Tag: editorial

Editorial: Evolving an ethical response to mice & rats

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Editorial:  Evolving an ethical response to mice & rats

Probably the most ethically vexatious of all mammals,  if not all sentient beings,  are mice and rats–who are also by far the most numerous,  problematic,  and at times the most deadly of all non-insect pests to human beings.

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From the origins of food storage,  well before the beginnings of agriculture,  mice and rats were the most ubiquitous and successful of food thieves.  We owe our long association with dogs in great part to the role of dogs as rodent hunters,  attracted not only to our refuse but to the chance to eat the mice and rats who were already feasting on it. Read more

Editorial—The "Animal Rights Agenda" 25 years later

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2012:

The “Animal Rights Agenda” 25 years later

 

“Politics of Animal Liberation” was the formal title of an ad hoc document prepared in 1987 by ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett, Animal Rights International founder Henry Spira, feminist theorist Marti Kheel,  and others who formed an animal rights caucus at that year’s Green Party national convention.  Spira,  who died in 1989,  Kheel,  who died in November 2011, and Bartlett sought without success to win inclusion of the principles outlined in “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the U.S. Green Party platform.

Bartlett,  then editor of the Animals’ Agenda magazine,  subsequently published “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the magazine as a discussion document,  but little discussion followed.  Apparently not controversial with Animals’ Agenda readers,  “Politics of Animal Liberation” was never formally presented to animal rights organizations for ratification. There has never actually been any mechanism through which the many different organizations representing what they perceive as the animal rights cause might have adopted a collective mission statement.  Yet in the years since 1987, “Politics of Animal Liberation” has been extensively reprinted around the world by people on all sides of the issues as “The Animal Rights Agenda,”   and remains widely accepted as such. Read more

Editorial: The shelter killing of pit bulls

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Editorial feature—

More adoptions will not end shelter killing of pit bulls


Tangible progress on behalf of animals is often hard to recognize, amid paradoxes such as polling data showing that more people think about farm animal welfare even as world meat consumption is at an all-time high and rising.

Just about everyone agrees,  though,  that the past 25 years have produced unprecedented improvement in the human relationship with dogs,  especially here in the United States.  Americans keep half again more pet dogs than in 1986.  Average spending per dog per year for food,  toys,  and accessories has increased from $58 in 1986–with purchasing power worth $114 today–to $347.   Yet sales of doghouses,  once the most costly common dog accessory,  have crashed, because most dogs today live indoors with their people. Read more

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