Category: Reviews

BOOKS: Dining With Friends

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

Dining With Friends

The Art of North American Vegan Cuisine
by Priscilla Feral, Lee Hall,
& Friends of Animals Inc.

Nectar Bar Press, 777 Post Road, Suite 205, Darien, CT 06820.
164 pages, paperback. $19.95.

This marvelous collection of vegan recipes might be called a
fusion cookbook, since the recipes explore a wide variety of
sources, among them Italian, West African, and Mexican.
Not being qualified cooks ourselves, we gave Dining With
Friends to Leroi Willmore, the gourmet chef who also runs the
Barnyard Donkey Sanctuary, near George in the Cape Province of South
Africa.
Explains Willmore, “The Sanctuary was started in 1995, as a
direct result of our history and involvement with the National SPCA
over the years. We found a need to care for the amazing amount of
abused and neglected donkeys we came across in the townships and
poorer parts of the country.

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BOOKS: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
by Will Tuttle, Ph.D.
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York, NY 10003), 200
5.
318 pages, paperback. $20.00.

Will Tuttle is a professional pianist and
teacher with a strong background in Zen Buddhism.
He argues for a broader understanding of the
implications of our food choices. He promotes
veganism to all people of conscience, whatever
their religion, as the vital first step to allow
our species to break out of the cycle of
violence, poverty and destruction.
Unlike most other authors on
vegetarianism, Tuttle does not content himself
with listing the physical harm done to our bodies
from meat/dairy consumption. He contends that
the harm from meat eating is much broader and
deeper than we realise, and has important
emotional and spiritual ramifications. He
believes that our relentless cruelty to animals,
principally for meat-eating, is the fundamental
cause of a global crisis today, and not merely a
symptom of human limitations.

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BOOKS: Gods In Chains

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

Gods In Chains
by Rhea Ghosh
Foundation Books
(4764/2A, 23 Ansari Rd., Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002, India),
2005. 239 pages, hardcover. $20.00.

Rhea Ghosh, of Boston, Massachusetts, spent the summer of
2004 researching the status of working elephants in India,
commissioned by the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation Centre in
Bangalore, Karnataka state, India.
Gods In Chains is the 230-page record of her findings, including her
detailed recommendations for changes in the elephant-keeping regimen,
and extensive appendices containing much of her source material.
Ghosh’s observations are heavily derivative of those of Peter
Jaeggi, who has observed captive elephants in India since circa
1990. The extent to which Jaeggi’s commentary has influenced Ghosh
is evident from comparing her text to the two Jaeggi articles
included among the appendices, “Chained in Delhi” and “Living Gods
in a living hell.”

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BOOKS: The Holocaust & the Henmaid’s Tale

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

The Holocaust & the Henmaid’s Tale

Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York,
NY 10003), 2005. 138 pages, paperback. $30.00.

Karen Davis, founder and president of United Poultry
Concerns, concludes that, “The Holocaust epitomized an attitude, the
manifestation of a base will. It is the attitude that we can do
whatever we please, however vicious, if we can get away with it,
because we are superior and they, whoever they are, are, so to
speak, just chickens. Paradoxically therefore, it is possible,
indeed it is requisite, to make relevant and enlightening
comparisons between the Holocaust and our base treatment of non-human
animals. We can make comparisons while agreeing with the approach
taken by philosopher Brian Luke towards animal abuse. Luke writes:
“My opposition to the institutionalized exploitation of
animals is not based on a comparison between human and animal
treatment, but on a consideration of the abuse of animals in and of
itself.”
Davis’s philosophy is well-argued and closely reasoned, so
that by the time she reaches her conclusion–that there is a Nazi
within all of us–the reader has already arrived there.

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BOOKS: Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations & Humane University

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2005:

Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations
Edited by Julie Miller Dowling

Humane University (c/o Humane Society of the U.S., 2100 L St. NW,
Washington, DC 20037), 2005. 184 pages, paperback. $44.95.

Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations is the second in a
Humane University how-to series that began with Volunteer Management
for Animal Care Organizations, by Betsy McFarland. Much of
Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations overlaps and closely
parallels the fundraising information included in the ANIMAL PEOPLE
handbook Fundraising & Accountability for Animal Protection
Charities, available in PDF format free for downloading at
<www.animalpeoplenews.com>, under “important materials.”
Thus in reviewing Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations
for the ANIMAL PEOPLE audience, the $44.95 question is whether the
HSUS take on the topic offers enough additional information to be
worth the cost.
The answer is probably yes for U.S.-based organizations that
already raise more than $100,000 per year, but no for smaller
organizations and those based abroad.
The ANIMAL PEOPLE handbook, albeit shorter, includes more
information about simple, basic approaches to fundraising that any
organization, anywhere, can use right away.

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BOOKS: Man the Hunted

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

Man the Hunted:
Primates, Predators, & Human Evolution
by Donna Hart & Robert W. Sussman
Perseus Books (2300 Chestnut St., Philadelphia,
PA 19103), 2005. 312 pages, hardcover. $29.95.

I first encountered Man the Hunted co-author Donna Hart more
than 20 years ago, while investigating the U.S./Canada transborder
traffic in exotic cats, as a reporter for the Sherbrooke Record. I
had already seen and photographed the cats, on the premises of a
small private hunting preserve that would now be called a “canned
hunt.”
With the help of Montreal activist Anne Streeter, and local
sources who chose to be anonymous, I had traced the substantial
criminal history of some of the people who were involved. I had
interviewed the bad guys. Now I needed an informed pro-animal source
to comment on the veracity of what I had been told about where the
big cats came from, how they were bred, how they were kept, and
what would become of them.
Animal rights and humane organizations, at the time, mostly
had little institutional knowledge of exotic cats and “canned hunts.”
But three different people mentioned that I should talk to
Donna Hart, if I could find her.

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REVIEWS: QuickSpay: 1-hour DVD

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

QuickSpay: 1-hour DVD, featuring Marvin Mackie, DVM
Animal Issues Movement (420 N. Bonnie Brae Street, Los Angeles, CA
90026; <QuickSpay@aol.com>), 2005.

The City of Los Angeles in 1974 took over the operation of a
low-cost sterilization clinic opened a year earlier by Mercy Crusade,
and started the first city-subsidized sterilization program in the
U.S.
Working for that clinic, Marvin Mackie, DVM, developed
high-volume sterilization. Teaching his methods to others, Mackey
eventually founded a string of low-cost, high-volume sterilization
clinics, emulated by many others, including Jeff Young of Planned
Pethood Plus in Denver, and Mary Herro, now retired, who started
the Animal Foundation of Nevada in Las Vegas.
When Mackie started in veterinary practice, under 10% of all
pet dogs in the U.S. and under 1% of pet cats had been sterilized.
Today more than two-thirds of all pet dogs and upward of 80% of all
pet cats are sterilized, mostly by vets using the Mackie methods.
With practice, Mackie method vets routinely sterilize from
30 to 50 dogs and cats per day–and their productivity commands
salaries of upward of $100,000 a year.

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BOOKS: Greenpeace

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

Greenpeace: How A Group of Ecologists,
Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World
by Rex Wyler
Rodale Press & Raincoast Books (33 East Minor
Street Emmaus, PA 18098), 2004. 623 pages,
hardcover. $25.95.

The Greenpeace Story by Michael Brown and John May
Dorling Kindersley (Out of print, but available
used from <www.Amazon.com>), 1989. 160 pages,
paperback. Includes more than 170 photographs.

Greenpeace originated in 1968 as the
Don’t Make A Wave Committee, formed by Canadian
opponents of nuclear weapons testing in Alaska
and the Pacific Ocean.
Initially most closely aligned with the
peace movement, Greenpeace evolved into the
first global front for environmental activism.
Attracting talented and committed people from all
cultures and walks of life, it predictably
fragmented and re-fragmented into offshoot
organizations and causes.

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BOOKS: Raising The Peaceable Kingdom

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2005:

Raising The Peaceable Kingdom by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Ballantine Books (1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019), 2005. 170
pages, hardcover. $22.95.

As an experiment in animal sociology, former psychoanalyst
Jeffrey Masson acquired a variety of animals of differing species,
and then devoted time to observing their interaction. His book is a
charming and well-written inquiry about what animals can teach us
about the social origins of tolerance–and conflict.
To us, Masson found little in the way of novel revelation.
Most farmers and rural dwellers know how easily different species
live peacefully together, and it is scarcely surprising that a
motley collection of dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits and rats should
find friendship with each other across species lines. So although we
read the book with particular interest, because of our own
experience in the Kalahari doing wildlife rehabilitation among many
different species, we were a little disappointed not to learn
anything new.

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