Category: Tactics

Editorial feature: Art, nukes, & ethical energy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2011:

Chilean shock artist Marco Evaristti won global notoriety in
February 2000 with an exhibit at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding,
Denmark, consisting of 10 blenders containing live goldfish.
Visitors were invited to puree a goldfish.
Friends of Animals/Denmark, not affiliated with the U.S.
organization Friends of Animals, won an injunction ordering that the
electricity supply to the blenders should be cut off. When two
goldfish were pureed anyhow, FoA/Denmark pursued criminal charges
against Evaristti and museum director Peter Meyer. The case against
Meyer went to court in May 2003. Meyer was acquitted, but even in
Denmark, whose national identity is intertwined with commercial
fishing, whale massacres in the Faroe Islands, and the Copenhagen
fur trade, public opinion clearly rejected the notion of pulverizing
live fish as “art.”

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Talk of dogs in Bahrain amid demos & shooting

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:
MANAMA– Thousands of opponents of the regime of King Hamad
bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain reoccupied central Manama on February
20, 2011 after troops were withdrawn, following gunfire that left
at least five protesters dead and 25 missing.
Amid the demonstrations, which began on Valentine’s Day,
“Residents across Bahrain have come out in force with suggestions on
how to tackle the increasing number of stray dogs plaguing the
country,” reported Basma Mohammed of Gulf News. “Dozens of e-mails
have been sent to Central Municipal Council chair Abdulrazzaq Al
Hattab following his appeal,” on February 8, “for ideas to find a
solution to the problem. The animals have been accused of attacking
cattle and leaving many residents too afraid to leave their homes at
night.”

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How to move the earth to help farmed animals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2011:

“Give me a lever and a place to stand,”
the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes
reputedly said, “and I shall move the earth.”
His premise affords a metaphor for how
animal advocates sometimes manage to motivate
animal use industries to change-and an
explanation of why some seemingly promising
efforts fail.
As large and influential as some of the
biggest animal advocacy organizations appear to
be from within the cause, the budgets and assets
of the entire cause, worldwide, are still
substantially less than those of supermarkets in
any major U.S. metropolitan area. Graphing the
economic magnitude of animal advocacy compared to
that of agribusiness is much like trying to graph
the size of the earth in proportion to the rest
of the solar system.

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EDITORIAL: Empowerment through understanding the phases of a cause

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2011:

Editorial feature:
Empowerment through understanding the phases of a cause

Social Movement Empowerment Project founder Bill Moyer was last mentioned in ANIMAL PEOPLE in his obituary,  published in our January/February 2003 edition.  His insights,  however,  have helped to inform almost every ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial.

A key strategist for Martin Luther King’s 1966 open housing campaign in Chicago,  Moyer after 1972  spent the rest of his life teaching advocacy tactics.  At invitation of ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett,  who was then editor of the long defunct Animals’ Agenda magazine,  and Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral, Moyer in September 1989 visited Stamford,  Connecticut,  to present one of his Movement Action Plan workshops to about 40 leaders of national animal rights groups. Read more

"Summit for the Horse" promotes slaughtering wild horses

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2011:

LAS VEGAS--Intended to promote horse slaughter in general,  and slaughtering wild horses in specific,  the Summit for the Horse held in Las Vegas during the first week of January 2011 heard messages from Bureau of Land Management director Bob Abbey and slaughterhouse design consultant Temple Grandin that were not what most of the reportedly sparse audience wanted to hear.

Not more than 200 people converged on the Southpoint Casino to attend the Summit for the Horse,  according to a variety of crowd counts. Most counts placed the plenary attendance at 100-150,  including 42 speakers.

Speaking for allied animal use industries were National Cattlemen’s Beef Association vice president J.D. Alexander,  Masters of Fox Hounds Association executive director Dennis Foster, and Mindy Patterson,  who led breeder opposition to Missouri Proposition B,  a ballot initiative to increase regulation of puppy breeders that was approved by voters in November 2010. Read more

Birders push shooting feral cats

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2010:

WASHINGTON D.C.–The American Bird
Conservancy did not come right out and say on
December 1, 2010 that it favors shooting and
lethally trapping feral cats. But ABC did issue
a media release steering reporters to a newly
published University of Nebraska at Lincoln
extension service report that made those
suggestions.
The release quoted ABC vice present for
conservation advocacy Darin Schroeder stating,
“The report validates everything American Bird
Conservancy has been saying about the feral cat
issue for many years.”‘

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Editorial: The renewed potential of online petitions

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2010:

ANIMAL PEOPLE has never circulated a petition, online or
otherwise. Yet one of our frequent functions in recent years is
helping to inform and inspire online petition drives–and,
sometimes, to point out that a petition may do more harm than good.
The popularity of petitions as a protest tactic perhaps began
with the success of English nobility in obliging King John to assent
to the Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215. The Declaration of
Independence, addressed by American colonists to King George III,
reinforced the lesson on July 4, 1776. Subsequent petitioners have
often lost sight of the two elements that made these petitions
memorably effective. The first was that in either case the signers
were influential constituents of the king whom they sought to
persuade. The second was that their actions had consequence. When
John Hancock stepped forward to become first to sign the Declaration
of Independence, his action had moral force because he put more than
just his name on the line. This is what inspired others to add their
signatures to his and then tax themselves heavily to back their words
with the effort to introduce a new regime.

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10-year Vier Pfoten effort to introduce street dog sterilization to Bucharest gets go-ahead

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2010:
(Actual press date November 3.)

 

BUCHAREST–“Authorities in Bucharest, Romania, have finally
agreed to cease killing stray animals and allow our teams to treat
and neuter the city’s 40,000 [street] dogs instead,” the
Vienna-based animal charity Vier Pfoten announced on October 6, 2010.
Vier Pfoten said the pact “may be the biggest breakthrough”
in the more than 10 years that it has sent veterinarians to Romania.
The Vier Pfoten dog and cat sterilization project began in
Bucharest, then expanded into parallel projects elsewhere in
Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Jordan, Egypt, and South Africa.
The initial project in Bucharest was thwarted, however, when
then-Bucharest major Traian Basescu ordered a purge of free-roaming
dogs in 2001. Bucharest pounds killed 48,000 dogs that year, and
have continued to kill dogs ever since. Basescu–long controversial
for many reasons–meanwhile ascended to the presidency of Romania,
and oversaw the admission of Romania to the European Union, whose
public health policies disfavor high-volume killing as an animal
control method.

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Charitable standards & the discerning donor

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2010:
(Actual press date November 3.)

ANIMAL PEOPLE has over the years often
criticized the charity evaluation methods of both
the Wise Giving Alliance, a project of the
Council of Better Business Bureaus, and Charity
Navigator, whose easily accessed online star
ratings of charities are now by far the charity
evaluation method most used by donors.
The Wise Giving Alliance evaluations, as
ANIMAL PEOPLE has in the past explained in
detail, require charities to meet a set of
standards for governance which for animal
charities and most small charities actually work
at cross-purposes to the goal of maintaining a
strong focus on the charitable mission.

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