Honoring Ted Kennedy

When the alarm clock radio woke me up this morning, someone was discussing Ted Kennedy's impact on health care in this nation. It reminded me that I've been so disconnected lately that I haven't heard much about him for the last several weeks. I pondered what an awful, sad day it was going to be when he died. A couple minutes later, as the interview concluded, I realized that it wasn't a news story about health care reform but about Ted Kennedy--that day had already come.

With this being an animal rights blog, and with AR not being a cause for which Ted Kennedy advocated, I don't feel like there's much that's strictly on-topic that I can say about him in this particular space (that said, I wouldn't be surprised if some digging around showed he worked on some animal welfare issues; I adamantly disagreed with his support of breeders, but I don't think anyone would argue that he didn't clearly, deeply love the dogs with whom he shared his life--and home and even office).

But as I've noted before, I'm not just an animal rights advocate. No animal rights advocate is. And there was much I deeply admired and respected about Ted Kennedy in other areas. I admired him for the work he did and the concern he showed for people of all backgrounds, of all experiences. And a while back, I learned that 20 years ago, when one of my friends was uninsured and in need of her own brain surgery after much drama resulting from the disaster that is our health care system, Ted Kennedy found out about it and personally called her hospital room, to wish her well, to tell her how hard he was trying to change things, to let her know she mattered. Ted Kennedy genuinely cared about people. It is a sad day. My heart, like many others', is heavy.

Please consider reading the many posts written across Change.org today about the mark Ted Kennedy made, from the areas of poverty and homelessness to health care and gay rights and more.

And then please join us in petitioning Congress to complete Kennedy's unfinished work, in his honor, by passing the health care reform for which he worked so tirelessly.

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As I was preparing to publish this, I saw a friend link to a post by Wayne Pacelle regarding Ted Kennedy's record on animals. Honestly, it's not often that HSUS and I are close enough to being on the same page that I'll link to these posts, and I think trying to present Kennedy now as an animal rights advocate would be opportunistic and less than sincere (one of the reasons I won't go nearly as far as Pacelle and say that "he had all the right instincts"), but I will at least on this occasion direct you to Pacelle's post, where he documents the efforts Kennedy supported to protect animals over the years. As I said, Kennedy may never have become an animal rights advocate, may never have reached the point that I would have loved to see him reach, but we can't argue that he wasn't without concern for animals either. A brief excerpt for Pacelle:

Measures he cosponsored and voted for included those to crack down on dogfighting and cockfighting, ban horse slaughter, curb abuses at puppy mills, end the slaughter of “downed” animals (those too sick or injured to stand and walk), limit federal subsidies for very large factory farms, condemn Canada’s commercial seal hunt, halt poaching of bears for their viscera, block oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and restrict taxpayer funding for use of steel-jaw leghold traps on national wildlife refuges. . . .

Sen. Kennedy also championed the first-ever legislation calling for development of alternatives to animal testing—as part of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) Revitalization Act of 1993—and he was the lead Democratic sponsor of a bill enacted in 2000 that strengthened and made permanent the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods, to encourage the use of non-animal or less invasive tests that are more humane and can be more accurate and cost-effective than antiquated animal tests used for products such as cosmetics and cleaning supplies.