No More Homeless Pets Forum March 21, 2005 Cultural Differences

Merritt Clifton of ANIMAL PEOPLE has traveled widely and visited humane groups around the world and across the US. He will answer your questions about different cultures and the way they relate to animals.

Introduction from Merritt Clifton:

Animal advocates who find themselves challenged by unfamiliar cultures, whether abroad or in U.S. inner cities and on reservations, tend to respond in one of three ways. Some "go native" and become as indifferent to abuse and neglect as anyone else. A few may actually become active apologists for the cruel activity, or even participants, accepting culture as a rationale for such practices as animal sacrifice, bullfighting, trophy hunting, or fur trapping.

Some join or found humane societies whose membership and activities tend to focus rather narrowly on fellow expatriates. Thus British expatriates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries founded hundreds of humane societies all around the world, many of which still exist, without having had the slightest visible influence on their surroundings, because they simply fail to interact.

Some "go missionary." They rant, rave, rail, sometimes persuade, sometimes alienate, cannot be faulted for lack of interactive intent, and yet often do not succeed because they convey the attitude that knowing more about animal care equals moral superiority. Too often the missionaries do not realize that the difference between themselves and the people around them is not a matter of caring but a matter of feeling empowered to act upon their feelings.

I do not believe it is necessary or even intelligent to be "culturally sensitive" to the point of not raising hell about cruelty and neglect. The role of a journalist is to "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, print the news, and raise hell," and I personally have afflicted the comfortable and raised hell all over the world.

At the same time, the role of comforting the afflicted is not to be overlooked, and some of the most afflicted people in every society are the people who care about animals but for cultural reasons have felt unable to raise hell. Those people can be found, and so can the hidden themes within almost every religious or mythological tradition that helped to develop and reinforce their pro-animal attitudes, despite societal repression.

Show me the community that purportedly does not give a damn about cruelty and neglect, and I will show you how to find and empower people who care intensely – much as you yourself may have, at some point, in your own hometown, when you also felt alone in your concern for animals.

Questions

Empowering individuals within a society
Racism and pit bull terriers
So, what should we DO about the pit bull problem?
Winning the trust of Native Americans
Inspiring and involving the 'natives'
Helping our group become more ethnically diverse
The difference between men and women
What kind of culture is the animal rescue community?
Do we lead by explanation...or example?
Is Japan pet-friendly?

Empowering individuals within a society

Question from Tracy:

My take on your introductory comments is that if we want results, we need to empower individuals that already belong to a different culture. These empowered individuals can then create real change in their home countries. Is that right? Do you have some specific suggestions on how to enable animal lovers to "be the change"?

Response from Merritt:

First you have to find the people who care about animals. Then you have to find those who are willing and able to do more, who will usually be among the younger and better educated people.
After that you need to figure out what needs to be done in a specific place.

None of this is necessarily complicated. If you look for people who care about animals on the Worldwide Web or through Internet message boards, they willy-nilly will tend to be the younger and better educated people. A word of caution: verify their activities with an in-person site visit, by yourself or someone you know and trust, before committing funding. The Web and Internet are crawling with scammers who merely talk about loving animals, bagging donated funding in the name of doing all sorts of projects copied from other people's web sites.

If you are in a foreign nation (or among an unfamiliar culture right here in the U.S.), and see animal issues that you wish to address, do not just look at the animals and assume that because you see abuse and neglect, that is all that is going on. The animals would not exist if they were not finding food and shelter somewhere. Look for discreetly placed dishes set out for the animals. In city after city, through eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa, I have heard visitors deplore the treatment of animals, yet never notice the paper plates on rooftops and plastic tubs in alleys, dozens of them sometimes visible from a hotel window, that sustain the homeless dogs and cats, and sometimes the monkeys and the pigeons.

Often those food offerings are made by people who have little or nothing themselves. Sometimes the feeders are capable persons who lost their jobs through technological change. A few have the ability to help found and manage a pro-animal organization. Most will need substantial help in the form of leadership as well as material aid. Most will have no idea how many people like themselves exist.

They will have no concept that they can become a culturally transformative force, because they have not yet met their Cleveland Amory, who as a relatively young man said that his purpose in founding humane organizations was to put combat boots on the little old ladies in tennis shoes. By the time Amory was an old man, he had helped to create the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) in 1954, the International Society for Animal Rights in 1959, and the Fund of Animals (now merged into HSUS) in 1968, and had enjoyed an influential role in founding the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, PETA, SNAP, the Ark Trust (also now part of HSUS), and the Association of Sanctuaries, among myriad others.

In no case was Cleveland Amory the day-to-day driving force behind the formation and success of these organizations, not even at the Fund, where Amory wrote books while Marion Probst handled the organizational affairs. What Amory provided was hope, a vision, and an expression of boundless confidence that the enterprise would succeed. He let the people he worked with figure out what specifically needed to be done in each situation. In confronting patriarchal hierarchies, Amory played the patriarch, but he was bright enough to do so to no more extent than was necessary to give opportunity to the many brilliant women who actually formed and built most of the organizations.

Because of American prestige abroad and the strength of the U.S. dollar, every American and western European animal advocate in an economically disadvantaged nation has the opportunity to do what Cleveland Amory did. You don't have to be a big wealthy man who writes best-selling books. You can be a small, quiet woman of modest means who mostly remains obscure, if you are good at imparting confidence and know how, and making introductions.

I know at least two American women who founded highly successful and influential dog and cat sterilization projects in Latin America, for example, whose incomes were below the U.S. poverty level, though "middle class" for where they were. What they had, that made them successful, was the willingness to engage their communities, and help to empower the people they met who cared about animals, instead of merely wringing their hands about how terrible the conditions were.

This leads to what not to do.
Bad conditions for animals need to be exposed, but they must be exposed in perspective. Rarely if ever are the bad conditions the product of a cruel or indifferent society, as opposed to cruel or indifferent individuals, who are not stopped because most people feel powerless to stop them. Very rarely are the monsters as many or as numerous in broad daylight as they are perceived to be by those whose lives are wrapped up in fighting them.

Humane workers think everyone is cruel. Cops think everyone else drives drunk. Firefighters see the world as arsonists and ringers-in of false alarms. The truth is that is takes only one rotten apple to spoil a barrel, and the best way to excise the rotten apples is to put the good apples into a fresh barrel first.

No matter where I go, in the U.S. or abroad, animal advocates want to occupy my time with war stories and their worst-case photos. Usually they are completely burned out and hate everyone. And usually I don't see a damned thing that I couldn't see in any other community, anywhere in the world. If you respond to cruelty cases, you see cruelty.

Eventually I go off by myself for a long walk or jog, and I start seeing what is really happening: lots of those little bowls of scraps and water here and there, near doors and porches and even on rooftops. There are lots of street dogs who run to particular doorways when I approach, not just any doorway. I see cats who if safely out of reach are as casually disdainful of a passing human as any cats anywhere. Dogs sleeping in open doorways.

Sure, there is cruelty, but no more so relative to the human population than anywhere else. In the Third World, you see it, because it's on the street. In the U.S. and Europe, it is all politely behind closed doors.

Neglect due to lack of knowledge is a whole different problem. Yet there is an easy cure for that. It begins with remembering that Americans and Europeans didn't know how to handle problems like worms, mites, and rabies either just a generation or two back. We're not morally superior to anyone else because we know how to use Ivermectin and vaccinate. What we are is lucky enough to be able to teach it.

Generations of people who cared about animals could only see the suffering and suffer in their hearts. We have the opportunity to live in a time when the resources exist to inspire a complete cultural turnabout, which begins with believing it is possible.

Racism and pit bull terriers

Question from Linda:

Your answer about empowering individuals was the most inspiring piece I've read in a long, long time – at a time when I truly needed to hear it. I've been reading all the info I can on the dogfighting that goes on underground in our country, including a stack of articles I got from Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS') West Coast office. I am developing a plan of attack for our region.

Though I have the assistance of HSUS' regional office, this issue has not really been dealt with in our neck of the woods, and the more I read, the sadder & more repulsed I become. So your response to the reader with this question really helped me to put things in a perspective I can live with and not be overwhelmed by. Thank you! Do you have any other comments on the topic of dogfighting?

Response from Merritt:

The HSUS literature will not really help you a fraction as much in combating dogfighting as it should. Neither will the literature or strategy of any other major mainstream humane society or animal control agency in the U.S., because all of it tends to tap-dance around the crux of the problem.

One of the major reasons why the major organizations in animal protection tend to tap-dance around the problem is a deep and indeed deliberately cultivated misunderstanding of the ethnic and racial issues involved.

Most animal advocates who deal with dogfighting today tend to recognize it as a deadly problem in inner cities, associated with Afro-American and Hispanic drug gangs, as well as with white methadrine addicts in rural areas, but most of the people trying to stop dogfighting today don't know how it came to be where it is.

Most are not clearly aware that as recently as 25 years ago dogfighting was virtually unknown in inner cities. Most U.S. animal control officers had rarely if ever seen pit bull terriers, or American Staffordshires or any of the many other terms used to describe what are essentially just color variants of the same breed of fighting dog.

Dogfighting in most of the U.S. was an artifact of history. Historically, dogfighting had once been practiced in waterfront neighborhoods around the country, brought from England along with the dogs. Dogfighting thrived as a gambling pastime of sailors for more than 100 years, but before it spread far from the coasts and the Great Lakes, it was discouraged by the strict anti-gambling perspective of frontier Protestant religion, by the association of dogfighting with idlers, by the impracticality of transporting fighting dogs by wagon or train, and eventually by the aggressive opposition of the author Jack London.

Allied with Massachusetts SPCA founder George Angell, his voice amplified by the hundreds of Jack London Clubs that Angell sponsored via the American Humane Education Society, Jack London between 1905 and his death in 1916 drove dogfighting out of the respectable sporting press. Dogfighting was soon banned by legislation in almost every state whose legislature the Ku Klux Klan did not control.

From then until the early 1980s, dogfighting was almost exclusively a fundraising activity of the Klan and Klan splinter groups, along with cockfighting and pigeon shoots. As recently as the early 1930s, Klan chapters would openly advertise dogfights, cockfights, and pigeon shoots. As overt racism became less and less respectable, along with cruelty to animals, the ads became more discreet.

By the 1970s, as the Klan itself faded, the Klan connection was barely visible... unless you knew what to look for. By then, the Klan itself had largely morphed into motorcycle gangs and skinheads, and the younger generations of racists had fled to the West and Pacific Northwest, pursuing twisted dreams of building a white supremacist empire that would stretch from Utah to Alaska. Instead of moonshining, they cooked meth. Instead of bed sheets, they wore tattoos.

But they took dogfighting with them. In Oakland, where the national headquarters of the Hell's Angels and the Black Panthers were only blocks apart in the early 1970s, where I first encountered dogfighting, and in prisons all over the country, the white bad guys and the black bad guys met, exchanged cultural influences, and produced mirror images of each other: white pimps. Black dogfighters.

If the Imperial Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan had devised a plot about then to do the maximum possible damage to Afro-Americans, he could not have concocted a more diabolical scheme than to introduce dogfighting to black inner cities.

With the proceeds from dogfighting in decline for generations, there was no longer any reason to keep it as an exclusive franchise, while unleashing pit bull terriers amid crowded housing projects and multi-family small frame houses full of little kids was a surefire way to kill and maim many more children, faster, than the Birmingham Bomber ever dreamed of.

Here was a weapon deadlier than razor blades for inner city youth to fight with, with more backfire potential than a zip gun. Here was an animal who crime-plagued people would chain to porches for protection, who would as often harm them instead.

But the Imperial Grand Wizards Ku Klux Klan are not really wizards at all. There was no big plot to what they did. Certainly they did not anticipate that the bleeding-heart liberal humane community would unwittingly become their strongest allies – and would continue to be for the next 30 years, at least.

During the same years that dogfighting was spreading around the world from port to port with the British Navy and merchant fleet, a few generations before Charles Darwin spent his shore leave deducing the theory of evolution instead of attending dogfights, the principles of selective breeding to produce fiercer fighting dogs and faster racehorses became generally known.

While gamblers produced the pit bull terrier and kindred fighting breeds, upper class dog fanciers developed the concept of the purebred show dog.

They also applied the theory of selective breeding to explain their own good fortune. Inherited wealth was theirs not simply because their ancestors were on the winning side of a war, or kissed the king's butt, or both, but because they were of "good breeding," which perhaps even entitled them to own slaves.

"Well-bred" people of course had to have "well-bred" dogs. From out of the attitude of class superiority came the further notion of the superiority of dogs whose gene pool was deliberately narrowed to the point that a similar narrowing among humans would most assuredly produce idiots. Breeds were defined as "pure" only when it was no longer possible to discern the work of natural evolution among them.

The theory of evolution arrived as a great challenge to this mistaken view of natural hierarchical order. Evolution recognizes adaptability, not specialization, as the ultimate requirement for species survival. Purebreds, human or canine, are maladaptive and foredoomed to extinction. "Breed" and "race" represent the beginnings of slow adaptation into more specialized creatures whose opportunities to thrive despite habitat change over the centuries are relatively limited. The infinite variability of mutts – hybrid vigor – is the trait that best ensures passing one's genes farthest into the future.

Adherents of a belief in racial purity tend to resist accepting the implications of evolution. Remember what I said about the production of idiots.

People who worry about preserving particular dog breeds are mostly unwittingly upholding similarly misguided pre-Darwinian ideas. Dogs themselves did quite well at selecting the traits that would best ensure their survival, including in proximity to humans, for millions of years before humans mucked about in the process, creating breeds, like the pit bull terrier and many dozens of others, who have no natural analogs and could not survive on their own, in their natural ecological niche, without undergoing considerable backward evolution to resemble their much less specialized ancestors.

However, dog breed fanciers are a considerable subset of the dog-keeping population. From the beginning of the humane movement, dog breed fanciers have been among the highest donors to human organizations. When most of the U.S. banned dogfighting in the early 20th century, the humane community abruptly found itself called upon to dispose of countless dogs who had been bred for fights that would now never occur.

Even though those humane societies that held animal control contracts were already struggling to find ways of quickly killing ever larger numbers of harmless humble mutts, the humane community responded to the discomfort of breed fanciers over mass destruction of pit bull terriers by initiating the first large-scale attempt to alter the dangerous image of the breed. Books such as Pep: The Story of A Brave Dog were commissioned and distributed to public school libraries, for example, to attempt to persuade the public to adopt pit bulls over humble mutts.

The current claims of pit bull defenders that pit bulls were once America's favorite dog, were not dangerous toward human handlers, etc., can mostly be traced back to that epoch. In fact, the most popular dog breeds when pit bulls are said to have been most popular were the American Collie and the Border Collie, reflecting the then long-time importance of the since almost vanished U.S. wool industry.

Between the early 20th century and the early 1980s, breed fanciers similarly called upon the humane community to help defend and rehabilitate the image of Dobermans and German Shepherds, who never actually rated high in actuarial risk, i.e. amount of payout in death and injury cases relative to the numbers of dogs insured.

Except for trained guard dogs, whose behavior was specifically modified to increase their threat potential, Dobermans and German Shepherds were never demonstrably more dangerous than other large breeds.

Then came the invasion of dogfighting into inner city black neighborhoods. Remember where it came from. Be aware that a black child is now three times more likely to be killed or maimed by a dog before age 10 than a white child. Be aware of the role of fighting dogs in guarding the crack houses that menace entire neighborhoods with the sort of traffic they attract. Know the extent to which bad guys with their bad dogs have amplified the fear that inner city people already had of street crime.

Remember the origin of the whole idea of "breed" as a virtue, among people dedicated to maintaining their own privileged status by equating it with their own "racial purity," distinguished by "good breeding."

Now consider the irony that in the mistaken equation of "breed discrimination" with human racism, the Humane Society of the U.S. and American SPCA, among others, have since 1984 joined the American Kennel Club in leading the opposition to breed-specific legislation that would fight the proliferation of dogfighting in exactly the same manner that we fight drug abuse: by prohibiting the production and sale of the dangerous item and associated paraphernalia.

Prohibiting the production and sale of crack, speed, and heroin in no way interferes with the legitimate production and use of drugs of authentic medicinal value.

Prohibiting the production and sale of dog breeds who have been artificially manipulated to become weapons will in no way interfere with the right to existence, such as it is, of any well-behaved living dog. It will merely ensure the rapid reduction in numbers of the only dogs who in the U.S. are bred and disposed of like meat, with an average lifespan of only about 18 months, whether killed in the ring or euthanized by an animal shelter, and a euthanasia rate of 93% when admitted to animal shelters.

Pit bull terriers and their close mixes, constituting fewer than 5% of the U.S. dog population, have accounted for half the total actuarial risk in each individual year since 1982. Rottweilers have accounted for about 25%, and all other breeds combined have accounted for the remainder.

While there are human victims among all classes and ethnic groups, Afro-Americans, especially Afro-American children, have suffered most.

Failing to fully integrate the Afro-American community into humane work during the 20th century, after a promising start in the 19th century, was the first great dereliction of duty toward Afro-Americans of the U.S. humane movement. The second was failure to keep dogfighting from spreading into the Afro-American inner city, from the most racist niches within white America.
Both failures now need to be rectified, as does a significant dereliction of duty toward dogs.

No dog chooses to be a pit bull. As Randy Grim has observed among the feral dogs of the abandoned industrial areas surrounding St. Louis, dogs themselves genetically select away from pit bull traits as rapidly as they can, so that within two generations any defining pit bull characteristics disappear.

Comment from Phyllis:

The only other observation I would like to mention is that, from what I've seen in California, at the hearings at the end of the 1980's when Art Torres attempted to have pit bulls banned, because of the growing number of attacks, the publicity of the Senate hearings (and especially testimony from the major humane groups which discussed how lucrative dog fighting can be), caused Latino gangs to realize the money and power of owning pit bulls and fighting them in an organized manner. That began what appeared to be an even more intensive and slightly more sophisticated breeding program, in both urban and farm areas where they worked on farms, and then moved into low-income city areas.

Their intrusion into the world of dog fighting created an accessible tool in the race war that occurred as another low-income group competed for recognition in underground areas. However, because they could more easily assimilate into the border areas of White communities, I believe they were also responsible for bringing more pits into middle-class urban life and also causing the acceptance of it as a "cultural" tradition that should just be accepted and overlooked.

I think this, in a way, was also another excuse for large humane organizations and law enforcement to look the other way and not get involved in "discriminating" against La Raza. The Latino (mainly Mexican) youths also had more disposable income because more members of the family worked at menial (but obtainable) jobs and lived in a commune environment. They were more likely to live in a house or somewhere with a yard and more space for breeding and training. They also had more powerful gang connections than many Blacks. They found fighting pit bulls a successful exercise in ethnic combat and a way to drive Blacks out of many of the high drug-sale areas and take over their territory. For instance, most of South L.A. is now Hispanic, rather than Black. Whites interpret a Hispanic youth with a pit bull "normal" and ethnically tolerable; however, a Black youth with a pit bull in the same borderline community is immediately noted with greater alarm.

Also, there is a sexual issue in the entire dog fighting "industry" that is revolting but I think very obvious. The men involved (both young and old, but especially the younger ones) manipulate and force breeding in "rape" machines, and have total dominance over female pit bulls. They treat them like they do women, and can get by with it because the dogs are so stoic and usually acquiescent to all the brutality imposed upon them. I think this sense of power over feminine sexuality is another major factor and source of perverse satisfaction; and also it appeals to some of the sick, weak female druggies who hang around hoping for crumbs. If the dog fighter wins, she moves up in stature. If he loses, at least he is more likely to kick the dog than her.

Please publish more on the racial aspects of this problem. I believe this enlightenment could be a major part of the solution. Please don't EVER stop writing!!

So, what should we DO about the pit bull problem?

Question from Linda:

So, what do you suggest be done about dogfighting? HSUS, as little credit as you give them, has at least encouraged the courts to prohibit felons on probation for drug offenses from owning or possessing pit bulls or any other dogs. You cited the problem of fighting dogs being used to protect crack houses; they are also used in many other aspects by persons involved in illegal activities and persons on probation/parole. Anyone involved with or knowledgeable about dogfighting is aware of the connection between dogfighting, drug sales, illegal gun sales, and prostitution. This is a much broader problem than what the Ku Klux Klan has done to Afro-Americans.

It is a question of how we are going to address the violence that is so prevalent in our culture, race aside. And how are we going to deal with a network of violence (the dogfighting network) that has resources well beyond any government or animal advocacy agency?

Response from Merritt:

Read 100 Years of Lynching, by Ralph Ginzburg, and then let me know if you care to repeat your remarks. The Ku Klux Klan and splinter groups lynched Afro-Americans in 46 of the 48 continental states between 1865 and 1965, tens of thousands of them. They raped, beat, tortured, robbed, and vandalized hundreds of thousands more, most of them innocent of any crime. There is scarcely an Afro-American my age who didn't have a close relative who experienced KKK terrorism first hand.

You are never going to be able to deal effectively with dogfighting until you recognize that, among many young Afro-American men, owning a fighting dog is symbolic of taking away and personally controlling and using a former instrument of repression. Ironically, dogfighting and the proliferation of pit bull terriers in particular, Rottweilers to a slightly lesser extent, are still among the instruments of those who most oppress the Afro-American community – and now the terrorism comes mostly from within.

The white dogfighters, meanwhile, are the same trash they always were, but now they cook methadrine in the rural West and Northwest more than they cook moonshine in the South.
Stopping the proliferation of dogfighting requires recognizing that the linkage to crime is not just an association with crime. It is an association with crimes of repression and dominance, committed by low-status males not just for money or kicks, but as part and parcel of trying to raise themselves up by forcing someone else down.

These days the human victims are usually the women and children who are unfortunate enough to be in proximity to the dogfighters, their own wives and girlfriends... their own children. The most numerous victims are the dogs, several of whom have recently been founded hanged, like lynching victims, in St. Louis.

Why do you suppose that was?

What do you suppose inspired it?

What message was it supposed to send?

Overall, personal participation in violence in American culture is actually much lower than it has ever been. Our schools are far less tolerant of fighting than when I was lad, duking it out daily with gangs of bullies in order to eat in peace the vegetarian lunch I made myself.

Our courts are far less tolerant of drunken brawling, wife beating, and sexual assault. Violent men are held in far less community esteem. The odds that a man will go to war are still just a fraction of what they were during the Vietnam War years, let alone the World War II years. So flush that rhetoric about "the violence that is so prevalent in our culture."

Show me any society, anywhere, that has reduced violence faster. We still have a lot more personal violence going on than our Canadian neighbors, but much less than our Mexican neighbors, whose levels of violence are actually quite comparable to what ours used to be, a mere two or three generations back.

What all of this tells me is that we know what to do about violence and how to do it, once we form a societal consensus that we want less of it. It involves applying a whole range of strategies, from early childhood education to how we manage criminal justice.

One of the most important elements is reducing access to weapons. Restricting where men could take sidearms markedly reduced saloon shootouts, for example.

Another important element is reducing public tolerance of contributory behavior. Not only drunken brawling, but public drunkenness itself is now socially unacceptable, even for sailors on shore leave. That wasn't true half a century ago in many and perhaps most working class neighborhoods.

Both of these elements point toward the necessity and utility of accepting and promoting breed-specific legislation to prohibit the breeding and sale of pit bull terriers, their close mixes, and other dogs bred specifically for fighting characteristics. Rottweilers and their close mixes belong on the list as well, as the only other breed type associated with comparable actuarial risk. Descended from the medieval cart-pulling dogs who were crossed with terriers to produce the ancestral pit bull, Rottweilers are actually among the closest pit bull relatives (other descendants of cart-pulling dogs apparently didn't share much with the fighting dog gene pool, and enjoy generally good reputations). None of them have close analogs in natural dog evolution, all of them are the products of highly contrived human intervention in their gene pool, and there is no rational reason why anyone of good sense and compassion should want to breed more of them.

Incidentally, over-breeding most kinds of dogs, e.g. Dalmatians and Chihuahuas, is eventually self-corrected by market factors. When all the homes are filled, the price drops, so the breeders stop turning them out, albeit after animal shelters are flooded with the homeless offspring.

Over-breeding pit bulls and close mixes is not corrected by market factors, because the dogfighting market exists to profitably dispose of any who flunk out of homes or never find homes, but do not find their way to shelters. The secondary market in fighting dogs and bait dogs for training fighting dogs has kept the over-breeding pit bulls lucrative. The existence of the secondary market makes breeding pit bulls much more like breeding pigs and chickens (or racing greyhounds) than like breeding animals who are not considered short-cycle disposable commodities.

Comment from Gail:

Please send a huge thank you to Merritt Clifton for speaking out clearly and forcefully, clarifying issues which need clarifying. His thoughts are most enlightening, and this understanding of these issues is so very valuable. We in the animal welfare world have needed better understanding of the reasons behind these problems for a long time. Many humble thanks to him for sharing these insights.

Comment from Louise:

I totally disagree with Mr. Clifton's opinion that legislation concerning restricting breeding and selling of pit bulls and Rottweilers is the answer to this problem. His own statements of public acceptance and attitudes towards what is right and wrong are what need to change.

Winning the trust of Native Americans

Question from Tristan:

Often, outsiders (and probably insiders, too) are disturbed by the free-roaming, intact, and sometimes feral dog populations on Indian Reservations. Many Whites would like to open a 2-way dialogue about this phenomenon in order to come up with some viable alternatives. Before they do so, it would be helpful to know what "red flags" Indians react to when relating with non-native Americans. In other words, what ticks them off the most, that we should avoid because it would spell instant death to any possible favorable outcomes? I know any answer would be a big, fat generalization since every Indian tribe is a separate nation with distinct cultures, but is there a common denominator?

Response from Merritt:

One red flag, in this context, might be the term "red flag". It sounds like a pun on "redskin", and similar terms that to many Native Americans are offensive.

Another might be "ticks off". Ticks in the bedding are a constant problem for people who sleep on the ground, and at one time the stereotype of the tick-infested Native American was relatively common. Most white folks today have forgotten it, but insults tend to be remembered longer by those who feel them than by those who fling them.

Still another might be "big, fat". Indigenous people all over the world have had difficulty adapting to a diet of processed foods, rich year-round in fats, starches, and sugar, and many Native American tribes have had more trouble than most. Obesity is a life-threatening social problem on many reservations.

Unthinking, unintentional use of words that might be mistaken for ethnic slurs probably will not cause you problems if you come across as a warm, genuine, helpful person; but if you do not, thoughtless words can contribute to the impression that you are not someone to be trusted. That tends to be true anywhere. The only difference is that you may be a bit more aware of what might be offensive in the company of people you perceive as being more like you.

With that much said, most Native Americans are more "like us" than we realize. Most of our ancestors were comparably traumatized by invasions, massacres, epidemics, and displacement from traditional homelands, but in the Old Country. Most of our ancestors lived for at least a generation in ethnic neighborhoods composed largely of recent immigrants, not greatly different in their emphasis on family, mistrust of government, omnipresent poverty, fear of failure, and frequent incidence of alcoholism from the atmosphere of many reservations.

Most of us are removed from the ethnic "reservations" of our ancestors by no more than the lifespan of our parents or grandparents.

Sang Bob Dylan in 1970, "If dogs run free, then why not we, across the swooping plain?"
Dylan was singing about a common cultural condition, that he expected every listener to recognize as an irony. As recently as the 1970s, many and perhaps most dogs in rural and suburban neighborhoods still ran at large. Fewer than 10% were sterilized, and not even 1% of all pet cats.

The past 35 years have seen a cultural revolution in attitudes toward animal care, which has yet to be fully felt in rural areas and poverty areas. In most instances the dog and cat problems on Native American reservations have little or nothing to do with the residents being Native American, and everything to do with chronic unemployment, lack of transportation, and the nearest veterinarian being a considerable distance away.

There are some differences among tribes in cultural attitudes toward dogs, in particular, which can still appear and be problematic. Dogs traditionally had a high status among most Native American cultures, as in southern Africa, because dogs helped in hunting, driving away wild animals who might prey upon humans (especially children), and helped to pull heavy loads when the villages moved.

There was a caste system among the tribes of the Northwest and Midwest, however, with the most technologically advanced tribes at the top, including the seafaring Haida and Tlinget, along with the horse cultures of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, and the less advanced "dog eater" tribes toward the bottom. The "dog eaters" were so named in derision by the dog-friendly tribes before European settlers ever arrived. They subsisted on the High Plains and western desert, or followed the horse cultures at a discreet distance, scavenging the animals who were not entirely consumed before the horse people moved on. They also scavenged wounded hunting dogs.

Eventually most of the "dog eaters" who survived the conquest of the West were thrown together on reservations with the remnants of other tribes. As all Native Americans became a lower caste in the U.S. for approximately 100 years, the "dog eaters" ethnic identity was largely lost. If remembered at all today, it may be a sore point.

However, former "dog eaters" often made an easier cultural transition into working for white people in animal use industries than other Native Americans. Some prospered, relatively speaking, by being willing to do work such as selling horses to slaughter and rendering dead livestock, that others found offensive. In other words, they more easily accepted the utilitarian view of animals that prevailed among their conquerors.

Though the "dog eaters" ceased eating dogs well over a century ago, the attitude that a dog is a thing rather than a sentient being may persist here and there. Where it does, it is worthwhile to remember that it persists because it was reinforced by people of the dominant culture, who may have been our own ancestors. Somehow it changed for most of us, and it can change there, too.

Far to the north, among the Inuit and Cree of northern Canada, a more recent wound festers. From the 1950s into the 1970s, Royal Canadian Mounted Police shot thousands of sled dogs. Official documents indicate that the shootings were rationalized in the name of controlling threats to human health and safety, or protecting wildlife. Nunavut and Nunavik leaders, however, have long contended that the real purpose of the shootings was to force the Inuit into reservations, under white dominion, obliged to work in a cash economy.

A legacy of the shootings is that even decades later, any effort to reduce the Inuit dog population that is directed by outsiders may be viewed with deep suspicion. Uncontrolled breeding and too many dogs is a constant problem in many Inuit villages, but an effective response requires building trust.

This may be difficult to achieve if one happens to be opposed to fur trapping, seal hunting, trophy hunting of polar bears, killing bowhead and beluga whales, and racing dog sleds. On the other hand, honesty is the best policy. It is not to the advantage of the Inuit, for example, that the Canadian fur and sealing industries hide behind the image of the indigenous trapper and hunter, when fewer than 10% of Canadian trappers and seal hunters are Native Americans, and they collect as little as 5% of the return from pelt sales. Neither is trading access to mineral and hydroelectric resources for trapping and hunting rights to the long-term advantage of the Inuit. Hunting polar bears for trophies will probably not be a booming industry for much longer, given the rapid aging of the trophy hunting population, while global warming is shrinking the bears' habitat.

The worst exploitation of Native Americans underway in our own time is done by those who use the pretext of preserving Native American culture as cover for ruthless consumptive use of animals. Pointing this out may not be popular, but I suspect a truthful critic will be much better accepted and respected than a person who tries to pretend that differences of perspective do not exist.

Inspiring and involving the 'natives'

Note: Merritt's answers are interspersed throughout Terri's question, in italic font.

Question from Terri:

My small org works with a tribal shelter. We have done so for five years now. In the beginning their way of handling pet overpopulation was to corral the dogs in a chicken wire expanse, leave them there in the boiling heat (this is Arizona) and then when they piled up, they would be shot. The cats they shot in a trapping cage.

Obviously this is bad stuff, but within the past dozen years this was also the norm in more than a third of the counties of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi, and still goes on to a lesser extent in many other rural areas where the folks are almost all white.

We made this public knowledge and with that bad publicity, they were shamed into building a shelter for the tribal animals.

If you resort to shame as your motivational force, you have already lost the issue. Shame does not inspire, encourage, or build higher expectations of each other among the people who have been humiliated.

The humane community should have learned to abandon shame as a tactic from the utter failure of decades of shaming to persuade Americans to sterilize pets and adopt strays.

In city after city, county after country, village after village, the turnabout came when shame-oriented old-guard humane workers retired or died, and new people came in with an upbeat message: you, too, can prevent cruelty and save lives. You can be the hero who dismantles the decompression chamber or the gas chamber. You are better than this. You're the one who can do it!

Tribal members can get FREE spay/neuter, license and rabies shots. Yet they don't.

"Free" is too costly for people of already fragile self-esteem, when showing up for the free services amounts to a public confession of poverty and negligence, accompanied by endless scolding because the animals were not fixed five litters ago.

You have to say "Welcome!" and "Thanks!" and mean it.

Our friends at Best Friends are very good at this. The most important thing that anyone can learn from Best Friends is a positive attitude. Everything else is just the tool kit.

We cannot convince them to fix their dogs. This particular tribe is so lazy, it has other tribes talking about how lazy they are.

Lazy, or practicing passive/aggressive resistance to conquest?
Lazy, or depressed?

You could be up against either, or both.

And you sound to me like the two men I once saw who were yelling their lungs out, beating a herd of cows on the flanks with barrel staves, trying in vain to get them to walk up a steep hill to change pastures.

When the men finally gave up, a teenaged girl who weighed less than 100 pounds came in their place with one apple. She tucked it into her apron pocket, walked among the cows for a few minutes, then walked up the hill to the new pasture that the cows were supposed to go to but couldn't see, and all the cows followed. Most of them got a small piece of the apple.

There is still hatred for white people (which is what my org is, no tribal members have ever volunteered), and we have been unable to get over this hump.

How do you know someone hates you if you don't have a close relationship?

I'm a caustic investigative reporter and alleged Asberger's case who appears to make enemies the way some folks eat potato chips. Every time I check my e-mail, five to 50 people are sending flames. But a lot of those folks are not really enemies at all. When they see I don't mean things personally and don't take things personally, they simmer down, put the info I give them to work, and sometimes turn out to be good friends.

The important part is, I engage them. Want to get a tribal member involved?

First off, forget that he or she is a tribal member. This is a person, much like you, who will respond positively to much the same sort of appeal and encouragement.

If someone asked you to catch feral cats or stray dogs for sterilization, for example, and you had never done it before, you might feel too busy, you might be worried about getting scratched or bitten, and you would probably say no. However, if you were asked to catch just one cat or dog who was hanging around your neighborhood, as a favor, and someone loaned you the equipment and went out the first time with you to show you how, you might just get into it, and after catching one, catch many.

The world is full of old guys who used to go fishing and sleep in the sun who now trap feral cats and street dogs for sterilization as a hobby. They still sleep in the sun. They are still doing very much the same thing, but now they do it with more purpose, and all the motivation they need comes in the form of kind and appreciative words from the women who run the programs.

That's just one example. Nathan Winograd likes to talk about how he got bike gang members to foster kittens in San Francisco.

There are any number of other cases in point, but they all begin the same way... with reaching out, one to one, looking for help with just one animal.

I have never met the tribal chairman and she has never contacted me either.

And you have been there how long?

Covering the environment and Native affairs in rural Quebec decades ago, I was always an outsider, an English-speaking white American who came to make trouble, practically by definition.

So what did I do when I blew into each small town?

I walked into the post office, usually located within the village store, and introduced myself. Usually some child would run to fetch the village priest; I rarely had to go looking for him. Someone would pull up some chairs and town councilors would start arriving in pickup trucks or on snow machines. Before I ever had occasion to write a word about the village, or even ask a question, I had met the local leaders, heard their complaints, and promised to write what I could to help them.

I made friends before I made enemies, a lot more friends than enemies in the long run, just by taking the time and trouble to get to know a few people where I intended to work.

If you have been trying to work in rural communities for even 10 minutes and have not yet made a point of making the acquaintance of the local people of influence, you are an alien invader, and it is small wonder that you are getting a negative reception, or none at all.

You need to step outside your force field and say, "Take me to your leader."

When it was suggested they have a thank you dinner for us volunteers it was ignored. The chief tribal ranger told me, "Don't break your arm pattin' yourself on the back," when I told him in the course of five years we have not received as much as a thank you from the tribe.

Why should you? Since you have made very clear that you have only contempt for the people, you are obviously not doing anything "for" them.

If you were truly motivated by the hope of doing something for the animals, you would not be expecting thanks in human terms.

To the locals, you are an alien from hell, doing your own unfathomable thing for your own unfathomable reasons, and the suggestion that a "thank you dinner" should be held probably came across like a conqueror's demand for tribute.

We have paid for medical care for abused and broken animals, we have cleaned the shelter and fed the animals, we have spread the good word about the shelter, giving them good publicity and yet they take all of this as if they are entitled. How do we get in a better place with the bigwigs? How do we convince lazy, ignorant people to get their pets fixed at no cost? Their mission statement mentions stewarding the earth and its animals for their grandchildren yet many of them can't put a bowl of water outside for their dog! How does my organization deal with the disgust we feel for the tribe?

Get out of town by sundown and don't look back. By the sound of it, you have already made such an unholy muck of everything that it will take a newcomer with a better outlook considerable time just to undo the alienation.

On the other hand, once you get your bad attitudes out of the way, leadership in the right directions may emerge from within the very community you denigrate. I have seen that happen time and time again.

When the scolding schoolmarm turns her hickory stick into a broom and rides it into the sunset, the quiet girl or bright, but rowdy boy in the back row emerges as the patient, encouraging teacher who has all the purportedly hopelessly dense heathen learning to read in almost no time.

Not ready to leave town? Here is something else you can do.

Go to see the elders, one by one. Introduce yourself to each one, tell them you know that your work is not succeeding and that your approach is a total disaster, and ask what they recommend. Then listen.

Hear each one out before you say another word. Ask if you can take notes, and then do it. Some may ignore you, some may scold you as you have scolded them, and some might be silent for hours before they respond. Wait. Be patient.

If you have to leave before you get an answer, explain that you have to leave, but promise to return in a few days for the elder's advice. Make sure you do it.

If younger people come around while you are waiting for the elder to speak, tell them your problem too. Often they will be interpreters for the elders. Treat them with the same respect and courtesy.

Digging yourself out of a pit as deep as you seem to have dug for yourself will not be easy, but you probably won't have to do all the shoveling. Others will come to meet you halfway, once they understand that you are sincere.

Helping our group become more ethnically diverse

Question from Monica:

Our shelter/animal welfare organization is without any cultural diversity. We do not have volunteers or Board Members of color. I know, because of this, we are missing the opportunity to attract and engage groups of persons in our community who do care about animals. How can we reach out to those persons not well represented in the animal welfare movement, for example, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans???

Response from Merritt:

Your Board composition does not limit your potential outreach. Most humane organizations have Boards of five to seven members, who scarcely represent all socio-economic strata and all parts of town, and often don't even represent both genders, but nonetheless manage to serve most of the community and most of the town.

How does this happen?

If all of your Board are Republicans, how do you serve Democrats?

If all of your Board are Catholics, how do you serve Jewish people and Protestants?

Turn this around any way you like. It's really the same problem, but chances are you have not ever felt you had any problem with serving Democrats or Republicans or people of other religions who look more or less like you. You have known some of those folks all your life. Some live on your block. You're comfortable with them. They donate, volunteer, and adopt animals.

You are not comfortable with those other folks. You don't know any.

That's the whole problem. You don't know Afro-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. You think of them as strange and different, and besides, you might be afraid of the pit bull terriers and crack dealers on their side of town. You're afraid you'll get mugged if you try to do TNR on feral cats down those alleys.

Well, guess what? Most of the folks who live on that side of town are just as afraid. A black child is three times more likely than a white child to be killed or maimed by a dog before age 10, and that's just one of the crime statistics that keeps inner city people living under constant stress that the affection of pets can help to relieve. The cat ladies over there are even more afraid of being mugged, because it is not just an abstract fear; it is a reality of life, along with the further realities that the nearest veterinarian is 10 miles away, animals are not allowed on public transportation, and taxis won't stop on certain blocks.

But the inner city is not the only place that Afro-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans live. Actually, most live in suburban neighborhoods not much different from those of other Americans. You don't have to go into the housing projects to start doing outreach to minorities. You just have to find the minority meeting place where you might feel least uncomfortable, walk up to the door, and say hello.

Most likely, the place will be a church, but it could also be a community social hall, a school, a firehouse, or a fraternal lodge. It might even be a funeral home.

Don't telephone or e-mail. Those are distancing mechanisms. Go in person. You might take a letter of introduction with you, in case you can't find a person, but usually you will find someone who can introduce you to whomever you need to meet.

That's a start. You are already making contacts.

You say, "Hi. I'm Jo Blow from the humane society. We have a hell of a problem here. We know we are not serving your community very well, and we need help. We'd like to hold a public meeting and find out what we have to do."

Talk about the idea. Explain what the humane society does to serve the rest of the community and wants to do here. Talk about dangerous dogs, feral cats, fostering programs, programs to help older people keep their pets, youth volunteer programs, job opportunities, and if yours is a smaller organization, your role in training people who advance into better jobs elsewhere.

If someone asks why you are doing this for animals instead of children, talk about how reducing harm to animals makes children safer as well.

Get the neighborhood grapevine going. Hire the hall, ask the people whose hall it is to help circulate announcements, and come prepared to listen.

Take notes about every complaint. Respond carefully to each person. Look for ways to work ideas raised from the floor into your program, and involve the people who raise them in the follow-up.

Do this bravely, and soon you will be holding adoption days and sterilization clinics in the ethnic neighborhoods, developing a network of TNR supervisors and other local representatives, and accepting donations, too, even if you do not actually solicit donations in the less affluent areas. As you become the community's humane society, the community will want to donate to help support your work, just as they donate to support their churches, schools, and lodges. You may not see big checks, but you will see carefully hoarded ten and twenty dollar bills. These will represent people who are literally buying into your work.

At a certain point you will suddenly realize that you no longer notice the color or the Spanish accent of the people you are working with. You just think of them by name. You may discover, however, that the grapevine has taken your work block by block right into the inner city neighborhoods you were afraid to visit. The housing project cat ladies will meet you where the cabs stop, with their cats already in the plastic carriers you loaned them. The bad guys won't pay you any mind.

Along the way, there undoubtedly will be times when you feel frustrated and overwhelmed. The animal lovers you are helping will have felt that way all their lives. They will understand a few tears, and will appreciate that you have come to help, even if you are a bit awkward about getting acquainted.

Comment from Brenda:

Excellent! Being an African-American woman, doing Trap, Neuter, Return (TNR) for feral cats, that is excellent advice!!!

Thanks, Merritt!

The difference between men and women

Question from Rita:

As long as you're discussing cultural differences, perhaps you could address the particularly difficult time women in the humane movement have changing the mindset of men when it comes to spay/neuter and hunting for sport. I feel this is an important issue, particularly because the vast majority of animal advocates seem to be women, and it can be hard relating to the mostly male decision makers in local, state, and federal government.

I would like to point out, however, that the men I've met in the humane movement are way more evolved than, say, my couch potato husband, and I am so glad we have them on our side!

Response from Merritt:

You are enormously underestimating your success. Just 35 years ago, under 10% of the dogs in the U.S. were sterilized, and under 1% of the cats. Now more than 70% of the dogs are sterilized, and from 70% of the cats in the most backward parts of the country to 90% plus in the northeast and northwestern coastal cities.

Who done it?

Women, mostly, because women do about 80% of the pet care in homes with both male and female adult residents. Women also do about 80% of the childcare and the cooking. Men keep the car going, take out the garbage, repair things, and do other heavy chores, such as hauling in the sacks of litter and kibble.

Women typically make the veterinary appointments and transport the animals, but as an almost lifelong rural resident in many different places, I have never yet met a man who was not happy to be rid of such traditional male chores as drowning kittens and shooting dogs.

Among the outcomes of liberating men from that work is that men today have much less inhibition about allowing themselves to become emotionally close to pets. I saw that process working among bikers in the San Jose barrio 30 years ago, grizzled old farmers in rural Quebec 25 years ago, and inner city tough guys in Connecticut 15 years ago.

I have run into just three men who were extremely resistant to sterilizing pets over the years. Two were extremely insecure control freaks. The third guy came around quite easily, once I paid him a visit and found out that the basic problem was that his cat was the only female presence in his life, and he was afraid she wouldn't rub against him and be affectionate if she was fixed. Dealing with that was as easy as introducing him to one of my cats.

I have run into equal numbers of women who would not sterilize their pets. They were hoarders. Over time, their net contribution to pet overpopulation was many times greater.

What about hunting?

When I was my son Wolf's age, there were 21 million licensed hunters in the U.S., among about 100 million male Americans. Most hunters under age 16 didn't need a license. Most hunters over age 65 didn't need a license. Small game hunters didn't need a license.

Today all hunters need a license in most states. Despite that enormous increase in the licensing requirements, there are now only 13 million licensed hunters in the U.S., among about 140 million male Americans.

That is a whopping cultural change, and if you look at actual days of hunting participation per year, you see the decline in activity level even more clearly. If you look at the current age structure of hunters, you will see that recruitment is so far below attrition that hunter numbers are expected to drop by half again over the next decade.

Never mind the guys who don't seem to be paying attention. Obviously quite a lot of them are. Move on, talk to someone else, and every now and then look back. You'll sometimes be surprised to see who's following.

In response to men in the animal movement being more evolved: Some is, some ain't. Some of us even look like Sasquatch. Wolf calls me the Humanzee.

What kind of culture is the animal rescue community?

Question from Suzanne:

I have recently joined several rescue listservs, wanting to become involved in rescue. I have been astonished and dismayed at the vitriol that comes forth directed at people who contact these rescue lists to try to re-home their pets without resorting to a kill shelter.

While I agree that it is heartbreaking when someone is apparently abandoning a pet for no good reason, at least the person is contacting a rescue list, rather than a) dumping the animal somewhere, b) killing it him/herself, or c) dropping it off at a kill shelter. Education might be warranted in some situations, where a gentle suggestion might enable the person in question to decide to keep their pet. However, what I see instead, in addition to trying to find placement for the animal (which is good), is flaming the person and making a lot of assumptions about their situation (which is not so good).

One recent post was from a woman who was losing her home and was having to move into an apartment that didn't allow pets. She posted to the list asking for help placing her dog, whom she had kept for 10 years, and was immediately attacked by one rescue volunteer, who implied that she was terribly irresponsible. When I posted a gentle reminder to the list that someone losing her house might not be able to afford an apartment that did allow pets, and that she might very well be devastated by this additional loss (the loss of a house being difficult enough!). I was given the response that when "you've been around as long as I have" I'd see that "pets are always the first to go", meaning essentially that there couldn't be a reasonable reason in her case.

Response from Merritt:

Such scolding by burned out and self-righteous shelter workers, thankfully not nearly so common now as in previous decades, scared generations of people into abandoning pets in duress situations, rather than braving the wrath of the people behind the counter.

The people behind the counter, like many of today's flame-throwing online rescue volunteers, are often chronically depressed, overworked, underpaid for their efforts, don't sleep well from worry about the animals in their care, and frequently got into animal work in the first place because they get along better with animals than with people.

If working at a shelter, they see the animals they may have to kill: hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. If part of an online rescue network, they may formerly have worked at a shelter, or may spend a lot of time in shelters, making the hard choices about which animals they can take out and try to place.

It is easy and understandable for these folks to become embittered, but not in the least productive, and the very people they scold or flame are usually those who least deserve it.

People on the receiving end in shelter work and rescuing know what they see and hear, but historically have been quite poor at interpreting and understanding it.

Only within the past 15 years or so has research into the reasons why people surrender pets gotten past what they say, to look at why they say it, and who says it.

The findings are quite revealing.

To begin with, the person who actually surrenders a pet is rarely the person who actually makes the surrender decision. The person surrendering the pet is often the person who cares most about the animal, without whom the animal would have been dumped or shot long ago.

The person who brings the pet to a shelter or contacts a rescue list is desperately trying to save the animal, under pressure of ultimatums from husbands, wives, other family members, landlords, or neighbors, and is usually relatively powerless: someone else owns the home, is the primary source of income, or [especially in the case of elderly people] has power of attorney.

Second, when the person doing the surrendering seems abnormally detached from the animal, is not in tears about the surrender, and gives glib, often silly reasons for the surrender, much of the time that person is NOT really the pet keeper or primary caretaker.

The advent of microchipping has enabled shelter managers to telephone the homes of "surrendered" pets to find out if the family really intended to make the surrender. In anywhere from a third to half of the "surrender" cases who turned out to be microchipped when scanned, the pet turns out to be inexplicably missing. My understanding is that those who were asked invariably claimed that the animals were not microchipped, but the shelter managers were bright enough to scan them anyway.

The person who "surrendered" the pet turns out to be a disgruntled spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, neighbor or landlord. This is, in fact, by far and away the most common form of pet theft. I don't think anything of a formal nature has been published yet, but I have had quite a few conversations with shelter people who called to find out if anyone else was seeing what they were seeing, or even looking for it, and have been trying to get people to write it up. I have heard essentially the same thing from all parts of the country during the past two or three years.

Fifteen years ago I wondered why surveys of pet owners indicated the possible theft of up to two million pets per year, while total laboratory use and theft for criminal abuse could not account for the disposition of even 10% as many. Now we know. About two million pets per year were "surrendered" back then for seemingly frivolous reasons by people who did not seem to care about the animals' fate.

The people whose indifference contributed most to shelter worker and rescuer burnout were not criminally indifferent toward their pets; they were in fact criminals, committing theft and fraud, and doing immense emotional harm to their human as well as animal victims.

This still goes on, albeit at lesser levels because of greater societal tolerance of problem pets, and everyone who receives or tries to place "surrendered" pets needs to be aware of it.

The flamethrower probably has not been around and dealing with these problems for as long as I have, and I would inform the flamethrower that it is a lot easier to see the sunshine, avoid migraine headaches, backaches, and pains in the butt, and think clearly, when the flow of blood between the brain and the heart is not constricted by sphincter pressure on the cranium from the gluteus maximus.

Loss of a home or any relocation to smaller and more restricted living quarters typically follows the loss of a job or a family member, an illness or injury with protracted recovery time, and/or a disaster, ranging from house fire to tsunami. The original problem is traumatizing to begin with. Add to that the trauma of loss of social status, independence, and familiar surroundings.

Whether the person relocating is an older person who may never again enjoy a home of her own, or a younger person having difficulty becoming established in life, or a suddenly single person trying to cope with divorce or bereavement, shedding the pet is a desperate measure perceived as a last-ditch survival tactic, and as mentioned above, is most often compelled by someone else upon whom the person surrendering the pet is dependent.

Often the person would like to keep the pet. Often, especially when the pet keeper is not elderly, what is necessary is not a scolding but breathing space. Bridge fostering for 60 to 90 days can give the pet keeper the time he or she needs to find a new job, find new accommodations that will accept pets, raise the cost of making the deposit that will persuade a landlord to allow a pet, etc.

Bridge fostering is among the most-needed humane services that most shelters and rescue groups still do not provide. It can keep pets in homes and build community good will as effectively as any other form of outreach. Doing it requires no more than doing any other kind of fostering.

If the pet in a bridge fostering program is not reclaimed within the designated time, the animal can be made available for adoption. That's part of the contract.

But the contract should be renewable. Bridge fostering for people who are called up for active military service may be necessary for as long as two years before the pet can return home. People who need bridge fostering while in jail for non-violent offenses may be away for six months or a year, and sometimes are surprisingly conscientious pet keepers. Their animals may be the only positive relationships they have to return to, upon discharge.

I don't recommend getting into bridge fostering for jail inmates under circumstances that would put the inmates into direct contact with foster families at their homes, nor for inmates who will not be under supervised probation after discharge, including substance abuse counseling.

However, I have had frequent opportunity in recent years to observe at close range the success of a local bridge fostering program that works with Narcanon. Senior Narcanon participants do the fostering, and do a wonderful job.

My informal role is to be on call for help when anyone needs emergency information. So far, the worst problems I have been called about were cats up trees after escaping from houses, and a dog who ran off but later returned.

Do we lead by explanation...or example?

Question from Sonrisa:

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a different country when I visit my relatives! ...

How do we, as individuals, bring up awareness of animal issues without being dismissed as loopy or overly sentimental, preferably without alienating the people we're hoping to influence? Is humor a good approach?

Response from Merritt:

Only the suicidal want to be dunked in the river.

What you are asking, essentially, is "How do I make converts?"

What I am telling you is, forget it. Conversion isn't the way. Try to baptize anyone who isn't desperate to change his or her life, and you will at best have a frustrating experience.

Nobody normal likes to be preached at, but most folks will follow an admired leader. The trick is to lead instead of preach. People who feel strongly about things always want to testify, thump the Bible, sing, dance, roll in the aisles, and save all the sinners, but that is not really how enlightenment is shared, no matter what the creed.

Those are ways of reinforcing the faith among the already converted, at best. At worst, the rhetoric and rituals of religion... any religion, including a completely secular belief in being kind to animals... set the self-professed Holy Joe and Josephine apart from everyone else, and everyone else tends to think the enraptured people speaking in tongues look and sound mighty peculiar. No one who already has friends and a satisfying life wants to be among them.

What works instead?
I don't preach to the sinners until I'm asked, and I don't call them sinners until and unless they define themselves that way. Instead, I set an example.

The first cat I ever had fixed was my own first cat, back in the San Jose barrio in 1976. As a present to my neighbor, the California poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, who had given me the cat a few months earlier as a sickly kitten, I had the mother cat fixed too.

Lorna, at age 20, was already among the best-respected people in the neighborhood. When her cat was fixed, neighbors saw and got their cats fixed. Within a few months the ripple effect had spread for blocks.

Soon thereafter, I moved (as result of my first marriage) to rural Quebec. Within a few days of my arrival, I woke one morning to frantic mewing, and learned soon thereafter that my new in-laws had just conducted their first of usually many spring drownings of unwanted kittens. I didn't have much money and didn't have work yet, but I knew what to do. I got the first female barn cat my new wife and I could catch fixed, others pitched in to do the rest, and no more kittens were ever drowned on that farm. Word about what we were doing spread to the village.

I won't pretend that by the time I moved, 12 years later, unwanted kittens there were history. In fact, about six months before I moved, my last local cat rescue was of a kitten I still have, Alfred the Great, who had been used as live bait by a coyote trapper, but somehow escaped. I found and destroyed the illegally placed snare line, as I was authorized to do by the local game warden, and found Alfred's tracks, but couldn't find him, amid heavily falling snow, at dusk, in an abandoned junkyard with a zillion places to hide. I gave up when there was nothing else to do, trudged sadly home, and was astonished when my former mother-in-law pointed out the kitten who was hobbling through the snow 50 yards behind me.

Reversing the bad habits of centuries is not quickly or easily done, yet the story of Alfred includes several other closely related lessons.

I was authorized to destroy illegally placed trapping and snaring lines as result of discovering a poacher's traps, on posted land, on Christmas Eve during my first winter in Quebec. I missed the family dinner and was out past midnight, following and removing a long trapline that I had discovered in our woodlot during mid-afternoon.

I placed the steel-jawed leg hold traps on a railway that cut through the property. After the night freight pulverized the traps as easily as it would flatten pennies, I put the remnants of each trap back for the trapper to find. Then I erased my tracks, as a hint that these woods might be patrolled by the mysterious Loup Garou, the legendary Quebec werewolf, whose mere mention caused many of the village people to cross themselves.

Never before was I so cold, weary, or hungry in such a satisfying cause, insuring that the holiday would be a day of peace for all living things who lived nearby. The day after Christmas I talked all the neighbors for more than a mile around into allowing me to keep their land trap-free, but I didn't do it by preaching. I was just asking around to try to identify the trapper. I didn't mention having destroyed the traps.

The neighbors I talked with all knew that trapping was cruel, and a potential menace to their dogs and cats, but never before, it seemed, did they feel empowered to stop it. The old game warden was well beyond covering the territory on either side of the Yamaska River on foot, as was necessary to find illegal traplines. But, if I could help him catch poachers, trappers or otherwise, I had their blessings, hardly having to ask.

For as long as I lived there, I covered nine to 23 miles each morning before breakfast on foot, running cross-country, while the legend spread among the poachers that the Loup Garou was in those woods.

Some of the farmers whose land I patrolled probably thought I would be shot by a poacher, or would fall through the ice in a swamp to freeze or drown. Many of them also imagined that I was some sort of strange holy man, because I never ate meat and mortified my flesh daily (as they saw it) with long-distance runs and cold showers. (The cold showers were really because we didn't have hot running water).

In that time and place no one had ever heard of "animal rights." They had, however, heard of St. Francis and various beatified hermits who also cared about the beasts. They saw me as no threat to the rural economy of breeding and killing.

Quebec then did not even have an anti-cruelty law. The only tool against cruelty that anyone had was moral suasion. I left that to my friend Carol Moreau, now deceased, who was so sweet that hardly anyone ever said no to her, the priest, and the postmistress (although I did back them up with my camera from time to time.) What I did was go where they couldn't.

There were many paradoxes about what I was doing. One woman, who owned three farms, always wore a full-length fur coat. She was nonetheless among my first and strongest supporters. On her deathbed she called and begged me to keep up my patrols on those farms. Despite the paradoxes, there was no question that I gradually earned the endorsement of almost everyone there, even some of the folks who worked at the local canned hunt.

Shortly before I moved, when it was known that I would soon be leaving, the mayor and town council secretly arranged for me to receive an honorary 1988 Winter Olympic Games medal. Officially, it was for service to amateur athletics. But there was very little by way of amateur athletics in that village. Everyone knew it was really for the miles of trap busting, chasing deer poachers, rescuing lost dogs and abandoned kittens, and being their local Loup Gareau, who not only helped to keep the community safe but also helped to change the community values, without ever saying much of anything to teach a lesson.

In truth, I could not have preached a sermon if I'd wanted to. They all spoke French. I don't. The only way I could get anything across to anyone was to demonstrate it, and over time, it worked.

Is Japan pet-friendly?

Question from Marti:

I am a teacher who visited Japan two summers ago. I was surprised by the number of people who would not allow pets in their homes. This surprised me due to the strong Buddhist influence there. Can you shed any light on this?

Response from Merritt:

There are three factors of importance involved. The first is that until fairly recently, urban Japanese mostly lived in paper houses. Paper houses and pets don't mix well. The second is that indoor pets make messes. The Japanese emphasis on cleanliness conflicts with basic animal behavior. The third is explained by Elizabeth Oliver, founder of Animal Refuge Kansai, who came originally from England, but has lived much of her life in Japan, Animal welfare in Japan by Elizabeth Oliver, founder, Animal Refuge Kansai

(excerpted from ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2002)
"Visitors to Tokyo who expect to see street dogs, ubiquitous in much of Asia, may be surprised to see only pampered purebreds."

"Perhaps because Japan is an island, street dogs have never been common here, although dogs did once enjoy much greater freedom. Before World War II, dogs were kept primarily by people affluent enough to have a house and land. They may have been kept as guard dogs, but were seldom chained and could roam at will.

"Because they were free and were usually greeted by everyone, they tended to be friendly. Hachiko, for example, an Akita, used to see his master off at the Shibuya railway station in Tokyo every morning and go back to the station to greet him on his return in the evening. One day his master died suddenly, but Hachiko continued to go to the station every day until he died of old age. The Japanese were so impressed by his devotion and loyalty that they erected a statue to him, which still stands outside the Shibuya station.

"A dog like Hachiko could not roam in Tokyo today. People would be frightened of him, and the hokensho would quickly dispatch him to the gas chamber.

"Dogs all but disappeared from Japan during the war years, eaten by the starving people. By the time pet keeping resumed, attitudes had changed. As part of a zealous campaign to eradicate rabies, chaining became mandatory. Stray dogs were hunted down and often brutally killed in front of the public. Many Japanese became dog-phobic.

"To this day some people scream at the sight of a lively dog. Others cross the road to avoid meeting even a well-behaved dog on a lead. Mothers tell their children, "Be careful; the dog will bite you!" So children learn early to fear dogs and to assume that all dogs bite. There is some ironic truth in this, since prolonged chaining increases canine territoriality, making dogs more likely to bite."

Note from Forum Moderator:

Read the complete article from ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2002
Animal welfare in Japan by Elizabeth Oliver, founder, Animal Refuge Kansai http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/02/11/animwelfareJap1102.html.

Comment from Merritt Clifton:

The attitudes and conditions that Elizabeth Oliver describes in Japan today are remarkably similar to the norms of many major U.S. and European cities during the mid-20th century. The rapid transformation of U.S. and European treatment of homeless animals in recent years, still underway, gives hope that Japan too can achieve a rapid turnabout. [See below.]

Japanese shelter data
By Yoshiko Seno
"AnimEarth"

The Japanese dog population is estimated to be 10 million: less than 10% of the human population, about half of the U.S. dog-to-human ratio. The total number of licensed dogs was 5,779,482 in 2000, believed to be 60-to-70% of the population. In Japan 98 self-governing bodies do animal control under the two applicable national laws and city or prefectural bylaws. They killed 280,819 dogs in 1999, or about 2.8% to 4% of the total dog population. This is very similar to the U.S. rate of dog killing. However, since we do not have no-kill shelters doing high-volume rescue and adoption in Japan, many cities unnecessarily kill young and healthy animals. In other cities, people have been working hard to reduce the killing. I have gathered the 2001 animal control data from the major cities and prefectures:

As the numbers are still relatively low compared to those of the U.S., Japan could become a no-kill nation very quickly, if inspired with the will to do so. Some cities are already close to the goal. If those cities could reach it, more might follow.

Note from Forum Moderator:

Go to http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/02/11/animwelfareJap1102.html for numerical statistics for individual cities.

Closing comments from Forum Moderator:

Thank you to the many members who sent in questions for this week's Forum! Transcripts from this and all other forum weeks are archived for easy reference and are made available to all at http://www.bestfriends.com/nomorehomelesspets/weeklyforum/forumarchives.cfm.

For more information and advice related to this past week's topic, please visit the No More Homeless Pets Forum Archives (see link above). The sections on Working with Others and Community Outreach may be of particular interest, particularly The Link Between Animal Abuse and Violence at http://www.bestfriends.com/archives/forums/020705abuse.html and Dangerous Dogs? at http://www.bestfriends.com/archives/forums/022805dangerous.html.

As always, thank you for being part of the forum, and for all you do for the animals!

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