Empowering individuals within a society
No More Homeless Pets Forum - 3/33/05 -
Cultural Differences
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 Clifton:
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--but a word of caution: verify their activities with an in-person site visit, by yourself or someone you know and trust, before commiting 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 knowhow, 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. Lots of street dogs who run to particular doorways when I approach, not just any doorway. 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.
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Posted on SHARE Yahoo group - 3/22/05