Making Tracks:  The Marin Humane Society Celebrates 100 Years

The most remarkable aspect of the Marin Humane Society turning 110,  as it will on December 14, 2017,  is not that it has endured as long as it has,  but rather that it endured the first 100 years with only three generations of longterm leadership,  through repeated redefinitions of role,  in a community changing almost beyond recognition.

Making Tracks:  The Marin Humane Society Celebrates 100 Years is a souvenir album,  including only transient discussion of most of the controversies that Marin Humane has addressed or been part of–but a three-page timeline gives hints.

Founder Ethel H. Tompkins lived almost her entire life in the San Anselmo home where she was born in 1876 and died in 1969.  She briefly attended a New York City boarding school,  but was expelled in 1894 for leaving class to ride a policeman’s horse.  She had obtained the policeman’s permission.

Tompkins opened the first Marin Humane Society shelter in a San Rafael stable in 1912,  and started a classroom humane education program in 1913,  becoming a charter participant in the annual American Humane Association “Be Kind to Animals Week” two years later.

Farming,  fishing,  and operating San Quentin Prison, founded in 1853,  were then the Marin County economic mainstays. Ferry boats connected the county with San Francisco to the south and Richmond to the east,  but frequent interruptions of service due to inclement weather and adverse tides inhibited the growth of the region into a bedroom suburb of San Francisco until after the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937.

Anticipating the eventual transition of the community, Tompkins opened a dog-and-cat shelter in 1929,  and added full-time humane officer Scott Tilden to the staff in 1935.  With auxiliaries already active in the four largest Marin County towns,  the humane society took over the county pound in 1949.

Tompkins retired in 1957,  at age 88,  but remained involved in the organization until her death,  shortly after the 1968 opening of the oldest portion of the present Marin County Humane Society complex.

Tompkins’ successor,  Mel Morse,  a World War II military dog trainer,  had helped American Humane Association president Richard C. Craven to establish humane supervision of the Hollywood screen industry in the 1940s.  Later,  as director of the Rocky Mountains office of the American Humane Association,  Morse helped American Humane to relocate to Denver,  after 80 years in Albany,  New York.

Making Tracks erroneously credits Morse with hiring the “nation’s first full-time humane educator,  Madelon Tormanen” in 1969.  As some humane societies had employed full-time humane educators for nearly 90 years,  and Morse knew it,  something appears to have been garbled in repetition.

But Morse did introduce the use of a computer to track Marin County dog licensing in 1958.  This appears to have been the first use of a computer in humane work,  a distant yet direct ancestor of the web-assisted rehoming networks now active worldwide.

Making Tracks notes that under Morse,  Marin Humane in 1962 opposed wearing furs and the use of leghold traps.  Morse and Marin Humane thereby affirmed policies that had been unequivocal positions of the American Humane Association for decades,  but from which American Humane had retreated.

Morse in 1964 won passage of the first California county bylaw prohibiting the sale of pound animals for laboratory use. Morse also led Marin Humane in actively opposing seal-clubbing and bullfighting,  and in encouraging appreciation of wild pumas and coyotes,  who were actively persecuted by local sheep ranchers.

These too reflected campaigns aggressively waged by the American Humane Association as far back as the mid-1930s,  but dropped in the 1950s and 1960s,  while the Humane Society of the U.S. took them up.

Founded in 1954 by former American Humane staff member Fred Myers,  in rebellion against the loss of moral leadership that the compromises represented,  HSUS hired Morse away as Myers’ successor in 1972–one year before Marin Humane realized Morse’s ambition of opening one of the first low-cost sterilization clinics in California.

Morse served only briefly at HSUS before giving way to the 30-year regime of former ministers John Hoyt and Paul Irwin,  who were succeeded in 2004 by current HSUS president Wayne Pacelle.

Marin Humane meanwhile ran through four executive directors in eight years before bringing aboard attorney Diane Allevato in 1980,  who retired in July 2007.

Allevato is described as exemplifying a caring,  nurturing, teamwork-based leadership style.
Possibly not coincidentally,  Marin County during Allevato’s tenure at Marin Humane attracted a constellation of national animal advocacy organizations,  each founded elsewhere but finding Marin congenial to further growth.  Among them are the Animal Legal Defense Fund,  the Humane Farming Association,  and In Defense of Animals.

While Tompkins and Morse initiated the Marin Humane tradition of working closely with national groups,  Allevato expanded it to include active national outreach in shelter improvement,  humane education,  and disaster relief.

A decade after Allevato retired,  that legacy has proved most fortuitous,  as the Marin Humane Society has taken the leading role in animal sheltering and rescue during the Diablo Winds wildfires.