$200 million fund to save dogs and cats

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

CONCORD, Calif.––Richard Avanzino, president
of the San Francisco SPCA since 1976, has 200 million reasons
why no-kill animal control should catch on across the U.S.
They’re the same 200 million reasons why Avanzino
is leaving the SF/SPCA to head the Duffield Family
Foundation, effective January 1, 1999.
“Dave and Cheryl Duffield of the Duffield Family
Foundation have pledged to put in the bank $200 million for a
no-kill nation,” Avanzino told the fourth annual No Kill
Conference on September 11.
The funding is to underwrite a program which
Avanzino is to head, effective January 1, 1999, whose mission,
he continued, “is to revolutionize the status and wellbeing
for companion animals.”

OBITUARIES

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Bill Blogg, 54, died of cancer on September
21 in Tiburon, California. Born in Australia, Blogg
qualified for the 1968 Australian Olympic track and
field team, but instead followed his father into a career
with Gestetner Corporation, a maker of printing equipment.
Transferred to the U.S. in 1974, Blogg married
his wife Tamara in 1979. One day in late 1991, Tamara
told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “while shopping for cat
food, we saw a sign asking us to help feed the cats
under the Golden Gate Bridge. We were both shocked
that cats lived there. We called and were shown eight
colonies totalling about 80 cats. We organized feeders,
trapped, took kittens, and founded the Cat Caring
Connection. We quickly found that it was nearly
impossible to find people willing to bottle-feed kittens
and stay up 24 hours a day for weeks. There were times
we had 40 kittens, all on a different schedule. Besides
me, Bill left our own 36 cats plus over 1,000 cats whom
we fostered and thousands more who were rescued due
to his efforts.” Said San Francisco SPCA president
Richard Avanzino, “I think Bill was a fabulous human
being––he exemplified a spirit which those of us who
love animals cherish. He and Tamara were belittled and
demeaned by some other animal groups who didn’t
believe in what they were doing, but they were willing
to commit everything they had to save lives.”

Obituaries

HELEN JONES, COFOUNDED HSUS AND STARTED ISAR

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Helen Jones, 73, died of carbon monoxide
poisoning during a morning fire on August 14 at her
home in Abington Township, Pennsylvania. Arriving
for work, her hospice care nurse Debbie Moore,
Moore’s husband Raymond, and a police officer they
summoned saw the fire and pulled Jones from her
burning bedroom, but too late to save her.
Cofounding the Humane Society of the U.S.
in 1954, to more vigorously oppose vivisection and
hunting than the existing national animal advocacy
groups, Jones became disenchanted, and left to form
the National Catholic Society for Animal Welfare in
January 1959. On July 10, 1966, Jones led the first
protest for animals at the White House, opposing the
then-pending Laboratory Animal Protection Act––
against the views of all other major animal protection
groups––because she believed it did more to legitimize
vivisection than to save animals. Jones moved
NCSAW from Washington D.C. to New York City in
1974, and retitled it the International Society for
Animal Rights, as the first national advocacy group to
embrace an explicitly “animal rights” philosophy.

Veggie shakes, rattle and roll

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

BERKELEY, California––You’ll find few obviously vegan or
vegetarian items on the lengthy menu at Michael’s American Vegetarian
Diner––and you’ll see an icon of crossed fingers alongside more than 100
items, including six kinds of hot dog, 10 kinds of burger, and dozens of
alleged chicken, beef, turkey, pork and fish items.
Explains the menu cover, “At Michael’s, all of our food is made
from vegetable, grain, dairy or soy products. There is no meat, poultry, or
fish served or used in this diner.”
“We see this as a transitionary place,” says co-proprietor Dan
Sklar (above, left), who came to veganism as part of a spiritual quest.
“Many of the people coming in here aren’t yet familiar with vegan
or vegetarian food. We think if we can give them familiar textures and
tastes, we can help get them hooked on a healthier and more compassionate
way of life.”

HENRY SPIRA, FOUNDER OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Henry Spira, 71, died in his sleep
on September 12 from esophageal cancer,
after an uncomplaining three-year battle.
Encouraging Peter Singer to expand a 1973
essay on why animals should enjoy rights into
the book Animal Liberation, while taking a
night course from Singer, Spira virtually created
the animal rights movement by leading
his classmates in converting the ideas they had
discussed into political action.
Along the way, Spira learned that
more than 100 years of antivivisectionism
hadn’t ever stopped a cruel experiment. He
changed that with the 1976-1977 campaign
that persuaded the American Museum of
Natural history to end 18 years of sex experiments
on maimed and disfigured cats.

BOOKS: Puss in Books

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Puss in Books:
Adventures of the Library Cat
Video by Gary Roma
Iron Frog Productions (9 Townsend Street, Waltham,
MA 02453-6026), 1998.
30 minutes. $24.95 plus $3.00 p&h.

Taking a fluffy look at the lives of several cats
who inhabit or formerly inhabited public libraries, documentarian
Gary Roma raises but pussyfoots around the serious
issue of tolerance of animals in public places.
Indoors or out, wild or domestic, animals are
appreciated by most of library-goers, park-goers, and users
of other public space, but are often banished by the demands
of a vocal minority who claim allergies to cat dander, or terror
of cats, as Roma’s video discusses––or protest against
the presence of other species because they poop, make
noise, or eat gardens.

BOOKS: What The Parrot Told Alice

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

What The Parrot Told Alice
by Dale Smith
Illustrated by John Bardwell
Deer Creek Publishing (POB 2402, Nevada City, CA
95959), 1996. 125 pages. $11.95, paperback.

Loosely structured after Alice In Wonderland, with
black-and-white art instead of the color a book about parrots
would seem to demand, What The Parrot Told Alice owes more
to John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, than to
Lewis Carroll, the vicar who broke from the tradition of “entertaining”
children with thinly disguised sermons.
Like both pre-Carroll children’s books and many
other recent ecologically sensitive titles, What The Parrot Told
Alice is unrelentingly preachy, albeit more sensitive to the
complexities of issues than most works of the genre, and
packed with information about parrots. It’s good enough to
wish it was more fully developed.

Reviews

BOOKS: The Master’s Cat & The Ugly Dachshund

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

The Master’s Cat:
The Story of Charles Dickens
as told by his Cat
by Eleanor Poe Barlow
132 pages. $24.00 hardcover.

The Ugly Dachshund
by G.B. Stern
Illustrated by K.F. Barker
192 pages. $15.00, paperback.
Both from J.N. Townsend Publishing
(12 Greenleaf Drive, Exeter, NH 03833), 1998.

Charles Dickens spent the last 14 years of his life
with a small white cat as his constant companion. The cat
was reputedly deaf. At least in Eleanor Poe Barlow view of
Dickens’ later years, as allegedly written from the cat’s perspective,
this did not preclude her from hearing human
speech. Purported dialogue appears on almost every page,
including improbably long soliloquies.

Moi brings back Leakey to patch wildlife service

October 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

NAIROBI, Kenya––Anthropologist Richard
Leakey, 56, on September 25 returned to the head of the
Kenya Wildlife Service. His appointment by president Daniel
arap Moi surprised just about all observers.
A third-generation Kenyan, whose British grandfather
came as a missionary in 1902, Leakey previously took
charge of the KWS in 1989, also at Moi’s request. Then as
now, poaching, crime, and mismanagement threatened the
viability of the Kenyan wildlife reserves, which together attract
as many as 750,000 visitors a year, and are the nation’s third
biggest source of foreign exchange.
Attracting strong support from abroad, Leakey
stepped up wildlife law enforcement, scarcely missing a day on
the job even after losing both legs in a 1993 plane crash, but
his legal rigidity openly antagonized some of Moi’s intimates.
Some reportedly wished to undo the Kenyan constitutional ban
on sport hunting, in order to start trophy hunting businesses;
others were accused of farming on wildlife reserve property.

« 1 2 3 4 »