Indecency remembered: Kitten Stompers at the Supreme Court

Last Tuesday the Supreme Court patted America on the back about its specialness, its  sacred right of free speech, by striking down a law which prohibited the selling of “crush” videos where kittens and other small animals are stomped to death for the sadistic sexual satisfaction of, well, people who have a God-given right to sadistic sexual satisfaction and that most defended corollary American right — the right to make money off of it. The  8 to 1 majority decision (http://is.gd/bAK7p) is a straight up over broad interpretation of a very targeted law which let off the hook nearly every other kind of depiction of animal cruelty — hunting, slaughterhouses, bullfighting, etc. –  as Justice Samuel Alito’s WTF! dissent makes obvious. 

The case in question involved a man selling videos of dogfighting which, like the brutality in “crush” videos, is illegal in every state. However, the eight injustices weren’t interested enough to look at dogfighting on its own brutal “merits” and, instead, twisted themselves into knots trying to find a scenario where the law could be found “over broad.” They came up with a hypothetical someone  in non-hunting Washington, DC (huh? — isn’t it always open season on Muslims there?) possessing a hunting video made in another state. However, even Congressional opponents of the 1999 bill (like Ron Paul) acknowledged that it didn’t apply to depictions of hunting. As Rep. McCollum said, “ The sale of depictions of legal activities, such as hunting and fishing, would not be illegal under this bill.” No matter, the human supremacist court majority wasn’t taking  any chances.

Alito’s dissent made the point that “crush” videos are analogous to child pornography: the conduct that they depict has no redeeming social value, free speech does not protect violent criminal conduct and, without prohibiting the trade in these videos, the crimes depicted are almost impossible to investigate and prosecute. Here’s Alito citing the Humane Society of the United States brief:

“[A] kitten, secured to the ground, watches and shrieks in pain as a woman thrusts her high-heeled shoe into its body, slams her heel into the kitten’s eye socket and mouth loudly fracturing its skull, and stomps repeatedly on the animal’s head. The kitten hemorrhages blood, screams blindly in pain, and is ul- timately left dead in a moist pile of blood-soaked hair and bone.” Brief for Humane Society of United States as Amicus Curiae 2 (hereinafter Humane Society Brief).

The inspiration for this piece was a tweet of Salon’s Glenn Greenwald where he defended the court’s decision. Screw you, Glenn Greenwald, and your lofty liberal white bread apologetics, which don’t mean shit in the real world of “crush” videos and capitalism.

RANDY SHIELDS can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com
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SPECIAL ADDENDUM

MONTH: June 2006
E D I T O R I A L

Progress against dog & cat fur in China

“Senior officials in the Chinese government yesterday vowed to stamp out the trade in cat and dog fur which they described as ‘illegal and barbaric,’” European Parliament member Struan Stevenson’s office announced from Brussels on May 24, 2006.

The announcement appeared to represent a major milestone in the long march toward the passage of humane laws in the world’s most populous nation.

According to Stevenson, the officials he met with described the cruelties of the cat and dog fur trade as violations of general humane statutes which do not yet exist.

From a western perspective, pledging to enforce laws which do not exist might be taken as an empty propaganda ploy. In the Confucian context of Chinese government, the ploy might be as much toward the Chinese public as toward the outsiders.

Either way, the Chinese officials reportedly acknowledged the importance of humane concerns.

At the State Forestry Administration headquarters in Beijing, Stevenson met with deputy forestry administration chair Zhao Xuemin and five other senior officials, including Chen Runsheng, secretary general of the China Wildlife Conservation Association.

Chen Runsheng has already facilitated the phase-out of many of China’s oldest and most abusive bear bile farms. He has also enabled the Animals Asia Foundation to operate a sanctuary for retired bile farm bears near Chengdu, has curtailed feeding live prey to large carnivores at zoos, has worked to suppress the use of rare species in traditional Chinese medicine, and has pursued many other actions seeking to reduce animal suffering and exploitation.

“The State Forestry Administration in China is the government department responsible for all animal welfare issues,” Stevenson said. “I met with the top officials who deal with these policy areas, and gave them a copy of a graphic DVD filmed recently at an animal market outside Beijing, which shows dogs and cats being skinned alive. They were horrified by this evidence.

“Mr Zhao said to me, ‘Chinese law prohibits the barbarian practice of skinning animals alive or indeed any kind of cruelty. We have no tradition in China of wearing fur made from dogs and cats and for centuries have regarded such animals as friends and pets. However, we cannot deny that incidents of cruelty do occur, such as those you have brought to our attention. Sadly this barbaric trade is driven by economic factors. But, these cases you have mentioned have made a strong impression on us and we will make renewed efforts to stamp out these barbaric practices.”

Zhao Xuemin, Chen Runsheng, and the others were almost certainly already aware of the actions shown on the DVD, first exposed to the world on February 2, 2005 at press conferences convened by Swiss Animal Protection, the Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan, and Care For The Wild, of Britain. The video actually depicts the Shangcun Market in Hebei province, relatively far from Beijing. The market reputedly handles about 60% of the Chinese fur trade.

On April 5, 2005, Beijing News photographer Chen Jie and reporter Wu Xuejan unflinchingly affirmed the authenticity of the video, after visiting the market themselves. They added critical coverage of the conditions under which tanuki dogs and foxes are raised for fur. “At present China has no national animal welfare legislation,” Wu Xuejan wrote. “Only the China Wildlife Protection Law and the Regulations on the Licensing of the Rearing and Breeding of Protected Wildlife of National Importance contain some sections covering the management of wildlife breeding.”

The Beijing News exposé of live skinning was only one of many exposés of cruelty published in Chinese government media in recent years, with escalating frequency since the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic of 2004 brought home to many officials that ill treatment of animals has effects that ripple destructively throughout human society.

The emergence and rapid suppression of so-called “crush” videos at a Chinese web site earlier in 2006 was especially noteworthy for the public outrage roused by the torture killing of just one kitten. Twenty-three delegates to the National Committree of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference cosponsored a resolution by member Han Wei calling for the passage of national anti-cruelty legislation.

The Hainan Animal Protection Association announced amid the furor that it expects the Hainan government to introduce the first humane law in China before the end of the year. Similar reports indicate that the city of Beijing may have a humane law in place before the 2008 Olympic Games. The official Xinhua News Agency prominently mentioned both the Hainan and Beijing legislative interest.

Cats have been boiled and eaten in Guangdong since circa 1350, but the practice did not catch on elsewhere in China. The public response on behalf of the kitten killed in the “crush” video may have significantly strengthened Beijing in dealing with Guangdong, the economic hub of southern mainland China, but a city whose globally notorious treatment of animals has long been a national embarrassment.

Historically, the Guangdong attitude toward direction from Beijing, on any topic, has been that “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.” Managed famines meant to starve Guangdong into submission killed millions of people as recently as the 1950s, and helped to reinforce the regional habit of eating “everything with legs except the table.”

Now that Guangdong has become among the most affluent parts of China, dictating policy to the region has become especially sensitive, lest orders be defied and the defiant attitude spread. Thus, before Beijing moves against anything Guangdong does, the rulers like to be sure that the Beijing recommendations have broad national support.

Both SARS and the H5N1 avian flu are known to have jumped into humans from the Guangdong region. The dog meat and fur farms of the region appear to be the last major reservoirs of canine rabies in China, and conservationists have charged for more than 15 years that the Guangdong live markets are sucking wildlife out of the whole of South Asia, even depleting turtle populations as far away as the Carolinas in the U.S.

All of this, however, was beyond the scope of Stevenson’s meeting.

Summarized Stevenson, “I will now report to Commissioner Kyprianou, the European Commissioner for Consumer Affairs, that there will be no opposition in China to his proposed directive banning the import, export and trade in cat and dog skins across the European Union. Indeed, the senior government officials in Beijing made quite clear that they would regard an E.U. ban as helpful in their fight to stamp out this cruel trade. Commissioner Kyprianou can now proceed with all possible speed to get approval for an outright ban.”

ANIMAL PEOPLE received the Struan Stevenson e-mail first from actor/director Dennis Erdman, whom we knew as a committed animal advocate long before becoming aware of his celebrity status.

“I just received this and wanted you to see it immediately,” Erdman said. “As you know, I have been working on this with the McCartneys [Paul and Heather] and Struan Stevenson for about three years. My trajectory started with my correspondence with you. Let’s hope this is the real thing.”

Minutes later, Erdman forwarded Stevenson’s complete minutes of his meeting in Beijing, which provided more about the larger context.

Zhao Xuemin “thanked me for my concern which, he said, the Chinese share,” Stevenson began.

“’In China, plants and animals have rights,’ he said, ‘just as they have in the E.U. We have laws to protect and preserve them,’ he said. ‘Cats and dogs are our friends, and many families in China have these animals as pets. But we have never encouraged farming cats and dogs for their fur. However, there is clearly demand in the EU for these products, which encourages illegal smuggling.

“I am against the export of such items,” Zhao Xuemin told Stevenson, “but although our law strictly prohibits this trade, market demand in the EU keeps it going.”

Added Chen Runsheng, “In the media we occasionally see cases of animals being skinned alive. These are isolated cases, because skinning an animal alive negatively affects the quality of the fur, so it is a practice which is simply avoided by people in the fur trade. It could be that some of these films and stories in the media are made for some ulterior motive,” Chen Runsheng suggested. “But even for these isolated cases the Chinese government takes action and has laws to solve these problems. We carry out spot checks and inspections of fur farms, and we prosecute anyone transgressing the law.

“In China,” Chen Runsheng continued, “cats and dogs cannot be reared for their fur. Only specified animals are approved for this purpose. I reiterate, cats and dogs are our friends and pets. There is no market for these cat and dog fur items in China. Coats and other items made from cat and dog fur are against our tradition. You should do something in the E.U. to outlaw this trade.”

What the announcement means

The Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng statements, while welcomed globally, were somewhat perplexing to much of the animal protection community, including the Animals Asia Foundation, founded by Jill Robinson in 1998, after she had spent 12 years as Hong Kong representative for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

“We called Chen Runsheng yesterday,” Robinson e-mailed on May 25, “and confirm the positive news that China welcomes the E.U. ban of trade in dog and cat fur. This means that the government does not encourage the industry. The sticking point,” Robinson anticipated, “will be banning such trade within China. Whilst Chen Runsheng stated that [the government] is against animal cruelty and abuse, and therefore strongly against the live skinning of dogs and cats, there is no law or regulation prohibiting the use of their fur. It seems that this issue does not fall under either State Forestry or China Wildlife Conservation Association remit and there are no moves to implement any action within the country at all.

“What is particularly worrying are the stories coming out of this where ‘humane slaughter’ is raised,” Robinson continued. “If China brings in ‘humane slaughter’ of dogs and cats for food or fur, we have lost everything, and compromise decades of work by groups in other countries of Asia.”

“China exports the vast majority of the world’s fur,” added Animals Asia Foundation executive director Anne Mather. “Currently there are no animal welfare laws [in China] to protect fur-bearing animals, including domestic dogs and cats, from the most barbaric treatment imaginable. The Animals Asia team have routinely witnessed first hand unbearably small barren cages, violent handling, inhumane transport, and brutal slaughter.”

Contrary to several of Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng’s statements, there has been a secondary market for dog and cat pelts in parts of China for centuries, as a byproduct of the dog and cat meat industry. Recently the demand for cheap fur has allegedly expanded enough that some producers are now raising dogs and cats more for pelts than for meat.

But Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng were both right on the money in pointing out that this development was fueled by European demand.

European indulgence in cheap fur has been fed in the past by the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt in the 1970s, muskrats and nutria trapped in the U.S. in record volume during the 1980s, dog and cat fur from the pelt-selling budkas [pounds] of eastern Europe, and the live markets of China after most of the old-style budkas were replaced in recent years by western-style humane societies and animal control agencies.

“Cheap Chinese fur, including the pelts of cats and dogs, is flooding into Britain and the E.U.,” Care For The Wild charged on April 15, 2006. “The rise of Internet shopping and the anonymity it affords have led to a shocking increase in the availability of Asian fur online.” Care For The Wild chief executive Barbara Maas claimed she was “able to purchase the skins of household pets over the Internet, paying less than £10 for a dog pelt.

“We were also offered skins of domestic cats for less than £2.60,” Maas testified.

“In a two-hour snap survey conducted this spring, I found more garments and accessories made from, or containing Chinese fur than I was able to carry home,” Maas continued. “They included coats, shawls, t-shirts, handbags, shoes and scarves. Some items were on sale for as little as £5.00. Despite industry denials, one retailer admitted that “Everyone sources [fur] from China now––it is much easier and cheaper to obtain.”

British Fur Trade Association figures show that Britain has in recent years imported more fur than any other nation, Care For The Wild charged. British retail fur sales fell from £80 million in 1984 to £11 million in 1989, bringing the closure of 175 of the then-200 British retail fur stores. Britain eventually banned mink farming. Yet the British Fur Trade Association claimed a 35% sales increase in 2000-2001, seemingly reversing many years of pro-animal progress.

The partial recovery of the British fur trade illustrates the difficulty of lastingly changing human behavior toward animals in either Britain, widely considered the most animal-loving of nations, or China, parts of which may be among the most animal-abusive.

Even though the overwhelming majority of British people don’t buy or wear fur, and never did, fur is again seen in London because fur-wearing is an entrenched habit among a high percentage of those who ever wore it, reinforced by the approval of their peer group, little affected by the norms of society beyond their peers.

Fur-wearing might be suppressed in Britain if the non-fur-wearing majority chose to outlaw fur, including imports of real fur products that are mistaken for fake, but while most British people have already been moved to not wear fur, for various reasons of culture, compassion, and economics, the number of fur-wearers probably still exceeds the number of voters and taxpayers who would commit government resources to putting the British fur trade out of business.

Confucian approach

It is axiomatic in politics that a candidate may be elected with only 51% support from a constituency, and legislation may be passed with only 51% support from a governing body, but legislation cannot be effectively enforced unless fewer than 5% of the public are either actively violating it, or are inclined to ignore and even assist violators. Otherwise the enforcement burden becomes much greater than the society is willing to sustain.

Few governments are more aware of this reality than the rulers of China. While China is far from a democracy in any respect, including outward pretense, it is a “People’s Republic” in the sense that almost everyone in political authority understands that the people must be willing to cooperate with any sort of successful change. Most Chinese old enough to hold senior governing positions have personal memories of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, as omnipresent reminders of what can happen when a government tries to impose sweeping change by mandate, instead of allowing the society to grow into it.

If there is one political consensus in China, shared by both the most ardent proponents of democracy and the most conservative wing of the Communist Party, it is that no one wants to live through those “interesting times” again.

Post-Mao tse Tung, the once radical and fanatical Chinese variant of Communism has morphed back toward the Confucian philosophy of governance which has historically been the only approach to succeed in a geographically unified China. Characteristic of Confucian government is day-to-day rule by bureaucracy, which prevents instability through regulating the pace of change. The goal of Confucian rulers is not to deny change, but rather to introduce it element by element, bringing the pieces together at just the right time to avoid resistance. The institutional goal is to facilitate change, which Confucianism sees as inevitable, without provoking conflict.

As an authoritarian system of government, Confucianism expects laws to be obeyed. Yet because Confucianism seeks to impose only laws which will be obeyed, it shares with democracy an inclination to draw authority from what the U.S. Declaration of Independence calls ‘the just consent of the governed.”

All of this is context for understanding the importance of the Chinese federal government response to the live skinning of animals for fur, farming bears for their bile, and the rising clamor from individual Chinese for the passage of national anti-cruelty legislation.

Western animal advocates are often frustrated by Chinese leaders who speculate about whether China is “ready” for an anti-cruelty law, because from the western perspective, the mere existence of an abuse is reason enough to pass a law now, and worry about enforcement later.

From the Confucian perspective, however, an unenforced law is a demonstration of governmental weakness. When a law is introduced, Chinese leadership wants to feel assured that the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens will obey it, will put peer pressure on those who do not, will cooperate with law enforcement in crackdowns against scofflaws, and will not complain that the enforcement effort is drawing attention and resources away from other serious problems.

The latter is relatively more important in China than in western democracies, because in western democracies the existence of institutional opposition accommodates perpetual dissent. Incorporating dissent into the governing structure may be the most stabilizing aspect of western-style democracy. There is no similar feature in Confucian government, which treats dissent as a potential prelude to conflict, either to be suppressed if the dissenters are few, or avoided if they are many.

In this light, the statements of Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng that live skinning and other forms of cruelty to animals are already illegal in China bear further scrutiny. From a Confucian perspective, Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng may have been saying that China is ready at last for humane legislation to be enforced. By claiming that humane legislation already exists, Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng may be creating the expectation of enforcement. Their remarks might be taken as implying that any new legislation will be to reinforce existing norms and values, not to change them.

By portraying a big change as no change, Zhao Xuemin and Chen Runsheng defined those who practice cruelty as the people who dissent from the norm and introduce conflict.

This, in a Confucian society, is a great leap forward in achieving a genuine cultural revolution.

From a western perspective, there is reason for anxiety and mistrust.

Around the world, animal advocates have had decades and in some nations centuries of experience with laws being passed with so many structural weaknesses that they either codify the status quo or cannot be enforced––like the 1991 South Korean law against public consumption of unsightly and disgusting foods. Supposedly passed to curtail dog and cat eating, the 1991 law preceded booms in both, driven by rising affluence.

The boom has now receded, as the dog-and-cat-eating portion of the South Korean population ages and diminishes. Yet there are still enough dog and cat eaters in positions of influence to have stalled efforts to pass a stronger general humane law for more than three years. At issue is whether the new law will distinguish between dogs and cats raised as pets and those raised as meat. Recognizing a distinction would in effect legalize eating dogs and cats.

The 1996 Philippine law against dog-eating, providing an exemption for traditional Igarot ritual practices, is another example. Although authentic Igarot dog-eating is rare, as Igarot guest columnist Bing Dawang explained in the November 2003 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE, the exemption became a pretext for the continued existence of a dog meat restaurant trade which was never part of Igarot culture. In April 2006 the Animals Asia Foundation helped Philippine groups to fight off an attempt by dog meat restauranteurs––who should have been long gone––to repeal the 1996 law.

Implementing change

Jill Robinson is accordingly rightly worried about the Chinese discussion of “humane” methods of killing dogs and cats for fur and meat. The Chinese government might compromise to avoid conflict with the relatively small but influential dog-and-cat-eating population, strongest in southern regions and coastal provinces close to Korea. A Chinese humane law might accept that dogs and cats may be killed, skinned, and eaten, if the killing is done in a prescribed manner.

Robinson’s concern is that this might legitimize a trade that animal advocates would prefer to see abolished.

Public opinion surveying in both China and Korea has already established that the numbers of dog and cat eaters in both nations have already fallen close to the threshold at which abolition could be enforced in a western democracy.

But the same could be said of wearing fur, sport hunting, and fur trapping in the U.S. and Europe.

While as few as 6% to 10% of South Koreans and Chinese eat either dogs or cats, and under 6% of Americans wear fur, hunt, or trap, these activities are still culturally accepted by most of the friends and family of the participants.

With the base of acceptance at 30% or more of society, and with many of the participants (including fur buyers) tending to be older males, holding disproportionate political influence, abolition may still be a generation away.

Only with active participation down to about 1%, and with cultural acceptance down to 5%, is overt prohibition of anything really likely to succeed.

What may be accomplished, meanwhile, is reducing the levels of cruelty involved in dog-eating, cat-eating, the fur trade, hunting, and trapping, while continuing to expand awareness that these are all inherently cruel practices, no matter what may be done to mitigate the suffering they cause.

This is a gamble. In China, as Robinson and others fear, there is the risk that the economic interest of dog and cat meat and fur marketers will prevail over humane considerations if laws exist which say that what they do is “humane.”

In the U.S., we have had 47 years of precautionary experience with the never adequately enforced Humane Slaughter Act, and 40 years of comparably sobering experience with the often amended Laboratory Animal Welfare Act, which became the broader reaching Animal Welfare Act of today in 1971.

The Animal Welfare Act is among the most successful national humane laws worldwide, rivaled only by the laws of Britain and India. Yet the standards it enforces are so low and so limited that many animal advocates tend to see it as a failure. Overlooked is that it has been invoked thousands of times to help put out of business more than 90% of the sellers of dogs and cats to laboratories, traveling circuses and animal shows, and substandard roadside zoos that existed when it came into effect. Eliminating most of these obvious repositories of institutional animal neglect has in turn contributed to raising public expectations of other animal use industries––and has enabled animal advocates to challenge forms of use and abuse which were scarcely noticed a generation ago.

Whatever anti-cruelty legislation is eventually adopted in China will almost certainly exempt much that we wish to prohibit, with frustratingly long phase-ins of enforcement and much need for strengthening amendment. Like the Humane Slaughter Act, it may be ineffective, or like the Animal Welfare Act, it may seem to be enforced so slowly that the real changes it brings about are almost invisible from year to year.

Yet the Confucian way is to take the long view. As ANIMAL PEOPLE editorially pointed out in March 2006, there are already believed to be more than one million pet dogs in Beijing alone, an estimated 150 million dog-keeping homes throughout China, and up to 300 million total pet dogs, according to the highest official estimates. That would be 30 times more dogs than are eaten––and almost five times as many dogs as there are in the U.S., which has the third largest dog population of any nation. The Chinese ratio of pet dogs to humans is already not less than the ratio in Britain, and may be comparable to the ratio in the U.S. and Costa Rica, the most dog-friendly of nations.

Pet cat-keeping, while less documented, is believed to be likewise rapidly expanding. Cats even seem to be achieving new status in Guangdong, according to a Times of India news brief issued on April 14, 2006, which recounted that “Residents of Sanjiang, in Guangdong province,” held a ceremony “to thank cats for eradicating rats from their farms. The village committee spent about $860 to purchase cats,” the Times of India recounted, “whom they released to control the rats. The move was a success and villagers decided to reward the cats for the good harvest they expect this year as a result.”

The rats arrived, necessitating the cat release, “after snakes were caught and slaughtered by local residents in previous years,” the Times of India concluded.

Agrarian utilitarianism

Agrarian utilitarianism is the official Chinese policy toward all animals other than endangered wildlife.

One recent example would be the defense of the bear bile industry issued on January 12, 2006 by Wang Wei, deputy director-general of the Chinese department of wildlife conservation, after the European Union passed a resolution asking China to end bile farming.

Another example of agrarian utilitarian thinking would be the recent move of the foie gras industry into northeastern Jilin province. The Chinese industry leader, the Jifa Grou, partners with Delpeyrat, the second largest foie gras producer in France, which keeps about 4.5 million ducks.

“For the past two years we have produced about 100 metric tons of foie gras in our Changchun factory,” Jifa Group managing director Qi Mingce told Agence France Presse in April 2006. “That’s about two-thirds of Chinese production, force-feeding some 200,000 geese. Our aim is to reach 1,000 metric tons over the next five years with two million geese.”

Endangered species appear to have been protected in China during the past 20-odd years largely as a matter of pragmatic choice: westerners were willing to foot the expense–– creating jobs, introducing technology, and bringing foreign exchange to China.

While endangered species received special status, with poachers in some cases getting the death penalty, ruthless crackdowns on unauthorized dog-keeping repeatedly reiterated the “Great Leap Forward” view of pets as parasites.

As keeping pet dogs becomes ever more popular, however, while recent dog purges have produced increasing internal dissent, the Confucian way would be for Chinese leadership to accept that pet-keeping is rapidly transforming Chinese life and attitudes, just as occurred earlier in the U.S. and Europe, when economic growth enabled ever more of our populations to distance themselves from agrarian utilitarianism.

The Confucian way would be to strive to integrate the new paradigm with tradition, while letting obsolescent practices wither.

There is much work to be done in China to end dog and cat slaughter, and to outlaw extreme forms of cruelty to other species as well, but there is reason to be hopeful.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ANIMAL PEOPLE (AP), the world’s leading independent publication devoted to ecoanimal issues. Bartlett is a veteran activist who formerly edited The Animals’ Agenda, the first animal rights magazine in the anglo-speaking world. She currently serves as publisher of AP and works, too, as incubator and advisor for animal defense groups around the globe. Merritt Clifton is an award-winning environmental journalist and a distinguished reporter and analyst of ecoanimal issues. He serves as Animal People’s editor in chief. 

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