Grumpy Vegan

Founders can be harmful to organizational sustainability when needed change is stifled or the organization cannot function without that one key individual: one person does not make a community institution.

The vast majority of nonprofit organizations go through a birth-and-growth process that is pretty much the same, no matter the locale or service being provided. And, because of those similarities, most organizations experience the phenomenon known as “Founder’s Syndrome” — a label normally used to refer to a pattern of negative or undesirable behavior on the part of the founder(s) of a organization.

Extract from Surviving Founder’s Syndrome

Whenever people say ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add ‘We must be realistic,’ they mean they are going to make money out of it.

Brigid Brophy, English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. Vegetarian and animal rights advocate. (1929 – 1995)

Key interest groups’ involvement in the policy process offered government a number of possible benefits, including:

• Expertise and information — interest groups often have expert knowledge of a particular field and can therefore be a vital source of guidance and advice for government.
• Legitimacy — having the agreement of key interest groups in an area of government policy can afford the policy a legitimacy in the public eye which it may not have if simply the decision of civil servants or ministers.
• Implementation — the success of policy often depends on the cooperation of particular interest groups. It can be difficult to ensure effective implementation of policy if the groups responsible are not sympathetic to the policy.

Stuart McAnulla, British Politics: A Critical Introduction (London: Continuum; 2006)

We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects. The illogic of this relationship is one that, on a day-to-day basis, we choose to evade, even refuse to acknowledge as present. We, or so we argue, have access to a truth, knowledge, reason and order, into which we place animals. And yet at the heart of that truth, knowledge, reason and order persists this danger, this limitation on our power. Animals are present all of the time in our lives, but frequently we treat them as if they were not there as animals. They are the limit case, if you like, of all of our structures of understanding. They stand between us and our sense of ourselves, but they also allow us to think about ourselves.

Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books; 2002)

My message is that animal welfare, in the general and in the particular, is largely a matter for the law. . . . There is no complete substitute for the law. Public opinion, though invaluable and indeed essential, is not the law. Public opinion is what makes laws possible and observance widely acceptable.

Lord Houghton of Sowerby at the Trinity College, Cambridge, Animal Rights Symposium at the culmination of Animal Welfare Year in 1977.

It is far more important in the very young to attend to the formation of character than the impartation of knowledge, and instead of cramming the children with lessons only meant for the memory and the head, a due share of time should be given to subjects which interest the feelings and improve the heart. It is not merely for the sake of the lower animals that we say this, but for the highest advantages of the pupils. As the effects of cruelty are twofold—hurtful to the poor victims and hurtful to those who inflict the injury, so the effects of benevolence are twofold‚preventing suffering, and improving the hearts of those who show kindness.

Dr. James A. Macaulay, Plea for Mercy to Animals 1875