ANIMAL FLACKS

Zizi was exactly what a humane society education coordinator was supposed to be: blonde, pretty, smart, and upper-middle-class. Because she really was not so much an educator as a fund raiser, the idea was for her to be a cross between a Junior League museum docent and the primary school teacher you dearly loved. We got along great. She was not at all a snob, she had a high energy level and a wacky sense of humor. No doubt she is somewhere happily enjoying her grandkids by now.

There was another woman who worked with Zizi who was small, dark, and codependent. She LOVED the misery of it all, made it into a great romantic heath-swept tragedy. The more ghastly the animal case, the more she was fascinated. She specialized in dysfunctional boyfriends, often violent, and used to speak of the agonized ecstacy of the gazelle in the jaws of the lion. I expect she’s dead by now.

Humane societies have both a light side and a dark side and they are not usually so well-separated as the example above. For instance, some humane societies claim that they never kill animals -- but when one looks into it a bit further, it turns out that this is because they either don’t accept animals for which they have no space or shift their excess animals to shelters that DO kill animals, often animal control shelters supported by government taxes. They engage in this deception because they are afraid that if the public connects them to death, their donations will diminish. There is nothing so corrupting of nonprofits as the shift of focus from the ends to the means, namely preserving the institution that provides the jobs. If the real end is to stop pet overpopulation and to end cruelty, then achieving that end is literally self-destructive. The goal is to put themselves out of business, isn’t it?

The forces that generate too many puppies and too much cruelty are complex and cultural, as subtly powerful as those that empower gun ownership and drug addiction. At first glance they hardly seem dangerous. Consider the AKC, which I compare to the NRA, both for its enormous political clout and for its insidious promotion of myths, specifically that certain kinds of animal ownership confer certain kinds of prestige, that “breeds” are better than mutts, that pets are consumer objects. If the classified ads in your paper runs “free pets to be given away” across the page from “animals for sale” listing $400 purebred pups “with papers,” that is a pretty good illustration of the schizophrenia we have accepted without question except for a few faint voices now and then.

Anyway, Zizi had a radio program on the local high school station and our agreement was that if she couldn’t find anyone else to interview, I’d come on short notice. I had the same arrangement with a breakfast talk show hostess who broadcasted from a very nice restaurant. I made up a folder of subjects: “five ways to scoop your dog’s poop without making a total fool of yourself” was for Zizi’s show rather than the breakfast crowd. The programs were so short and superficial that there wasn’t much impact, but it did prompt reporters looking for longer stories and sometimes something good would come of it. Zizi let me sneak in some issues that were more animal control than humane society. Zizi did no in-house training, nor did she do research or development.

When Burgwin finally managed to get approval for an animal control education coordinator, we had to work though civil service. (Most animal educators are from humane societies, but sometimes the society has the contract to enforce animal laws.) It was a bit unusual, but a description of the job and criteria for hiring were necessary. I wrote them up, which was a little reflexive, and the results -- ahem -- seemed somehow to closely resemble me. The trouble was that after the tests (which I composed) and interviews were done, I came in second.

First place was a handsome young man who, like Zizi, was a person attractive and persuasive. One of the people on the hiring board was an AHA executive who just found me too unorthodox, frowsy, and, well, “uncommercial” to be effective. It wasn’t the knowledge that was the problem -- it was the image. Burgwin could hire anyone in the top three candidates and, after torturing me for a few days, he did hire me. But it was a strong lesson about our society based on appearances and commodification. It applies to ministers, doctors, teachers -- and dogs themselves.

Dog overpopulation was the main story then. I used to take around a big jar of dry beans. I’d put two out on the table. Dog parents. Two heats a year, assume four pups in each litter: in the next generation ten beans. Assume half female (five), two heats a year with four pups each: forty beans. In a few more generations I was weighing the beans rather than counting them. Then I’d separate out -- this many killed by cars, this many euthanized in shelters, this many dying of distemper, and still heaps of beans left. It was graphic enough that people sometimes gasped. But now dogs are much less of a problem -- now it’s cats, especially feral cats that don’t belong to anyone.

My favorite newspaper photo of me (after the one of me being swiped at by a lion, anyway) was taken when I was about to leave. I had bought a big silly stuffed dog to take around to elementary schools so I could demonstrate how kids should act so as not to get bitten. For the photographer I was joking and said, “Here’s how dogs look when they spot the dogcatcher! YIKES!” And I made the dog’s ears go straight up in the air. The photog loved it. The county officials in suits hated it. Any form of real education made them nervous. Anything funky. Anything that might suggest a loose cannon.

Modern humane societies, like many other modern do-gooder non-profits, would have fired me. Would never have hired me. They are like church denominations, trying desperately to have a unique enough message to bring in the money while never really being radical enough to separate themselves from conventional humane societies. The public never even registers that there’s more than one humane society or that they’re not government functions. HSUS, SPCA, AHA, PAWS, PETA -- all the same to the public. Our culture never blames humane societies, unless they have the animal control contract. So long as officers go out only on cruelty or rescue operations, all is calm. Have you seen the television show on Animal Planet?

There is one area where humane societies are vulnerable: the budget sheet. When the public sees what high salaries the executives get, they are horrified. Here’s where the “cute cuddly pet” syndrome comes home to roost. Only serious grownup people are supposed to get $100,000 a year, especially when the real work is often done by volunteers. (Governmental animal control is controlled by civil service and therefore public knowledge.) A friend sent me the address of a website that publishes the embarrassing budgets of humane societies. I went to the website and found it had been vandalized: all the high salaries were hacked off.

As the fellow lurking in the potted plant used to say, “Very interesting.”