Category: Tactics

Energetic humane educator: “Bow to the cat!” (Or she’ll change you into a mouse?)

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

PORT JERVIS, N.Y. –– Jan Matthews is over-
worked, and that’s the way she likes it. A classroom elementary
school teacher for 17 years, she now visits 72 classrooms a
month at four different schools, as humane educator for the
Humane Society of Port Jervis/Deerpark, New York. Her dedi-
cation is such that when her husband took a temporary job in
Alaska, she commuted between New York and Alaska for seven
months to keep her program going.
“Three of those months were during the summer,” she
explains, “when we were only visiting summer classes.”
Oh.

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Elvis manager Tom Parker made first fortune from animal shelter

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

TAMPA, Florida––While playing
Elvis Presley’s longtime manager Colonel
Tom Parker in the recent NBC made-for-TV
movie Elvis & the Colonel, actor Beau
Bridges mentioned to Canadian Press TV
writer Wendy McCann that Parker was “one
of the first people to come up with the con-
cept of a pet cemetery,” as a fundraiser for
an animal shelter he ran in Tampa, Florida.
Since every tabloid needs an occa-
sional Elvis story, even once removed, we
jumped right on it. And it’s as true as any
story involving either the King or the
Colonel; truer than most.

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Fundraising tactic

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Animal shelters and advocacy groups might consider
emulating an Iowa State University College of Veterinary
Medicine fundraising tactic, Iowa Veterinary Teaching Hospital
chief of staff Dr. Ronald Grier recently told The Chronicle of
Philanthropy. The vet school encourages alumni to send small
memorial gifts after pets in their care die or are euthanized––and
to send along each pet keepers’ name and address. The pet keepers
then receive personalized sympathy cards from the school’s
Companion Animal Fund, notifying them of the veterinarians’
gifts, along with brochures describing how donations to the fund
buy equipment to help save animal lives. Although the cards and
brochures do not directly ask for money, many recipients respond
with gifts. The participating veterinarians build good will, and
the vet school collects about $35,000 a year in donations.

North Shore Animal League changes guard, offers free neutering

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. –– North Shore Animal League president David Ganz resigned
March 1, just as the March issue of ANIMAL PEOPLE reached readers with a page one probe of NSAL’s
unconventional approach to promoting adoptions and neutering. The investigation discovered that the NSAL
approach is substantially reducing both pet overpopulation and euthanasia rates wherever tried, and found little
current evidence to support criticisms often directed at NSAL by more conventional humane groups.
Although a successor to Ganz was not named immediately, NSAL chairperson Elizabeth Lewyt said,
“It is business as usual at NSAL, with all divisions running smoothly,” adding, “All NSAL programs and poli-
cies, including support and assistance for other animal shelters, will continue without interuption.”
NSAL attorney John Stevenson is now acting chief executive officer. “As chairprerson,” Lewyt con-
tinued, “I am now taking a more active role in the management of the shelter.”
As Lewyt’s first public action, she announced that, “Commencing April 1, NSAL will be providing
free spaying and neutering to all NSAL adopters.”

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Houston Humane Society then and now; $15 neutering vs. 93% euthanasia rate

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Then
In September 1980, Houston Humane Society
board president Sherry Ferguson drafted a 12-page report to
her fellow board members. Opened in February 1963, HHS
was in every sort of trouble: badly overcrowded because of
a no-kill policy, financially shaky because of weak admin-
istration, and struggling to adopt out 700 animals a year.
By comparison, the Houston SPCA was adopting out
15,000 a year, and Citizens for Animal Protection, a group
founded to reform HHS, was adopting out 2,500 even
though it had no shelter.
That wasn’t the worst of it. HHS had no neutering
requirement for animals who were adopted out. When there
wasn’t space for newcomers, people who tried to surrender
animals were turned away––so many came at night and sim-
ply abandoned the animals on the property, alongside a
busy secondary highway. Many were killed by traffic
before staff arrived in the morning. Vermin infestations
were so severe that Ferguson said she wondered if HHS had
become a shelter for rats.

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Guest column: Helping all dogs through breed rescue by Gina Spadafori

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Some nights the telephone never stops ringing for
Sheltie Rescue.
The local humane society is holding a dog and
hopes we will pick her up soon––like today. A rescuer who
works with a different breed has pulled a Sheltie from a
municipal shelter two counties away––when can we pick
him up? A veterinarian is calling in hopes we can help a
middle-aged dog left for euthanasia when the family
moved. Two people want to dump their dogs tonight, and
we have no place to put them.
“If you don’t come get this dog right now,” hisses
one caller, “it’s dead. And I’m going to tell everyone what
hypocrites you are. Sheltie Rescue my ass.”

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Editorial: Listen, talk, dicker

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1993:

Members of the ardently pro-vivisection Foundation for Biomedical Research got
quite a shock with their January/February 1993 newsletter. On pages four through six, the
editors extensively, respectfully, and congenially interviewed Henry Spira, the most effec-
tive antivivisection activist of our time and perhaps of any time. He’s not a household word,
because he doesn’t do big direct mailings touting his accomplishments, nor does he head a
multimillion dollar organization, or go on television regularly to shout about victories he
barely acknowledges, because he believes gloating is counterproductive. Still, working
virtually alone, with a miniscule budget, Spira has accomplished more over the past 17
years toward getting animals out of laboratories than any of the national animal rights
groups and antivivisection societies; perhaps more than all of them put together. The bio-
medical research establishment certainly knows his name, and significantly, some of the
most influential people in that establishment thought it was high time to open public,
friendly dialog––even if they got bashed for it by colleagues conditioned to view animal
use/protection as a war zone, a Manichean struggle between good and evil in which one
side or the other must ultimately be annihilated.

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Where horse rescue gets hot by Sharon Cregier

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

AMMAN, Jordan –– The sound of a stick on
hide summons Chris Larter to her second-story balcony.
“It’s the donkey-beaters,” Larter explains. Below, a
mare, foal at foot, plows a stony verge. Sheep and shep-
herd dodge four-lane traffic to graze the edges of con-
struction projects. And of course there are boys driving
donkeys. “Last time they were trying to cut a donkey’s
ears off,” Larter continues. She recalls braving a hail of
stones to take photos, locating the parents of the donkey-
boys, and pleading for the donkey’s welfare.
Today, courage requires police reinforcement.
Obtaining backup, Larter partially unloads a staggering
donkey, obliging the donkey-boys to make multiple trips
to finish moving their cargo.
Larter is field supervisor, publicity officer, and
photographer for the Jordanian Society for the Protection
of Animals, sponsored by the 70-year-old Society for the
Protection of Animals in North Africa. Based in England,
SPANA is among the last and most popular remnants of
the British occupation of Jordan, 1920-1946.

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Gene and Diana Chontos: Helping the tough and stubborn

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1993:

“Talking to someone about myself beyond my life
with burros seems abstract to me now,” Diana Chontos told
ANIMAL PEOPLE, “since my life has become burros and
their continued survival. I am a daughter of the pioneers of
Washington, and continue to live by many of the same val-
ues as my great-grandparents, except that during my child-
hood I found the practice of slaughtering and eating animals
abhorent. As soon as I possibly could, I became a vegetari-
an.” Her first animal rescue may have been at age 13,
when, “I rode my horse, galloping bareback, between a
gun-happy bounty hunter and a beautiful coyote I had been
watching as she caught and ate grasshoppers.”
Gene Chontos, Diana’s partner of 18 years, came
to animal rescue later in life, but no less dramatically. “I
was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1937,” he
remembers, “son to Hungarian immigrants. My father and
all his kin served the Bethlehem Steel Company as cheap
labor and resided in lower class poverty, replete with ethnic
prejudice, hatred, and violence. I escaped at age 17
through a four-year enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps.”

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