low point to the recent high was barely 20%,
and the trend is apparently again downward, but
perhaps mostly because of two years of economic
recession.

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Editorial: “Lion-tamers” versus dull accountants

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2002:

Michael Palin of the British comedy team Monty Python’s
Flying Circus in 1971 inadvertently sketched how animal charities
really operate. Playing a dull accountant, Palin confessed to a job
counselor that what he really wished to be was a lion tamer. He did
not actually know a lion from an anteater, but he had a lion tamer’s
hat.
Animal protection charities are nearly always founded by
“lion tamers,” or former lion tamers anyway, who work with animals,
love animals, and are not averse to risk–including from the “killer
cats” who stalk great cities, also portrayed by Monty Python.
Among bare-armed “cat ladies,” ANIMAL PEOPLE often notes
that the most evident visual distinction between cat rescuers and the
suicidally depressed may be that self-inflicted scars on wrists are
short, neat, and horizontal, whereas the wounds from feral cats
tend to be jagged and run vertically from elbow to wrist.

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Editorial: To save endangered species, don’t kill them

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2002:

“About 19% of native animal species and 15% of native plant
species in the U.S. are ‘imperiled’ or ‘critically imperiled,’ and
another 1% of plants and 3% of animals may already be extinct–that
is, they have not been located despite intensive searches,”
declared the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the
Environment on September 24, in a purported landmark report formally
titled The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems.
“When ‘vulnerable’ species are counted, about one third of
plant and animal species are considered to be ‘at risk,'” the report
continued.
Most U.S. newspapers gave The State of the Nation’s
Ecosystems just one paragraph.

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Editorial: 10 years and still flying for the animals!

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2002:

Ten years ago this month, they said
ANIMAL PEOPLE would never take off. The runway
was too short, too shaky, we were hauling too
much weight, and we would be flying blind,
dodging flak all the way.
No one had ever before done what we set
out to do–to independently report about animal
protection, for a global audience, with a
proactive and self-starting approach to getting
things done.
We started out flat broke, hopeful, yet
lacking even a tangible promise that help would
come from anyone.

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Editorial: “Rescue” should not perpetuate the problem

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2002:

Nine years ago, in April 1993, ANIMAL PEOPLE first brought
the plight of the Premarin mares and their foals to the attention of
the humane community.
Citing a previously unpublicized investigation by Tom Hughes
of the Canadian Farm Animal Care Trust, we pointed out that the
farms that gather the pregnant mares’ urine from which the estrogen
supplement Premarin is made typically keep the mares stabled and
connected to collection tubes from September to April each year.
Rarely were the PMU mares released for outdoor exercise then, and
their holding conditions now seem little different.

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Shooting animals in the rural South: animal abuse or cultural norm?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2002:
Shooting animals in the rural South: animal abuse or cultural norm?
by Sue-Ellen Brown, Psy.D.

“Who shot the dog?” I asked.
“I killed him! I shot him right in the face!” the
13-year-old boy boasted, sitting on his 4-wheeler.
“That was cruel!” his 8-year-old female cousin from the
suburbs objected.
“Well, he ate my cat!” exclaimed the 13-year-old.
For a moment I thought that could be a legitimate
explanation. I felt relieved that the next serial killer was not
living next door. But then, he continued, “Well the cat was dead.
The dog dug him up and ate him.”
I asked what happened to the cat.
“My dad shot him.”

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Editorial: Humane nation-building

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2002:

Flying into Afghanistan on January 13, World Society for the
Protection of Animals international projects director John Walsh
drove straight to the Kabul Zoo with two colleagues and several
suitcases of veterinary supplies.
Few if any humane workers have helped more animals in more
places, under more dramatic circumstances, than John Walsh. A
former field officer for the Massachusetts SPCA, Walsh transferred
to the International Society for Animal Protection when it was spun
off as a subsidiary in 1964, and was soon literally immersed in
helping to carry an estimated 10,000 animals to safety from the
floodwaters behind a new dam in Surinam.

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Editorial: Lessons from the Red Cross debacle

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2001:

 

ANIMAL PEOPLE had planned that this very late November 2001
edition would feature our first-hand investigative report on the
success of the “No homeless animals, no-kill, no shelter” approach
to dog and cat overpopulation taken by the Veterinary Licensing Board
and allied animal welfare groups in Costa Rica. Seeing is believing,
and after nearly two weeks in Costa Rica, counting dogs and cats and
observing how they are faring wherever we went, we can testify that
the Costa Rican animal care community has a lot to teach the world.
But that report will have to wait until our December edition
appears, when it can help to inspire a happy and productive New
Year. We fell behind in May, when ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim
Bartlett contracted pneumonia following two distressful hours of
photographically documenting the sale of dogs and cats for meat at
the Moran Market near Seoul, South Korea. Then we held up
production of our September edition for an extra week to include
coverage of the animal aspects of the terrorist attacks of September
11.

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