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OCTOBER 2005

BOOKS & MULTIMEDIA

Greenpeace originated in 1968 as the Don’t Make A Wave Committee, formed by Canadian opponents of nuclear weapons testing in Alaska and the Pacific Ocean.

Initially most closely aligned with the peace movement, Greenpeace evolved into the first global front for environmental activism. Attracting talented and committed people from all cultures and walks of life, it predictably fragmented and re-fragmented into offshoot organizations and causes.

Aging into an implosion phase by the late 1990s, Greenpeace is no longer conspicuously different in day-to-day operations and philosophy from many other major environmental groups. Founding members Irving Stowe, Ben Metcalfe, David McTaggert, and Bob Hunter are now deceased.

Patrick Moore and Paul Watson are still feuding just like old times on the Internet, 28 years after Watson left Greenpeace to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, but they have white hair now.

To activists coming of age in recent years, Greenpeace has become just another fading supernova, whose signature tactics long ago became clichés.

Many books commemorating the Greenpeace glory days tend toward fierce partisanship. This unsurprising, since Green-peace was always a fiercely partisan and deeply factionalized organization or movement, with one of the earliest and deepest divides being over which it should become.

Watson demonstrated in Seal Wars (2003) that his feelings about Greenpeace may never mellow, while longtime Greenpeace staff member Kieran Mulvaney did not even mention Watson in The Whaling Season: An Inside Account of the Struggle to Stop Commercial Whaling (also published in 2003). Hired 12 years after Watson departed, Mulvaney nonetheless bounced repeatedly over his wide political wake.

Yet many of the Greenpeace old guard who are still alive and active in various causes seem markedly more charitable toward each other than those who write books, in my experience of interviewing them.

Al “Jet” Johnson, for example, speaks well of almost everyone. He likes some former shipmates better than others, and profoundly disagrees with a few, but does not mingle acknowledgement of disagreements with allegations of moral turpitude.

Rex Weyler captures this gentler spirit in Greenpeace: How A Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changes the World. Weyler was the original editor of the Greenpeace Chronicles, the newspaper that evolved into the Greenpeace magazine of the 1980s (for which I was briefly a Quebec correspondent), before collapsing back into a newsletter after a catastrophically costly attempt to publish in a slick format on 100% post-consumer recycled stock.

Weyler apparently knew almost everyone who helped to found and build Greenpeace, kept his files, kept in touch with all the living, and has produced a history that manages to be sympathetic toward almost everyone. McTaggert may be the sole exception, but Weyler gives even the “Great Satan” of his account his due for many achievements.

Left animal issues

Animal advocates have long lamented that Greenpeace under McTaggert’s influence turned away from animal advocacy, after building recognition and influence through confrontational campaigns on behalf of whales and seals. This might not have happened if Quaker cofounder Irving Stowe had lived.

Weyler recalls that Stowe, who died of stomach cancer in 1974, “remained a vegetarian and refused to wear leather.”

A paragraph later, Weyler mentions that, “Greenpeace America was established as an adjunct to Joan McIntyre’s Project Jonah,” an early whale-saving campaign whose theme was that whales are fellow sentient beings.

Farther down page, Weyler recounts that “Peter Hyde, president of the Animal Defense League of Canada, arrived from Ottawa in November (1974) and proposed that the Greenpeace Foundation endorse an ‘Animal Bill of Rights,’ which included an end to trophy hunting and lab animal abuse. Animal rights seemed as revolutionary in 1974 as the Bill of Rights might have seemed to King William III and Queen Mary in 1689, but Hyde cited a tradition dating from the Buddha to aboriginal people of the 20th century…we supported his Animal Bill of Rights.”

Greenpeace was thus positioned to emerge after Peter Singer published Animal Liberation in 1974 as the proto-global animal rights group. Both Watson and Moore seemed to lean in that direction, despite their strategic differences.

Post-Watson, Moore became the most prominent voice within Greenpeace against the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt, until at last the offshore hunt was suspended for 10 years beginning in 1984.

“I left Greenpeace at the end of 1985,” Moore told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “I was always opposed to the seal hunt and remain opposed to the present hunt.”

Moore acknowledged that, “I went to the Northwest Territories to meet with Inuit leaders around 1984, to discuss the impact of our campaign on their subsistence hunt,” but attributed to Remi Parmentier and “perhaps McTaggert” the Greenpeace decision to drop anti-fur campaigning that year.

The Weyler narrative ends five years before that infamous episode, summarized by Michael Brown and John May in The Greenpeace Story:

“One of the most contentious campaigns in the history of Greenpeace,” they wrote, “was the anti-fur campaign launched by Greenpeace U.K. in September 1984, using a powerful poster and cinema advert by the photographer David Bailey. The campaign was designed to highlight the cruelties of the leghold trap, and to dissuade potential consumers from wearing fur. It was soon clear that it was causing considerable problems within Greenpeace. The offices in Canada and Denmark had developed working relationships with the Inuit…After long deliberations, the Greenpeace International council voted to end the fur campaign.”

Within another 10 years Greenpeace observers at the International Whaling Commission annual meetings would be reminded by superiors that Greenpeace does not “in principle” oppose whaling and sealing.

Comparison of Greenpeace by Weyler with The Greenpeace Story by Brown and May is inevitable. Covering half as many years in more than three times as many pages, Greenpeace is by far the more readable narrative, bringing the major figures much more fully to life. Writing at greater distance from the events, Weyler has a better perspective on what was truly precedental and historically important.

The Greenpeace Story on the other hand provides a more definitive record of who did what, where, when, with about 10 times more photographic documentation. Both are necessary to a complete understanding of the Greenpeace phenomenon.
Incidentally, on page 293 Weyler appears to settle years of contention over who first demonstrated the commercial potential of whale-watching.

“In 1907,” writes Weyler, “the Pacific Whaling Company took up humpback whaling in the Strait of Georgia, but met with opposition from J.A. Cates, manager of the Vancouver Terminal Steamship Company. Cates founded the world’s first whale-watching tours,” nearly 60 years before anyone else, “taking customers from Vancouver to see the humpbacks. He argued that the region would benefit more by keeping the whales alive.”

Cates failed to save the Georgia Strait humpbacks, yet his idea became the economic mainstay of whale-saving worldwide.

––Merritt Clifton

Caring humans around the world have been troubled at how most humans have treated animals for as long as written literature has existed. The earliest writings meant to motivate other humans to change their ways tried to make kindness toward animals a sacred duty, as in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and to some extent Judaism, and is often mentioned in the literature of other religions, including many of the Hadiths of Bukhari, collecting the sayings of Mohammed.

Unfortunately, religious proscriptions failed under economic pressure. Animals were abused without recourse.

The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity is described on the back cover as “A Muslim Sufi work of 10th century Iraq, translated by a rabbi into Hebrew, rendered into Latin for a Christian king.”

It emerged from a time and place where secular law was just forming to reinforce religious teaching, in a manner that could be applied uniformly across the many cultural divisions that might exist within an empire.

The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity makes the case, through fable, that animals should be recognized as possessing rights, guaranteed by social contract, which could be enforced in secular courts.

As well as listing the many ways in which animals are abused, the fable evaluates the different relationships that wild and domestic animals have with humans, and seeks equitable ways to resolve conflicts of human and animal interests.

It was almost a millennia ahead of its time, but fortunately it has now been “translated from the popular Hebrew version by Jews into English, edited by a Christian and illustrated exquisitely by a Muslim woman from India under the patronage of a Saudi princess,” just in time to help provide the cultural foundation for the rapidly growing pro-animal movement in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Those of us from elsewhere can enjoy it too; but it will have most value to the people who recently induced Turkey to pass one of the most progressive animal protection laws in the world, founded the first humane societies in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and sustain a humane movement in Pakistan despite virtual isolation from the international humane community.

––Merritt Clifton

As an experiment in animal sociology, former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson acquired a variety of animals of differing species, and then devoted time to observing their interaction. His book is a charming and well-written inquiry about what animals can teach us about the social origins of tolerance––and conflict.

To us, Masson found little in the way of novel revelation. Most farmers and rural dwellers know how easily different species live peacefully together, and it is scarcely surprising that a motley collection of dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits and rats should find friendship with each other across species lines. So although we read the book with particular interest, because of our own experience in the Kalahari doing wildlife rehabilitation among many different species, we were a little disappointed not to learn anything new.

Masson writes on page 45 that he “would almost certainly not succeed with this project with animals who were truly wild.” However, our experience is that even wild animals can and do form friendships outside their species, and indeed, we used this fact as a tool in rehabilitation. ANIMAL PEOPLE recently published a photograph [reprinted below] of our large, fierce Boerbull dog Shumba snoozing while a meerkat friend sat upright on his body doing sentry duty.

Catching quick young jackals to handle them was virtually impossible in a large veld camp. But just bring Shumba in to their camp, and the jackals would come running up to him, tails swishing wildly, and prostrate themselves in front of him in submission. From there it was easy to grab them and to remove thorns or ticks. Seeing how easily the dogs, foxes, and jackals befriended each other caused us to doubt Masson’s statement on page 61 that “No wolf has ever made friends with an animal from another species ––unlike dogs, although they are of the same species.”

We found agreement with Masson on page 91, where he wrote, “It was amazing to see how badly even a chicken wants to communicate certain things.”

And how! Once, a small flock of guinea fowl woke us up early one morning by fluttering against our bedroom window, cackling and shrieking. They had never done this before. When we investigated, we found  that one of their chicks had fallen into the water trough. We were able to rescue the avian swimmer, dry him off with a hairdryer, and return him to his flock.

Masson states on page 119 that he would have liked to take his rats for a walk with the cats. Indeed he could have. We have video of our morning strolls through the Kalahari bush, a veritable caravan led by ourselves and followed, always in the same order, by the dogs, then the bat-eared foxes, a Springbok ewe, the meerkats (not much bigger than rats but easily keeping up), and finally a pair of ostriches.

Mori the Vervet monkey delighted in cross-species relationships. She needed a companion and we could not find her one of her own species. So we put a two-week old chick into her enclosure. They adopted each other, slept and played together, and became so interdependent that if we tried to remove the chicken, Mori would attack us. If Mori sat up in the branches, the chick, still too immature to fly, would try desperately to flutter up and join her.

Later we had to rehab a young duiker antelope, and decided that she would settle down better in animal company. So we put her in with Mori and her chicken. Soon Mori was grooming the little buck.  She would curl up with him to snooze, while the chicken, now fully grown, would cluck and peck around them. The three became inseparable.

––Bev Pervan & Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.co.za/>

I first encountered Man the Hunted co-author Donna Hart more than 20 years ago, while investigating the U.S./Canada transborder traffic in exotic cats, as a reporter for the Sherbrooke Record. I had already seen and photographed the cats, on the premises of a small private hunting preserve that would now be called a “canned hunt.”

With the help of Montreal activist Anne Streeter, and local sources who chose to be anonymous, I had traced the substantial criminal history of some of the people who were involved. I had interviewed the bad guys. Now I needed an informed pro-animal source to comment on the veracity of what I had been told about where the big cats came from, how they were bred, how they were kept, and what would become of them.

Animal rights and humane organizations, at the time, mostly had little institutional knowledge of exotic cats and “canned hunts.”
But three different people mentioned that I should talk to Donna Hart, if I could find her.

Hart was among the former International Fund for Animal Welfare staff and volunteers who had just broken away to form the International Wildlife Coalition. She seemed surprised to be called, surprised to be known, and anxious about being quoted––and fairly obviously had a deeper understanding of predator behavior, in or out of captivity, than any of the hunters, wildlife law enforcement personnel, and animal advocates I had encountered to that point.

Hart left IWC in mid-2000 to pursue an academic career. According to the jacket flap of Man The Hunted, she is “currently on the faculty of the Honors College and Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri in St. Louis,” just across town from Washington University anthropologist and Man The Hunted co-author Robert W. Sussman. Sussman is further identified as “editor emeritus of American Anthropologist, and author of many scientific articles and books on anthropology and primatology.”
That is putting it all in perhaps the driest, most abstract possible manner. What we truly have in Man The Hunted is a woman who intuitively thinks like a big cat, stalking early human behavior. Her central contention is that humans have been primarily a prey species, not a predator, through most of our existence. We developed unique attributes, Hart argues, chiefly to avoid being “wolfed down” by bigger, fiercer species. We were more likely to end up as cat food than to die in a non-violent manner.

The early human perspective is represented by a man whose whole career has developed from his ability to deduce from fragmentary fossil evidence how our distant ancestors thought and behaved.

I imagine the writing process behind Man The Hunted as a series of stealthy Hart pounces and Sussman leaps to safety in the high branches of scholarship.

As each learned to anticipate the arguments and counter-arguments of the other, they must have acted out many times on the personal and psychological level the evolutionary drama they describe in Man The Hunted.

Writing Man The Hunted, in other words, almost certainly required surviving and learning from a series of trials paralleling the evolution of the almost physically defenseless apes we were, into the intellectually empowered dominant species we became.

Beginning her stalk of historical truth as a fierce animal rights activist with provocative but mostly untested ideas, Hart has sharpened her focus and developed academic discipline. Sussman has scambled away from conventional wisdom–– where group-thinkers hope to survive as predatory critics pick off the old, the young, the sick, and the injured––to claim and defend a stronger branch of the family tree.

Together, Hart and Sussman themselves demonstrate how sustained challenge drives the evolution of thought.

Though human physical evolution is part of their subject, the evolution of thought is their actual central topic: how the experience of predation came to shape human culture. Among the enduring consequences are societal attitudes toward meat, hunting, choices of mates and leaders, choices of pets, which animals become the icons of athletic teams, which attract donor support as subjects of appeal mailings, and even what humans most often choose to watch on television and read about in newspapers.

––Merritt Clifton

The City of Los Angeles in 1974 took over the operation of a low-cost sterilization clinic opened a year earlier by Mercy Crusade, and started the first city-subsidized sterilization program in the U.S.

Working for that clinic, Marvin Mackie, DVM, developed high-volume sterilization. Teaching his methods to others, Mackie eventually founded a string of low-cost, high-volume sterilization clinics, emulated by many others, including Jeff Young of Planned Pethood Plus in Denver, and Mary Herro, now retired, who started the Animal Foundation of Nevada in Las Vegas.

When Mackie started in veterinary practice, under 10% of all pet dogs in the U.S. and under 1% of pet cats had been sterilized. Today more than two-thirds of all pet dogs and upward of 80% of all pet cats are sterilized, mostly by vets using the Mackie methods.

With practice, Mackie method vets routinely sterilize from 30 to 50 dogs and cats per day––and their productivity commands salaries of upward of $100,000 a year.

While U.S. dog and cat sterilization programs long since learned that one good vet who can perform quick, clean spays and castrations day in and day out is worth twice the salary of a vet who works at half the speed or whose surgeries often have complications, the Mackie methods are still not well known and widely practiced abroad, where street dogs and feral cats are still too often poisoned or killed by other cruel methods.

In addition, veterinarians serving humane organizations in rural and less affluent parts of the U.S. often have not yet had the opportunity to learn what Mackie does to make dog and cat sterilization quick and easy.

QuickSpay seeks to remedy that by showing, in just an hour of videotape time, how Mackie performs start-to-finish spays and castrations on a female dog, a male dog, a female cat, and a male cat.

There is no voice-over, no commentary, no extraneously illustrative material, just a single camera and recorder picking up Mackie’s description of what he is doing as he does it, in “real time.” A veterinarian who watches attentively should be able to emulate every step.

“There is no charge to anyone in animal sheltering, humane work,  or veterinarians who want this DVD,” producer Phyllis Daugherty of the Animal Issues Movement told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “They need to send a self-addressed, padded envelope suitable for DVD/CD mailing, and include either stamps or the correct metered postage on the envelope. It should also have the requester’s address for return. That way, if anything goes wrong in mailing, they will still receive it. If they include an e-mail address, I will let them know that we have received their envelope and when the DVD is on its way. Those who want to contact us by e-mail can write to <QuickSpay@aol.com>.”

Daughtery is now at work on a companion DVM, Setting Up Spay Sites/Clinics, featuring Mackie and Young. “It will be ready by mid-2006,” she promises. “This will be a walk-through of Mackie’s clinic, showing how to handle all the details and procedures from the phone call to make an appointment to the pet going home after surgery. We will show how Mackie schedules and coordinates appointments for shelter animals, feral cats and private pets. We will also discuss financial and political pitfalls, location, staffing, etc.

“If we have room,” within the time permitted on a single DVM disk, “we will include some footage on doing high-volume surgeries in a mobile setting,  i.e. a van, or at a remote location where an existing room or building is turned into a temporary surgical site,” Daugherty promises.

“We will handle the distribution in the same manner as QuickSpay, without charge.”

––M.C.