I was 9 when I began my first publication for people who loved animals. It was called Kookie (gimme a break, I was 9).

It had articles about fashion and style, animal-themed crosswords, whimsical animal fiction, and cool stuff you could buy (pet-themed greeting cards). My bedroom was the newsroom, my staff was Ev and Myrna who provided transportation and paper. It went to press in the living room, on an old hand-cranked rexograph machine (yeah, you’re too you to know what that is, but it used a kind of ink that smelled good and probably got 9-year-olds high. I made 30 or so copies before my arms gave out, stapled the pages and sold them to a hostage audience – my friends and relatives. The money went to a local animal shelter.

Fast forward a few … well, decades, and I’m picking up where I left off, pretty much with the Kookie 2.0 – aka humanebeings.com.

Same spirit, different … platform. And, obviously, a lot of living and experience and knowledge in between.

All my life I’ve loved animals, and all my life I’ve loved writing. I got a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Cornell, and a masters in Journalism from the University of Arizona. I was the publications director for the ASPCA early in my career – then took my writing and my animal POV to a wider audience working for daily newspapers. For more than 25 years I was a travel writer, drawn, of course, to wildlife and other animal-related destinations and activities. I wrote about rescued turkeys at a place called Farm Sanctuary for one Thanksgiving issue; volunteered with a group in Namibia that was returning ranchland back to the big cats of Africa (camping out with the black mamba snakes); saw polar bears in northern Canada hanging in netted sacks from helicopters, being relocated because of global warming.

Fun, and enlightening, but I also wrote about injustices and cruelty when I saw it.

My colleagues joked that if you look up “schensul” and “dog” or “animal” in the newspaper’s archive, you’ll call up just about every story I’d written.

I started out as a child loving puppies – as most of us do. Cute puppies, soft and loving and innocent. But as I grew, I widened that love, and became aware of the much wider issues involved in animal welfare. I realized that a lot of what we do in our everyday lives contributes to the big picture – the web of life, in the end. I worked with many activist groups in my early days, and back then we were considered radicals, hippies, the fringe, there was even a joke that those who cared about animals were just “old ladies in sneakers.”

Not so today. Companion animals are a huge part of our lives – we love to kvell over our “rescues.”. Ecotours, wildlife watching, safaris have are one of the fastest growing niches in travel. “Plant-based” has become part of the lexicon and the fast food industry, too. Adidas is making vegan sneakers.

After 10 or so years at my newspaper, I was dubbed “the conscience of the newsroom.” It is my hope that this website can have a similar affect on a much wider audience. Today I believe most everyone is a Humane Being.

People want to do the right thing.

Humane-Beings is here to help

There is suffering everywhere in this world, And we want to help. But sometimes the images and the mail we get can be – at least for me – debilitating, They also don’t want to be My goal is to what I was meant to do on a wider scale. To help bring awareness about animals to as many people as I can. Because I know that almost everyone is truly a Humane Being, and wants to be kind, and smart and really just do the best thing.