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NOVEMBER 2005

BOOKS

Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations is the second in a Humane University how-to series that began with Volunteer Management for Animal Care Organizations, by Betsy McFarland. Much of Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organiz-ations overlaps and closely parallels the fundraising information included in the ANIMAL PEOPLE handbook Fundraising & Accountability for Animal Protection Charities, available in PDF format free for downloading at <www.animalpeoplenews.com>, under “important materials.”

Thus in reviewing Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations for the ANIMAL PEOPLE audience, the $44.95 question is whether the HSUS take on the topic offers enough additional information to be worth the cost.
The answer is probably yes for U.S.-based organizations that already raise more than $100,000 per year, but no for smaller organizations and those based abroad.

The ANIMAL PEOPLE handbook, albeit shorter, includes more information about simple, basic approaches to fundraising that any organization, anywhere, can use right away.

Both handbooks include approximately the same advice about accountability and ethics, but the ANIMAL PEOPLE handbook describes accountability procedures in terms applicable to any charity in any nation. The advice in Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations is contrastingly geared to the specific requirements of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organiz-ations does include much more about finding, cultivating, and collecting contributions from high donors. Some of this may be of potential value to foreign charities, but much of it, for example a section about how to establish a charitable remainder trust, is closely dependent upon the quirks of U.S. tax law. Charitable remainder trusts and several other longterm arrangements discussed in Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations are not a big part of fundraising abroad because the legislation that enables such relationships rarely has an equivalent in other nations.

Chapter contributors to Fund-Raising for Animal Care Organizations include Judith Calhoun of the Denver Dumb Friends League, Vincent Connelly of Connelly & Associates Fund-raising LLC, Caryn Ginsberg of the Priority Ventures Group, Christie Smith of the Potter League for Animals, Alice Tracy of the Humane Society of the U.S., and Karen Medicus, who formerly headed the Austin/Travis County SPCA, and before that, the Humane Society of Greater Miami. Her current project, Imagine Humane, is jointly sponsored by the American SPCA and PetSmart Charities.

––Merritt Clifton

This marvelous collection of vegan recipes might be called a fusion cookbook, since the recipes explore a wide variety of sources, among them Italian, West African, and Mexican.

Not being qualified cooks ourselves, we gave Dining With Friends to Leroi Willmore, the gourmet chef who also runs the Barnyard Donkey Sanctuary, near George in the Cape Province of South Africa.

Explains Willmore, “The Sanctuary was started in 1995, as a direct result of our history and involvement with the National SPCA over the years. We found a need to care for the amazing amount of abused and neglected donkeys we came across in the townships and poorer parts of the country.

“Only when the donkeys learn to trust humans again do we put them up for adoption. We have homed thirty-eight donkeys since the inception of the sanctuary and have had to repossess only two donkeys from foster homes. The restaurant is an effort on our part to raise funds to cover our day-to-day expenses.”

We subjected Dining With Friends to the judgement of a critical panel of dedicated South African meat-eaters, whose taste in food is conservative in the extreme.

We assembled the panel to enjoy a six-course meal of recipes prepared from the book. Willmore went to great trouble to ensure that the dishes were authentic to the book, no mean feat in a nation where many of the ingredients are not readily available.

The meal extended over three hours. The dishes were vegetable bisque, toast caps with cilantro pesto, Italian vegetable and potato stew, and stuffed bell peppers with tofu and vegetables. For desserts there were blackberry and raspberry flummery and apple cinnamon crisp.  Vegan butter was provided for the bread.

The doubters were pleasantly surprised. The average rating on every dish exceeded 8 out of 10.

Anyone who thinks that vegan cooking is boring, bland or tasteless should try these recipes. Actually, everyone should try them.

Our one constructive criticism of Dining With Friends is that there should be a photograph of each dish, so that one can use the visual aid to decide which recipe to choose.

We doubt that our guests will change to a vegan lifestyle, as this involves making a philosophical choice involving much more than diet. But none of them will ever feel compelled to ask again, as one guest did before we started, “If you take all the meats and dairy products out of a meal, what is left?”

––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
Cape Town, South Africa.
<www.cannedlion.co.za>

Will Tuttle is a professional pianist and teacher with a strong background in Zen Buddhism. He argues for a broader understanding of the implications of our food choices. He promotes veganism to all people of conscience, whatever their religion, as the vital first step to allow our species to break out of the cycle of violence, poverty and destruction.

Unlike most other authors on vegetarianism, Tuttle does not content himself with listing the physical harm done to our bodies from meat/dairy consumption. He contends that the harm from meat eating is much broader and deeper than we realise, and has important emotional and spiritual ramifications. He believes that our relentless cruelty to animals, principally for meat-eating, is the fundamental cause of a global crisis today, and not merely a symptom of human limitations.

“If we cannot stop eating meat,” Tuttle argues, “how can we possibly develop the sensitivity which is essential for spiritual maturity?”

The argument is logical but it discounts examples like the Dalai Lama, who ate meat for decades before briefly going vegetarian in 1995 and finally going veg for keeps earlier in 2005. The Dalai Lama was widely regarded as spiritually mature long before eating meat visibly troubled him.

Tuttle lists human activities that brutalize livestock and then draws a comparison with related human suffering, to drive home the point that because all things are connected at all levels, we will all suffer ourselves for what we do to other living things.

“As we force animals to be fat, diseased, overcrowded and stressed, we become the same,” Tuttle writes. “As we feed them unnaturally processed chemical-laden foods, we find our grocery stores filled with similarly toxic products posing as food.”

Our meat-eating choices are inherited from our parents. This indoctrination is reinforced by social and market pressures as well as by acquired taste. To break out of the rut requires conscious effort, a desire to leave home‚ in the sense of wishing to achieve a higher set of moral values:

“In a herding culture nothing is more subversive to the established order of exploitation and privilege than consciously refusing to participate in buying and eating the animal foods that define that culture.”

Tuttle is at his best when describing the plight of farmed animals and linking it to our physical and emotional well being. We learned much that other books have failed to tell us. However, when he discusses the metaphysical consequences of animal cruelty, there are logical jumps which elude us.

For example, Tuttle links meat-eating directly to specific phenomena such as alcoholism and military spending: “Every minute our slaughter houses kill 20,000 land animals and the Pentagon spends $760,000.” While we can be convinced that meat eating can contribute metaphysically to the massive expenditure on armaments, the corollary to Tuttle’s argument is that if people stopped eating meat then the armaments industry would collapse.

––Chris Mercer

Gods In Chains
by Rhea Ghosh
Foundation Books
(4764/2A, 23 Ansari Rd., Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002, India), 2005. 239 pages, hardcover. $20.00.

Rhea Ghosh, of Boston, Massachusetts, spent the summer of 2004 researching the status of working elephants in India, commissioned by the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation Centre in Bangalore, Karnataka state, India.

Gods In Chains is the 230-page record of her findings, including her detailed recommendations for changes in the elephant-keeping regimen, and extensive appendices containing much of her source material.

Ghosh’s observations are heavily derivative of those of Peter Jaeggi, who has observed captive elephants in India since circa 1990. The extent to which Jaeggi’s commentary has influenced Ghosh is evident from comparing her text to the two Jaeggi articles included among the appendices, “Chained in Delhi” and “Living Gods in a living hell.” The Jaeggi articles might just as well have constituted the first part of the book, as Ghosh offers very little original insight about the present state of elephant care and the recent deterioration of the once lifelong bond between mahouts and their elephants. As Jaeggi pointed out in 2003, an elephant today may have a new mahout almost every year––or even more often, if either the elephant or the elephant owner is particularly difficult.

However, while Jaeggi more thoroughly and originally diagnosed the plight of Indian elephants, Ghosh offers much more extensive suggestions about what might be done to help them, within the present framework of Indian law and culture, and within present Indian technological capacity.

Ultimately, Ghosh would like to abolish captive elephant-keeping. Elephants who for whatever reason must be removed from the wild would be kept at spacious sanctuaries.

However, Ghosh recognizes that Indian cultural pressure to use and display elephants for a variety of ceremonial and symbolic purposes is unlikely to disappear within the present generation, though the use of elephants for strictly practical purposes long since faded out. Logging elephants remain in use only to approximately the extent that workhorses still exist on U.S. farms. Elephants today work by standing outside temples, marching in parades, and hauling tourists.

As the numbers of captive elephants today are comparatively few, and could be tracked by methods no more complicated than a check-in system making use of the ubiquitous Indian internet cafes, Ghosh recommends establishing an online elephant tracking system, which would be much more efficient and effective that the present paper tracking system, and could prevent many abuses. Ghosh also favors a system wherein captive elephants, like their wild kin, would remain property of the state, not of individuals, although those now in private hands might stay where they are now, if not abused. –

—M.C.

Karen Davis, founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, concludes that, “The Holocaust epitomized an attitude, the manifestation of a base will. It is the attitude that we can do whatever we please, however vicious, if we can get away with it, because we are superior and they, whoever they are, are, so to speak, just chickens. Paradoxically therefore, it is possible, indeed it is requisite, to make relevant and enlightening comparisons between the Holocaust and our base treatment of non-human animals. We can make comparisons while agreeing with the approach taken by philosopher Brian Luke towards animal abuse. Luke writes:

“My opposition to the institutionalized exploitation of animals is not based on a comparison between human and animal treatment, but on a consideration of the abuse of animals in and of itself.”

Davis’s philosophy is well-argued and closely reasoned, so that by the time she reaches her conclusion––that there is a Nazi within all of us––the reader has already arrived there.

Of course Davis does not state her point as baldly as we have. Her message is couched in more hopeful terms, suggesting that the sooner humankind changes our cruel and violent ways, the better for all of us as well as other life forms. This implies that there is some prospect of humankind doing so in the foreseeable future. There is little to suggest that this is likely. We have caused limitless suffering to ourselves and to all other life forms since the beginning of recorded time. 

The real question which underlies Davis’ book, and all treatises on animal rights, is simply this: How can we change human nature for the better?

Any suggestions?

––Chris Mercer

Dogs have their place in Jon Katz’s family, but Katz, author of A Dog Year and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, neither treats them as children nor accords them equal status with humans. He views no-kill shelters with disfavour, arguing that there is little reason to keep potentially dangerous, un-adoptable dogs in a lifetime of crowded, noisy confinement.

Katz offers guidance both from his own experience and from case studies about what kind of dog to adopt, how to train and feed the dog, and how to build a healthy rapport with a dog. Handling the complexities of multi-dog families is also discussed, as well as some ethical and spiritual issues.

Though centered on useful information about dog care, Katz On Dogs also discusses the changing roles of dogs in modern American society, and how increasing stresses on families affect dogs.

Katz deplores the growing tendency to sentimentalise dog behaviour. Referring to the belief among many dog guardians that their animals suffer separation anxiety‚ when apart from each other, Katz writes: “Tech-nically, the term applies to the anxiety a small child feels when separated from a parent.. .there is no equivalent response in a dog.”

We believe this statement is too sweeping. We know from our own experience, especially during our years of managing the Kalahari Raptor Center, how anxious animals become in separation, especially social animals such as dogs, lions, and meerkats. All of them exhibit obvious anguish when separated from their packs, prides, or den mates, and display unmistakable joy and relief when re-united––including with humans whom they have admitted into their social circles.

––Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.com>
South Africa