Author Wayne Pacelle, the President/CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, sat down with Hollywoodoutbreak.com to talk about his new book, The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them (William Morrow, 423 pages). Covering a wide array of subjects (including Pacelle’s meeting with Michael Vick, the Humane Society’s work during Hurricane Katrina, the NRA’s effect on wildlife), The Bond deals with our complex connection with animals.
“I wrote this book to kind of highlight the contradictory set of attitudes we have in our society,” said Pacelle. “On the one hand, we have so much goodness and decency to animals. All this philanthropy, all this pet keeping, all this wildlife watching. Yet in this very same culture we have factory farming, we have puppy mills, we have dog fighting we have seal clubbing. What a tangle of different behaviors we exhibit towards animals. I hope that I can disentangle in The Bond and show people a way forward.”
Click on the media bar and listen to Pacelle discuss his thoughts on Michael Vick, whom he visited in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.
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One chapter in The Bond deals with Pacelle’s time in Louisiana in the harrowing days after Hurricane Katrina. “This terrible calamity for this part of the country actually had some positive outcomes,” said the author. “One positive outcome was it showed the American public the depth of the human/animal bond. So many people would not leave their pets. They would not leave them behind even though they were at risk. They wouldn’t accept the rescuers’ invitation to come on to the boat to escape their current crises because the rescuer didn’t have any instructions to allow animals to come on to the boat as well. So many people said, ‘I’m going to stay behind with my animals because they are my best friends.’ And it was a moving experience and it showed us that you cannot have a proper to a response to a disaster situation without accounting for the human animal bond.”
Click on the media bar and listen to Pacelle talk about the work Wendie Malick (Hot in Cleveland), James Cromwell, Tobey Maguire and Hayden Panettiere (Scream 4) have done with The Humane Society of the United States.
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The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them is now out in stores.
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posted by Greg Srisavasdi
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