Category: Activists & Organizations

Public demands an end to old-style animal control

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

A series of early 1997 small-city clashes
over animal shelter management suggest that the cultural
transformation hitting big city shelters for more
than a decade is now universal: the public sees
more, expects more, and business-as-usual won’t
hack it.
Retiring sheriff Lee Vasquez of Yamhill
County, Oregon, said so in almost as many words
in January, when as his last official act he ordered a
halt to the 30-year practice of selling pound animals
to Oregon Health Sciences University and the
Oregon State University college of veterinary medicine.
“It is clear to me,” Vasquez concluded, “that
the sale of live animals is no longer a practice which
our county should tolerate.”

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The floods of ‘97

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Animal rescuers were stretched thin from late January to St. Patrick’s
Day by flooding in northern California and twisters followed by torrential rains that
on March 4 raised the Ohio River to its highest level in 30 years. The American
Humane Association had just a boat-carrying mobile clinic to a regional training
event when the floods began, and didn’t get it into action until March 10, when it
set up in Falmouth, Kentucky. The Kentucky animal relief effort to then was
apparently led by Henry Wallace’s Henry’s Ark petting zoo, in Prospect.
The Humane Society of the U.S. reportedly published newspaper ads ballyhooing
involvement in the California animal rescue work, but according to Bob
Plumb of the Promoting Animal Welfare Society, which sent $5,000 and several
staff to the hardest-hit area, actually rescued just one bird. Four HSUS staffers and
two from AHA mostly helped the California Veterinary Medical Association emergency
team with paperwork, reports from the field agreed. United Animal Nations
Animal Rescue Service coordinator Terri Crisp meanwhile organized 600 volunteers
to rescue and care for 857 animals, housed temporarily at the Sacramento
fairgrounds, with no supply help, she alleged, from other national groups.

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Wise-use wiseguys

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Kathleen Marquardt, just a few months after announcing the
merger of her anti-animal rights group Putting People First with the far-right
American Policy Center, was billed at a February 15 fundraiser for
Congressional Representative Rick Hill (R-Montana) as spokesperson for
something called Putting Liberty First––on the same bill as APC founder
Tom DeWeese. An extensive online data search indicates that Marquardt’s
husband, attorney Bill Wewer, may not have appeared in public or written for
PPF since July 1991, and has apparently surfaced in articles about PPF in
mass media only once since PPF moved in 1994 from Washington D.C. to
Helena, Montana––Marquardt’s home town. “I have not been as visible lately,”
Wewer said by fax, “because I have moled into a movement organization
uising an identity which, although assumed, does contain a humorous clue to
my real identity, if you know how to look for it.” From 1990 to 1994, it was
Wewer rather than Marquardt who tended to have the higher public profile.
Wewer and Marquardt were two of the four board members at the National
Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare when it ran afoul of
two Congressional investigations and was reprimanded by the U.S. Postal
Service and the Justice Department in the mid-1980s for allegedly misleading
fundraising. Wewer subsequently incorporated the Doris Day Animal League
in 1987; did legal work for the National Alliance for Animal Legislation in
1989, preparatory to the 1990 March for the Animals, after Marquardt founded
PPF; and left DDAL and the Alliance to represent PPF in early 1990.
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Information

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Dick Weevil, host since the 1991 inception
of the Animals & Society subsection of the Pet
Care Forum on America OnLine, and founder of a
new Rescue subsection, was fired February 17 by
the veterinary firm that owns the forum, apparently
due to conflicts over resource allocation with the
heads of subsections run by animal fanciers. Under
Weevil, also targeted for at least two years by
anonymous hunters and trappers using the screen
names “Ster600” and “MdPhdStud,” Animals &
Society was among the 50 most visited features
among the more than 5,000 AOL offerings. Weevil
indicated that he might start his own online forum.
Several Animals & Society assistant hosts and
facilitators resigned in solidarity with Weevil,
including ANIMAL PEOPLE, a regular presence
at Animals & Society since January 1994, with
compensated status since October 1996. ANIMAL
PEOPLE had declined an offer to publish our electronic
archives through Animals & Society, opting
to stay with our own web site.

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People & Organizations

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

Fred O’Regan, former director of the Office of Europe,
Central Asia, and the Mediterranean for the Peace Corps, has succeeded
Richard Moore as chief executive officer of the
International Fund for Animal Welfare. Moore moved into a consulting
role nine months ago. Best known for international campaigns
against sealing, whaling, and dog-and-cat-eating, IFAW
also issued grants to no-kill animal shelters and rescue programs
totalling $395,000 in fiscal year 1996-1997, according to field activities
correspondent and pet rescue project coordinator Kristina
Hemenway. To receive the IFAW Pet Rescue Grant Project guidelines
for fiscal year 1997, write to Hemenway at 411 Yarmouth Port,
MA 02675-1822. No grants will be made before August 1, 1997.

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FIXING THE WILD HORSE PROGRAM

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

BY ENZO GIOBBE, COFOUNDER, HORSEAID

Does HorseAid agree that 90%
of the horses adopted through the Bureau
of Land Management go to slaughter, as
alleged in a recent expose by Martha
Mendoza of Associated Press?
No. We cannot find any evidence
to substantiate the 90% figure,
allegedly tossed out by a BLM official
who now denies he said it. Based on years
of investigation, recognizing that there are
still a lot of “Mom and Pop” rendering
houses that do not report brands, and factoring
in the unreported traffic in horses for
slaughter in Canada and Mexico,
HorseAid puts the figure for all the horses
who have ever gone through the BLM program
somewhere between 35% and 60%.

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Playing politics to win

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1997:

The strength of the animal protection vote should be clear from the November
1996 referendum victories won against various especially abusive forms of hunting and
trapping in Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, and even Alaska.
Similar victories came in 1994, in Arizona, California, and Oregon, which then
passed the legislation that it affirmed last year. Referendum losses have come only in Idaho
and Michigan, two of the states with the highest ratio of hunters per capita.
Independent polls by Gallup, the Associated Press, and others have shown rising
support for animal protection, including endangered species protection, for more than a
decade. In November, this translated at last into political victory––in a manner distinctly
separate from other voting trends. All eight referendum victories came in states which also
elected conservative governors or legislatures, or both, in either 1994 or 1996. The animal
protection vote cut across partisan lines, as demographic studies have projected it should
since at least 1990. People who voted for fiscal conservatism and “family values” often
firmly rebuked traditional hunting-and-trapping-oriented wildlife management.
Animal protection lobbyists should be on a roll. Legislators should be aware that
when they pick up a gun for a photo-op, they lose as many votes as they gain.

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Who is the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service servicing?

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:

WASHINGTON D.C.––In the last week of January,
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service embraced a partnership with
the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International, permitted
the U.S. Navy to kill every endangered ovenbird on
Farallon de Medinilla 2.5 times each, and advanced a scheme
to kill coyotes, purportedly to rebuild the endangered
Columbian whitetailed deer population on the heavily overgrazed
Washington mainland sector of the Julia Butler Hansen
Refuge, along the Columbia River.

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TRIBUTE TO CARL SAGAN

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:

Carl Sagan, astronomer, pioneer
in exobiology, and author of many best-selling
books, died of pneumonia on December
20, 1996, at age 62 from complications
resulting from a bone marrow transplant
which, ironically, had cured him of
myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disease he
had battled for two years.
Sagan actively and sympathetically
participated in public discussion of animal
rights for at least the last 20 years of his scientific
career. He viewed intelligence as the
definitive requirement for the possession of
rights, rather than the capacity to suffer, but
did not draw the line at the limits of human
intelligence. He remained aware of animal
suffering, raising it in works that might otherwise
have been quoted in defense of unrestricted
animal use.

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