Organizations & key personnel

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1999:

Stabilizing a year after the death
of founder Henry Spira, Animal Rights
International including the Coalition for
Nonviolent Food has elected Princeton
University professor of bioethics Peter
Singer as president and has hired Pace
University adjunct law faculty member and
animal rights law conference organizer Susan
Porto as coordinator. ARI was directed since
Spira’s death by attorney Elinor Molbegott,
his executor and longtime close friend, who
remains on the ARI board, along with Singer
and Humane Society of the U.S. senior vice
president Andrew Rowan. Singer authored
the philosophical study Animal Liberation
(1974), co-authored Animal Factories w i t h
Jim Mason (1981), and wrote Ethics Into
Action (1998), the definitive Spira biography.
Rowan was among Spira’s most often consulted
advisors on scientific affairs.

Six years after the estate of Cape
Cod resident Edith Marks created the
Marks Spay/Neuter Assistance Program to
help fix the pets of year-round residents of
Barnstable County, administered by the
Animal Rescue League of Boston, Marks’
initial endowment of $362,000 has increased
to at least $674,130 (the 1997 closing figure),
but only 85 people have received neutering
vouchers from it, Cape Cod Times s t a f f
writer Robin Lord reported on August 31.
The Animal Rescue League itself holds assets
of $101 million, including a $92 million
investment portfolio, but spent just $3.4 million
on animal welfare programs in 1998.
Nine British hunting enthusiasts
including Countryside March organizer
Robin Nanbury-Tenison and Countryside
Alliance board member Robert WaleyCohen
are running for National Trust council
seats, hoping to reverse the National Trust
ban on stag hunting with hounds in effect
since 1997 and to fend off a proposed ban on
fox hunting within the 675,000 acres of
English land under National Trust control––”but
not one of the nine disclosed their
connections with hunting” in election literature,
London Times countryside editor
Valerie Elliott charged on September 13.
Former Life Conservationist
Association secretary Wu Hung, dismissed
in May “due to differences of opinion on religious
matters” with the Life Conservationist
board, is reportedly forming a new group,
the Environment & Animal Society of
T a i w a n, helped by three of the seven Life
Conservationist staffers who resigned in
protest of his firing. Wu Hung may be
reached at >>eastmail@ms38.hinet.net<<.
The Progressive Animal Welfare
S o c i e t y and Olympic Wildlife Rescue h a v e
merged. “The PAWS Wildlife Center in
Lynnwood, Washington, was the largest
wildlife rehabilitation center in the
Northwest, taking in more than 5,000 wild
animals every year,” PAWS News explained.
“Now, with OWR, which takes in around
1,500 animals a year, PAWS Wildlife is the
largest west of the Mississippi.”
Ron and Carol Azvestas, operators
of the Wild Animal Orphanage sanctuary
just north of San Antonio, Texas, have
reportedly agreed to pay a civil penalty of
$1,000 and spend $10,000 to fix cages, settling
Animal Welfare Act charges for which
the USDA sought a fine of $12,000 and a 90-
day suspension of the WAO exhibitors’ permit.
In addition, either Ron or Carol
Azvestas is to take a course in how to sedate
animals. The most serious of the charges pertained
to the 1996 deaths in transit of two
tigers and a puma whom WAO was flying to
the sanctuary from the defunct Walk In The
Wild Zoo in Spokane, Washington. Word
that a USDA penalty was pending reached
media just as WAO was preparing to receive
40 stumptail macaques and 60 sooty mangebys
who have been retired from research by
the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in
Atlanta. Formerly specializing in big cats,
WAO expanded in 1998 to take 94 stumptails
who were displaced by the closure of the former
University of Wisconsin breeding colony
at the Vilas Park Zoo in Madison.