People & positions

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:
The San Francisco SPCA on February 7, 2007 named Jan
McHugh-Smith to become only the eighth president of the SF/SPCA since
1868, but the third since 1998, when Richard Avanzino crossed San
Francisco Bay to head Maddie’s Fund, in Alameda. A 23-year veteran
of humane work, McHugh-Smith had headed the Humane Society of
Boulder Valley in Boulder, Colorado, since 1995.

One Voice has left the www.SaveJapan-Dolphins.org coalition
“to concentrate on French issues,” coalition founder Ric O’Barry
told ANIMAL PEOPLE at the start of 2006. “The new coalition includes
the Animal Welfare Institute, Elsa Nature Conservancy, In Defense
of Animals, and the Earth Island Institute,” O’Barry said. The
coalition opposes the capture and slaughter of dolphins at Taiji,
Japan, one of the focal campaigns that O’Barry began in 1970 under
the name the Dolphin Project.

The American SPCA has hired former Humane Society
International European director Betsy Dribben as senior managing
director of legislative services, Melinda Merck, DVM, as forensic
veterinarian (the first employed by any U.S. humane organization),
and former Humane Society of the U.S. and Humane Farming Association
investigator Robert Baker to do cruelty investigations.

The World Wild Fund for Nature/South Africa, a World
Wildlife Fund affiliate, in early February 2007 named conservation
director Rob Little as interim successor to chief executive Tony
Frost. Frost told Cape Argus environment and science writer John Yeld
that he was leaving “sooner than planned.”

Former Los Angeles Times writer John Balzar, author of Yukon
Alone (1999), about the Yukon Quest dog sled race, on January 22,
2007 became senior vice president for communications at the Humane
Society of the U.S.