Category: Editorials

Editorial: Please remember us, too

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1993:

Soon you’ll be sending your holiday gifts to the animals. It’s a big job, sift-
ing through the heart-rending appeals that fill your mailbox, measuring needs and pri-
orities against your ability to help. And it’s a critical job, because only your generosi-
ty makes animal protection possible. From the smallest local humane society to the
best-endowed national advocacy group, your choices of whom to help, and why,
direct the entire humane movement.
The responsibility to choose wisely is yours. And once again, ANIMAL
PEOPLE will be there to assist. Once again we’ve spent countless hours reviewing
the tax filings of the 50 biggest animal-related charities in the U.S., which we have
obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. In this issue we present our fourth annu-
al listing of their budgets, assets, income, and highest salaries.

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Editorials: When more pets don’t help

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1993:

It’s no secret that loneliness ranks among our biggest social problems. Those who
are lonely won’t need convincing, but the available statistics are still staggering. Twelve
Americans out of every 100 over age 15 live alone, including nearly a third of those who
are 65 or older, 41% of women age 65 and older, and more than half of women age 75 and
over. Certainly some people choose to live alone, but among both sexes at all ages over
25, the numbers who are alone closely correlate with the number who are widowed or
divorced. More than half of all women will be widowed or divorced by age 65.
The impact of loneliness on many people appears in further statistics. Single peo-
ple suffer more accidents, poverty, terminal disease, alcoholism, and drug dependen-
cy––and commit suicide more often. Men commit suicide three times as often as women;
the leading reason for male suicide is loss of a spouse.
Just as otherwise healthy but unloved infants may die from acute depression,
called by doctors “failure to thrive,” most of the rest of us need to be loved to feel well.
As almost all of us who have ever been alone can testify, we were born to be social ani-
mals; our social needs don’t end with our relationships.

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Editorial: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:

Most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers probably remember the saying, variously attrib-
uted to Benjamin Disraeli and Abraham Lincoln, that there are lies, damned lies, and sta-
tistics. In popular interpretation, the saying equates three categories of misinformation. In
practice, however, as both Disraeli and Lincoln knew, accurate statistics are perhaps the
most powerful means we have of demolishing lies and damned lies––which often reside in
purported statistics that don’t withstand scrutiny.
Inaccurate statistics are correspondingly an invitation to public demolition by one’s
opponents. When animal advocates take outdated or sloppily compiled numbers into public
debate, they figuratively stand up with pants unzipped. Some activists believe a big number
is most convincing and dramatic, whether or not it can documented. Yet people are more
often moved by the plight of one animal than that of many. “Millions” are overwhelming
and abstract. Smaller numbers are more hopeful. People feel empowered to save a certain
number; after that, the effort seems impossible and response diminishes.

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Editorial: Fighting the good fight

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1993:

Those of us who have worked with cattle know that there are two ways to get a
balky cow to move. Cowpunchers yell, push, and beat the animal, who often becomes
even more obstinate. Milkmaids by contrast just walk in front of the cow, hands in pock-
ets, and she follows from curiosity. One experienced milkmaid with a pocket full of apples
could probably move more cattle farther, faster, than all the cowpunchers west of the
Mississippi, if she had a mind to, but no one has ever convinced the punchers, who con-
tinue to rave and kick and beat on almost every farm and feedlot.
Persuading the public to adopt humane attitudes and practices often seems similar-
ly frustrating. Problems and solutions evident to those of us in animal protection are
ignored and overlooked time and again by governmental authorities, whether we’re talking
about violence to animals as precursor of violence to humans, the folly of spending mil-
lions for animal control but next to nothing on animal population control, or the hidden
costs of the meat industry to human and environmental health. Undeniably, progress is
being made, and even in comparison with a few years ago, it is impressive in many areas:
the rapid drop in animal shelter euthanasia rates, the decline of sport hunting, the collapse
of the fur trade, and the exponential increase of interest in vegetarianism, to cite just a
handful. Still, the progress can seem as slow relative to the size of some of the issues as
the pace of Old Bossy may seem to a young cowhand who’d rather be traveling at the pace
of a souped-up pickup truck.

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Editorial: Make sure you’re covered

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

On August 18, U.S. president Bill Clinton announced his design for an employer-
financed national health plan, intended to extend coverage to all Americans––not just those
who can afford it. To avoid increasing the cost of hiring so much that struggling firms
might cut jobs rather than pay the mandatory premiums, the Clinton plan would collect pre-
miums on a sliding scale. Small businesses, including charities, might be able to cover
their workers for as little as 3.5% of payroll expenditure.

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Editorial: Find more men to teach love

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:

Three Brazilian military policemen shocked the world July 23 when they
machine-gunned 45 homeless children who were sleeping in front of the Candelaris Church
and Museum of Modern Art in the fashionable part of Rio de Janeiro, killing seven. So
great was the outrage that three days later the suspects were arrested. And that was the real
news. In 1992 alone, 424 children were killed in Rio de Janeiro––as many as half of them
by police, many of whom liken the murder of a street orphan to shooting a stray dog. As
the very first issue of ANIMAL PEOPLE reported, the killing has previously been done
with impunity. People trying to help the children and attempting to bring the police to jus-
tice have also been killed. Elsewhere in Brazil, and in other parts of Latin America, the
situation may be worse, but only Brazil keeps good statistics, recording the murders of
more than 1,000 children a year––mostly poor semi-orphans. In all, 700,000 Brazilian
children don’t live with their mothers, and 460,000 of them don’t live with either parent.
More than four million don’t go to school, and more than 10% of adolescents can’t read.

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Editorial: No place for a saint

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1993:

Almost every day we hear from an animal rescuer in desperate trouble. Today it
was an elderly woman who had to relocate, and couldn’t take 50 feral cats she’d been feed-
ing with her. Only a handful of the females had been neutered; she lacked the funds to fix
the rest. She wanted us to recommend a shelter that could take them all in, guarantee they
would be socialized, and see to it that they were adopted into good homes.
“I don’t believe in euthanasia,” she warned us.
A few days ago there was the woman who’d purchased a farm and kennel with the
idea that the kenneling operation would support an all-species no-kill sanctuary. She got as
far as obtaining nonprofit status and acquiring a menagerie of 15 dogs, 14 cats, and 150
chickens, ducks, geese, and guinea hens before discovering that her income couldn’t come
close to meeting the mortgage payments. “All I need is $150,000,” she begged. “But it’s
coming down to where I have no choice but to put the animals down, and I know that when
I do, I will have a stroke and die.”

Editorial: You get more flies with honey than vinegar

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1993:

“We appeal once again for stronger ordinances for companion animals,” the
address to the city council began. “It looks as if more will be killed this year than last year.”
So far, so good: a succinct statement of the problem by a humane group with an estab-
lished record of accomplishment. The councillors were at attention, awaiting the statistics
and the proposed solution. But instead the humane society director mounted a figurative
pulpit, her voice rising to fill the room.
“Deciding that death for other beings is preferable to a risk-filled life is not
euthanasia in its traditional form,” she lectured, “but rather a lethal manifestation of
speciesism that projects our own fears and values onto another species.” As the perplexed
council members glanced at each other and scratched their heads, she raised her voice
another decibel and continued. “Mass killing manages an animal control problem for soci-
ety, but only a morally bankrupt community would continue to participate in such institu-
tionalized slaughter. Humane euthanasia may be indeed the lesser of evils facing aban-
doned animals in a hostile world, but it is still an evil. Instead of confronting the sources of
injustice, as represented by public ignorance, apathy, and cruelty, we have chosen to
punish the victims. Our city shelter is not much more than a killing machine.”
And then, as her supporters climbed up on their chairs to cheer, she asked for
$30,000.

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Editorial: The quest for accuracy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1993:

The New York Times is justly reputed as one of the most conscientious of newspa-
pers––because it runs a daily “Corrections” box, because it publishes lots of letters in
response to articles, and because editorial opinions, commentaries, and news analyses are
clearly labeled. Even at that, it sometimes badly goofs. A decade ago the Times reassigned
a distinguished investigative reporter and all but recanted his expose of how government
troops in El Salvador massacred 791 people, most of them children, because the editors
believed a U.S. State Department denial that any such thing ever happened.
Just the same, when the bones and the truth were exposed last fall, the Times
promptly admitted the horrible mistake––on page one.
And that’s why the Times can be trusted.

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