ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity. |
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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: NOVEMBER 2005
Editorial
ANIMAL PEOPLE & the role of humane reporting
“We still haven’t found an executive director. Guess no one wants to come down to the sunny south and dodge all the hurricanes,” Suncoast Humane Society interim director Warren Cox wrote on Halloween from Englewood, Florida.
Sending Cox to Florida was clearly easier than ushering him into retirement. Now in his 53rd year of humane work, Cox reduced his possessions before taking his 22nd leadership position by donating to ANIMAL PEOPLE a complete set of the National Humane Review, from the years 1933 through 1976.
Published by the American Humane Association, the National Humane Review for much of that time was a mainstream slick magazine, sold on train station newsstands, with separate regional editions serving all parts of the U.S. Even without carrying paid advertising, and without soliciting donations with particular vigor, the National Humane Review generated enough revenue at peak, through sales and subscriptions, to subsidize the AHA itself. At the height of her popularity, in June 1935 and January 1936, actress Shirley Temple was twice the cover girl.
Few animal advocates alive today ever saw the National Humane Review as it existed under a succession of former newspaper editors who took it to its heights, the last of whom was Fred Myers. Few even imagine that such a periodical ever existed, in many respects presaging the editorial positions and scope of coverage of ANIMAL PEOPLE. Well ahead of the times, the National Humane Review demonstrated similar sympathy for no-kill sheltering, feral cat rescue, and humane work abroad, and put comparable emphasis upon developing accurate statistics on animal issues. Many of the studies commissioned and published by the National Humane Review were markedly better designed and much more accurate than anything produced during the next several decades.
At times in the early 1950s the National Humane Review even leaned toward endorsing vegetarianism, though it never actually came right out and said so.
Those still in humane work who remember the National Humane Review––except Cox––tend to recall the last years of a shelter-oriented publication that nearly 30 years ago morphed into AHA Shop Talk. That was the terminal incarnation of the National Humane Review, and a faint shadow of the influential magazine it once had been.
At peak the National Humane Review emphasized uncompromising moral leadership. Just a month after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II, for example, a National Humane Review lead feature took note that wars sometimes must be fought, but warned against unduly glorifying war, and especially cautioned against the harmful psychological effects of giving children war toys, thereby encouraging the pretense that killing can be wholesome fun.
Notes of compromise on hunting, trapping, and pound seizure crept into the National Humane Review with increasing frequency after World War II, but the erosion of focus and moral clarity markedly accelerated after Myers resigned in 1954, rather than further weaken editorial integrity on topics including opposition to sport hunting, fur trapping, the use of pound animals in biomedical research, and animal experimentation in general. Meyer went on to found the Humane Society of the U.S., in partnership with Helen Jones and Cleveland Amory. Jones and Amory in 1959 split from HSUS to start the National Catholic Animal Welfare Society, which in 1977 became the International Society for Animal Rights. Amory soon returned to HSUS, but took his own direction again in 1968, when he started the Fund for Animals, merged into HSUS in January 2005.
Economics drove the ethical implosion of the National Humane Review, and of the AHA itself. The rise of television and decline of train travel cut deeply into readership and sales. The AHA leadership frantically tried to reposition themselves closer to mainstream perspectives, at cost of becoming increasingly irrelevant to their core audience. By the mid-1960s, the National Humane Review had long since become uncritical of high-volume killing in animal shelters, after a decade of waffling before finally endorsing killing by decompression. Having compromised on every other front, the National Humane Review in later years even accepted wearing fur.
In retrospect it is painfully clear that the more the AHA tried to mainstream itself, the more it lost the momentum and direction that had made it the leading voice of the humane movement from 1877 until the formation of HSUS.
As the National Humane Review imploded into a house organ, Frederick L. Thomsen in 1965 founded Humane Information Services Inc. as umbrella for a newsletter called Report to Humanitarians, which tried to fill the vacated leadership role. It grew into a newspaper, The Humane Report, featuring investigative exposes by the late Henry Spira. The Humane Report circulated 19,000 copies per edition at Thomsen’s death in 1978, but died with him.
Animals’ Agenda
The next periodical of record for the U.S. animal advocacy cause was the Animals’ Agenda, founded in 1981 through the merger of animal rights newsletters published by Jim Mason and Doug Moss.
Since the demise of the National Humane Review and The Humane Report, there had been no nationally distributed independent news media covering animal advocacy. Not even one newspaper in the U.S. had a reporter formally assigned to covering animal issues, though some had pro-animal columnists. Only a handful of syndicated columnists wrote about animals, most notably Cleveland Amory.
Yet the sudden rise of the animal rights movement required participant-oriented coverage, including forums for discussion and debate.
Animals’ Agenda filled the gap, as the self-designated “magazine of the movement.” The ANIMAL PEOPLE founders, not yet acquainted, were readers right from the beginning. Kim Bartlett, now the ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher, became editor of Animals’ Agenda in 1986, joining associate editor Patrice Greanville, who is now the ANIMAL PEOPLE web producer. Merritt Clifton, now ANIMAL PEOPLE editor, debuted as Animals’ Agenda lead feature writer in the January/February 1987 edition.
Animals’ Agenda achieved peak circulation, readership, income, and influence from 1986 to 1992, after turning two important corners.
First, before Bartlett was hired, came the decision to go slick. Unaware of the National Humane Review history, Animals’ Agenda went from a newsprint format resembling that of The Humane Report to essentially the format that the National Humane Review died with. Going slick never came close to paying for itself, but did put Animals’ Agenda on newsstands just as the concept of “animal rights” caught the public imagination.
This in turn inspired former Animals’ Agenda typesetter Laura Moretti to expand her Animals’ Voice newsletter into an even glossier magazine, heavily subsidized by philanthropist Gil Michaels.
Two years later, Bartlett and Greanville promoted Clifton to news editor, with a single-sentence mandate to establish for Animals’ Agenda a reputation for journalistic integrity and credibility. This was done at a price. The founders, before they departed, elected a board of directors consisting of longtime activists and representatives of national advocacy groups. The editorial team soon learned that the board largely wanted the good reputation without allowing the editors to exercise the reportorial independence, capacity for critical thought, and standards of factual verification that such a reputation must be built upon.
The board wanted applause for their own campaigns, often without regard to the greater health of the cause.
The most frequent flashpoints for conflict were coverage of movement controversies, investigations of the use of donated money, and attention to dog-and-cat issues, often emphasized despite a barrage of criticism that this was “trivializing” the animal cause, expressed in published letters from executives of PETA, the Doris Day Animal League, and various antivivisection societies.
Unconsciously echoing the editors of the National Humane Review more than 50 years earlier, Bartlett editorially explained many times that the leaders of the animals’ cause had to find ways to avoid killing more animals each year than either laboratories or the fur trade, if they were to be taken seriously.
Animals’ Agenda came full circle back to where it started on May 1, 1992, when the board opted to return it to being “of the movement” first and foremost, firing Clifton. Bartlett soon resigned. By sundown on May 2, the ANIMAL PEOPLE debut logo had already been designed, incorporation was underway, and a business plan was in development.
The “magazine of the movement,” like any house organ of any cause, was self-doomed to becoming little more than a historical repository as the movement matured. ANIMAL PEOPLE from the first was and is a community newspaper, emphasizing “News for people who care about animals,” for a community united by interest rather than geography.
Movements, succeed or fail, tend to die young, either becoming absorbed into mainstream culture or fading into self-isolated irrelevance. Communities grow, with no inherent limit on what they might become.
Animals’ Agenda eventually merged with Animals’ Voice, then collapsed. Moretti later revived Animals’ Voice as a website.
The community grows
The animals’ cause continues to grow and diversify. The 3,000 U.S. organizations that existed in 1981 are now more than 11,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service, including more than 5,000 animal shelters. The numbers of active groups abroad are growing even faster.
The Internet took over the role of providing internal communications, which Animals’ Agenda and ANIMAL PEOPLE once had, and expanded the audience, enabling ANIMAL PEOPLE to devote much more space to original investigative reporting and news analysis.
Discovering the value of ANIMAL PEOPLE as an accessible independent information resource, mainstream newspapers increasingly often explore the local dimensions of the topics we raise. Most mainstream dailies now have at least one reporter who is assigned to animal-related coverage on a regular basis, increasing their cumulative attention to animal issues more than tenfold since our debut. Many mainstream animal beat reporters have more knowledge of animal issues than anyone serving the animal cause did 20 years ago, because background on almost any issue is now readily accessible from the Internet, enabling anyone to become informed almost overnight if necessary.
Regional pro-animal tabloids supplement the mainstream coverage in many areas.
General interest pro-animal publications such as the Massachusetts SPCA’s Animals and the American SPCA’s AnimalWatch thrived when mainstream coverage was sparse, but faded out in recent years because the readership long since began getting equivalent material from mainstream sources. There was no longer a need for a humane society to do it, nor a viable niche for providing general interest coverage through a nonprofit medium.
The animal rights movement long ago followed earlier incarnations of the humane cause into developing established institutions and career tracks. The “no kill movement” emerged 20 years later, evolving through the same phases of growth and institutionalization during the past decade. A second-generation animal rights movement emerged as well, focused on food issues rather than vivisection, and has also produced many now fairly well established organizations and information media.
Animal advocacy is now not just a community but a fast-expanding megapolis.
There have been setbacks and implosions along the way, mirroring the disasters that afflict any growing community. Among our disasters were the amendments to the Animal Welfare Act that permanently excluded rats, mice, and birds from protection in 2002; the virtual repeal of the 1971 Wild Horse Annie Act in November 2004; the simultaneous exclusion of “non-native” species from coverage by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act; the resumption and expansion of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt, Norwegian and Japanese whaling, and the recovery of the fur industry through the sale of cheap pelts from China, including dog and cat fur. (Adjusting for inflation, fur still is not anywhere near as profitable as it was 20 years ago, but the animal toll is again comparable.)
Many of these setbacks and implosions occurred due to the short-sightedness of activists and activist groups who continued to think in terms of being a “movement” instead of in terms of belonging to the mainstream political landscape.
There are now more vegetarians in the U.S. than hunters and trappers, for example, and more financial supporters of animal advocacy causes than there are people who ever hunted or trapped.
Animal advocates are not a movement, but a constituency, and a major constituency at that, like the citizens of any community that encompasses millions.
If a constituency feels it is not getting adequate attention, it has the capacity to organize politically to change the status quo. This is at last beginning to occur.
A constituency needs multiple news media, of multiple kinds, and we have them. Like the National Humane Review and Animals’ Agenda in their heydays, ANIMAL PEOPLE occupies a unique niche as the only printed periodical providing fulltime specialized coverage of animal advocacy, but the national and international mainstream newswires now move enough pro-animal material every day to fill a daily newspaper. Online information distributors circulate more material each week than any pro-animal printed periodical ever did, or could, and may also reach more people.
While ANIMAL PEOPLE still looks much as it did in 1992, our mission continues to evolve.
Recognizing the growing importance of websites, we place increasing emphasis on making our online archives accessible and producing how-to handbooks that humane workers around the world can download to help themselves cope with such problems as fundraising and accountability, mange and rabies control, and keeping shelter cats healthy.
Our annual Watchdog Report On Animal Protection Charities long ago outgrew the annual “Who gets the money?” section, from which it descended.
The ANIMAL PEOPLE newspaper is not less focal to our work, but the newspaper is now the hub of much more activity, helping to move the animals’ cause forward.