THe Rest of the Story

The reason I became involved with the founding of the Cheboygan County Humane Society was that I had heard that some, but not all, humane societies were against hunting and I wanted to use whatever influence I had to prevent ours from being like that.  Animal control in Michigan is the responsibility of the county sheriff's department, but many of them contract it out to a local humane society.  I think the animal control officer (dog catcher) is still a deputy sheriff, but the humane society runs the animal shelter (dog pound) and handles adoptions and things like that.  In our case, the county bought the property and built the dog pound, then hired the humane society to run it for them. Before that the animal control officer had kept the dogs in his own barn.  It had been a part time job, but with the increase in both the human and animal populations in our county, it was decided to make it a more professional operation.  Since we didn't have a humane society, one of the county commissioners, who was a hunter himself, volunteered to help get one started.  A newspaper article invited anybody who was interested to attend the first meeting, where a board of directors was elected, which included me as vice president, probably because nobody else wanted the job and I didn't know any better.

In retrospect, I think those people all knew each other before that first meeting.  I found out later that the lady who was elected president was a strong minded woman, influential in the community, who was accustomed to getting her own way.  When I made my motion, the other board members,  including the county commissioner who was a hunter, just shuffled their feet and looked at the floor.  When I saw that even he wasn't going to support me, I figured that I was fighting a losing battle and decided that I didn't want my good name associated with that outfit any longer.  As it turned out, our local humane society has never made a lot of anti-hunting noise.  They have mostly stuck to rounding up stray dogs and cats and, last I heard, they were doing a pretty good job of it.  Madame President left town some years ago but, even before that, I don't remember her name being mentioned in news articles about our local humane society.  Does any of this sound familiar Uncle Ken?  By the way, was your Christmas light controversy ever resolved?

The newsletter from the HSUS explained that the reason they were going after the trappers first was because there already was a bit of a rift between hunting dog owners and trappers, and they figured that the hunters would not support the trappers and vice versa.  The bow hunters were next because bow hunting hadn't yet attained the popularity that it has today, and some rifle hunters were resentful of the early archery deer season that had recently been approved.  Some jurisdictions limit deer hunting to shotguns because it is not considered safe to use high powered rifles in populated areas, so you don't really need a high powered rifle to hunt deer.  The whole program reminded me of that famous quote about the NAZIs, "By the time they came for me, there was nobody left to complain."