Category: Tactics

Editorials: Prepare for post-pet overpopulation

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1995:

Any defunct gas station could become a vibrant example of a new age in animal
care-and-control: a neighborhood humane outpost. Offering easy access and plenty of
parking, ex-gas stations can’t keep lots of animals, but that isn’t what they should do.
Their showrooms can display cats in all the decorator colors; they have garages able to keep
adoptable dogs in spacious runs, and park a van for the night; and they have adequate
office space for a small-scale operation, which could be either a satellite of a larger organi-
zation or an independent entity cooperating with other shelters of differing capabilities.
The van would be not just wheels, but an extension of the job. In normal configu-
ration, it would do animal pickup-and-delivery. A slide-in veterinary module would make
it a mobile neutering-and-vaccination clinic, or a rescue vehicle.
A humane outpost obviously couldn’t receive lots of drop-off litters and other
owner-surrendered animals. Nor could it house animals through a multi-day holding period,
or do any but emergency euthanasias. Those would remain the duties of central shelters.
Likewise, a humane outpost couldn’t do law enforcement. But it might hold drop-offs tem-
porarily, for exchange with adoptable animals from a central shelter. It might also do com-
munity liaison for anti-cruelty and animal control officers working out of a larger office.
A humane outpost would not be an animal shelter in the familiar sense. It would
exist not to collect, keep, or kill animals, nor to deal with pet overpopulation per se, the
main job of animal shelters for the past 120 years, but rather to facilitate responsible pet-
keeping in the post-pet overpopulation milieu, by arranging appropriate placements, help-
ing pets get essential care, and providing referrals for other services. In some towns, a
low-overhead, high-traffic humane outpost might even pay for itself.

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SHOWDOWN AT THE DOLPHIN PEN

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1995:

SUGARLOAF KEY, Florida––The first anniversary of the arrival of the dolphins
Molly, Bogie, and Bacall at the Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary came and went with no resolu-
tion in sight of the impasse between Sugarloaf director of rehabilitation Ric O’Barry and oth-
ers involved in the rehab-and-release effort. Brought from the former Ocean Reef Club in
Key Largo on August 10, 1994, all three dolphins remain at Sugarloaf, for the time being,
along with three former U.S. Navy dolphins whom O’Barry is preparing for release in a sepa-
rate deal arranged by the Humane Society of the U.S.

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Editorial: Compromise & the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1995:

Editorially favoring hunting, trapping, fishing, ranching, logging, rodeo, and ani-
mal use in biomedical research, the Spokane Spokesman-Review has probably never in recent
decades been mistaken for an exponent of animal rights.
Yet on September 15, 1952 the Spokesman–Review became perhaps the first and
only daily newspaper in the U.S. to editorially endorse “A Charter of Rights for Animals,”
drafted by the World Federation for the Protection of Animals.
The oldest of the three organizations whose mergers eventually produced today’s
World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), the Dutch-based World Federation then
represented “humane societies in 25 countries,” the Spokesman-Review editors noted.
“Most civilized countries already have laws to cover most of the protection for ani-
mals that the federation asks,” the Spokesman-Review continued. “Beating animals, forcing
them to do work beyond their strength, transporting them in a manner to cause pain or without
adequate food, all are punishable now in the U.S., for example.”

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The Cult of Animal Celebrity by Captain Paul Watson

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

Within the animal protection movement, there are
two types of animals: those with individual names and those
without. The movement is accordingly split between advo-
cates for animals with names, and advocates for all the rest.
Free Keiko, free Lolita, free Corky, free Hondo.
These are wonderful and appealing ideals––but not all captive
cetaceans can or should be freed. Not all facilities holding
marine animals are the enemy. And the huge sums raised to
free a few individuals could be more positively directed
toward ending the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of
nameless whales, dolphins, and seals on the world’s oceans.
The amount of money raised for the cause of freeing
marine mammals with names may exceed $45 million a year,
from the thousands raised to aid local seals and dolphins in
distress to the $14 million estimated cost of someday, maybe,
freeing Keiko, the orca star of the film Free Willy!

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Editorial: Low-status primates & chicken-manure

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:

In hindsight, the Oklahoma City bombing seems predictable, as a reversion of
low-status males to a form of basic animal behavior observed to varying degree among most
primates, as well as some canine, feline, avian, and fish societies:
Excluded from mating opportunities and other currency of the animal world, the
low-status males form a parallel troop of their own at the fringe of the tribe. Within that all-
male troop, obsessed by status, the low-ranking males establish and defend a superficially
rigid but fragile hierarchy of their own. Eventually, emboldened by numbers, they risk
raids on the main tribe, killing the offspring of low-status females who are not well-defend-
ed by the males of dominant and secondary rank. The vulnerability of the young is indeed
often how the low-status males determine which females may be accessible to them,
through a mating strategy amounting to psychologically coerced rape, if not overt rape.
The equation of often only momentary vulnerability with lower status is indicative
of the low-status males’ frequent inability to read more subtle social cues, which in turn
often explains why they are low-status males to begin with. Certainly there is no reason to
believe the victims in Oklahoma City were of lower status in our society in any respect
except in the eyes of their attackers, to whom their vulnerability to a truckload of refined
chicken manure signified expendability in the pursuit of power. Note that Henry Kissinger,
another enthusiastic bomber at the zenith of his own influence, once defined power as the
ultimate aphrodisiac. The only other indication of lesser status one could assign to the
Oklahoma City victims, with a certain sensitive reluctance, would be the need of many for
government-sponsored workplace daycare, since upper-rank families in our society enjoy
the luxury of being able to provide their children with in-home care. It is worth pointing out
in this regard that the daycare provided in the blast-shattered Alfred P. Murrah building was
considered to be of an elite quality, as workplace daycare goes.

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Who you gonna call? Pet Savers

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 1995:

PORT WASHINGTON, New York––If $35 could save
each and every shelter animal’s life, how many would you save?
“We’ll save them all,” longtime North Shore Animal
League board chairperson Elisabeth Lewyt decided six years ago,
committing North Shore resources to saving not only the animals
coming through its own shelter, but also those handled by other
shelters around the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
Since then, North Shore and the two-year-old Pet Savers
Foundation it created with a $6.3 million start-up grant have helped
arrange nearly 170,000 extra adoptions, above and beyond the annu-
al totals the participating shelters achieved prior to North Shore
involvement. By itself, the North Shore/Pet Savers adoption pro-
gram has achieved a cumulative 3% drop in the U.S. euthanasia
rate––an even more impressive figure considering that, big as it is,
it involves barely 1% of U.S. shelters.

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Innovation

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1995:

“By the end of 1995, the Progressive
Animal Welfare Society shelter will stop killing
healthy, adoptable dogs and cats,” executive direc-
tor Craig Brestrup announced on February 24. He
pledged to accomplish this through increasing adop-
tion promotion, beginning to offer free and low-cost
neutering to the public, expanding use of foster care,
and introducing an “outplacement” program to assist
people who must for some reason give up a pet.
“Animals deserve better from us than a painless
death,” Brestrup continued. Other changes at PAWS
include “a mostly new shelter staff,” and a promise
that, “While the PAWS phone system will continue
to offer voice mail and recorded messages, your calls
will be answered by a knowledgeable, friendly, hon-
est-to-goodness real person.” Founded in 1967, the
PAWS shelter serves King County, Washington.

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Against mandatory cat licensing, by Richard Avanzino and Pamela Rockwell

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1995:
Can licensing wipe out homeless-
ness, raise the status of the underprivileged,
eliminate the budget crisis, and make people
more caring and responsible? Few would
believe these claims, if made about a pro-
gram to license people. Yet, when it comes
to cats, we are asked to believe all these
claims are true: according to proponents,
mandatory cat licensing will put an end to
the problem of stray and abandoned cats,
raise the status of felines, increase funding
for budget-strapped animal control agencies,
and make cat owners more responsible.
Unfortunately, licensing cats, like licensing
people, won’t do any of these things.

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Editorial: Remembering the aim

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1995:

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” George Santyana
observed of would-be world-changers circa 1905. “Fanaticism,” he added, “consists in
redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
He was half right. As sociologist Bill Moyer illustrates, reform movements fol-
low a certain cyclical course, willy-nilly. The three great movements for animals have each
closely followed Moyer’s Movement Action Plan trajectory, beginning in the U.S. just after
the Civil War, when the humanitarian focus shifted from abolishing slavery. After Henry
Bergh founded the American SPCA in 1869, the first U.S. humane group with an explicit
mandate to defend animals, other animal-focused humane societies and antivivisection
societies formed in every major city, until humane momentum shifted again, toward abol-
ishing child labor, instituting orphanages, and introducing temperance.

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