A Project of Animal People, Inc., 1992-2013
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2007:
“As there has been no funding from leading animal rights
groups for a sustained anti-fur campaign in the affluent
neighborhoods of New York City, I decided to put up an anti-fur
mural,” wrote New York City resident Irene Muschel. The mural went
up in March 2007, “recognizing,” Muschel said, “that the best time
for anti-fur murals is when the weather is warmer, so people can
learn before they buy fur.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2003:
STOCKHOLM–South African novelist and advocate of
vegetarianism J.M. Coetzee was on October 1 named winner of the 2003
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The award is to be presented in Stockholm on December 10 by
Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden. The date is the anniversary of the
death of Alfred Nobel, who endowed the Nobel Prizes with his profit
from inventing dynamite.
“Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and
controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of
apartheid,” wrote Jennifer Schuessler, deputy editor of the Ideas
section of the Boston Globe. But his most recent novel, Elizabeth
Costello, raises “another unsettled and unsettling question,”
Schuessler continued.
“By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid
conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and
skin, are we all complicit in a ‘crime of stupefying proportions’?
Those words are Costello’s, whose two lectures on animal rights
–‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the
Animals’– make up the longest section of the book. The
preoccupation is very much Coetzee’s own, and has moved increasingly
close to the moral center of his work.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:
Bird Hand Book
Photographs by Victor Schrager, text by A.S. Byatt
Graphis (307 5th Ave, 10th floor, New York, NY 100016), 2001.
128 pages, hardcover. $60.00.
Beautifully photographed, as one would expect from from
Victor Schrager, in sepia rather than stark black-and-white or the
often explosive color of the birds depicted, Bird Hand Book at first
glance appears to offer nothing more provocative than just 98 birds
perching on human hands, with a few words beside each bird by
novelist A.S. Byatt or quoted from someone famous.
“The slaughter of birds in the great shooting parties of the
Edwardian upper classes in Britain has been seen as a precursor of
the slaughter of the young men in the First World War,” Byatt erupts
unexpectedly on page 98, then extensively quotes Rachel Carson on
pesticide poisonings of birds.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2003:
Bird Hand Book
Photographs by Victor Schrager, text by A.S. Byatt
Graphis (307 5th Ave, 10th floor, New York, NY 100016), 2001.
128 pages, hardcover. $60.00.
Beautifully photographed, as one would expect from from
Victor Schrager, in sepia rather than stark black-and-white or the
often explosive color of the birds depicted, Bird Hand Book at first
glance appears to offer nothing more provocative than just 98 birds
perching on human hands, with a few words beside each bird by
novelist A.S. Byatt or quoted from someone famous.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2002:
Wild Asia:
Spirit of a Continent
by Natl. History New Zealand Ltd.
Pelican Publishing (P.O. Box 3110, Gretna, LA 70054), 2000.
192 pages, illust. $49.95 hardback.
Africa’s Animal Kingdom:
A Visual Celebration
by Kit Coppard
Sterling Publishing (387 Park Ave. S.,
New York, NY 10016), 2001.
512 pages, illust. $24.95 paperback.
Read more
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:
OTTAWA––Eric Wolf, 26, of Ottawa,
who spent a week in a mock battery cage in 1997
as part of a performance art expose of poultry farming,
was convicted on June 18 of kicking and
punching his former girlfriend Rhonda Major.
Major spent much of the week-long
demonstration in October/November 1997 alongside
the cage, shared by Pamela Meldrum, then
27. Wolf and Meldrum were chosen by artist and
film maker Rob Thompson from among 80 people
who auditioned for the chance to win $2,500 by
enduring the entire week in the cage, which was
placed in a downtown Ottawa storefront. They
were allowed to eat only a vegetarian mush similar
to chicken feed, and were not permitted to have
books, radio, or television.
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July 1996:
Pet theft
The Oregon Court of Appeals o n
May 18 overturned a $100,000 defamation
award to former laboratory animal supplier
James Joseph Hickey, issued by a Linn
County Circuit Court jury in July 1994 against
his godmother Merthal Settlemier, over
remarks she made to the ABC television program
2 0 / 2 0 in a 1990 episode about pet theft
called “Pet Bandits.” Hickey lost a similar suit
against ABC, heard in federal court. The
appellate court ruled that Hickey, as a public
figure, had the burden of proving that Settlemier’s
claim that his animal care was “inhumane”
was false, and that he “presented no
evidence that the conditions defendant
described did not exist on the day she visited.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 1996:
On the screen
PETA on December 5 asked the USDA to
investigate alleged Animal Welfare Act violations by
Tiger’s Eye Productions, of Orlando, Florida, which
trains animals for use in TV commercials and rock
videos. “Our investigator witnessed facility owner
David McMillan beating tigers in the face, ramming
ax handles down their throats, and depriving them of
food and water as punishment,” charged PETA
researcher Jennifer Allen. “Animals have also been
left outside without shade in searing heat, or without
shelter from raging thunderstorms, and have been
denied necessary medical attention when sick.”
Finding venues for his diving mule act
scarce, Tim Rivers has turned to Hollywood, training
many of the animals used in Ace Ventura: When
Nature Calls, the second of a comedy film series starring
Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, pet detective and animal
rights militant. Because Rivers’ role was entirely
off-set, his involvement eluded American Humane
Association observers, whose contractual role in
supervising the use of animals in films is limited to on
set action. As the November 28 edition of T h e
National Enquirer put it, Rivers’ diving mule act “is
so hideous that Rivers has been arrested on cruelty
charges in Alabama, his act is banned in Illinois, and
he was thrown out of Atlantic City by Donald Trump.”
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1994: