By Bernard Unti, Ph.D.
"There is no more sure tie between friends than when they are united in their objects and wishes." —Cicero
On August 26, 2006, in a strategic decision with broad implications for humane work in the nation's capital, the Doris Day Animal League and The Humane Society of the United States agreed to a corporate merger. The combination, which took effect immediately, is the second such union involving The HSUS in as many years; in early 2005, the organization forged a similar union with The Fund for Animals.
As part of the agreement, DDAL Executive Director Holly Hazard and eight other DDAL employees will become staff members of The HSUS and/or its 501(c)(4) affiliate, the Humane Society Legislative Fund. DDAL will continue to operate as an affiliate of The HSUS, and its operations will be integrated within those of The HSUS.
The decision to combine operations is based on an established tradition of broad agreement and collegial association in pursuing animal welfare gains at the federal level. The DDAL and The HSUS have worked together on many issues, including greyhound racing, the testing of household products and cosmetics on animals, the addition of bittering agents to anti-freeze to protect children and animals, and providing relief for the animal victims of Hurricane Katrina.
"The purposes of our union," HSUS CEO and President Wayne Pacelle wrote in an Aug. 28 memorandum to HSUS employees, "are to use dollars and resources more wisely, foster greater cooperation within the animal movement, build greater depth of program activity in areas of overlapping concern, and increase our effectiveness."
A Girl and Her Dog
In a certain sense, the corporate combination between DDAL, founded in 1987, and The HSUS, founded in 1954, has its roots in an event that took place in the late 1930s—a tragic incident in the life of a young Cincinnati girl and her dog Tiny.
Confident as always in his good training, and fearing that a leash would have upended the crutches on which she had to rely for over a year following a serious injury, she took Tiny out one day—the little black and tan walking close beside her off leash, as he did every day.
This day, however, their shared life took a tragic turn when Tiny uncharacteristically bolted, dashing out into the street, where he was hit by a car and died before the young girl's eyes.
The terrible incident left the girl with a searing guilt, and a strong determination to do something to help the animals during her lifetime.
Such sad occurrences have played out in many lives, of course, but this was not to be an ordinary life, and she was no ordinary girl. In later years, as Doris Day, she would establish herself as a star in five distinct mediums—big band, live radio, recording, film and television—and become the one of the most-celebrated and popular musical/comedic actresses and singers of the 20th century, with 29 original record albums, 39 films and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to her credit.
In a 20-year film career, her leading men included James Cagney, Jack Carson, Clark Gable, James Garner, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, Rock Hudson, Howard Keel, Jack Lemmon, Gordon MacRae, David Niven, John Raitt, Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Stewart. There was just something about Doris Day, Cagney once observed, "that caught the mood and fancy" of postwar America.
Not to mention its heart.
As it turned out, the girl who grieved over the death of Tiny would also become a lifelong "animal person," lending her name, time, and energies to humane work, from her days as a rising star in the 1950s, to her participation in anti-fur and spay/neuter campaigns in the 1970s, to her post-Hollywood career as the founder of a national animal protection organization and the proprietor of a hotel that pioneered policies friendly to pets.
A Leading Lady's Love for Animals
Tiny was not the first of Doris Day's childhood pets, but he would prove the most important, providing great company and emotional satisfaction during a yearlong convalescence from an injury that nearly crippled her for life. This relationship, as she recounted in Doris Day: Her Own Story (1975), "was the start of what was to be for me a lifelong affair with the dog …. Tiny taught me how much life, and affection, and undemanding companionship a dog can give—and what an antidote for loneliness he was!" Dogs, she revealed, would always be an important part of her home life, and "a source of joy and strength to me."
Day also traced her passion for dogs to J. Allen Boone's two books on non-verbal communication with animals, Letters to Strongheart (1939) and Kinship with All Life, (1954). Boone's accounts of life with a German Shepherd named Strongheart, a predecessor to Rin-Tin-Tin, enjoyed a strong popular following in the 1940s and 1950s. Boone's belief that there is a language between humans and animals, a "language which moves without the need for sound from heart to heart," resonated deeply with Day's own experience.
From time to time, Day was able to leverage her stature within Hollywood to have a positive effect for animals. While in Morocco filming "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956) with Alfred Hitchcock and fellow animal lover Jimmy Stewart, she insisted that she wouldn't work unless the emaciated animals on or near the set received proper care. Responding to Day's concerns, the production company promptly set up a feeding station for the goats, lambs, horses, cows, dogs, cats, burros and other animals.
Day often brought her dogs to the set of her television series, "The Doris Day Show" (1968-73), and animal-friendly themes sometimes filtered into the plot lines, as in "Hot Dogs," an episode that aired on January 19, 1970 during the second season. Disturbed at the sight of six poodles locked in a station wagon with windows closed on a hot day, Doris Martin (Day's character) and co-worker Myrna (played by Rose Marie) persuade a locksmith to set the dogs free. These actions land Doris in court, where she gets herself off the hook with an impassioned plea for the animals' safety. The dogs signal their approval of the verdict by crowding around her, while the largest barks and nips at the grooming parlor proprietor who had left them all locked in his vehicle.
On "The Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff Special," her March 1971 CBS special, Day's own dogs crowded around her as she sang, "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby."
Day's developing consciousness of cruelty issues, and her increasing engagement with them, were reflected in the biography published in 1975, which appeared several years after she gave up her television series. An entire chapter dealt with her devotion to dogs, her concerns about animal homelessness and mistreatment and her support for the activities of the organization Actors and Others for Animals.
By that time too, she was also collaborating with her long-time friend Cleveland Amory and the Fund for Animals on a few projects. In 1974, she joined Mary Tyler Moore, Angie Dickinson, Jayne Meadows and Amanda Blake in a then-controversial advertisement for imitation fur that appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Esquire, Look, and New York. Each of the actresses appeared in a synthetic fur coat. In a public interview, reproduced in Amory's Mankind (1974), Day related how awareness of the suffering of animals for fur had changed her: "At one time, before I was aware of the situation, I did buy fur coats." Needless to say, there are no fur coats hanging in Day's closet today.
By Day's own admission, companion animal issues are the ones that most strongly interest her. She has adopted many strays through the years, and has strong convictions about the role that pet stores and puppy mills play in creating overpopulation. Another issue that has occupied her attention for a long time has been dog-friendly public accommodations. On her own, she unstintingly sought out restaurants with outdoor seating, beaches that allowed dogs, outdoor malls, dog-friendly parks and other places where her companion animals would be welcome. When she became co-owner of Carmel's Cypress Inn in 1989, she made headlines by changing its "no pets allowed" status to a "pets welcome" policy.
What a Difference a Day Makes
As one of the nation's all-time box office sensations, and someone who had worked hard since her teenage years, spending most of her life in the public eye, it would have been understandable if Day—by nature a private person—had decided to enjoy a retirement away from the spotlight.
But that's not what she did. Instead, she elected to invest her energies in the broader effort to shine the spotlight on cruelty to animals. In the mid-1980s, enjoying life, family, hobbies, and pets at her northern California home, but wanting to do something more for animals, she and her son Terry Melcher began to research the landscape of animal protection in the United States to identify a way in which she could make a distinctive contribution.
The route they chose was the creation of a 501(c)(4) organization, based in Washington, to mobilize around a few key issues affecting animals, especially companion animals and their inhumane treatment, and to get concerned citizens active in the political process.
Incorporating DDAL as a 501(c)(4) was a deliberate and inspired choice. Day and her son recognized the value of an organization that was free to lobby, and they understood that success required good judgment in picking the right issues on which to focus. Under their leadership, and that of Holly Hazard, DDAL's first and only Executive Director, the Doris Day Animal League quickly and steadily gained respect and influence on Capitol Hill.
Nearly 20 years after they founded the organization, DDAL has more than 180,000 members and supporters, and has worked on legislation to end the sale of fetish "crush" videos that depict cruelty to animals, to end the slaughter of horses for human consumption, to regulate the sale of puppies from puppy mills, to require counseling for animal abusers, and to streamline and reduce federal requirements for animal testing while promoting alternatives.
Nor has Day's commitment to the cause gone unnoticed in the nation's political center. She had the ear of longtime friend and onetime co-star Ronald Reagan after he became president. And on June 23, 2004, President George W. Bush, honoring Day with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, put it plain and simple. "It was a good day for our fellow creatures when she gave her good heart to the cause of animal welfare," the president noted.
The Winning Team
The corporate combination of the DDAL and The HSUS comes just a year after The HSUS took steps to create its own 501(c)(4) entity, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, to gain the same advantages Day and Melcher identified when they founded DDAL in 1987—the opportunity to marshal and deploy the funds necessary to advance the cause of animals through political and lobbying activity. As a non-profit charity, The HSUS and its other affiliate arms must observe strict limits in the amount of resources they can devote to such efforts.
"In constituting DDAL in the way that she did, Doris Day anticipated that a commitment to public policy is a crucial component of animal protection," said Pacelle, who came to Washington as a legislative intern in 1985, and remembers the days when the humane movement's influence in the nation's capital was but a shadow of what it is now. "By conducting some of our most crucial work through a 501(c)(4) entity like DDAL, or the HSLF, we can mobilize our resources more effectively and secure lasting and meaningful reforms."
As it happens, there is a strong fit between The HSUS' bipartisan approach to animal advocacy and the perspective that Day brings to the subject. "Animal welfare is not a partisan issue," she wrote in a message to DDAL members in winter 2000. "Responsible pet care and concern about, for example, spaying and neutering, don't follow party lines, just as flaunting wealth over compassion by wearing fur coats does not signal one's political preference."
The merger will not curtail Day's own work for animals, which will continue as before. But she's certainly pleased about the matter. "There is no other group like The Humane Society of the United States," she said. "We are very enthusiastic about being part of this organization and combining our resources to help the animals."
Bernard Unti, senior policy advisor and special assistant to the president at The HSUS,
received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press. 
