CHILDREN & ANIMALS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Israel on September 10
banned six British women from giving
birth in the Red Sea at a dolphin sanctu-
ary, under supervision of obstetrician
Gowri Motha. Motha told reporters she
wanted to see whether the dolphins
could communicate with the fetuses
through ultrasonic waves. “We hope to
make these children more in tune with
nature,” she said. Israeli authorities
believed the experiment might jeopar-
dize the survival of the newborns.

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Religion & Animals

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

The Rev. Andrew Linzey has been
appointed to the first-ever chair for the study
of animal welfare at Oxford University. The
International Fund for Animal Welfare invest-
ed approximately $500,000 to establish the
chair for a five-year period. Linzey, an
Anglican, was formerly chaplain and director
of studies at the University of Essex Center for
the Study of Theology. He left that post in
mid-1992, shortly after refusing to conduct
services while university staff were killing
“nuisance” rabbits outside the chapel. Linzey
is author of numerous books, including
Christianity and the Rights of Animals
(Crossroad, 1987).

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Guest Column: An Avoidable Conflict by Dan Namowitz

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Would you fly in an airplane if upon boarding you beheld a
sign proclaiming, “Notice: the flight crew is trained to cope with nor-
mal operations only. The management is not responsible for the per-
formance of the pilots under emergency conditions.”?
Would you ride aboard a train or an ocean liner, if the engi-
neer or captain had received no emergency training?
What kind of emergency training should the driver of an
automobile undergo? With all the loss-of-control accidents that occur
on icy roads at the beginning of each new winter, and all the
animal/automobile collisions that occur each spring and summer, it is
obvious that drivers whose normal operating environments involve
certain predictable hazards are doing a poor job of dealing with emer-
gencies, resulting in unnecessary death and injury.

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Canadian government crackdown: Animal Defense League loses charitable status; RETALIATION FOR ANTIFUR EFFORTS?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

OTTAWA, Ontario–– The
Animal Defense League of Canada has
been stripped of the charitable status it has
enjoyed since 1967 by Revenue Canada,
the Canadian equivalent of the Internal
Revenue Service,
Although the ADLC retains non-
profit status, donations to the group are no
longer tax deductible.
“For several years now,” the
group told members in late September,
“Revenue Canada has been reviewing the
charitable status of animal rights organiza-
tions and taking a very narrow view of what
they will accept as being ‘charitable.’ We
believe this position is being taken in
response to the complaints and pressure
from factory farmers, the fur industry,
vivisectors, the hunters’ lobby, and oth-
ers.”

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Pressure from Shedd aquarium squelches expose

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

CHICAGO, Illinois––The sched-
uled October 10 debut of Modern Animal
News TV on WGBO-TV Channel 66 was
twice postponed and then cancelled by station
management under pressure from the Shedd
Aquarium. The program was to focus on the
capture of two beluga whales in northern
Manitoba, Canada, last August, and their
subsequent death at the Shedd on September
25, apparently from overdoses of worm med-
icine.

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Who Shot Those Pigeons?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

HARRISBURG, Pa.––The Sept-
ember 9 edition of the Valley View Citizen
Standard took a few weeks to reach partici-
pants in the Labor Day protest against the
59th annual Fred Coleman Memorial Pigeon
Shoot, but when it did, it ignited a furor.
The hometown paper of Hegins,
Pa., where the pigeon shoot is held, pub-
lished the names and scores of all pigeon
shoot registrants. Among those listed as
scoring, a euphemism for killing pigeons,
were seven protesters who paid the $75 reg-
istration fee in order to let pigeons escape
by intentionally shooting high, low, or
wide when the traps were opened. Twenty
pigeons were released for each registrant to
shoot at, one at a time, on command.

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Letters [November 1992]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Corrections & Clarifications
We’ve always admired The New York Times for publishing a daily “Corrections”
column; most papers publish corrections only when threatened with a libel suit, from fear
that if they admit to making even one mistake, readers won’t trust anything else they print.
We don’t share that fear. When one handles a vast amount of material in a short period of
time, there will be mistakes, and we think the most accurate paper is the one that straightens
them out the most promptly.

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Editorial: Helping a few good men and women find a better way

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

I find no subject more difficult to write about than child abuse, because none other
provokes such conflicting emotions. I don’t claim to have been an abused child; indeed in
some ways I had unique advantages. Both my parents were schoolteachers, well aware of
the faults of formal education and quite adept at providing educational opportunities outside
of the classroom, as well as quite willing to help me dodge classroom attendence to do any-
thing and everything else useful and constructive––attending courtroom proceedings, ram-
bling around Europe, and working parttime for newspapers, among other alternative
“lessons” that were never graded. At the same time, our family was not immune to the
times and the stresses that afflict all of us. We went through part of a winter without gas and
electricity during a period of prolonged parental unemployment; there were several years in
my early teens when because my father was working the equivalent of two fulltime jobs, I’d
rarely have seen him if I hadn’t been working for him almost every day away from school; I
was beaten and starved for disciplinary reasons in a manner unfortunately not uncommon ;
and we all had to cope with several terrifying explosions of a long-smoldering mental illness

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Editorial: Change vs. “movement”

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Our mail box has been full of letters either presuming or attacking our presumed
position with respect to the animal rights movement. Animal rights philosopher Tom Regan
among others welcomed our contribution to the movement; New York activist Dawn
Hernandez jumped on us for “movement-bashing”; and on the letters page, opposite,
Michael Gurwitz proposes that we should rename the movement, whatever it happens to be.
As we see it, though, the “movement” is largely history. A movement is the take-
off phase of a theme in social evolution, when a cause has relatively few supporters, and
must provoke confrontation to draw notice––often taking rhetorically extreme and practical-
ly impossible positions for the same reasons that an infant shrieks. The primary aim of the
animal rights movement was restoring animals to public awareness, after nearly a century
of slipping interest in humane concerns. Public opinion polls, political response (pro and
con), and a few striking camapign successes all showed that this was achieved by 1988, as
sociologist Bill Moyer of the Social Movement Empowerment Project pointed out in 1989
to a gathering of “movement” leaders convened by ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim
Bartlett and Priscilla Feral of Friends of Animals.

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