CATCA (Ericka Cabellos)

What is the organization you started and how large is it?
Campaigns Against the Cruelty to Animals (CATCA). It was created in the Netherlands in 1989 and has thousands of supporters worldwide. For more information about who we are and what we do, please check our website: www.catcahelpanimals.org

What specific areas of animal exploitation and abuse do you handle?
All. CATCA has been involved in all issues of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. In the Animal Conservation area, we have been involved mostly with saving the African elephants, Polar bears, whales, Caucasus brown bears, illegal e-trade of wildlife, etc.

What motivated you into starting up your organization?
Actually CATCA started like an Animal Conservation organization, against the slaughter of African elephants in Africa (and for animal welfare against bullfighting), followed by the seal hunts that were happening in Namibia and in South Africa. Then I got involved against the Canadian commercial seal hunt.

The horrendous slaughter of African elephants in the 70's and 80's, wiped out more than half of the African elephant population for their ivory tusks, and that made me take action to somehow help the elephants and other animals.

What did you do to get things going?
I started by talking to my friends, neighbours and others about animal cruelty, in Holland, other European countries and Mexico, about animal rights, animal welfare and animal conservation issues. In 1989, I started to have a weekly column in the South East of Mexico largest newspaper, about environment and animals. I wrote by 1993 over 100 articles, including pages of animal R/W/C news worldwide.

I was very lucky, as I was one of the first non governmental individuals or from the only few existent handful of people in very few universities, that got to have internet access by 1992, so I started to gather information asking universities and governments questions, by a very primitive form of e-mail.

Then by snail mail, I started contacting amazing animal groups in the UK, getting their info and supporting their campaigns, especially against vivisection, the farm industry, and the fur industry.

Then once when I contacted one government urging them to ban ivory in their country, they replied to me asking me to send them a printed letter with the name of my organization, so that is how I created CATCA.

One friend donated to me a 1.5 meter long massive company photocopy b/w machine, so I started to print out my petitions, fliers, brochures, stickers and posters. That is how I started to print out stuff for everybody I knew, and I started to hold informative animal R/W/C informative events, carrying on my back a portable table several blocks away from my house in Holland.

I printed petitions and letters supporting international campaigns from big NGO's and my own against elephant poaching, I launched my own anti-bullfighting educational campaigns in Europe and Mexico, and made brochures about how to take care of cats and dogs for free distribution in Mexico, anti-vivisection fliers for Europe, etc.

I also started to mail petitions, fliers and brochures to my friends abroad for them to collect signatures, hand out my informative fliers/brochures in social events, etc.

Then I started to be the first Latin American person to participate in an European or international anti-bullfighting conference, in an anti-vivisection international meeting, in the annual animal rights conference in the United States. After that I started to get requests to talk to the radio, newspapers and even TV.

So, literally that is how CATCA started…

How did you attract supporters to the cause?
I am a persuasive person, so I literally pushed the issues with everybody I knew, urging them to help the animals, and I wasn't taking NO as an answer. I had lots of info to share (printed or by just talking to the people in person), so that kept people interested and with an interest in helping the animals.

How did you get these supporters to keep participating?
I started with friends and their kids. Everytime they saw me, they were to learn something new about the fur industry, farm industry, whaling, the dolphin massacre due to the industrial tuna catching, anti-bullfight, against animal vivisection and dissection, etc.

Slowly I started to collect phone numbers, later on e-mails and I started to create my lists of activists and supporters.

Were there any specific internal problems (ideology, politics etc) that had to be dealt over the years?
Oh God, too much. Religion, politics, discrimination but I always managed to keep it going.

I always got heavily critiziced and ridiculed because of my animal work, and have been stabbed in the back by false friends and collaborators, that just pretended to be my friends to take over my organization and even worse, to get personal notoriety instead of focusing on the animals' sake.

I paid a big price on a personal level because of that.

Can you give some examples of how you counter opposition from the animal abusers?
Always demand justice for the abused animal(s) and urge the proper authorities to reform and update legislation to protect the animals.

On a higher level, I just train myself to learn as much as I can on an issue, so when confronted by politicians or people from governments trying to critizice me, they get surprised by my knowledge on the issue.

What are the future goals that do you foresee your organization developing?
To witness the Canadian commercial seal hunt end. This is starting to happen now thanks to the ban on the import trade of seal products, that CATCA's enormous efforts helped to achieve.

We are collaborating with our Mexican colleagues to ban the bullfights in Mexico city.

We hope to succeed in helping to relocate Yupi the Polar bear in Mexico to a better place in Europe. If that succeeds, we can try a similar tactic for other Polar bears in the state of Jalisco, Mexico.

Through our worldwide e-trade research on elephant ivory, we hope to use our results to lobby for the elephant conservation in Africa, and against the threatening one time sale on ivory and downlisting of their populations in African countries.

We will continue exposing the e-trade of wildlife in Europe and using our results to lobby to urge the authorities to prosecute the illegal sellers.

Do you have any advice for others who plan to join or even start an animal rights organization?
Oh yes! Soon my book Surviving Animal Activism will be published. There I provide lots of valuable information in how to start a grassroots to an NGO organization from scratch. Look for our book in few months time!