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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: September 2007
Books for Animal People
Get Political for Animals and win the laws they need
by Julie E. Lewin
National Institute for Animal Advocacy
(6 Long Hill Farm, Guilford, CT 06437), 2007.
276 pages, paperback. $29.00.
"Becoming a power player in the lawmaking
arena requires learning to think and function as a lawmaker does--politically
and strategically--with the arithmetic of elections foremost," Julie
Lewin emphasizes in Get Political for Animals. "Ignorance of political
dynamics leads to repeated, avoidable failures --and to thinking small.
"When voting on legislation," Lewin elaborates, "a lawmaker cares only about his constituents who vote. He doesn't care about his constituents who don't vote or what the broader public thinks.
Hearing from advocates who live outside
his district wastes his time, which he doesn't appreciate. It also shows
him we're politically naïve.
"In the absence of voting blocs,
lawmaking is driven by money. When casting a vote means choosing between
a wealthy business interest and a politically organized grassroots group,
a lawmaker goes with the grassroots group every time. Why? She knows that
otherwise the voting bloc will punish her on Election Day--by endorsing
her opponent and directing members in her district to vote for her opponent.
She knows that the wealthy interest cannot protect her from that."
Variants of these paragraphs recur every
few pages through Get Political for Animals, along with real-life cases
in which a small amount of political organization accomplished a great
deal, while huge investments of money and effort in other approaches achieved
either nothing or negative outcomes.
Lewin points out repeatedly that hunters
have influence hugely disproportionate to their numbers--barely 4% of
the U.S. population, a fifteenth as many as people who keep dogs or cats,
outnumbered even by vegetarians--because they are politically organized.
Foes of hunting have barely begun to mobilize.
Many of Lewin's most instructive examples
come from her own experience of decades as an animal advocate. As a former
newspaper reporter and magazine writer, Lewin at first put much effort
into media campaigns. She learned that, "Media attention almost never
achieves strong laws or public policies...If media coverage is not buttressed
by political power, the resulting laws, if any, are cosmetic and weak,
and are not enforced.
"Media coverage of proposed legislation
is often harmful," Lewin adds, "because it gives your opposition
ink and air time to attack it--and alerts opponents who then contact their
lawmakers."
Much of the opposition to pro-animal goals
was rallied in response to the success of pro-animal media campaigns which
were not backed by political mobilization.
Chapter 9 of Get Political for Animals
extensively covers how and when to seek publicity. Unfortunately, Lewin
offers one pointer in the wrong direction. "Get over the notion,"
Lewin writes, "that today's reporters do real research. You have
to hand-feed them everything except opponents' views, which they manage
to find on their own."
Today's reporters actually spend much
more time on research than when Lewin was a reporter. Journalism education
today far more heavily emphasizes research technique. But changes in how
research is done feed into Lewin's other points about how both successful
politics and obtaining publicity depend on having local angles and being
prepared.
Today's reporters no longer work much
out of press clubs. Most attend far fewer press conferences than 30 years
ago. Fewer newspapers, with smaller staffs, mean reporters spend less
time on research that requires leaving the office. Sifting through documents
obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, a new reporting technique
in the 1970s, died with the advent of the Internet.
But today's reporters typically use web-searching
to check the backgrounds of sources and subjects, and to find varied perspectives
on issues. The typical news article of 30 years ago used two sources.
The typical article today uses four--and an embarrassing action or stupid
remark today is far more likely to follow a source or subject for years.
In addition, the Internet has hugely increased
the use of "value added" reporting, in which a reporter grafts
a local angle to syndicated material. "Value added" reporting
resembles the team reporting of 30 years ago, but the team members may
be scattered worldwide. This increases the breadth of reportage while
decreasing the prominence of primary sources, except in their own communities.
Conversely, a national story is much more
likely to be given a local angle if local activists are already making
the angle known. The importance of local organization has accordingly
never been higher.
But effective local organization must
take a form that has political leverage.
"Demonstrations and protests almost
never achieve meaningful laws or public policies," Lewin notes, having
staged many protests herself before learning that this was ineffective,
"because they in no way hold individual lawmakers accountable to
their own voting constituents."
Lewin is also critical of petitioning
as it is usually practiced. "Unless petitions are designed politically
and strategically, they do not create one-to-one accountability of any
individual lawmaker to his or her own constituents," Lewin points
out. "In contrast, a highly effective petition is addressed to a
specific lawmaker; asks that lawmaker to take a specific position (support
or oppose a specific bill or proposed ordinance); is signed only by the
lawmaker's own constitutents; includes the home (voting) address of each
signer; and includes the phone and e-mail addresses of signers who are
willing to provide them. These petitions are joyously effective, because
the lawmaker sees that you have the contact information to let each signer
know exactly what actions he takes."
Lewin provides extensive tactical advice
on GOTV, short for Getting Out The Vote, the most basic component of effective
voting bloc organization.
Chapter six offers a detailed introduction
to all of the various levels of lawmaking and regulation, which may save
many activists years of fruitlessly seeking change at the wrong levels.
For example, the administrators who execute public policy rarely have
authority to amend it, but the policymakers may be quite content to let
the administrators take the brunt of public protest.
Time and again, Lewin reminds that protests
are usually futile. "In my many years of work at the [Connecticut]
state capitol," Lewin testifies, "I never saw a lawmaker decide
to vote for or against an animal-related bill because of a protest. Law-makers
often view protests as infantile, engaged in by people who don't understand
the dynamics of power and marginalize themselves. Protests retard our
political advance for animals," Lewin believes. "They miseducate
new enthusiasts about the dynamics of change. They subliminally reaffirm
the protesters' self-image as outsider rather than mainstreamer. They
cause malaise among some segments of the public, strengthening the psychological
barrier between the public and the facts we want the public to understand."
But beyond all else, "Protests use
time poorly," Lewin believes. "If 100% or 50% or 20% of the
time and effort put into organizing and attending protests had been spent
instead recruiting members to voting blocs for animals, how far along
we would be!"
--Merritt Clifton
Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia
Woolf,
Emily Dickinson, Elisabeth Barrett Browning,
Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte
by Maureen Adams
Ballentine Books (1745 Broadway, New York,
NY 10019), 2007. 320 pages, hardcover. $24.95.
Shaggy Muses presents mini-biographies
of female literary celebrities, as seen through their relationships with
their pet dogs. It is also a heart-breaking exposure of the struggle of
intellectual women to keep their sanity in a stultifying male-controlled
world.
"Ranging from lapdog to mastiff,
their dogs acted as loyal companions, staunch protectors, and patient
comforters."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was offered
a cocker spaniel puppy when she was very ill, not only with a fever but
also with the heartache of losing a mother and two brothers. Her father,
alarmed by his daughter's condition, reported "It is a wonder to
me that she lives." The diversion of receiving the puppy and its
arrival lifted the sombre atmosphere in the house. Elizabeth was entranced
by this little dog and valued him because he was devoted to only her.
Flush had lifted the misery and she made a promise, which she would keep
for the rest of his life: "He & I are inseparable companions,
and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion."
Emily Bronte's private writings were destroyed
by her sister Charlotte. Thus the most vivid portrait of Emily and Keeper,
a huge dog descended from mastiffs, is from Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley,
which was intended as a tribute to her sister.
After losing her mother and sisters at
a very early age, Emily was prone to unbearable anxiety whenever she left
home, and so she turned her affection towards animals. Writes Adams, "She
never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for
animals."
Her attitude and way with the family dogs
was sometimes violent and at other times very gentle. Her book Wuthering
Heights, which was seen as autobiographical, received shocked reviews
from the conservative nineteenth century critics. Wrote one, "How
a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without
committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters is a mystery.
It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
This prompted me to read Wuthering Heights,
a copy of which has been languishing on my book shelf for many years.
It is a tragic description of the repression of women.
Emily Dickinson was given a New-foundland
puppy by her father, who thought that the dog would "act as a buffer
between his daughter and the world that so frightened her."
Emily became emotionally dependent upon
Carlo. "In the year that followed Carlo's death she wrote almost
nothing. Her creativity would never again reach its previous peak,"
Adams reports.
Edith Wharton, writing in her autobiography
when she was in her seventies, remembered "that with the gift of
the puppy, a new life began for me."
This was because, as a well-behaved little
girl in a family whose highest value was conventionality, Edith had scant
outlet for her emotions until Foxy arrived in her life.
Thereafter Edith was never without the
companionship of her dogs.
Virginia Woolf's life was a litany of
tragedies. She was molested at the age of six years old by her 20-year-old
half brother. This had a damaging affect on her emotional state, and indeed
her whole life. She later had a lesbian affair during her childless marriage.
Woolf too became emotionally dependent
upon her pet dogs, and "composed entire sections of books by talking
them out loud while she walked with her Pinka (a spaniel) in a state of
trance-like swimming." At age 59, when Woolf started to hear voices
and knew she was going mad, she committed suicide by filling her pockets
with rocks and walking into the Ouse river.
Shaggy Muses is a reflection on the times in which these women lived and wrote, and would be as interesting to feminists as it is to animal lovers. --Beverley Pervan
Getting Lucky
by Susan Marino with Denise Flaim
Stewart, Tabori & Chang (115 W. 18th St., New York,
NY 10011), 2005. 144 pages, hardcover. $18.95.
Getting Lucky is the story of the Angel's Gate animal hospice as founder Sue Marino wanted to tell it, through the stories of 18 of the many animals who have lived their last days or years in her care.
Located in Fort Salonga, on Long Island,
New York, Angel's Gate has become probably the best known animal hospice
in the world, through frequent positive news coverage and Marino's guest
appearances on Animal Radio.
Unfortunately, soon after Getting Lucky
appeared, the Angel's Gate story took a different twist, and Marino has
for more than a year now been battling town officials who rewrote the
local zoning to exclude Angel's Gate--after it had already been operating
for more than a dozen years. The Smithtown Town Court on July 10, 2007
fined Angel's Gate $800 for noise violations.
Said Marino, "The good news is that
a property in the Catskills has become available and we may be able to
afford to buy it. It could prove to be Angel's Gate's home one day, and/or
an annex for our farm animals. Also, a benefactor has offered to purchase
property for us on Long Island, so no matter the outcome of our court
appeal, it looks like Angel's Gate will be able to continue to serve Long
Islands neediest creatures."
The Angel's Gate case, driven by hostile
neighbors, is hardly unique. The Oasis Animal Sanctuary operated by Eddie
Lama, profiled in the Tribe of Heart video The Witness (2001), is also
facing fines and the threat of closure. The Town of Callicoon has revoked
a kennel variance permit that Lama has held since 1998, asserting that
a sanctuary is a "nonconforming use" of the property.
The dispute started when Lama handed town
officials proof of nonprofit status and asserted that Oasis is entitled
to a tax exemption under New York law. Lama has paid $130,000 in property
taxes over the past 10 years, according to Mary Esparra of the Middletown
Times Herald Record.
A court order meanwhile forced Pat Klimo
of Ringwood, Illinois, to close the 15-year-old Pets In Need shelter at
the end of June 2007. Klimo had fought zoning complaints for more than
10 years, while helping as many as 18,000 animals to find new homes, she
told Jeff Long on the Chicago Tribune.
Barking dogs are a perennial irritant
that animal shelters are just beginning to learn how to contain. Claims
to an exemption from property taxes are seldom welcomed by any community.
Yet the most difficult issue for Marino may be that few people understand
what she is doing.
The only other animal hospice of prominence
in New York state is operated by Bruce Van Bramer of Lake Katrine, who
is also fighting allegations that he is in violation of zoning. The Ulster
County Sheriff's Office in September 2006 seized 56 dogs and 29 cats from
Van Bremer, but the county grand jury refused to charge him with an offense,
and ordered the Ulster County SPCA to return the animals to him.
Care standards and control of infectious
diseases have been issues in the Van Bramer case. Marino's care and sanitation
at Angel's Gate are reputedly up to the human hospital standards she learned
to maintain in 30 years as a pediatric nurse.
As a nurse, Marino cultivated the warmth
and patience to explain her work over and over to anxious and uncomprehending
people. Getting Lucky committed her favorite illustrative examples of
her animal work to paper, in a surprisingly upbeat voice. Though Lucky
the dog and the other animals whom Marino profiles were doomed, they retained
nobility, dignity, even a sense of humor, and had lessons to teach the
observant.
Marino views hospice care as a natural
extension of the other roles of animal sheltering, for those who truly
value animals' lives and individual personalities. To her, the major question
about her work is not why she does it, but rather why so few others provide
similar care.
Animal hospices have existed to provide
terminal comfort to favored animals for as long as animal shelters of
any kind. Indeed, the original role of the temple animal sanctuaries of
India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand was to keep spent cows and draft animals,
who in other cultures are slaughtered and eaten.
Yet the hospice concept has struggled
almost from the beginning. Many an Asian temple sanctuary has degenerated
into thinly disguised commercial animal husbandry. Secularizing Indian
pinjarapoles in the mid-20th century was meant to reform the tradition,
but instances of unscrupulous operators allowing cattle to starve in order
to sell their hides still come to light appallingly often.
In the U.S., providing lifetime care to
exotic animals is easily the form of sheltering most attractive to donors,
relative to the numbers of animals helped. Conversely, euthanizing dogs
and cats is so thoroughly accepted that the whole notion of giving a terminally
ill or incapacitated dog or cat special care has until recently attracted
little donor support, and a great deal of misunderstanding.
Angel's Gate may be the first U.S. animal hospice to build a broad donor
base. As the status of animals rises, it almost certainly will not be
the last. --Merritt Clifton
Mystories of the Savannah
by Margaret Hehman-Smith
Trafford Pub. (Suite 6E, 2333 Govt. St., Victoria B.C. V8T 4P4, Canada),
2007. 171 pages, paperback. $17.95
Margaret Hehman-Smith, widow of pioneering
animal behaviorist Donald Leon Smith, contributed an essay on the intelligence
of fish to the March 1993 edition of animal people which remains timely
and relevant.
If Hehman-Smith had the literary skill
of Michael Crichton, the ideas she outlines in Mystories of the Savannah
about non-human primates organizing resistance and retreat in response
to human invasions of their territory might make a best-seller and hit
film. Her rogue biologist who teaches a baboons to use a rifle might become
a cult hero.
Unfortunately, what we get is more a plot summary than the page-turner that Hehman-Smith had in mind. --Merritt Clifton