HELEN JONES, COFOUNDED HSUS AND STARTED ISAR

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.

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HENRY SPIRA, FOUNDER OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

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.

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Moi brings back Leakey to patch wildlife service

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.

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Beers for the road at U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

James Beers, former chief of
wildlife refuge operations for the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service and now USFWS liaison to
state wildlife agencies, recently told August
Gribbin of The Washington Times that USFWS
has attempted to oust him because he accepted
the National Trappers Association’s
“Conservationist of the Year” award for his
role in killing a European Union attempt to ban
imports of leghold-trapped fur.
This, Beers claimed, offended
USFWS brass who wish to cozy up with animal
rights activists. He didn’t name names.
He is reportedly now trying to press a whistleblower
complaint against higher-ups for transfering
him from Washington D.C. to
Massachusetts.

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Four thousand acres––and 600 emus

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

ELK CREEK, Calif.––”Our object
in obtaining this land,” explained Humane
Farming Association Founder and president
Brad Miller, greeting the first outside visitors
to the 4,000-acre Suwanna Ranch after the
1998 No-Kill Conference, “was to see how
long we could maintain our policy of never
turning away a farm animal who had been
involved in a cruelty case, who had been
referred to us by a humane society, animal
control department, police department, fire
department, or county sheriff’s office.”
HFA guarantees farm animals who
have endured prosecutable cruelty a caring
home for life in a semi-natural environment.
But, Miller continues, “After many years of
doing this, our original HFA Farm Animal
Refuge in Fairfield,” just north of San
Francisco, “was becoming a little crowded.
We think, with this extra space, we’ll now be
able to keep going for quite a long time.”

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Wearing the black hat well

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

GREENSBORO, N.C.––Sheriff B.J. Barnes
of Guilford County, North Carolina, on September 10
relievedly turned the county animal shelter over to the
United Animal Coalition, a consortium of 13 local
organizations including both the Guilford County
Humane Society and the Greensboro SPCA.
Forced to run the shelter temporarily through
the summer, when no one else wanted the contract,
Barnes on August 7 jolted viewers of his weekly
“Sheriff’s Beat” cable TV program with a 35-second
clip of himself killing a homeless dog.
Over the next six weeks, the Guilford
County adoption rate jumped 300%, and the UAC
formed in response to public outcry.

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ANIMAL CONTROL, RESCUE, & SHELTERING

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1998:

Newly appointed City of Los
Angeles Animal Services chief Dan
Knapp in September opted against retaining
Animal Foundation International t o
provide low-cost neutering under a city
contract. AFI opened a neutering clinic by
agreement with L.A. Animal Services in
November 1997, modeled after the AFI
clinic in Las Vegas, which has fixed more
than 100,000 animals since 1989. After
complaints about the quality of care at the
Los Angeles branch surfaced in May 1998,
amplified by local activists, AFI president
Mary Herro shut the clinic and dismissed
the whole staff––although clinic statistics
indicated the AFI clinic had no higher a rate
of post-operative complications than the
average (4%) for all U.S. veterinary hospitals.

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BOOKS: Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1998:

Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare
Edited by Marc Bekoff with Carron A. Meaney
Greenwood Publishing Group (POB 5007, Westport, CT 06881-5007), 1998.
472 pages, hardcover, $59.95.

Extensive but incomplete, and
inherently unreliable due to partisan composition
and editing, the Encyclopedia of Animal
Rights and Animal Welfare purports be a single-source
backgrounder on major animal
protection issues. Compilers Marc Bekoff
and Carron A. Meaney erred, however, in
entrusting authorship of key entries to
employees of major advocacy organizations.
Their work was apparently not subjected to
well-informed nonpartisan scrutiny. Second
opinions are offered on only a handful of the
most obviously controversial topics, e.g. zoos
and biomedical research. The result is much
uncontested repetition of inaccurate dogma.

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BOOKS: Ethics Into Action

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1998:

Ethics Into Action:
Henry Spira and the
Animal Rights Movement
by Peter Singer
Bowman & Littlefield, Publishers
(4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706), 1998. 192 pages, hardcover,
$22.95.

We hope Ethics Into Action, Peter
Singer’s revealing and inspiring biography of
Animal Rights International founder Henry
Spira, shall become as influential over the next
25 years as Singer’s 1973 opus Animal
Liberation has over the past 25: as a blueprint
for action on behalf of animals, this time exemplified
as well as theorized.

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