Some of you may have received an alert from Wayne Pacelle of HSUS asking you to support AB 2343, legislation in California. It would be a mistake. If passed, AB 2343 threatens to take cats from their families and give them to for-profit companies, including potentially, companies who sell animals to research labs. In the case of cats entering shelters without ID, shelters can adopt them out or give them to individuals who sell them the very moment the cat enters a shelter, the very day that animal becomes lost, and before a family even has the opportunity to recognize that their cat it missing. To understand how it does this, I am not asking you to take my word for it. I am asking you to: - Read the bill: bit.ly/1nbKiz3 - Read my analysis: nathanwinograd/?p=14040 - Read the letter from the No Kill Advocacy Center: bit.ly/1hAYwHy - Read the analysis from a Professor of Animal Law at UCLA: bit.ly/1jEvjK8 Then make up your own mind. Pacelle, however, wants you to take his word for it. As the UCLA law professor wrote: “many people have expressed confusion about the characterization of AB 2343 they saw here and the alert they received from Wayne Pacelle of HSUS asking for support of AB 2343. Those confused people should consider the possibility that Wayne Pacelle had not actually read AB 2343 before he sent the alert and that he was instead relying on someone else’s judgment about AB 2343. Look at the alert and ask yourself if there is any indication that he read it. Certainly he does not encourage YOU to read AB 2343. He appears to expect blind reliance, perhaps just like his own.” (See on.fb.me/1gGLBSH) If you want to weigh in on this important issue, you may be asking yourself who you should believe. My advice? You don’t have to believe either of us; what is right or wrong does not come down to who is advocating a particular position, but which position is most likely to foster the kind of outcome you, as an animal lover, would like to see. In fact, your duty to animals requires that you make up your own mind, rather than relying on any one person or organization to tell you what to believe or to do. Humans are fallible. They are also capable of being manipulated. People who we respect can get it wrong. They can also change, become corrupted by power or their proximity to power, causing them to shift priorities so that we while we may believe it is safe, given their history, to defer to them, their calculations and allegiances are no longer in line with ours, and in deferring to them, we err. Because we can never truly know another’s heart, we must come to rely on the only person we can ever fully know and trust: ourselves. We owe the animals an open mind and thoughtful deliberation of those views that contradict our own, but we also owe them the determination to stand up for what we, in the end, determine to be the correct course of action, rather than abdicating that responsibility in order to defer to “leaders” like Wayne Pacelle through cultish devotion. Our duty, first and foremost, lies with the animals who face needless suffering and whose very lives are often at stake. It does not lie in allegiance to “leaders” of the animal protection movement who might be embarrassed, offended, or threatened by others challenging their wisdom or authority. And it doesn’t lie with activists who regurgitate the pronouncements of those “leaders” without first thoughtfully deliberating their validity for themselves. My hope is that, eventually, the animal protection movement will evolve to welcome rather than shrink from points of view that challenge the views of those in the greatest positions of power within our movement, not because all points of view are of identical merit, but precisely because they are not. Pacelle has called this view a “vendetta.” I call it democracy. It is what we owe the animals in a movement of conscience. If you agree with me, here is the call to action: nathanwinograd/?p=14040
Posted on: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 16:06:52 +0000