ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

DECEMBER 2003 EDITORIAL

Donor defense in a desperate cause

Starting on page 12, ANIMAL PEOPLE for the 14th year presents "Who gets the money?" This popular annual feature reveals the financial affairs of the animal-related charities whose appeals are most likely to land in your mailbox. It explains which organizations have money, how they get it, and what they do with it.

Three pages of prefatory notes help readers to interpret the numbers. As a further aid to donors, ANIMAL PEOPLE each spring publishes a comprensive handbook, The Watchdog Report on Animal Charities, supplementing the financial data with succinct descriptions of programs and any policy or administrative matters of special note. At $25 per copy, The Watchdog Report costs less than 25¢ per charity evaluated, a bargain for any frequent pro-animal donor.

As detailed on page 10, pro-animal donors may expect to receive more direct mail appeals in 2004 than ever before, because the U.S. Postal Service in mid-November 2003 handed the direct mail industry an early multi-million-dollar Christmas present. In addition to loaning charities the cost of launching direct mail solicitations, often at steep interest rates, and reserving the right to keep mailing in the names of the charities to pay themselves back, whether or not the charities net a cent, direct mailing firms now can use nonprofit rates.

More than ever, animal protection donors need to learn to defend themselves against aggressive high-volume mailers.

The best way, beyond making extensive use of "Who gets the money?" and The Watchdog Report, is to pitch straight into the trash unopened any solicitation that comes in the name of any charity that hits you up repeatedly with the same mailings, and any charity about which you have no information from an independent source.

If you wish to research a charity that we have not listed and you have web access, you can quickly run searches for independent information about it via Google, <www.guidestar.org>, <www.elibrary.com>, and <www.newslibrary.com>.

If the charity is new, you can search on the names of the founders. If the founders have a credible public history, their charity will probably also be credible. If, on the other hand, you find that the proprietors of a faltering roadside zoo are trying to pass it off as a sanctuary, or that the director of a new humane society has been convicted of embezzling, or that the president has been repeatedly charged with animal hoarding, the charity is likely to help the mailing house more than the animals.

If the founders of a new animal charity have no public history, they probably also lack the experience and the media skills to be successful. Animal charities that grow into their mission tend to be founded by people who have previously worked in responsible capacities for other animal charities, have been quoted by news media, have written well-informed letters-to-the-editor on animal-related topics, and are already known and respected by their peers in animal-related charity work. Very few successful founders come seemingly out of nowhere.

If a charity sends you the same mailing over and over, you can bet your name appears repeatedly on the lists the charity is renting, and that the charity is renting lots of lists because it is doing "cold" prospecting mailings in very high volume.

Each direct mail packet you receive typically costs the sender between $1.00 and $2.00 to print and mail, at current prices, so if you get mailings from a charity ten times a year, the charity hopes you will donate more than $10-$20 per year. If your typical donation is less than $20, every cent you send is likely to be used in trying to get you to give more.

Beat the game: don't respond to any charity that tries to play you like a slot machine. Narrow your list down to the handful of charities about which you know the most, preferably from personal contact. Generously help them, and do nothing whatever to reward or encourage the direct mail mills, including by writing to ask to be dropped from their lists. No charity can drop you from a rented listbut your response is likely to be taken as an indication that you are reading the appeals you are sent, making you a hotter prospect.

If you volunteer any information about yourself and/or the charities you prefer to support, those details may well go into shaping future mailings to appeal to you more. As well as watching out for overt scams and direct mail mills it is worthwhile to crosscheck the "factual" claims made in mailings.

For example, a recent mailing by Last Chance for Animals stated that, "In 1996, LCA busted one of the most ruthless Class B dealers, Irvin Stebani. Stebani was captured on hidden camera taking a springer spaniel by the neck, tethering it to a pole, shooting it in the head, and butchering it for food for the local Hmong and Vietnamese community. Our intense undercover investigation and covert footage were the keys to putting Stebani out of business," the mailing claimed. "He was the first to have his license permanently revoked by the USDA due to the tremendous pressure of LCA's media campaigns."

What actually happened, detailed by ANIMAL PEOPLE at the time with extensive quotes from Last Chance for Animals founder Chris DeRose, is that in 1993 two undercover operatives of LCA paid Wisconsin animal dealer Erving Stebane $50 to kill and butcher the dog while DeRose clandestinely videotaped the action. Felony charges were filed, but in June 1993 Calumet County circuit judge Donald Poppy ruled that the case constituted illegal entrapment and ordered the return of 143 dogs who had been seized from Stebane.

The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service had fined Stebane in 1987 for repeated violations of the Animal Welfare Act, appealed seeking stiffer penalties when an administrative law judge suspended Stebane's operating permit for only 20 days, and continued to cite him for violations, but lacked the legal instrument to put him out of business until the Pet Theft Act came into effect in January 1993.

In February 1993 the USDA put four Class B dealers out of business by cutting off their access to dogs from undocumented Canadian sources, based on information provided by ANIMAL PEOPLE. Cases were opened against many other dealers.

Stebane was permanently put out of business by the USDA as part of a February 1994 plea bargain pertaining to multiple alleged AWA violations, mostly predating any involvement by Last Chance for Animals.

The "conservation" scam

Donors must also learn to resist "green" rhetoric and cute photos of baby animals used in appeals by conservation charities which speak of providing "sanctuary" to wildlife even as they open their lands to sport hunting, promote indigenous destruction of animals in the name of "sustainable use," and annihilate any species deemed to be feral, non-native or "invasive," a buzzword sometimes used to rationalize killing native species too.

"Conservation" itself is a suspect word, having been popularized in the late 19th century by National Audubon Society and Boone & Crocket Club founder George Bird Grinnell counter to the efforts of the American Humane Association, beginning in 1877, to ban sport hunting in New York state and to pass a federal law protecting endangered animals. It was in opposition to humane goals that "conservation" became the campaign theme of pro-hunting organizations including the National Wildlife Federation, the Wilderness Society, and the Nature Conservancy, some of which pretend to neutrality on hunting, we suspect, chiefly because the pro-hunting political status quo is in no current danger, while huge shares of their revenue comes from non-hunters who are unfamiliar with their history.

The trophy hunters who founded and still hold significant influence over the World Wildlife Fund added to the mantra of "conservation" the equally misleading phrase "sustainable use." This term means that the organizations endorsing it believe that animals should be "used" (mainly "harvested") to fund "conservation," unless killing the animals jeopardizes the survival of a species.

Most conservation groups are genuinely interested in protecting endangered species, but primarily so they can be "sustainably used" in the future, or because the presence of endangered species is helpful in protecting scenic landscapes from development. This kind of concern for endangered species does not extend even to individuals of endangered species. Few conservation charities have any hesitation about "culling" animals from endangered species breeding programs if they are considered poor breeding specimens or "genetically redundant." Many endorse exterminating every predator or potential competitor for many miles around the sites where endangered species are returned to the wild, even though learning to evade predators and compete successfully for food and nesting sites is essential to the survival of any wild animal. The Nature Conservancy and allied regional conservancies worldwide have been exceptionally aggressive about killing non-native species on their property, even when the non-native species are ancient breeds of livestock which are in fact scarcer than some of the sea birds they are being killed to "protect."

Some animals who are endangered in the wild are abundant in captivity. The silence of the mainstream conservation groups about their fate is deafening. No major conservation charity is prominently opposed to "canned hunts," even when the victims are captive-bred tigers and leopards. The Nature Conservancy even rents property to canned hunts, while the National Audubon Society recently hosted a deer cull by bowhunters on property it owns in Greenwich, Connecticut, which amounted to a canned hunt.

Mainstream conservation groups are not opposed to the fur trade, if the furs are not from endangered species. Thus furriers now proudly assure their customers that the skins they sell are not from "endangered animals." Much of the cheap fur used on fur-trimmed garments imported from China is from dogs and cats slaughtered for meat, exempted from the U.S. fur labeling laws because the laws do not apply to garments costing less than $50.

No major conservation group appears to actively oppose bear-bile farming so long as the bears are not taken from the wild. None has called for closure of the notoriously cruel and filthy live markets of southern China, which are responsible for depleting wild animals throughout Asia. Some conservation groups have denounced the bushmeat trade in Africa and South America, but usually with exemptions for "indigenous subsistence," which provides the cover for thinly disguised commercial bushmeat hunting. In central Africa some representatives of mainstream conservation groups have reportedly gone so far as to encourage the locals to eat dogs instead of bushmeat, and two representatives of the London Zoological Society recently called for making the bushmeat trade "sustainable."

Particularly dismaying is that some charities which portray themselves to donors as veritable animal rights groups display entirely different values abroad. For example, as ANIMAL PEOPLE documented in November 2003 (with follow-up in this edition), the British-based Born Free Foundation has endorsed shooting healthy homeless dogs in Bale Mountains National Park, purportedly to stop an outbreak of rabies among the highly endangered Ethiopian wolves who inhabit the park. The outbreak could have been prevented if a vaccination project sponsored by Born Free had been extended to the homeless dogs, as the Homeless Animal Protection Society repeatedly recommended.

Of note is that even before the rabies outbreak started, the founder of the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program was on record as wanting to kill the homeless dogs to prevent them from hybridizing with the wolves.

Nature eventually balances itself if humans leave it alone long enough, but the philosophy of "conservation" is founded on the concept of "managing" nature like a farm. Nature fills the niches of extirpated predators such as wolves with other predators, including feral species, who expand their territories to fill the void, at least until the previous dominant predator species recover, but feral species are hated by many mainstream environmentalists and conservationists as much as the extirpated animals were loathed by livestock farmers who wanted them all killed to protect their sheep, goats, or cattle.

Humane advocates were the first to promote endangered species protection, but not at the expense of kind treatment of all animals. Looking back, making common cause with hunter/conservationists to save endangered species appears to have served the interests of abusers and exploiters more than the cause of animals. Too often granting special consideration to "endangered" species has only lowered the status of other animals, increasing their vulnerability to exploitation and cruelty.

We want to protect all animals, whether their species is endangered or not. That approach will protect both endangered wolves and homeless dogs, as well as every other suffering creature, exempting none from moral consideration.

The humane cause is about preventing suffering. A species does not suffer; individual animals suffer. Organizations which favor causing individual animals to suffer in the name of conservation should accordingly receive no support from any humane donor.