Alex Pacheco forms Humane America
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2000:
LOS ANGELES––Alex Pacheco, who with Ingrid Newkirk cofounded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 1981, left PETA at the end of 1999 to head the newly formed Humane America Foundation, billed–– in a distinct break from PETA policy––as focusing on dogs and cats, intending to help make the U.S. a no-kill nation. PETA has always been highly critical of no-kill sheltering.
Other key figures with Humane America include executive director David Meyer, who was executive director at Last Chance for Animals, 1995-1998, and research director Doug Mckee, of Virginia. Various celebrities have also lent their names to it.
The first Humane America project was a survey of 517 Los Angeles residents about pets and attitudes toward petkeeping. It mostly confirmed the findings of surveys of San Jose and San Diego residents done in 1995 and 1996 by Karen Johnson of the National Pet Alliance. L.A. residents kept fewer cats than expected, however, and opposite to Johnson’s findings had fixed 80% of their dogs but only 67% of their cats.
Meyer acknowledged that Humane America did the survey and formed a coalition of 30 Los Angeles-area animal rescue and advocacy groups in hopes of gaining support from Maddie’s Fund. Central to a Humane America plan to create a no-kill Los Angeles, he said, would be reopening the neutering clinic run in 1997-1998 by Animal Foundation International.
But a new Los Angeles neutering ordin a n c e (see page 3) virtually excludes the city from eligibility for Maddie’s Fund money, according to criteria set forth by Maddie’s Fund executive director Richard Avanzino.
[Humane America is located at P.O. Box 3042, Chatsworth, CA 91313; telephone 818- 352-6247; fax 818-352-8319; ; www.humaneamerica.org>.]
