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WHAT PASSES FOR "humane education" is generally left to local animal shelters that feel they have fulfilled their obligations if they make an annual visit to primary schools to talk about "responsible pet ownership." Teaching proper treatment of companion animals is important, and no doubt more dogs and cats are spayed and neutered and given proper care because of these school visits.
But humane education needs to expose children and teenagers to the important ethical issues involved with using and abusing animals for food and fur, laboratory experiments, and blood sports. Local animal shelters shy away from controversial topics involving animals because they are dependent on community funding, and they also fear exclusion from contact with schoolchildren if they talk to them about things their parents don't want them to know, or to question. It's really only the national organizations that are in a position to conduct outreach campaigns to youth on the more heavy-duty ethical concerns.
We applaud the occasional serious coverage of animal issues by the mainstream media, but it is erratic and unreliable and often oversimplifies the issues, leaving viewers confused or believing the problem is being resolved. It is no wonder then that we are still fighting against seal clubbing, whaling, the fur trade, and the worse excesses of hunters - all issues that have received intermittent but significant mainstream media coverage over the years. It is for this reason that we originally began ANIMAL PEOPLE as the animals' own media.
For many years, ANIMAL PEOPLE sent free subscriptions to around 1500 school and public libraries, but the program was suspended several years ago due to lack of funding. The foundation that had been paying for the library subscriptions decided that they were going to direct their resources towards the development of non-surgical methods of sterilizing dogs and cats - an important but elusive goal that remains out of reach even now. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding has been provided and is tied up in the pursuit of non-surgical dog and cat contraception.
Indeed it is a worthy goal: an easy method of preventing births of unwanted dogs and cats would revolutionize animal control on a global scale and relieve almost unimaginable suffering. However, if people haven't learned to be more tolerant of street dogs and cats between now and then, they still aren't going to accept the presence of the sterilized dogs and cats long enough for non-lethal animal control to be effective. That people have not learned enough compassion for animals to allow them to simply exist unharmed and unmolested on streets and alleys and in garbage dumps is the major reason now why established dog and/or cat neuter/return projects fail.
Nothing is going to protect animals except a change in human attitudes. I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, "Peace is the only safe border." Something similar applies to animals: creating a state of peaceful coexistence with animals is the only thing that will make them safe.
That is why all of our efforts through ANIMAL PEOPLE have been towards the goal of changing the human dynamic with animals - mainly through publishing the ANIMAL PEOPLE newspaper and sending as many free copies as we can afford; creating our archival website where 18 years worth of articles are freely accessible and where each new edition of the paper can be read in its entirety; empowering animal activists in developing nations by co-sponsoring regional conferences; and by providing whatever funding is made available to help activists in poor countries begin projects and programs designed to raise the floor of animal welfare and make a visible difference - however small it might be.
From the beginning, we challenged animal control dogma with the case for neuter/return, but even as we urged the conventional sheltering community to rethink their rationale for high-volume euthanasia, we encouraged no-kill shelters to become more realistic and to shoulder their share of responsibility for dog and cat overpopulation. We tried to get people working at local humane societies to seriously consider animal rights issues, and we tried to get animal rights activists to understand the enormity of the dog and cat problem.
There is no doubt that ANIMAL PEOPLE would have attained greater circulation and popular support if we had focused just on dogs and cats or just on wildlife. Certainly we would have been more successful financially if we hadn't always been getting into our readers' comfort zones by calls to vegetarianism. But we hoped we would attract readers who were concerned about some kinds of animals and help them to start caring about all animals.
The overarching theme of all the projects we have endeavored to promote and support in the developing world is that all creatures deserve respect and kindness regardless of the species of which they are a member.
Occasionally things haven't turned out successfully. There is a fail rate in all endeavors, and charitable projects are no exception. The important thing is that one doesn't lose faith in the ability to achieve the ultimate goal, which, in the case of animal rights, is creating an entirely new ethic for how people relate to animals.
I have always wondered why it is that people are able to claim that they are morally superior to animals while at the same time using examples of violence in nature to justify doing cruel things to animals - often things so dreadful that the cruelty in nature pales by comparison.
If we were truly morally superior to animals, then we would treat them better than they treat us and not worse. To me this double standard seems the greatest illogic of all human illogics, and I asked Wolf (my son) why it is that more people don't see it for the absurdity that it is. After some deliberation, he replied that it is because humans are in a transition point in history where we are caught between the old paradigm of might makes right and the newer paradigm of respecting the rights of others, and thus we are constantly justifying what we do by both pointing to animals as excuses for our misbehavior ("we eat meat because chimps do it") and as illustrations of why in some (exceedingly rare) cases we may be better than animals.
My interactions with young people recently have made me despair that we are not doing enough and yet have given me hope that things will turn out well eventually.
A favorite movie of mine is Dragonfly, in which a doctor played by Kevin Costner is despondent over the death of his pregnant wife who was working for the Red Cross in the Colombian jungle. He experiences strange phenomena which cause him to imagine that his dead wife is trying to communicate with him. A wise nun who had been studying near death experiences in the hospital where he works tries to explain to him the power of faith. She tells him that it was only because he was able to believe that he could become a doctor that he was able to achieve it, and likewise, she advises, it is the power to believe in an afterlife that gets one into that "white light" that seems to appear after death, if one believes reports of near death survivors. "Belief gets us there," she says.
No doubt it is our belief that we can make a new world for animals that will get us there. While we are aware that all social advocacy (and even political) movements may hold their vision of the truth as the superior one, we are confident in the moral rightness of our cause.
When abolitionists fought to end human slavery in the United States - and it happened less than 150 years ago, remember - they were told that people had always owned slaves, that slavery was sanctioned in scripture, that it was good to breed slaves because otherwise they wouldn't be born at all (into lives of exploitation and often abject misery), that you can't change "human nature," and all the other things that animal rights advocates are told today about why animals are exploited and abused and why it will always be so. No doubt the abolitionists were often discouraged, and probably some of them gave up the struggle because they began to feel it was hopeless. But some continued to believe--however powerful the opposition seemed to be--and it was their belief that got them there.
We know you believe as we do that animals deserve compassion and that one day there will be a world in which our ideals are realized.
In the meantime, we need your help.
The past two years have been extremely difficult financially. We stayed afloat, but could have done much more if resources had been available. With the worst of the economic recession hopefully behind us, we ask for the increased support needed to sustain and to expand our efforts to help create the new world for animals that you and I believe in so deeply.
Everything we achieve depends on the generosity of donors like you. Please help ANIMAL PEOPLE with as generous a gift as you can send today.
For the animals,
Kim Bartlett, President of Animal People, Inc. |
