BOOKS: Adopting an Animal Friendly Menu for Your Shelter’s Events
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2002:
Adopting an Animal Friendly Menu
for your shelter’s events
Animal Place (3448 Laguna Creek Trail, Vacaville, CA 95688), 2002.
<Info@AnimalPlace.org> or <http://AnimalPlace.org>
It would be hard to find a more mainstream group of shelter
directors than the Food for Thought Advisory Committee assembled by
Animal Place founder Kim Sturla.
Among the 10 panelists are former Humane Society of the U.S.
companion animal program director Ken White, at least three longtime
members of the HSUS shelter accreditation team, and New England
Federation of Humane Societies past president Bert Troughton.
Victoria Wellens of the Wisconsin Humane Society and Ed
Sayres of the San Francisco SPCA direct no-kill shelters, but
Wellens is best known for quiet diplomacy, and Sayres literally grew
up in the St. Hubert’s Giralda shelter in New Jersey, which his
father long headed. Sayres himself later managed St. Hubert’s, then
directed the American Humane Association animal protection division
and PETsMART Charities.
Animal Place founder Kim Sturla has firm shelter
establishment credentials herself, as a former Peninsula Humane
Society executive director and former head of the Fund for Animals’
anti-pet overpopulation program.
The identities matter, because the panel is collectively
endorsing the view that humane societies should not serve meat at
public events.
“Too often we rescue injured pigs from the roadway or place a
classroom chick who became a chicken, then host our annual gala with
breast of chicken on the menu or kick off our dog-walks with a
breakfast of sausage links,” writes Marin Humane Society director
Diane Allevato. “The Food for Thought campaign is not intended to
coerce individuals to make personal dietary changes or to change what
we feed the animals in our care. Instead, it asks us to be
consistent. We rescue them. We care for them. We adopt them. At
our shelter events, we should not have them on the menu.”
The Marin Humane Society went meatless more than a decade ago.
Discontinuing serving meat is logistically much easier for a
humane society to do than going no-kill–so why are there apparently
still more no-kill shelters than shelters observing a meatless
policy?
