Letters [November 1992]

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Corrections & Clarifications
We’ve always admired The New York Times for publishing a daily “Corrections”
column; most papers publish corrections only when threatened with a libel suit, from fear
that if they admit to making even one mistake, readers won’t trust anything else they print.
We don’t share that fear. When one handles a vast amount of material in a short period of
time, there will be mistakes, and we think the most accurate paper is the one that straightens
them out the most promptly.

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Editorial: Helping a few good men and women find a better way

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

I find no subject more difficult to write about than child abuse, because none other
provokes such conflicting emotions. I don’t claim to have been an abused child; indeed in
some ways I had unique advantages. Both my parents were schoolteachers, well aware of
the faults of formal education and quite adept at providing educational opportunities outside
of the classroom, as well as quite willing to help me dodge classroom attendence to do any-
thing and everything else useful and constructive––attending courtroom proceedings, ram-
bling around Europe, and working parttime for newspapers, among other alternative
“lessons” that were never graded. At the same time, our family was not immune to the
times and the stresses that afflict all of us. We went through part of a winter without gas and
electricity during a period of prolonged parental unemployment; there were several years in
my early teens when because my father was working the equivalent of two fulltime jobs, I’d
rarely have seen him if I hadn’t been working for him almost every day away from school; I
was beaten and starved for disciplinary reasons in a manner unfortunately not uncommon ;
and we all had to cope with several terrifying explosions of a long-smoldering mental illness

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Editorial: Change vs. “movement”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Our mail box has been full of letters either presuming or attacking our presumed
position with respect to the animal rights movement. Animal rights philosopher Tom Regan
among others welcomed our contribution to the movement; New York activist Dawn
Hernandez jumped on us for “movement-bashing”; and on the letters page, opposite,
Michael Gurwitz proposes that we should rename the movement, whatever it happens to be.
As we see it, though, the “movement” is largely history. A movement is the take-
off phase of a theme in social evolution, when a cause has relatively few supporters, and
must provoke confrontation to draw notice––often taking rhetorically extreme and practical-
ly impossible positions for the same reasons that an infant shrieks. The primary aim of the
animal rights movement was restoring animals to public awareness, after nearly a century
of slipping interest in humane concerns. Public opinion polls, political response (pro and
con), and a few striking camapign successes all showed that this was achieved by 1988, as
sociologist Bill Moyer of the Social Movement Empowerment Project pointed out in 1989
to a gathering of “movement” leaders convened by ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim
Bartlett and Priscilla Feral of Friends of Animals.

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WAR IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN: Saving Children and Animals

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

WASHINGTON, D.C. –– The
press dispatches should have warned the
world. “Rivers and water holes have
dried up for the first time anyone can
remember, starving and burning to death
some 400 hippos,” Associated Press cor-
respondent Angus Shaw wrote from
Zimbabwe in mid-July. “Dead birds have
dropped out of shriveled trees, tortoises,
snakes, rodents, and insects have disap-
peared, and predators are killing more
weakened animals than they can eat… As
southern Africa suffers its worst drought
ever, thousands of animals have died and
officials are continuing to shoot many
more to feed the increasingly desperate
human population. The meat from the
culled animals has been targeted for chil-
dren showing signs of malnutrition.”

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Seeking The truth about feral cats and the people who help them: NEW STUDY YIELDS CONTROVERSIAL FINDINGS

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

BOSTON, MASS. –– The leading cause of death among homeless cats may be
humane euthanasia. Homeless cat colonies exist in almost every American neighborhood––but
four out of 10 homeless cats live in just 6% of the colonies, and two-thirds live in only 16%.
Over half of all stray and feral female cats are pregnant at any given time. Yet attrition is so high
that despite local fluctuations, the national homeless cat population is remarkably stable.
These and other challenges to conventional thinking about homeless cats emerge from
data gathered by ANIMAL PEOPLE and the Massachusetts SPCA, in the first-ever national
survey of cat-feeders and cat-rescuers. The controversial nature of the findings and the complex-
ity of interpreting the data in light of experience became apparent when even the ANIMAL
PEOPLE editors strongly differed over what some of the numbers may mean.

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A voiding roadkills: Secrets of animal behavior that can save your life!

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

You’re cruising near the speed limit late one night,
tired from a long drive. You catch a glint of eyes in your
headlight beams, a dark shape breaking from the shadows
to your right, an oncoming car to your left––
Do you jam on the brakes? Speed up to get past
before the animal bolts? Risk swerving? Take your foot off
the gas?
Combat pilots memorize silhouette cards and air-
craft specification sheets, in order to recognize every other
plane in the sky even if all they see is a fleeting glimpse of
something on radar. They need to know instantly what’s out
there: whether it’s hostile, how fast it can go, how far it
can shoot. At Mach 2, there isn’t time for second-guessing.
But at 60 miles an hour your car is outracing the
focal distance of your headlights even faster than a fighter
pilot outraces radar range. And like most other drivers, you
haven’t had any training in how to respond to an animal in
the roadway.

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Rethinking Our Bargain With Cats by Jessica Bart-Mikionis

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 1992:

Growing up, I always wanted to be a cat. My
very first pet was a dog, though, named Heather. I
don’t remember her, nor the accident that killed her. I
was in my stroller, I have been told, with my mother,
when Heather bolted into the street perhaps in pursuit of
a cat and got hit by an oncoming car. A while later,
when I was three or four, came Mehitabel, named after
Don Marquis’ tale archie and mehitabel.. I remember
Mehitabel vividly. We used to explore the world togeth-
er, sleep together, and play hide-and-seek and tag, until
one time she ran under my legs, I stumbled and fell on
her, and broke her leg. I don’t think I was ever the same
after that. Mehitabel sported an elaborate splint for sev-
eral months, and my mother and I would support her
when she used her litter pan in the beginning of her recu-
peration.

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BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

The Myth of Wild Africa:
Conservation Without Illusion,
by Jonathan Adams and Thomas
McShane. W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
266 pages; hardback; $21.95.
Adams and McShane, both offi-
cials of the World Wildlife Fund, advance
the WWF view that only hunting and
“culling” marketable species can provide
impoverished African nations with suffi-
cient economic incentive to insure that the
animals will otherwise be protected. The
case of the African elephant demonstrates,
however, that the presence of a legal market
for wildlife parts in one nation only stimu-
lates poaching in others where there is no

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BOOKS: Harmony With Horses

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1992:

Harmony With Horses. By Maurice Wright.
J.A. Allen Horsebooks (1 Lower Grosvenor Place,
Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0EL, United
Kingdom). 1991. 127 pages. Inquire for current
U.S./Canadian price.
If more of us understood the generous and willing
spirit of horses, fewer horse people would approach them
as “a gladiator, not an educator,” as horsetamer John
Solomon Rarey put it nearly 150 years ago––and fewer ani-
mal rights activists would attack the use of horses for work,
pleasure, and performance. Strangely, however, despite
the prominence of horses in human culture since prehistory,
understanding horses hasn’t been a priority even for many of
those most involved with them. There was a gap of nearly
2,000 years between Xenophon’s instructions to cavalry
masters to treat horses gently, without whips, and the 1550
publication of Federico Grisone’s book on horse training,
which emphasized dominance, and became the basis for
many of the myths, misunderstandings, and downright cru-
elties afflicting horses today. It was only within the last few
years, for example, that the veterinary profession banned
“firing,” the medieval practice of applying hot irons or
caustics to an ailing horse. Tail-docking is still commonly
performed.

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