Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“This is my second book,” author Wayne Pacelle told Hollywood on the Potomac at a book launch at the Kalorama home of Juleanna Glover & Christopher Reiter hosted by Juleanna, Karen Brooks & Lisa Spies. “I wrote a book five years ago called The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them and essentially made the argument that we humans have an instinctive connection to other animals. It’s kind of hard-wired in us that we’re drawn to other creatures; kind of like a moth to a flame. It gives us kind of an inclination to be good to animals, but it’s not the final word, and we need to do a lot of thinking and acting in a way that reflects a compassionate concern for all animals. That book was, I think, a really important one for me. Now this book is called The Humane Economy and I argue here that we need to marry our business and our commerce with our values, and that so many companies need to reflect a sensibility about animals, and more and more are.” Pacelle is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Humane Society of the United States.
“From my earliest years, I had an immediate connection with animals. I had all the encyclopedias in my house dog-eared to all the animal entries,” he explained in reference to what time frame was the earliest he was aware of his interest in protecting animals. “My favorite show was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I [subscribed to] National Geographic. I just consumed whatever I could, but I didn’t know there was a larger movement and a cause to help animals; partly because I didn’t know that things were bad for them; that people hurt them; that there were people who did cruel things and there were industries that caused harm to them. When I realized that there was kind of two sides to the equation; that there’s a good instinct that some people have, but there’s also people taking advantage of animals. In college, I started an animal advocacy group in my sophomore year at Yale and we started fighting for animals and I’ve been kind of running ever since.”
We wanted to flip the coin a bit so we asked Wayne to help us understand how animals on occasion turn on their trainers. What happens when the empathy is gone and the trainer is attacked and then the animal is usually killed in return. Is it the animals’ fault and should the animal be subsequently put down? “These are predators, and wild animals belong in the wild. When we interact with powerful, wild animals they can engage in behaviors that are predatory or defensive, and when you’re dealing with a powerful 400 pound animal with one of the most powerful carnivores in the world this is what happens sometimes. It’s terrible. It’s tragic. It’s tragic for the person, it’s tragic for the tiger and that’s why in captive settings, you’ve got to be exceedingly cautious. We’ve got a number of captive wild animals that we house at the Humane Society who were victims of cruelty or some other problem, but we’re very careful.”
John Cleveland with his mother Kathleen Parker, Pulitzer Prize-winning American newspaper columnist and Wayne Pacelle
There were lots of dogs trolling the party, available for adoption. We’re not sure how many made it to a new home, but we were tempted by the tiniest dog who had no teeth – how can you not want to take her home? “Please don’t walk out with them,” said co-host Karen Scott. “Some have adopt me leashes on them and of course reminds us that the Humane Society of the US is a patron of and supporter of rescues all over the country and indeed all over the world. In some respects rescuing dogs and cats maybe what most of you think of when you think of the Humane Society of the US; but in fact, the Humane Society and certain portions of the international arm is on the cutting edge of change when it comes to animal welfare across a full spectrum of issues and it’s really transforming the way animals coexist with us on the planet. Also, one of the things we’re going to be talking about tonight is about how business interacts with animals and the theme of Wayne’s book is creating a humane economy, and really the Humane Society of the US with the society internationally has been at the forefront of changing the way people think in the business world across the world about animal welfare, and it is having an absolute transformative impact.”
Guests included Christina Sevilla, Steve Rochlin, Sean & Rebecca Spicer, Daniel Lipmann, Scott Simon, Nikki Schwab, Becca Glover Watson
“We just had the announcement from Walmart which Kathleen Parker wrote about,” Wayne told us. Her story here. “Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, but it also sells 25% of groceries in the United States which is an extraordinary amount of food. They sell 15 billion eggs and one of the big problems that we’ve identified is the treatment of the animals in agriculture where the hens are jammed in cages where they can barely move. Six or eight birds in a small cage about the size of a microwave, they don’t get out of that for twelve or eighteen months while they’re laying the eggs and then they’re stacked side by side and eight high.”
“I went to one farm in Iowa, one of the largest farms in the US, with ten million birds,” Pacelle added. “I mean there are three million people in Iowa, there were ten million birds at this one farm. You think okay, well we all grow up eating these products but do we really know what’s going on behind the scenes? If you’re like most of us as consumers who have eaten animal products or are continuing to eat animal products, it still really stirs you and you’re like ‘my god are we this miserly to treat animals this way?’ Can’t we do better when it comes to the treatment of these creatures who are powerless before us?”
John Cleveland, Policy Advisor & Special Assistant to the President of The Humane Society and Kathleen Parker
“To have Walmart, as this enormous multi-national company with endless numbers of products, really take a stand for animal welfare is great,” Pacelle concluded. “We’re going to begin overtime scouring all of our eggs from farms that don’t confine their hens so terribly. We just had another announcement from Armani – the legendary fashion company – saying it’s going to end its use of fur. So you can see different sectors of the economy – in fashion, in food, the use of animals in live entertainment, and the book goes through the other sectors of the economy – where we’re starting to have an awakening about animals: That they think, that they feel, that they have their own lives that matter to them, they have families, they have the same will to live that we have. But we’re so often disconnected from what’s going on that it’s just out of sight, out of mind.”
Nope, not a couch guest, but a Dogs for Veterans recipient.
“So we again are trying to shrink that gap and also ask people to check some core values. We all believe in our society that cruelty to animals is wrong,” emphasized Pacelle. “It’s really now just a question of logically applying anti-cruelty principals in a world where animals are brought up in so many different industries and intersected in our consumption habits and our lives in so many ways. The book I think is really an optimistic one that tells us that things are changing for the better. We are constantly improving as a society; we’re not the same society we were twenty years ago, or fifty, or a hundred years ago. We have dealt with a lot of important moral questions and we’ve dealt with them well in some many cases. This is one that demands our attention. Any thinking person should be conscious and aware of our human relationship to animals. There is such an asymmetry in power between us and them that it asks a personal question to do the right thing in this regard. I’m excited to have this discussion around the country with people, and I’m excited to work with so many people who care about the world and want to make a difference. And I hope each of you will find in whatever small or large way you can contribute to this cause and to this effort. I hope tonight will be a moment where you kind of reflect on that and think about ways that you can help.”
