Editorial: Know where your gifts go

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1997:

The Philanthropy 400, an annual ranking by income of the biggest U.S. charities,
published by The Chronicle of Philanthrophy, is the nonprofit equivalent of the Fortune
500 index of for-profit corporations. The organizations appearing on either list are those
most likely to be respected as movers and shakers by the rest. Fortune 500 firms are both
most often solicited for donations, and most frequently hit by boycott, especially boycotts
called by relatively small activist groups whose leaders hope that choosing a high-profile
target will enhance their own prestige, as well as that of their cause.
Conversely, Philanthropy 400 charities are most likely to receive corporate
largess when for-profit companies seek to promote themselves––and avert or undercut boycotts––through association with prominent philanthropic projects.
Thus the rich get richer, and overworked underbudgeted grassroots groups struggle
just to survive, even as they build the moral impetus, provide the volunteers, and do
most of the outreach that expands donor support.

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Editorial: Living in the House That Jack Built

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1997:

Sometimes it seems as if we live in the House That Jack Built, taking telephone
calls several times a day from the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
Narrated as a variety of songs and children’s stories, both “House” and “Old
Lady” go pretty much the same way: one creature is sent to chase another, dog after cat
after mouse and so forth, creating ecological and social chaos.
That’s just about exactly what happened here on Whidbey Island this year.
Gardeners, irate that rabbits ate their crops, released housecats into their yards in hopes the
cats would kill the rabbits. Birdwatchers became irate that the cats ate birds, too, after
depleting small mammals. Already, the gardeners were irate again, complaining now
about deer and raccoons. Commuters objected that the occasional presence of deer on the
roads kept them from driving like bats out of hell after dark. Bats caused a panic, too,
when some people tried to attract them to eat mosquitoes, whom they accused of being
potential carriers of equine encephalitis. The bats were said to be potentially rabid. Then
people who let their housecats and small dogs wander, to have a “natural” life, joined
with hunters in raising a howl against coyotes, who followed nature in locally solving the
alleged rabbit, cat, roving dog, and deer problems.

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Editorial: Slugs, burros, men & boys

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1997:

Two young burros from Wild Burro Rescue now share the ANIMAL PEOPLE
premises with 19 cats, two dogs, three humans, and just about every kind of wildlife
native to Whidbey Island, Washington, including all seven types of slug.
The slugs would remind us of the often slow pace of change, even if our work did
not, having survived, almost unaltered, for more than 450 million years, with scarcely a
visible friend. Even the cats back disgustedly from their dishes when slugs crawl through
the heavy-duty screens around the porch to invade their kibble. We patiently relocate the
slugs more from obedience to the compassionate ethic than from genuine empathy––except
for Wolf, now seven, who has insisted on relocating every kind of life from harm’s way
since he could walk. Wolf opened this school year by rescuing a snake and attempting to
save grasshoppers from boys who tormented and tried to kill them on the playground. The
notion that “It’s just a [fill in the blank]” has never been part of his psychological vocabulary.
Instead, he explains––to anyone who denigrates any life form––that “all life has an
importance.” To be able to love a slug, we think, exemplifies the hope of the humane
movement and indeed, of humanity.

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Editorial: White hats and black hats

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1997:

Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley executive director Vicki Crosetti has for a
year now endured a nightmare of harassment, just for doing her job.
Until mid-1996, Crosetti was best known as an early leader in borrowing adoption
techniques from the North Shore Animal League, including opening a downtown adoption center
that displays animals more attractively and conveniently than the aging HSTV shelter, and
sending adoptable puppies for whom there was no local demand to the North Shore adoption
center on Long Island. Adopting through satellite facilities and transporting animals to meet
demand in lieu of killing are fast becoming standard procedure, but just five years ago were so
controversial that some conventional shelter operators derisively accused Crosetti of trying to
turn HSTV into a “no-kill,” meaning either an overcrowded, diseased animal collection, or a
“turnaway,” which would not help problem animals.
It is thus ironic that Crosetti is now routinely sizzled by Knoxville tabloids and talk
shows as a purportedly needle-happy animal killer hellbent on an anti-no-kill vendetta, and has
been sued for euthanizing animals whom she as a veterinary technician believed to have little or
no chance of being recoverable within the limits of HSTV resources.

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Editorial: Predators, parasites, and cat rescuers

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1997:

Cat ladies, and gentlemen, who venture into dark alleys alone to catch and neuter
seemingly endless legions of ferals, could teach the rest of the animal protection cause quite a
lot about patience, endurance, fortitude and strategy.
While Cleveland Amory said he formed the Fund for Animals to put combat boots
on the little old ladies in tennis shoes, younger advocacy leaders long derided cat-rescue as
beneath concern, somehow less important and less glamorous than saving the seals, the
whales, the elephants, and the dolphins. Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral has a
stronger record than most at seal, whale, elephant and dolphin-saving, yet was ridiculed for
years after she once described herself to media as “a cat lady with a global perspective.”
Cat rescue did eventually become socially acceptable in advocacy circles, largely
through the efforts of ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett, who insisted in her former
role as editor of The Animals’ Agenda, 1986-1992, that activists had to address the suffering
in their own back yards in order to earn credibility with the public. Eventually so many cat
rescuers identified themselves among the activist donor base that today almost everyone in a
leadership capacity at least pretends to rescue one or two cats per million dollars raised by
direct mail, including those who figuratively tied tin cans to Bartlett’s tail for putting cat rescue
on the animals’ agenda. Some advised then––in writing––that activists should stay away
from the homeless cat problem, as a problem beyond solution.

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Editorial: Potty-and-other environmentalism

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1997:

The 28th annual Earth Day celebration came and went, 10 days after the close of
the 14th Summit for the Animals, a convocation of animal rights organization heads that
perennially does nothing. Chances are, most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers were as unaffected
by either as the organizers were by one another, despite the stated intent of Earth
Day organizers to spotlight the Endangered Species Act, and of the Summit organizers to
court the thoroughly indifferent environmental movement, whatever is left of it.
Better potty training might have prevented this sibling schism, along with air and
water pollution, before the popular concept of the environmental cause came to be eliminating
waste. In a time when “environmentalist” is misleadingly synonymous to much of
the public with Big Brother, as much due to onerously mandated recycling as to wise-use
wiseguy machinations, and when some leading “environmental” organizations such as The
Nature Conservancy as aggressively extirpate nature and wildlife as any commercial developer,
it is worthwhile to recall that the first Earth Day, which the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
helped publicize as a cub reporter in Berkeley, California, offered the notion of an
ecology-centered approach to living as a direct challenge to the environmental establishment
as much as to Washington D.C. and Wall Street.

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Playing politics to win

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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Editorial: Instinct vs. education

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1997:

“A seven-year-old boy and his father were hiking through a cornfield near Green
Bay when they saw two hawks fighting,” Karen Herzog of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
recently reported. “A redtailed hawk fell to the ground, ripped open from her eye to her
beak and down her neck and breast bone. The father told his son to stay by the bird while
he got help. When the father returned, he was surprised to find his small son on the
ground, his body curled over the bird to protect her from the other hawk, who was still targeting
her adversary. The boy’s winter coat was tattered from the dive-bombing hawk
attacks, but both the boy protector and the injured hawk were safe.”

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Editorial: Them bones, them bones

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1997:

Twenty-four years ago, toward the end of an active scientific career that spanned
half a century, the late Konrad Lorenz was honored with the Nobel Prize for Physiology
and Medicine, in recognition of his development of the science of ethology.
Ethology is studying how animals work, including humans, by studying behavior.
Lorenz formed important theories about human marriage and parenting, later affirmed
by direct observation of human subjects, through studying greylag geese. Ethology encompasses
social science, including sociology and psychology, and physical science, from
anatomy to zoology, but most essentially, ethology applies ecological principles to the
study of individual species. Unlke the disciplines of science developed by taking things
apart, which attempt to segregate, categorize, and define, ethology recognizes that living
beings act and evolve in continuous response to ever-changing conditions. Instead of asking,
“What is this part?”, the ethologist asks “How does this action relate to the whole?”
That to understand animals we should study them in their totality doesn’t sound as
if it should have taken a Nobel Prize winner to realize, yet before Lorenz, most investigations
of natural history were, as he put it, exercises in necrology, the study of death.

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