MARINE MAMMAL NOTES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

The U.S. Navy plans to shut down
14 of its 18 Sound Surveillance System
(Sosus) underwater listening posts, perma-
nently disabling much of a $16 billion network
of more than 1,000 microphones linked by
30,000 miles of seabed cables. The Sosus
budget has been cut from $335 million in fis-
cal year 1991 to just $60 million for fiscal year
1995; staffing is to drop from 2,500 in 1993 to
750 in 1996. Set up 40 years ago to monitor
Soviet submarines, the system was used in
1992-1993 to track whale migrations––and
proved sensitive enough to follow one blue
whale for 1,700 miles. Hoping to keep using
Sosus to help check compliance with interna-
tional fishing and whaling treaties, Commerce
Secretary Ron Brown on May 17 asked the
Defense Department to keep what remains of
Sosus intact, pending completion of a joint
study into retaining it via interdepartmental
cost-sharing. However, The New York Times
reported on June 12, a National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration internal memo
indicates NOAA is not willing to contribute to
the upkeep costs.

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LETTERS [July/Aug 1994]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

Save the Whales!
Editor’s note: The producers of Free Willy! addressed
this letter to the White House. We thought it worth further notice.
This administration’s handling of the whaling issue in
particular, and animal rights and conservation issues in general,
is utterly scandalous. Russia is currently exporting hundreds of
tons of fresh whale meat to Japan illegally. Norway has been
caught exporting tons of frozen whale meat to Japan through
Korea illegally. And now, by refusing to sanction Norway for its
illegal commercial whaling, and by adopting the RMP, the U.S.
is officially climbing into bed with the whaling nations.
You may or may not be aware that at the end of our
movie Free Willy! we put up a 1-800-4-WHALES telephone line
and received over a million responses from people extremely
interested in getting information on how they could personally
help whales in the wild. We are currently producing a sequel, and
fully intend to do something along the same lines, with the poten-
tial of reaching millions more. Using the names we already have,
plus the new list, we will send out information about what is hap-
pening to our planet’s marine mammals, why it is happening, and
what can be done about it. We expect another huge response.
The fate of marine mammals may not be top priority on
the agenda of the administration right now, but the issue has an
excellent chance of building and becoming a nightmare closer to
re-election. As lifelong Democrats, we hate to say it, but marine
mammals, like many endangered species, fared much better
under the Republicans.

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Endangered Species Act package includes wolves for Yellowstone

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

WASHINGTON D.C.––The Fish-
eries and Wildlife subcommittee of the U.S.
Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee opened discussion of reauthorizing
the Endangered Species Act on June 15 amid
a flurry of actions by the Clinton administra-
tion designed to mitigate objections to the
ESA from landowners while convincing envi-
ronmentalists that the key goals of the act will
not be yielded for political advantage.
Most notably, Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt announced June 14 that effec-
tive upon publication of new ESA regulations
in the Federal Register, it will institute peer
review of species listing and recovery deci-
sions by panels of three independent scien-
tists; produce multispecies listings and recov-
ery plans for species sharing the same ecosys-
tem, to expedite the regulatory process; pub-
lish land use guidelines spelling out what is
and isn’t allowed in the habitat of each new
species listed; and most symbolically impor-
tant, add landowners and business representa-
tives to endangered species recovery planning
teams. The latter comes close to building into
the listing process the cost/benefit analysis
that the George Bush administration argued
should be part of endangered species decision-
making back when the ESA first came up for
renewal in 1992.

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Fish wars erupt worldwide

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

Fishing vessels don’t fly the Jolly Roger, but fish piracy is increasing from the
Grand Banks to the Bay of Bengal, where crackdowns are underway. Related violence is up
as well. Malaysian marine fisheries head Abdul Hamid Syukor on May 18 disclosed the
seizure of a rocket launcher, five assault rifles, and 600 rounds of ammo from two
Vietnamese trawlers allegedly caught in the act of fish-poaching. The Russian news service
Itar-Tass reported June 5 that a Russian patrol boat “was forced to open warning fire” just
after midnight on June 4 to drive six Japanese vessels out of the Kunashir straits.
Norwegian coast guard ships on June 15 cut the nets of four Icelandic trawlers they caught
fishing in Artic waters and fired a warning shot to keep three others away. One Icelandic
captain claimed the Norwegians tried to ram his boat. Norwegian newspapers predicted an
imminent cod war. On June 18, meanwhile, a French destroyer broke up a net-cutting fight
among several dozen French and Spanish trawlers off the Azores. Violence is also close to
the surface on the Caspian sea, where caviar poachers affiliated with organized crime fight
with the fishing fleets of five nations for the last of the once abundant beluga sturgeon.

EDITORIAL: Nailing down boards

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

Three outstanding executive directors of humane societies were ousted last month
due to board politics. All three are nationally noted authorities on various aspects of
humane management. One was forced into retirement after 25 years on the job for alleged
fundraising failures in a city hit by three disasters during the past two years. Another,
known for turning deficient shelters around, was apparently fired from his third such effort
because the board didn’t like his ultimatum to either help or quit. The third individual lasted
barely six months in his first top job, after a distinguished career as a second-in-command,
because he apparently didn’t realize that the most important duty of most executive directors
is not management of the work to be done but rather management of the board.
Unfortunately, the above paragraph, with minor variations, could be written
almost every month. Only the number of people fired and their lengths of tenure change.
Curiously, none of the people fired last month were in the midst of building a new shelter.
That’s an almost surefire ticket to ouster, since the additional fundraising and the letting of
construction contracts multiplies the opportunities for executive conflict with board mem-
bers. A frequent result of changing executive directors in mid-building effort is that con-
tractual specifications are modified, or supervision is neglected, or both, resulting in cost
overruns and defective facilities. Witness the American SPCA, whose new shelter was sup-
posed to cost $2.9 million when longtime chief executive John Kullberg was booted out in
1991; it actually cost $5 million when opened a little more than one year later; and it still
needs an estimated $400,000 in improvements to meet humane standards. The blame for the
ASPCA fiasco can be cut many ways––we’ve been told by people who should know that
some senior staff never even looked at the blueprints––but it isn’t coincidental that a variety
of ASPCA board problems are almost legendary, including the presence of members who
have flouted ethical policies by openly wearing fur and participating in captive bird shoots;
who have had themselves sworn in as deputy humane officers in order to carry weapons
without a license; and in five cases hold lifetime posts reserved to particular families
through a quirk in the ASPCA charter. Lawsuits have challenged the legitimacy of the
ASPCA board at least four times in the past 45 years.
The financial and organizational problems of the Montreal-based Canadian SPCA,
documented here several times, demonstrate yet another common situation: a polarized
board, whose infighting over the past 15 years has caused it to go through more manage-
ment changes and proportionately greater economic losses than the Montreal Expos baseball
team. It may be stabilizing now, if only because more than half the board resigned in early
1993 when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and they were close to being held personally
responsible for the accumulated debt.
Wherever one looks, humane organizations are crippled by boards whose mem-
bers quarrel, second-guess, do nothing, and/or actively meddle––none of which properly
belongs in a board member’s job description. There are many available summaries of the
functions of boards and executive directors, compiled variously by standard-setting bodies
and consultants, but they all agree on the fundamentals:
The board exists to set broad policy guidelines and to raise funds.
The board must conduct itself according to the highest ethical standards of the
organization, both in public and in private.
Day-to-day management, including the hiring and firing of staff, is none of the
board’s beeswax.
The executive director makes the management decisions. The executive director
reports to the board upon the fulfillment of policy and on financial needs.
Unless summoned by the executive director to make a special presentation about
a program, staff members do not attend board meetings, do not report to the board, and do
not have direct access to individual board members. The proper channels for staff griev-
ances are through the executive director and/or through union grievance procedures.
If the board is dissatisfied with organizational performance, it should fire the
executive director and hire another. It should not try to override particular executive deci-
sions or otherwise micromanage the organization. Nor should it keep an executive director
in a state of limbo, with limited authority to make essential decisions and discipline staff.
There is also general agreement among nonprofit management experts that board
members should be:
Thoroughly familiar with and committed to the objectives of the organization,
with a long history of involvement on behalf of the organization.
Professionally qualified to deal with fundraising and policy questions.
Willing and able to raise funds. (In other areas of nonprofit activity, it is not
uncommon for board members to be required to ante up a certain amount each year, either
through fundraising activities exclusive of direct mail, which is generally supervised by the
executive director, or out of their own pockets.)
Note whom this excludes. Often longtime volunteers are rewarded with a board
post, a fatal mistake unless the volunteers are otherwise qualified, because suddenly some-
one over whom the executive director must exercise authority is in a position of authority
over the executive director. Inevitably conflict results. The remainder of the staff, both
hired and volunteer, becomes confused as to who is really in charge. Similarly, high
donors frequently are given board positions, without adequate grounding in just what they
are to do––an invitation to meddling.
Obviously well-qualified board members are in short supply. It is thus incumbent
upon boards to realize their responsibility to train themselves, on an ongoing basis. A sub-
scription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which often reviews board roles, should be
mandatory for board officers; a subscription to ANIMAL PEOPLE could help every
member of a humane society board; and the American Humane Association and Humane
Society of the U.S. both offer worthwhile board development seminars.
It is also incumbent upon boards to terminate vacant seats rather than filling them
with unqualified or uninterested people. Many of the most severely fragmented boards are
so large as to be unwieldy, as factions have tried to stack them one way or the other or
encourage high donations through creating new seats. Rule of thumb: if a board has more
members than the organization has departmental managers, the board is too big. A poten-
tial solution for the too-large board problem is to subdivide into an executive committee,
which will perform the policymaking function, and an honorary board, whose role is
exclusively fundraising––but make sure the executive committee is also committed to
fundraising and that the honorary board doesn’t confuse a title with entitlement to tell any-
one else what to do. At least two national humane organizations and one major regional
humane society have ongoing problems because the board that makes the decisions and the
board that raises the money are either in perpetual conflict with each other or simply have
no contact (in the latter instance to the considerable benefit of the executive director).
Where standards fail
It is likewise necessary that donors become more savvy about the nature of boards.
Since it is unrealistic to expect the average donor to know either the boards of his/her
favorite charities and/or have expertise in nonprofit management, this really means per-
suading the National Charities Information Bureau, Better Business Bureau, and other
standard-setting bodies, including legislatures, to update their ethical requirements. Extant
requirements focus upon preventing material conflicts of interest, an essential goal in that
charities can and have been used to squirrel away tax-exempt family fortunes, provide
sinecures to heirs, and/or enrich executives and board members. As ANIMAL PEOPLE
has documented, the National Anti-Vivisection Society demonstrates the potential for abuse
in that the current board president and executive director succeeded her own father, while
family members hold at least half of the board seats and all of the top-paying jobs in the
organization. Yet it is important to realize that none of the above might be a problem if
NAVS had not also heavily invested in companies which not only perform but promote vivi-
section, while paying the top executives huge salaries relative to organizational income,
and providing such outlandish perquisites as a television-equipped van reportedly used as
the personal vehicle of the board president’s husband. The abuse lies in the response of the
individuals in question to the situation, not in the situation itself. And, ironically, NAVS
so neatly follows the letter if not the intent of the various codified ethical requirements that
it recently drew the top rating of any national humane organization from one minor indepen-
dent reviewing body. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, meanwhile, consistent-
ly flunks the ethical requirements of the NCIB because it avoids both board problems and
conflicts of interest through the simple expedient of limiting board membership to three:
cofounders Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, plus one other trusted associate. We’re criti-
cal of PETA for many reasons, but the NCIB rulings are blantantly unfair, in that no one
has ever turned up the faintest hint that PETA is either enriching anyone or failing to spend
donations consonant with its charitable purpose. The structure of the PETA board, together
with the self-disciplined nature of the individuals involved, insures efficient management.
Enlarging the board to eliminate the “conflicts of interest” occasioned by the presence of
more than one voting staff member would do nothing to improve organizational integrity.
The same could be said of ANIMAL PEOPLE, whose board and staff are one
and the same, and of hundreds of other relatively small, tightly structured and eminently
effective humane groups, for whom accountability is a matter of being visible to the donor
base. If we’re not doing our job, you see it. If the Mom-and-Pop Animal Rescue League’s
founders drive a Porsche they didn’t have before they mailed their most recent appeal, the
community soon talks about it. If programs are adequately publicized and if executive com-
pensation and financial statements are published on an annual basis, the objectives of the
NCIB, BBB, et al are met even if every member of the charity in question is both related
and on the payroll. Real accountability begins not with board structure but with disclosure.
That’s why we publish the financial essentials of all the major national animal and
habitat protection groups each December. We regret that time and space don’t allow us to
do the same for each of the 3,000-odd regional and local humane charities in the U.S. and
Canada. We believe that by and large, animal-related charities stack up fairly well in the
area of ethical use of resources, compared to charites in other fields––and our reading of the
Chronicle of Philanthropy and other sources of information indicates that the greatest mis-
use of resources in this field as well as most others comes not through self-aggrandisement
and fraud, though certainly these are problems on occasion, but rather through ordinary
mismanagement resulting most often from board misperformance.
It is time the accreditation standards many donors use to guide them were updated
to stress operational efficiency as well as oversight, and to recognize that the best oversight
comes not necessarily from uninvolved and unrelated parties, nor from large boards, but
rather from dedicated people, whoever they are, who both keep the charitable purpose fore-
most and know how to work together to make decisions.

THE DOG MEAT SOUP HOAX

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

NEW YORK, N.Y.––As Joey Skaggs wrote
in his letter of confession, “On Monday, May 16, 1994,
artist and socio-political satirist Joey Skaggs mailed over
1,500 letters to dog shelters around the country announc-
ing that his company Kea So Joo, Inc. (which translates
into Dog Meat Soup, Inc., in Korean) was seeking to
purchase dogs at 10¢ per pound to be consumed by
Asians as food. The response was overwhelming. Calls
were received from people willing to sell dogs (most
likely attempts at entrapment); from people outraged at
the concept of eating dogs; from people who were out-
right hostile and racist; and from people who threatened
to kill the proprietor of this business as well as other
Asians indiscriminately. Representatives of various gov-
ernmental and animal rights organizations including the
American SPCA were pressured to do something…
American and Korean media were called to arms.”

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Spectacles

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

Bullfights and rodeos have been banned i n
Sao Paulo, Brazil, scene of more than 100 such events in
1993. The ban took effect in May.
Trying to slow the pace of the Iditarod dog
sled race from Anchorage to Nome, the Iditarod Trail
Committee has eliminated five food dropoff points, to
require mushers to pack heavier loads, and has cut the
maximum number of dogs in a team from 20 to 16. To
make up for sponsorship losses, the entry fee has been
increased from $500 to $1,750.

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Diet & Health

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

A 10-month study published in the
June issue of Cancer Causes and Control, the
journal of the Harvard School of Public Health,
found that children who eat more than 12 hot dogs
a month whose fathers have a history of similar
consumption have nine times the normal risk of
leukemia. The study compared 232 leukemia
patients under age 10 with a similar group of
leukemia-free children. Wrote Dr. John Peters,
who led the University of Southern California
study team, “These findings, if correct, suggest
that reduced consumption of hot dogs could
reduce leukemia risks, especially in those con-
suming the most. Until further studies are com-
pleted and this issue becomes clearer, it may be
prudent for parents to consider reducing consump-
tion of hot dogs for themselves and their children
where consumption frequencies are high.” About
2,600 children a year get leukemia; 72% survive.

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Laboratory animals: rodent and bird verdict reversed

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1994:

The U.S. Court of Appeals in late
May struck down a 1992 federal court ruling that
Congress meant the Animal Welfare Act to
apply to rats, mice, and birds, exempted by the
USDA since 1971. Declining to hear arguments,
the court held that the Humane Society of the
U.S. had no standing to bring the case because it
could not prove it is harmed by the USDA policy
in question. ““We intend to petition the Appeals
Court for a rehearing based on errors in the rul-
ing,” said Martin Stephens, Humane Society of
the U.S. vice president for laboratory animal
programs. Stephens dismissed the precedential
import of the verdict on standing, but Valerie
Stanley of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the
lead attorney in the case, told the Chronicle of
Higher Education that it means, in effect, that
no animal protection organization may sue to
protect laboratory animals.

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