|
CHICAGO
— Any puppy training class will have its share of
"eureka" moments. With endless repetition and
a big enough bag of treats, even the most unmanageable
dog eventually gets it.
But this,
this was special.
Two
high-school-age brothers were putting their 10-week-old
pit bull through his paces. It was obvious that the
brothers had been working closely with
O.J. He
maintained eye contact with the boys, responded to their
commands, did well on leash and got along with his
frisky classmates.
For
Cynthia Bathurst
, watching from the back of the room, it was one of
those eureka moments times two.
Bathurst,
of
Chicago
, is co-founder and principal director of Safe Humane
Chicago, an ambitious 2-year-old effort to fight
violence by promoting compassion for animals as well as
people. The program uses schools, churches and community
groups — more than 60 organizations have lined up
behind her — to get the anti-violence message to
citizens in high-crime areas.
Especially
young citizens: Get kids to treat animals with care and
respect, and you're on the right track. Clearly, O.J.
and the two youngsters were getting the message.
The
classes are just one part of Safe Humane Chicago's
strategy. It also works with
Cook County, Ill.
, government agencies and
Chicago's
community policing network, and it advocates for
stronger animal welfare legislation and the enforcement
of laws already on the books.
Ending
violence and animal abuse is an uphill battle being
fought on many fronts, but always with Bathurst leading
the way. One day she's making a presentation to 50
felony assistant state's attorneys at 26th and
California
. The next she's on the phone, lining up a location for
an event. The next she may be at one of the classes,
working with the dogs and cleaning up some puppy
spillage. Or, as was the case recently, she accomplished
all three in one long afternoon.
If dogs
are man's best friend, Bathurst likely is a dog's best
friend.
Take O.J.,
for example. In a worst-case scenario, he could have
ended up on the streets or involved in dog fighting. But
thanks to Safe Humane Chicago (safehumanechicago.org)
and through the efforts of his two young handlers, he is
fast becoming what Bathurst calls a good canine citizen.
"We're
training them to be socialized and toward being star
puppies, with the goal that they'll become ambassadors
for their neighborhoods," Bathurst says during a
lull in class.
The
animal welfare and law enforcement communities have long
pointed to statistics that show people who are abusive
to animals are more likely to be violent toward people.
Bathurst's efforts may tell us if the corollary is also
true.
"If
we're kinder to animals, will we be kinder to one
another?" says
Steve Dale
, a dog and cat behavior consultant, author and
WLS-AM
Chicago radio host who has worked with Bathurst.
"Working to help make Chicagoans kinder to animals
is working to help make Chicagoans kinder to one
another. And that is what Cynthia is doing."
The
nonprofit Safe Humane Chicago is one of several
animal-welfare programs that Bathurst has championed.
There was also a first-in-the-nation court advocacy
program for cases involving animal abuse. And there's an
ongoing study that looks at the abused, homeless and
at-risk pet populations from a municipal planning
perspective, which will be presented to the
Chicago City Council
later this year.
Bathurst,
who recently received the
American Veterinary Medical Association's
2009 Humane Award for her work, has been a driving force
behind these groundbreaking initiatives, always on a
volunteer basis. Over a quarter-century, she has built
relationships with law enforcement and child and animal
welfare officials, government and church leaders, and
people in the business world, and she draws on that pool
of expertise when there's a problem to be solved. Maybe
even more impressively, she not only can bring a variety
of people to the table, she gets them to work together
and reach solutions. When dealing with animal issues,
that is no small feat.
"Really,
all I am doing is bringing around a lot of these
networks that I know," she says. "And saying,
'You know this, you know this, let's do this.'
Organizing it, which I love to do, to make a difference.
I've been lucky enough, blessed enough, whatever, and
people have trusted me and it's come as far as it
has."
Interestingly,
this highly motivated animal advocate doesn't have a
dog. Or any pets.
"I
have a great rapport with dogs and cats," she says.
"I grew up with horses, all kinds of animals. I
have great relationships with animals and find it
important."
But she
says she can further the cause by not having pets of her
own. "(Not having a dog) helped me in the nonanimal
world," she says. "That wasn't my agenda. My
agenda was not my dog or cat at home."
Instead,
her agenda is the elimination of violence, and she's
focused on making it happen.
"She
amazes me all the time," says veterinarian
Shannon Greeley
, a past president of the
Chicago Veterinary Medical Association
. "Sitting in on meetings with her and watching her
strategize on how to weave the common thread between ...
groups with opposing opinions or groups that have
different thoughts on paths to a solution, she has this
ability to find that level ground by which we can
approach the problem. I don't think there are a lot of
people who have that ability."
Just
don't ask Bathurst to talk about it.
"She's
very understated, and that's why she's so endearing as
well," Greeley says. "She's not the type of
person who brags or boasts. She lets her actions speak
for her. She's very underspoken in many regards, but her
actions are very powerful."
Julie Castle
has seen it too. She's the director of community
programs and services for
Best Friends Animal Society
, the
Utah
-based organization that was so impressed with Bathurst
and Safe Humane Chicago that it is sponsoring the
program and hired her last year to take it to other
cities around the country under the Project Safe Humane
banner. She is the project's national director.
"She
came out ... a couple of months ago, and we had a
managers meeting," Castle says, "and I asked
each manager to go around and say something about
themselves that people might not know. Cynthia mentioned
some really low-key thing. Somebody asked a question,
and she was very reticent to give up her
accomplishments. And it turns out she is a Ph.D. in
rhetoric."
Bathurst
grew up in
Birmingham, Ala.
, and graduated with a degree in mathematics from the
University of Alabama
in 1974. She went on to the
University of Iowa
, where she earned a master's and her doctorate. She
worked for a
Chicago
company as a mathematical researcher and analyst for
more than 25 years.
As
Bathurst and husband,
Jim Rodgers
— they married while students at
Iowa
, and he would spend 25 years as vice president of
health policy research for the
American Medical Association
— settled into
Chicago
, she became immersed in neighborhood issues.
One of
her first forays into community involvement was with
CAPS, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, and it
started her on what has become a mission to reduce
violence. Bathurst volunteered to go on ride-alongs with
Chicago
police officers, figuring it was a good way to meet
people in her
Lincoln Park
neighborhood.
About
4 a.m.
on that first night out, she and the officer heard
shots. They arrived at the scene — a robbery gone bad,
she says — and she saw a shooting victim die.
"That
had a huge impact on me. ... I watched the whole thing,
and I realized how violence can impact everybody,"
she says.
Bathurst's
community involvement soon grew to include becoming
president of a
Lincoln Park
neighborhood association. Out of that came a committee,
the
Dog Advisory Work Group
, created to handle a growing number of disputes between
dog owners and non-owners. On a broader level, DAWG's
mission was to get owners and non-owners to live
together in peace.
After
DAWG became a separate nonprofit in 2000, Bathurst saw
another area where it could make an impact. She had
become familiar with court advocacy when she followed
the
Lincoln Park
robbery case through the courts. She thought DAWG could
do something similar. Court advocates, for the most
part, are a presence in a courtroom.
This is
especially beneficial in animal cases, because
Illinois
has changed many animal-related laws in recent years —
animal cruelty laws have been toughened, and dog
fighting has become a felony, for example — and has
increased the number of prosecutions.
Since
December 2000
, some 700 people have gone through the court advocacy
training and have attended more than 4,000 hearings.
Advocates are now in court every day, Bathurst says,
representing animal issues.
"We've
gone from cases being dismissed even before the offender
even stood up, to now where they're being taken
seriously," she says.
And while
she credits the volunteers, prosecutors and law
enforcement officials for its success, you have to go
back to how it got started.
"That
was totally her baby," says Dale. "It's just
amazing what she's done to get judges and also attorneys
to pay attention to laws concerning companion animals
and public safety (because) they're just being watched.
...
Chicago
is the first major city in the country, as far as I
know, to do this. It was all Cynthia."
Following
cases of animal abuse and violence, working with police
as they tried to get a handle on dog fighting, and
seeing mounting evidence of the correlation between
violence against animals and violence against people,
Bathurst believed there was a need for a more
comprehensive approach, one in which she could take
advantage of her alliances and organizing skills.
"(The
idea) was, let's form something that everyone in
Chicago
can get involved with," Bathurst says. "They
won't care (about the program) if it's DAWG, they won't
care if it's PAWS, they won't care if it's DCFS. So
let's name it
Chicago
and Safe and Humane."
"We
really know how much of a link there is between violence
against animals and violence against people, especially
children," Greeley says. "The two just seem to
have a deep correlation. So identifying the violence
against animals and dealing with that at a very early
age, and not allowing kids to become desensitized to it,
is really very important."
Safe
Humane Chicago takes ambassador dogs to community
events, where kids can see that dogs have a higher
purpose than to be used for fighting — some children
have never even learned to pet a dog, Dale says — and
teaches high school students the lessons of compassion.
At ground zero, though, are the classes.
"The
biggest challenge is getting that relationship going
when they're young," Bathurst says, watching a
couple of pit bull pups roughhouse. "And then these
young people get so proud. The whole idea is to get
ambassadors out there."
It's
Bathurst's approach that has made the difference.
"I
think the cool thing about her,"
Best Friends' Castle
says of Bathurst, "she didn't start with the animal
piece first. The world I come from, our focus is 'no
more homeless pets.' But where she really started from
is the people and community aspect.
"If
we're going to achieve no more homeless pets, it needs
to happen in that way. It needs to be a community
ownership issue, rather than 'here is an animal welfare
group that is going to save all the animals for us.' It
really needs to be a part of the fabric of the
community."
Bathurst
sounds hopeful.
"If
we are able to target and have public-private
partnerships to tackle these problems," she says,
"we can make life better for the animals and life
better for the people, for the communities, get safer
communities that will be more humane, provide good role
models, do something about this whole dog fighting
thing, the culture of violence.
"See,
it's like changing the world and using animals to do
it."
|
