PR Straight Talk

BY MIKE SCHWAGER - PUBLISHED IN FT. LAUDERDALE SUN-SENTINEL, “OUTLOOK SECTION” (Sunday, April 25, 2010)

They are the beloved and comfort of millions. They connect us to what is natural and spontaneous and unconditionally loving in our lives. They take us out of our busyness and complexity, out of our everyday stresses, out of our heads, and bring us into the wonder and joy of each moment.

Dogs are members of more than 43 million households in America, and cats of more than 37.5 million. These feeling, intelligent, loyal creatures give comfort to people of all kinds - to the young, middle-aged and elderly, to families with children, to couples without children, and to those living alone. When they are brought into hospitals caring for children with grave illnesses, or into nursing homes tending to the aged, they become healers who bring smiles to faces. They defend homes as faithful watchers. They save lives, whether on the battlefield, or as brave aides to firefighters.

The fact is, each year we kill 3 million healthy and treatable dogs and cats at our shelters. Here in Broward, the number killed is 10,000 per year. At Miami-Dade Animal Services, it is a horrifying 40,000; and in Palm Beach it averages 18,000.

If we are agree that these animals are precious individuals who have a right to live, then we can also agree that a fundamental paradigm shift must take place at all animal shelters. The new underlying principle must be no-kill.

For those who don’t believe it is possible to transition from kill to no-kill, look at other shelters who’ve done it - in Charlottesville, Va., in Tompkins County, New York and in Reno, Nev. They’ve done it. They show it is possible.

Here are strategies needed for a transition to succeed:

Hire a director who embodies humaneness towards animals in his or her philosophy - someone committed to no-kill. This is the linchpin element in a successful conversion, and in the implementation of the other essential elements that must follow. The director must support a “culture of life.”

Hire staff people who are likewise committed to humaneness, and the no-kill principle. This means a review of the people on staff to determine who would support the new principle, the weeding out of those who don’t, and the recruitment of those who do.

Make comprehensive adoption programs central to the shelter strategy. Some examples:

Ongoing and intensive public relations/marketing programs. The new director should hire a director of PR/Marketing equally committed to the no-kill principle. If budget precludes a hire, enlist the support of a retired PR professional. This individual should enlist a team of other volunteer PR pros. Consultation with chapter leader of the local Public Relations Society of America can help pull a team together, as well as outreach to the heads of local PR agencies.

Outdoor or indoor adoption events. Work with local Petsmarts, Petcos, pet supply stores, community wellness centers, festivals and carnivals to set up booths presenting dogs and cats from shelters, and literature about the shelters. Arrange ongoing creative vehicles, and redesign a shelter’s website to reflect new culture of life, with a new name, e.g., “Friends of Best Friends.” Conduct active search engine optimization campaign for this website. Air public service spots on television and radio, and complement those with animal photos on major websites like Craigslist. Follow-up with speaking appearances by shelter officials at PTAs, churches, synagogues, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, as well as in-studio appearances on radio/TV. Use those venues to announce off-site adoption events, and incorporate effective signage allowing traffic to shelters.

Help to increase pet retention. The shelter must be perceived by the community as a place to turn to for advice and support on how pet owners can keep their animals at home. Advice can include everything from discipline and house-breaking training programs to neutering programs to food budget savings.

Volunteers. An impassioned, dedicated and large group of volunteers needs to be the lifeblood of the shelter, often complementing too few-in-number paid staff. At Broward’s ACARD, limits have been put on the numbers of volunteers recruited, and volunteers have been discouraged to photograph animals and post on sites like Craigslist, which previously had brought in hundreds of adopters. Recruit volunteers at booths showcasing animals at festivals, carnivals and local pet supermarkets. Heading the Volunteer Corps should be a humane, paid (or retired) director of volunteers. Reports from other shelters indicate that more enthusiastic volunteers will be recruited after it’s known that a transition to no-kill has occurred.

Rescue groups currently account for only a relatively small percentage of animals saved. They need to be encouraged to pull as many animals as possible from a shelter - and not get discouraged from doing so. And that includes not only purebreds but the many greater-in-number and wonderful mixed breeds as well. Rescuers free up cage and kennel space, and reduce costs for feeding, cleaning - and killing. They need our support, not our discouragement.

Feral cat TNR programs. Trap, neuter and release programs have been effected by a number of communities across the country to reduce death rates.

Proactive redemptions. Often overlooked are lost animal reclaims. Sadly, besides having pet owners fill out a lost pet report, very little effort is made in this area. Becoming more proactive has proven to have a significant impact on life-saving and allow shelters to return a large percentage of lost animals to their families. Read animal advocate Nathan Wingrad’s book, Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation.

When you visit an animal shelter, walk up close to a dog or cat, and really look at it, appreciating it for its life and being. You can see and feel that you have simply connected with life, not only its life but your life. Then you can love it as you love yourself.

Mike Schwager lives in Plantation. His animal advocacy site: www.CompassionateAnimalFriendsofBroward.org. E-mail him at mikemaven@comcast.net.

This is the eulogy I wrote for my dear friend Luise Light, who passed away on April 15th.  I was unable attend the funeral in New York.  The remarks were read by her daughter Orrea. She will be sorely missed.

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I have Google to thank for finding Luise Light. It was 2007 and I was searching for a nutritional columnist for my new site, Enrichment.com.  I entered words like “nutritional experts, holisitic nutritional experts” and “stumbled” upon Luise and her book, “What To Eat:  The Ten Things You Really Need to Know to Eat Well and be Healthy!

I say “stumbled” – but now in retrospect, I know that meeting Luise was no accident.  It was as if I had reunited with a dear old friend, someone I had known for eons…and I had the feeling that we were two souls who had rediscovered each other.  Somehow, Spirit, with the help of Google, had let us to each other.

I have never met Luise in person.  That’s incredible to me because our connection was so deep and so satisfying, even if on the phone.  And who can mistake that rich and fullsome “Hello” as she picked up the phone.  Her unmistakable signature.  I think Luise could hardly wait to see who was calling.  For living up in Vermont, and living alone, the phone was her connector to the outside world.  The Internet too of course, but it was as if Luise rejoiced in connecting to people.  I think she celebrated each day in her phone meetings and exchanges with the people who constituted her galaxy of friends and colleagues.

I always felt Luise was full of energy, and enthusiasm, and eagerness to explore the world.  But it was much more than that.  For Luise was an intellectually brilliant person – and she was deeply spiritual in her own unique way.  You see, Luise CARED about the world, and about humanity.  Sometimes, when I’ve thought of Luise, I’ve thought of that statement by Rumi, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”  Because there was some kind of joy in Luise, and I think this joy had an almost kabbalistic quality – and by that I mean Luise’s joy had to do with going about to repair the world, making the world a better place, bringing it aright the way God intended it to be.

Luise cared about what we cavalierly call “Quality of Life”.  But for her there was nothing cavalier about that phrase.  Luise was deeply suspicious and resentful of what happens when entrenched power works for greed, or for anything that demeans the natural and God-given health and quality of life of the individual.  Luise was a true champion of the rights of the individual, a defender of each of our rights to live full and happy lives, and healthy lives.  Consequently, she was a harsh critic of the pharmaceutical industry – an entrenched power that in too many respects, she felt works against our health, overmedicating us and making us sicker, not healthier – all for the sake of more profits – motivated not by a concern for people’s well-being, but by greed.

Luise’s seminal book, What To Eat, shows her as a pioneer in the wellness movement.  As the once director of dietary guidance and nutrition education research at the United States Department of Agriculture – the USDA – Luise was the creator of the famed Food Pyramid.  What many people may not realize is that Luise’s version of the Food Pyramid – the original first draft of the Pyramid – was holistic, and emphasized whole grains and fruits and vegetables.  She was devastated when the USDA turned the tables on her, and reset the contents of the Pyramid by deemphasizing whole grains, and allowing processed flours and sugars and hydrogenated fats to become part of the American diet.  The truth is, is that if Luise Light had been given her way, the great explosion of obesity and diabetes in this country may never have occurred.  That was the potential impact of Luise’s work – and I believe that her pioneering work in striving to navigate a more natural, holistic course for our country laid track for the advent of the holistic food revolution that was about to come.

Dr. Walter Willett, M.D., who was Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said of Luise’s book:  “From her experiences inside the USDA, Dr. Light brings new insights on how powerful agricultural and political forces have created the recipe for our national diet.  Readers who care about their health will find much to learn within these covers.”

What To Eat is still a great book, with great advice about healthy eating, and wonderfully nutritious delicious healthy recipes, all tested by Luise and all standing the test of time.

I recognized Luise Light as a genius early on in our collegial association.  She was clearly a democrat in the small “d” sense of that word – someone who wanted to bring to the light the darker forces at work in political and corporate power mongering – mongering that undermined the health and rights of the individual.  She was a brilliant investigator of the work and movement of these darker forces, and a writer of articles on subjects seeking to expose them.

As her friend, I came to sense that Luise, with all her passion, and brilliance, did not fully recognize the extent of her genius or greatness.  I sometimes felt called to acknowledge her for her great gifts, to remind her of them, and to urge her to continue on her mission – and that the potential for great accomplishments were still ahead of her.  And because she was my friend, I will be eternally grateful to her for standing as an acknowledger and reminder of my own gifts and talents.  We were two souls, each on a mission, who recognized each other, and supported each other by being mirrors of each other’s gifts.

There was something else about Luise – and that is that she was a powerful voice for the Feminine Principle – the principle of Compassion and Kindness that has been sorely lacking in our world for so many centuries.  Without that principle, and its integration into society, everything is lopsided and out of balance.  Wars become rampant.  Holocausts and man’s inhumanity and cruelty to man create great wounding in the world.

Luise was a voice for the reintegration of the Feminine Principle into our world.  She was working on Magdalene as an archetypal representation of that Principle, and I have no doubt that that book, had it been completed, would have received a great and wonderful reception.

Luise introduced me to a man by the name of Dror Ashuah, who is here with you today.  Dror has written a wonderful book, now in multiple volumes, called Conversation with Angels.  It is a book of healing, written by a gentle soul who has been receiving messages from a higher dimension, beings who love us and care about us.

The wonderful thing about Luise is that she could recognize great souls like Dror, who as a man is also a carrier of the Feminine Principle into the world.  Luise assisted Dror as an editor with some of his material.  She had that special gift of recognizing people who are here to bless the world with messages of love and brotherhood and sisterhood.

In so many ways, Luise Light, was an emissary of the Light, and of Universal Love.

Did she have her struggles?  Yes she did.  One trauma she revealed to me, which I feel I can share with you at this time, is that Luise as a very young woman, as a girl really, while on a student trip overseas, was raped.  The ferocity of this act, and the deep wounding it created, set her on a long and sometimes difficult course of healing.  My own feeling is that this experience, while utterly dreadful, also heightened her awareness of the need for the Feminine Principle I just mentioned, the need for Love and Compassion, to come into the world as it has never come in before.

When she told me she had cancer, several months ago, and that it was a particularly difficult type, I recommended a remedy from China that had put my mother Sonny into remission.  Luise began on this remedy, but unfortunately had an allergic reaction to it.  Never, in the several months since Luise learned of her illness, until the time she arrived at the hospice, until the last moments of her life – never did I hear any fear in her voice.  I think part of her greatness is that as much as she felt a great mission still ahead of her, she seemed to also accept the hand that Destiny had given her.  I believe Luise trusted God at the deepest level.

For weeks, and every other day, I had the great privilege to give to Luise, on the phone, a ten minute Spiritual Healing Mind Treatment.  In that treatment, words would be said to her like:  “You are an individualized creative expression of the Infinite Creative Power of God.  There is One Divine Source, One Spirit of Love and Light pervading the Universe.  You are at One with this great Creative Source of all that is forever giving out of the loving action of Spirit.  You ARE Spirit manifest as Luise Light, a being of Light.”

When words such as this were uttered to Luise, she would often respond with the Hebrew Words, “Baruch Hashem” – “Blessed be God’s name”.

In this, I realized that Luise Light had not forgotten her Jewishness.  That she was a true daughter of Zion, living this life as a Universal Jew – and as one truly dedicated to Tikkun ha-Olam – the Repair, the Restoration of the World.  Our great, sweet Luise was one who was here to help bring Heaven to Earth!

My dear great sweet friend – thank you for having been in my life – thank you for seeing me, and dear God, thank you for having in some small way allowed me to have been a mirror for Luise to recognize her own greatness.  For great she surely was and is.

I also want to say that Luise loved her daughters Sarah and Orrea very much.  She told me so, and that she was very proud of them.  I note that the first people – the “women healers” – she dedicates her book to are her daughters, Sara Light-Waller and Orrea Light.

God Bless you Luise – and may you be blessed by all the angels and archangels on the other side – and embraced in the unconditionally loving embrace of God’s warm Hands.

May your Dreams continue onward, into the Celestial Sphere, and may all you have touched and taught, revere you always and touch the world with your light and love.  Amen.

Mike Schwager

April 18, 2010