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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: March 2008
Books
Animals Matter: the case for animal protection
by Erin E. Williams & Margo DeMello
Promytheus Books (59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228), 2007. 420 pages, paperback. $20.00.
Building An Ark: 101 solutions to animal suffering
by Ethan Smith with Guy Dauncey
New Society Publishers (P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, British Columbia V0R 1X0, Canada), 2007. 270 pages, paperback, $24.95.
I Care About Animals
by Belton P. Mouras
A.S. Barnes & Co., 1977. 254 pages, paperback. Out of print.
Written as introductions to animal advocacy, Animals Matter and Building An Ark will not contain much news for ANIMAL PEOPLE readers; but they may be timely, useful, and appropriate gifts for young friends who care about animals, and would like to become more involved on their behalf. Either would be suitable for people from high school age to recent university graduates. Both address potential activists who prefer to become well-informed before reacting, who think about tactics and try to be effective. Unlike several superficially similar handbooks which are published as recruiting tools for national animal advocacy organizations, Animals Matter and Building An Ark are both essentially nonpartisan, somewhat of a surprise in view that Animals Matter co-authors Erin Williams and Margo DeMello are employees, respectively, of the Humane Society of the U.S. and the House Rabbit Society.
Though similar in content and purpose, Animals Matter and Building An Ark are structured quite differently, with a different emphasis. Animals Matter is written in conventional chapters, presenting the issues in seven topical clusters. People who like to sit down and read a book will tend to favor Animals Matter, if not overwhelmed by the content. Much more of Animals Matter is about problems than about solutions, not because the authors are deliberately negative but because the problems tend to be much more complex than such possible responses as not eating meat, not wearing fur, and sterilizing pets.
Building An Ark is solution-oriented. Issues are outlined relatively briefly, with more emphasis on conservation and endangered species than in Animals Matter, and possible responses are presented at greater length, albeit still in short formats. Building An Ark has the look and feel of a series of web pages, meant for one-at-a-time reading, not necessarily in sequential order. Unfortunately, while the factual content of Animals Matter appears to be as sound and up-to-date as one could expect from a book, Building An Ark includes significant errors, including an assertion that the number of dogs and cats killed each year in U.S. shelters is nearly three times higher than the actuality, which is quite bad enough.
Building An Ark, produced in Canada by Canadian authors, includes a note on the back of the title page that "New Society Publishers acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities."
Though other branches of the Canadian government continue to defend and promote sealing and the fur trade, there are clearly internal differences of opinion. Veteran activists, and probably most observers over the age of 30, might describe both Animals Matter and Building An Ark as "animal rights" literature. The authors of both volumes are certainly familiar with the metaphor and philosophy of "animal rights," and the approaches that both volumes emphasize are consistent with the mainstream of "animal rights" philosophical theory. Yet the phrase "animal rights" is not used prominently in Animals Matter, and appears only twice in Building An Ark. Perhaps this is simply to ease entry into school libraries.
Alternatively, one might view both books as essentially "post-animal rights," in that the authors waste little time and ink arguing that animals should be recognized as sentient beings, deserving kind treatment. Instead, taking the agreement of readers about this point as a given, they rapidly move from abstract theory into practical response.
Paradoxically, this was also the approach of perhaps the very first handbook for animal rights activists that actually used the term "animal rights." I Care About Animals, by Belton P. Mouras, appeared in 1977, just one year after the late Henry Spira's successful demonstrations against cat experiments performed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City signaled the rise of animal rights activism as a new chapter in animal advocacy.
Mouras took note of the then young animal rights movement, succinctly explained the differences between "animal rights" and "animal welfare," and seemed to take as a given that authentic animal advocates would welcome the advent of "animal rights" advocacy, as a more dynamic descendant of the "humane" and "animal welfare" causes.
Mouras acknowledged that some aspects of "animal rights" would challenge conventional and complacent "humane" and "animal welfare" thinking, but believed that accepting and responding positively to the challenge would help to demonstrate sincerity to the public.
Mouras, now 84, was the son of a disabled sharecropper from the Louisiana bayou country. As a boy he successfully raised raccoons who had been orphaned by fur trappers and coonhunters. In his teens, he built a local ice cream sales empire, and tried to advance the ideas that later built the Dairy Queen chain, but lacked the capital and credit needed to put them into effect.
Enlisting in the U.S. Army two years before the U.S. entered World War II, Mouras rose to the rank of master sergeant, retired after 20 years in 1960, and found his real calling as national director of livestock programs for the then young Humane Society of the U.S.
Starting with admittedly almost no relevant knowledge whatever, Mouras rapidly absorbed everything he could learn about every phase of humane work, bringing to it the perspective of an experienced outsider, and an entrepreneurial spirit that both rapidly increased the revenue of every organization he worked with, and attracted considerable suspicion from observers on all sides of the issues.
Splitting with HSUS after the death of founder Fred Myers,
Mouras in 1968 started the Animal Protection Institute with $5,000 borrowed from International Society for Animal Rights founder Helen
Jones. API under Mouras pioneered direct mail fundraising, made
aggressive use of newspaper ads to boost campaigns and attract new
donors, and weathered lawsuits from HSUS and several other established organizations.
An internal coup d'etat eventually ousted Mouras and effectively disabled API, which recently merged into Born Free USA after 20-odd relatively undistinguished years under other leaders. Mouras went on to found United Animal Nations and the annual Summit for the Animals conference of animal advocacy group leaders. He was also instrumental in the growth of Primarily Primates. I Care About Animals mixed scraps of autobiography with summaries of major animal issues as Mouras perceived them 30 years ago, some overview of animal advocacy history, and a great deal of tactical advice, split into three categories: strategic advice about organizational relationships, technical advice about building organizations and running campaigns, and general advice about persuading the public.
Mouras also included profiles of three of his favorite allies: the late actress Kim Novak, the late Velma "Wild Horse Annie" Johnson, and the candy heiress Helen Brach, who bankrolled many of Mouras' campaigns, but disappeared shortly before I Care About Animals went to press.
Mouras discussed Brach's disappearance, wondering if she
might have been murdered by representatives of animal use industries,
but did not anticipate that the perpetrators would more than 20 years
later turn out to be a ring who killed expensive race horses and show
horses to collect insurance money.
There was at the time still hope that Brach had for some
reason vanished of her own volition. Mouras wrote of her as if still
alive, and made no mention of her estate, which was meant to
benefit animals but because of a badly written will ended up
benefiting many other causes that seem to have been of little
interest to Brach during her life.
I Care About Animals outlined most of the methods that the animal rights movement has used ever since, often with diminishing returns as the times have changed. The only major amendments in animal advocacy tactics since Mouras wrote have involved the use of technology such as videography and online communications that in 1977 barely existed.
Mouras spotlighted issues that are all still with us, including sealing, whaling, the fur trade, dog and cat overpopulation, wild horse removal from federal lands, and laboratory use of animals. Williams and DeMello cover almost all of the same topics, and Smith and Dauncy cover most. In each case, though the issues remain, their shapes have evolved, and in only one instance, the ongoing Atlantic Canadian seal hunt, has the situation become demonstrably worse instead of better. In that instance, the seal hunt was suspended for 10 years, 1984-1993, before being revived and made bigger than before.
Despite some setbacks on almost every front, organized animal advocacy has clearly had a positive impact, and most negatives--such as that more animals than ever are being used in U.S. labs--can be countered with context. For instance, that the numbers of animals used in labs have increased because the volume of scientific research now being done is as much as 100 times greater than 30 years ago, offsetting the drastic reduction in typical numbers of animals used per experiment.
The most remarkable aspect of I Care About Animals, in hindsight, is that Mouras presciently anticipated the institutional direction of the animals' cause.
Mouras detailed a growth-by-division phase in which new organizations would split off and grow from the trunks of those already in existence. After that, Mouras expected an epoch in which founders of strong personality would often speak of working together, while usually failing even to collaborate on projects of mutual concern. During this phase, Mouras anticipated, leaders would test a variety of different issues, ideas, and approaches, each attracting some public support, thereby building the cause. Only after that, after the retirement of the most fractious founders, and after many years of donor migration to the most successful groups, did Mouras expect the merger phase now underway, in which organizations of converging perspective would combine strengths.
Ironically, Mouras seems to have later ignored much of his
own advice. Mouras began United Animal Nations and the Summit for
the Animals as efforts to achieve the movement unity that in 1977 he
saw as unlikely and unnecessary until collaborations and mergers
became inevitable. --Merritt Clifton
Dog Detectives: Train Your Dog to Find Lost Pets
by Kat Albrecht
Dogwise Publishing (701-B Poplar, Wenatchee, WA 98807), 2008. 245 pages, $19.95.
Former police detective Kat Albrecht initially trained sniffing dogs to assist in tracking suspects, finding lost people, and finding cadavers. In 1997 Albrecht discovered that her dogs could also help to find lost pets. After an occupationally related disability prematurely ended Albrecht's police career, she became a fulltime pet detective. Of her first 99 searches, 68 discovered the missing animal or the fate of the animal.
Eventually Albrecht founded an organization called Missing Pet Partnership to promote and teach the use of dogs to find lost pets, following the "Missing Animal Response" techniques she has developed. Her initial template was the protocol for training the Search And Rescue dogs deployed to find missing persons. Albrecht then adapated the SAR approach to the peculiarities of finding lost animals, whose behavior varies considerably from human behavior.
Albrecht trains dogs according to three protocols: Cat Detection, Trailing, and Dual Purpose. These use two different approaches, the area search and tracking. Area searches are typically used either to find an animal who was last seen near home and is probably still nearby, or to find an animal who has been tracked to a specific location such as a park or warehouse, after which the tracking dog can no longer isolate the scent.
Area searches are the primary method used to find cats. Tracking is used to find animals who are believed to have taken a specific direction, for example a dog who panicked during a fireworks display.
Relatively few dogs who excel at area-searching are also good tracking dogs. Most MAR dog handlers will need to train different dogs in order to be able to do both kinds of work--and both are often required as part of a single animal recovery. Some dogs can be trained to do both jobs, but Albrecht tends to discourage the idea of trying to produce Dual Purpose dogs unless the dogs themselves demonstrate dual aptitude, partly because different kinds of training tend to produce dogs who may be respectable generalists, but are not as good at either area searching or tracking as specialists.
A dedicated handler could produce skilled MAR dogs just by following Albrecht's directions--but Albrecht's methods are also quite rigorous, and require frequent practice. Training and using MAR dogs is not work done casually. Neither is any dog suited to MAR training, though Albrecht notes that dogs of the right personality come in range of breeds and sizes.
Albrecht would like every community to have a trained MAR dog team on call. How many MAR dogs any given community could support is open to question, since MAR work is not lucrative, if compensated at all. However, almost every shelter director and animal control officer encounters frequent situations in which a MAR team could help. --Merritt Clifton
The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA
by Norm Phelps
Lantern Books (1 Union Square West, Suite 201, New York, NY 10003), 2007. 367 pages, paperback. $20.00.
If anyone wrote a history of animal
advocacy before Noah built the ark, it missed
the boat. Histories of animal advocacy have
mostly missed the boat ever since.
Many have been plagued by the usual
vexations of historians: lost sources, missing
pieces of contextual understanding, and partisan
ax-grinding, sometimes by the authors, more
often by surviving sources who take the
opportunity to posture over the achievements and
failures of the deceased.
A complicating factor, not afflicting most histories, is that the subjects of animal advocacy not only cannot speak for themselves here and now, but never could and never did.
Some narratives survive even from slaves and victims of genocide, but there are no clandestinely scribbled memoirs to be found from the Little Brown Dog, the Silver Spring monkeys, or any Atlantic Canadian harp seals.
The frustrating aspect of The Longest Struggle is that Norm Phelps covers so much, so well, that the errors and omissions are especially glaring--and, one suspects, could have been corrected with some well-informed proofreading.
To Phelps' credit, he acknowledges and adequately covers the influence on animal advocacy of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, which have been glaringly overlooked in most previous histories of animal advocacy--at least in the west. Unfortunately, after summarizing these sources of ideas, Pythagoreanism, and the major pro-animal teachings originating out of Judaism, Phelps leaps 1,200 years, from Jesus to St. Francis, in a mere two pages, with only one passing mention of Islam, none of Mohammed, and none of the Cathari.
This matters, because while Christianity
did little to suppress blood sport between the
epoch in which Christians were fed to lions and
the rise of Oliver Cromwell, Islam discouraged
cruel spectacles. While much of Europe tormented
captive wildlife as public sport, Islam harbored
the invention of zoos as educational
institutions, within which the animals were
supposed to be treated well.
The Cathari even more directly influenced the west, as the first people who brought ideas from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism to Europe. Arriving by trade routes in the wake of the early Crusades, the Cathari were educated merchants, probably descended from the Thari people of Pakistan and Rajasthan. Like the Bishnoi, who still dwell in Rajasthan, they were strict vegetarians.
The less educated gypsies, who were teamsters, animal exhibitors, and meat-eaters, appear to have traveled with the Cathari, perhaps as servants. The language of those gypsies who reached Ireland, called Shelta-thari, was in the 19th century recognized as a Thari dialect.
The Cathari had long since been exterminated by the Inquisition, after their teachings caught on so well in much of Europe, including southern France, as to challenge the dominion of the Roman Catholic Church. Though what little survives of Cathari belief was filtered through the perceptions of their persecutors, traces of ideas can be discerned that resembled modern Jainism.
Especially of note is that St. Francis and several other saints who were contemporaries of the Cathari seem to have appropriated the most popular of their beliefs, including the idea of being kind to animals, without the culturally problematic moral opposition to meat-eating and defiance of Roman authority.
Though the Cathari were centuries ahead of their time, and St. Francis may not have been the unequivocal animal advocate that history remembers, as Phelps discusses, the Cathari influence appears to live on in the image of St. Francis and the work of generations of pro-animal Franciscans.
Most of The Longest Struggle concerns the
past 200 years, and especially the most recent
50 years, in keeping with Phelps' thesis that
animal advocacy really only began to shift from
an "animal welfare" to an "animal rights" focus
in recent times. Ironically, this thesis might
have been strengthened by paying more attention
to the evolution of the American Humane
Association, which Phelps portrays as the
primary bastion of "welfarism."
Both "rights" and "welfare" factions were active within the AHA from the founding meeting. Internal splits over "rights" vs. "welfare" issues produced the American Anti-Vivisection Society (1883) and the Humane Society of the U.S. (1954). A perennial problem was--and is--that the AHA has always tried to maintain positions on animal issues that harmonize with their positions on child protection, the dominant AHA mission during the first half of the 20th century.
For example, the AHA leaders felt that they could not endorse vegetarianism because they believed that the orphans in their care needed meat. The leaders acknowledged that adults could live well and long without it.
The AHA stalwartly opposed sport hunting, including in a position statement issued soon after the U.S. entered World War II, but dropped this position postwar, as it phased out operating orphanages. The idea was to seek a political alliance with hunter/ conservationists on behalf of protecting wildlife, but the alliance never materialized.
Asked to endorse the surgical procedures
for sterilizing dogs and cats, while battling
eugenicists who favored forcibly sterilizing the
poor, the AHA at first respectfully declined; a
decade later denounced dog and cat sterilization
as "vivisection," though the AHA was not
formally opposed to animal experiments; and held
that position for 50 years, apparently
forgetting why it was taken.
Overlooking the internally conflicted history of the AHA leads Phelps to other noteworthy omissions. One is that the origin of well-funded opposition to animal advocacy began long before he supposes, with the formation of some still extant pro-hunting advocacy groups in the mid-19th century, the American Farm Bureau Federation in 1919, and the National Society for Medical Research in 1945, ancestral to the National Association for Biomedical Research, founded in 1979. The nucleus of the organized opposition to animal rights was accordingly well-funded and well-connected, warning the animal use industries against threats that had yet to materialize, long before the animal rights movement existed.
Another omission is that there was sporadic humane opposition to the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt--and to a similar hunt formerly held in the Prilibof islands off Alaska--for at least 70 years before the International Fund for Animal Welfare made Atlantic Canadian sealing an enduring public issue. Opposing sealing helped to rally the animal rights movement, but this was a case of new activists revitalizing an old cause.
At that, IFAW gets just one mention,
and the Animal Welfare Institute none, though
both were instrumental in developing the tactics
that built the animal rights movement. Friends
of Animals gets one mention. The founder of the
once influential National Alliance for Animal
Legislation is not mentioned; her successor,
under whom it imploded, is credited with her
work.
Most egregiously, Phelps writes of Best
Friends Animal Society cofounder Michael
Mountain, "Had he been born 20 years earlier,
Michael Mountain might have been a hippie in
Haight-Ashbury." Now 60, Mountain was a hippie
in Haight-Ashbury, though he spent much more
time elsewhere. Even then, Mountain and several
other cofounders were building the network that
became Best Friends.
Phelps does much better in tracing the rise of the Fund for Animals and PETA, and the evolution of HSUS. Phelps recognizes the enduring influence of Henry Spira, who died in 1998 but whose strategic views and emphasis on not eating animals are more widely appreciated now than ever in his lifetime.
Phelps' overview is plausible, though
his statistics on animal shelter killing are 15
years out of date and--like others who fail to
correct for inflation--he appears to be unaware
that in inflation-adjusted dollars, the U.S.
retail fur trade has never recovered from the
sales collapse of 20 years ago.
There are other ways to assess the longterm
trends, especially if one gets the numbers
right, but Phelps' conclusion seems right on the
mark:
"Today's activists do not expect us to win
overnight, and perhaps not even in their
lifetimes. But they do expect us to win. A
generation of activists has come of age who did
not experience the disillusionment that their
elders lived through. When they came into the
movement--for the most part, within the past
dozen years--it had become obvious that animal
rights was a marathon, not a sprint, and so
they took up activism with no illusions about how
hard or how long the struggle would be."Because of this, they measure success
by a different yardstick than the activists of
the eighties. Instead of disappointment because
they cannot get everything they want, they feel
a sense of accomplishment at every
gain...Insisting on all or nothing is isolating
and alienating, and creates a siege mentality in
which we begin to see our own fecklessness as a
sign of intellectual and moral superiority. This
in turn leads to a kind of fundamentalism, a
holier-than-thou mindset that pursues strategies
designed to preserve our own moral purity and
intellectual rigor rather than to relieve the
suffering of animals."
Phelps wrote The Longest Struggle to help empower new generations of activists, not to carve a stele in stone for all time. It is the most thorough history of animal advocacy published to date, and when a more comprehensive history is produced, The Longest Struggle will be the one by which it is measured. --Merritt Clifton