Category: Tactics

Kharkov bioethics course makes a difference

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

KHARKOV, Ukraine–Humane educators have been wondering ever
since Massachusetts SPCA founder George Angell introduced the first
humane curriculum more than 100 years ago whether the results of
their teaching can be effectively measured.
Olga Ivanova Tolstova, founding chair of the Bioethics
Centre at the Kharkov Zoological & Veterinary Academy in the Ukraine,
believes she and her fellow faculty members have developed evidence
that encouraging students to think about the ethics of animal use
makes a profound difference.

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Why animal advocates’ “war on terror” must be nonviolent

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

Why animal advocates’ “war on terror” must be nonviolent
by Steve Hindi, founder, SHARK

It has happened again. Thugs misappropriating the name of
“animal rights activism” have struck another blow against all animal
advocates and the animals for whom we toil. This time the crime
occurred in Villa Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, where during
the first weekend in February 2003 someone reportedly cut the brake
lines of as many as 40 trucks owned by a company that sells live
lobsters.

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Editorial: Conferences build movements

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2003:

Education, persuasion, fundraising,
and political organization all begin with getting
to know somebody.
Futurists have predicted since the
invention of book-printing that this ancient
truism would soon be amended by the advent of
mass media, which permit ever more rapid and
far-reaching distribution of ideas. Yet this has
not happened any more than the evolution of
advanced noses enabled dogs to give up their
eyesight. The actual major effect of each new
development in communication is simply to extend
human sensory input capabilities, and the most
frequent use of our extended input is always to
facilitate more human-to-human contact.
Thus book-printing stimulated the growth
of universities. Radio and television stimulated
travel. Use of the Internet exploded when
people discovered that it eases and expedites
meeting others with common interests. The
single most frequent specific use of e-mail is in
finding conjugal partners. Finding or placing
companion animals also ranks among the top dozen
uses, according to Internet researchers, some
of whom estimate that from a third to half of all
pet adoptions are now Internet-assisted.

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“The company doing the ‘mail-outs’ gets most of the money”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

“The company doing the ‘mail-outs’ gets most of the money”
–another ex-Eberle client

McLEAN, Va.-Fundraiser Bruce Eberle, representing many of
the animal protection charities with the highest ratios of
fundraising to program expense of all those whose IRS Form 990
filings ANIMAL PEOPLE monitors, has apparently both gained and lost
animal protection clients since ANIMAL PEOPLE last listed those known
to be associated with him.
Discontinuing a relationship with Eberle is the Dream Catcher
Farm, Sanctuary, of Rocky Mount, Virginia.
“We are no longer using any type of fundraising company,”
founder Catherine Sutphin wrote in an open letter to donors. “We
tried using one for a couple of ‘mail-outs,’ but not all the money
went to the sanctuary for the horses. We would net about 8%-10%…
The company doing the ‘mail-outs’ gets most of the money for mailing
list rentals, bank statements, designing, printing, [and] stuffing and mailing letters.

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Protesting is good for you!

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2003:
 
LONDON-“People should get more involved in campaigns,
struggles,  and social movements,  for their own personal good,”
University of Sussex psychologist Dr. John Drury recently told
Reuters Health.  Interviewing nearly 40 activists on issues including
fox hunting,  the environment,  and labor relations,  Drury found
that protesting helped them overcome feelings of personal stress,
pain,  anxiety,  and depression.

Editorial: Fighting the fur-clad spectre of Attila the Hun

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

The importance of fur-wearing, apart
from the lives of up to 40 million animals killed
for fur each year, is that after meat-eating it
is the most visibly conspicuous public symbol of
attitudes toward animals. Mass media and the
general public began to view animal advocacy as
an authentic socially transformative force after
fur garments abruptly vanished from the streets
of much of the U.S. and Europe in 1988-1989-and
perceive the cause as waning if they see more
fur, whether or not fur is actually the focus of
much active campaigning.
Today more fur is visible, and that should be cause for worry.
U.S. retail fur sales fell from a high of
$1.85 billion in 1987-1988 to $950 million in
1991-1992. In 2000 and 2001, sales recovered to
$1.69 billion, then dipped to $1.53 billion.
Adjusted for inflation, the real increase from
the low point to the recent high was barely 20%,
and the trend is apparently again downward, but
perhaps mostly because of two years of economic
recession.

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High-energy post-Soviet activists do everything but raise money

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2003:

MOSCOW, KIEV, KHARKOV-A sociologist or political scientist
probably could not design a better comparative experiment in starting
an animal advocacy movement than is now underway in Moscow, the
largest city in Russia, and Kiev and Kharkov, the two largest
cities in the Ukraine.
Russia and the Ukraine are neighbors, the most prominent
remnants of the former Soviet Union, sharing parallel history,
ethnicity, and standards of living, and post-Soviet birth rates
that are among the seven lowest in the world, but have active
rivalries dating back more than 1,000 years.
Their ancient kings conquered each other, their forced
alliances held Napoleon and Hitler at bay, and they are now racing
into economic development and social/political westernization at a
breakneck pace.

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Editorial: “Lion-tamers” versus dull accountants

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2002:

Michael Palin of the British comedy team Monty Python’s
Flying Circus in 1971 inadvertently sketched how animal charities
really operate. Playing a dull accountant, Palin confessed to a job
counselor that what he really wished to be was a lion tamer. He did
not actually know a lion from an anteater, but he had a lion tamer’s
hat.
Animal protection charities are nearly always founded by
“lion tamers,” or former lion tamers anyway, who work with animals,
love animals, and are not averse to risk–including from the “killer
cats” who stalk great cities, also portrayed by Monty Python.
Among bare-armed “cat ladies,” ANIMAL PEOPLE often notes
that the most evident visual distinction between cat rescuers and the
suicidally depressed may be that self-inflicted scars on wrists are
short, neat, and horizontal, whereas the wounds from feral cats
tend to be jagged and run vertically from elbow to wrist.

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Editorial: To save endangered species, don’t kill them

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2002:

“About 19% of native animal species and 15% of native plant
species in the U.S. are ‘imperiled’ or ‘critically imperiled,’ and
another 1% of plants and 3% of animals may already be extinct–that
is, they have not been located despite intensive searches,”
declared the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the
Environment on September 24, in a purported landmark report formally
titled The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems.
“When ‘vulnerable’ species are counted, about one third of
plant and animal species are considered to be ‘at risk,'” the report
continued.
Most U.S. newspapers gave The State of the Nation’s
Ecosystems just one paragraph.

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