Humane treatment of animals increasingly gains support

Whenever I contemplate the bad things happening in the world today, I reset my mind and think back over the incredible changes in human life that I have been privileged to live through.

There were the two World Wars, won by a courageous union of America, England and resistance movements from Bordeaux to Burma. There was the noble civil rights struggle in the United States, followed by the true liberation movement for women and wondrous attempts to save our wilderness and historic sites.

But as we move deeper into the 21st century, we find another cause to lose our selfish selves in and to herald our humanity in new ways. To me, it may be the greatest cause of all: the humane treatment of animals.

"Oh yes," I can hear you saying, "I understand. I love my Shih Tzu - you know, he is named after my grandfather - and my Maine coon cat, Yankee, is named after a distant relative from Maine who actually fought in the Civil War."

Well, that is just fine, but "the cause for paws" (my silly but loving description) spans infinitely more human space than that. The new idea is detailed in an eloquent new book, "The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals," by the innovative president/CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, Wayne Pacelle.

The quiet-spoken but indomitable Pacelle, who has become the de facto leader of the new movement over the last 10 to 20 years, loves pets and adores his adopted beagle-mix shelter dog, Lily, and his street-saved cat, Zoe. Supported by legions of individual animal lovers and other concerned organizations, he and his allies have already transformed much of horrible world of puppy mills and abandoned and mistreated pets.

Start with the pet store chains, PetSmart and Petco.

"They were once the end sellers," Pacelle writes, "the primary public face of the puppy mill industry. But in the mid-1990s, both companies, growing rapidly by providing all manner of supplies to pet owners, made a strategic decision: They ... threw open their doors to local rescue groups and shelters, giving them access to the foot traffic in their stores. ... It was a new economic model for pet stores."

It was also a bonanza for them. Grateful owners of pets "rescued" in those stores came back again and again for pet supplies, making it a capitalist gain for these stores and many others.

But the movement goes beyond pets; it is going beyond even the hopeless Congress to do whatever is necessary to get capitalists to treat farm animals humanely. It is now working toward, as the book puts it, a "humane economy."

First, a story that reveals a lot about Pacelle and his ability to use his contacts.

He is working in his office in Washington one day. The phone rings. An unknown man's voice says, "Yeah, hi, Wayne," and asks him if he needs help in working "against animal cruelty." (Heck, he always needs help!) The voice then identifies himself as Carl Icahn, the legendary "activist investor" whom Donald Trump often cites as an example for investor moxie.

Icahn's passion about animal cruelty was to become a key element in the gathering crusade. After all, the president of McDonald's would surely take Icahn's phone calls before Pacelle's - and he did. It ended with McDonald's, champion pork purchaser, answering Icahn's pleas that confining mother pigs in crates was "unacceptable." In a complicated series of steps, McDonald's changed its inhumane practices in purchasing pigs, followed by Wal-Mart and a number of other major companies.

Then there is the story of the chicken and the egg: Back in 2007, The Humane Society sent an undercover investigator to the Iowa egg-production company owned by Rose Acre Farms. The investigator's video showed hens packed painfully into small wire battery cages, some unable to move and some already dead.

It took seven years, but then the head of the company phoned Pacelle to announce he was moving toward "cage-free" chickens and invited him over. That victory has been followed by one after the other, until, only this year, Perdue, America's third-largest chicken producer, announced it would begin treating and killing chickens humanely.

The movement has now gone on to include so many farm animals, and even wild animals, that one can look almost everywhere and find its fingerprint. No more elephants, who suffered terribly in their trucks and with hooks, in circuses! No more whales at SeaWorld! An end to lab testing on chimps! One change inspires another, with perhaps the major challenge today being China, where dogs are eaten in massive amounts and the fight has already begun to save the poor creatures.

Wayne Pacelle goes on his way, determined but not alone. He cites biochemists that animals even "release a rush of oxytocin, which can in turn slow or speed up our heart rate, calm or excite us, or generate a smile or tears." But above all, he believes in the moral and even the artistic reasons for the appreciation of animals.

"In the fullness of time," he ends his book, "we'll become more alert to animals, more appreciative of their goodness and their beauty, and more grateful, as we should be, for how they fill the world with sounds, colors and sights that enrich every one of us, in more ways than we know."

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal