Category Archives: Advocacy Groups

Our Privilege to Look

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A link going around Facebook is asking:

Should animal advocates use graphic images of animals suffering or cute pictures of happy animals to get their message across? What simple techniques make people twice as likely to donate money or volunteer their time to help animals?

And come to  think about it, that’s mainly what one sees in animal advocacy: graphic images of animals suffering or cute pictures of happy animals.

Meanwhile, in real life, animals are doing much more than suffering and being cute. In their countless and varied communities, they lead lives of infinite richness.

Consider the “simple techniques” question, posed by someone in another area of social justice. By way of illustration, imagine someone in an immigration advocacy group asking:

Should refugee advocates use graphic images of refugees suffering or cute pictures of happy refugees to get their message across? What simple techniques make people twice as likely to donate money or volunteer their time to help refugees?

When I worked in migrant advocacy, I noticed a photo of the same emaciated child and mother on various fundraising websites. Refugees and asylum-seekers live and move in many roles. They might be homeless; they might be teaching international law. How do they feel when seeing refugees portrayed over and over as mouths to feed, while the fundraising campaigners who use the images have no idea what their lives are like or what their talents are?

Maybe the child and mother whose faces keep appearing, if they are alive somewhere today, are highly skilled people; in any case, these refugees are more than their victimhood.

I’ll get back to the “cute pictures of happy animals” in a later post. But real quick: For an advocacy group or sanctuary to depend on baby-faced animals to solicit funds parallels the conduct of zoos. Circuses, commercials and comedy hours often show chimpanzees smiling, though the smile on the chimpanzee’s face is a signal of fear. Pandas’ big eyes are there not to attract human caregivers; rather, as George B. Schaller writes:

The eye patches enlarge the panda’s small, dark eyes tenfold, making the stare more potent. In addition, a staring panda often holds its neck low, a position that not only presents the eye patches to an opponent but also outlines the black ears against the white neck, in effect presenting two pairs of threatening eyes. Conversely, to show lack of aggressive intent, a panda averts its head, covers the eye patches with its paws, or hides its face…

In other words, pictures that signal vulnerability, whether intended to raise funds or to move people to join a campaign, may inadvertently defy reality and respect for beings, or whole groups of beings, who are represented as helpless, perpetually needing rescue.

MasksThe “simple techniques” for drawing donors and supporters involve short-cutting: The animal advocate who uses shocking pictures and employs emotional words that require no thought (a high percentage of alerts include “cruel” or “horrific” or “barbaric”) can get by with limited understanding of ethical, environmental or political issues. That can be convenient when membership drives, a petition full of signatures, or fundraising take over as goals. It can also fail to respect the audience, and fail to accord genuine respect for the individual or population with interests at stake.

Even the gentlest, most painstaking and studious advocacy films interpret others’ lives through the camera’s lens. Often, the photographer or videographer was a passive witness to a harrowing event, infusing a disturbing element to the very process of obtaining the imagery.

Watching animals is normal for us. We were carefully and frequently taught as children to regard other animals as spectacles. So it takes a conscious awareness to question our privilege to look, and our prerogative to do what we like with the images.

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Online Pet Sales, Facilitated by the Humane Society of the United States

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Welcome to Vegan Place. You’re reading the best entry ever posted here.

Mind you, I wanted Vegan Place’s opening entry to be uplifting, encouraging, and beautiful. But it is not. Because this morning, the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States dropped a heap of disgraceful words about the group’s latest “victory” into my in-box. Well, something needs to be said about that. As in: If this is a humane “victory” what do the defeats look like?

Here’s the e-mail. The bold highlighting is there in the original. And here’s my bold highlighting: This is the codification of online mass pet retailing. 

September 10, 2013

Dear Friend,

I have a huge victory to share with you! After years of pressure from The HSUS, and hundreds of thousands of emails and support from advocates like you, online puppy mills will finally be subject to federal inspections and oversight. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans today to ensure that large-scale breeding facilities that sell puppies over the Internet, by phone, or by mail are licensed and inspected regularly for basic humane care standards. This rule will also apply to large commercial breeders of other warm-blooded pets, such as kittens and small mammals.

We are so grateful for the actions of our advocates. When we stand together, we can make a tremendous difference for animals on a national level.

Thank you for all you do for animals,

Wayne Pacelle, President & CEO
The Humane Society of the United States

I went to Wayne Pacelle’s blog, which posted the announcement today. Pacelle explains that the new administrative rule is “a long-held aspiration for The HSUS, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, and the Doris Day Animal League”–groups that have got the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s inspector general to review enforcement of the rules governing dog breeding, and that found “this glaring gap in the law that allowed Internet sellers to evade any federal oversight whatever.”

Pacelle goes on to thank the Obama administration, the “strong bipartisan support in Congress for closing the `Internet loophole` in the Animal Welfare Act regulations”, and the USDA, which will assign people to license (yes) and inspect the animal vendors.

The very same USDA, as Dissident Voice founder Sunil Sharma observes, “whose `inspectors` regularly visit factory farms and report nothing wrong.”

Pacelle justifies this codification project with one of the most tired old chants: “Puppy mills aren’t going away overnight…”

Of course not, if the world’s most influential humane-treatment group makes a campaign out of codifying them. The HSUS hereby marks its role as the federal regulatory regime for online retail animal sales is rolled out, and declares its key position in deciding who in the industry is not carrying out the sales according to that regulatory regime.

The establishment of the industry-regulating role will be followed by the correlative industry-policing role. Thus, administrative regimes are created with the help of the humane-treatment sector and they beget more jobs in the humane-standards field–an industry upon an industry. University classes are now being created and offered to prepare students for roles in refining animal breeding, use and handling. To say their aspirations to a humane, sustainable ideal amount to a lot of fairy dust would be to understate the actual harms done when the exploitation of animal life is continually hardened into the system of administrative law and custom.

It’s a gorgeous day, the moon has already risen, and I need a run. Thank you for reading. In later posts I’ll try, in the famous words of Harold Chasen’s mother, to be a little more vivacious.

Harold, please

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