A meeting of the University of Maryland Board of Regents was suddenly disrupted earlier this year when eight people in an audience of about 50 jumped up and began shouting: ”Cluck you, Frank Perdue!”
That bizarre display proved to be only a smokescreen to distract security police stationed at the meeting to protect Perdue, 71, a board member and head of a chicken-processing empire. While the guards struggled to remove the protesters, a woman dressed in a chicken costume who had hidden backstage ran up to Perdue and splattered his face with a cream pie.
Several protesters, including the pie-wielding attacker, identified themselves as members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, after their arrest.
That same day, campus police at Michigan State University discovered that the laboratory and office of a research project studying minks had been burglarized. Lab and office equipment had been destroyed, along with 30 years of scientific data amassed by the researcher, much of it on how to save wild mink populations.
A shadowy underground group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front claimed credit for the lab`s destruction, as it has done after similar raids over the last 12 years, through a PETA spokesman in a Washington press conference.
Until 1980, no groups in this country were campaigning violently to end the use of animals in biomedical research. Nor were there any widespread proposals for universal vegetarianism, campaigns against the use of animal fur and leather in human clothing, or attempts to close the nation`s zoos and aquariums.
Now there are hundreds of them, and PETA, founded on a shoestring in the nation`s capital in 1980, has become one of the largest, most radical and most visible. The organization has nearly 400,000 dues-paying members and $10.4 million in annual income.
And as we move into the `90s, some of the groups most often targeted by the animal-rights movement-from research facilities to aquariums to farm organizations-finally are moving to counter what they perceive as the rights groups` biases, with everything from lawsuits to public education and publicity campaigns that in some cases echo tactics the animal-rightists have used on them.
And, spokesmen promise, this counterattack is going to expand and diversify as the situation warrants.
Labs attacked
Since 1980, the most visible controversy has involved a number of violent attacks on laboratories that use animals for biomedical research. Generally, such raids involve breaking and entering the labs at night, destroying research equipment and files of research data, and ”liberating” animals used in the research.
The raiders often videotape or photograph the raids. Often, animal research is as gory and unpalatable as the diseases and injuries it seeks to study and cure, which means the pictures aren`t pretty. Animal rightists use them with great persuasive effect to raise money and other kinds of support.
The physical and intellectual attacks have made scientists who use live animals in experiments defensive in the extreme.
”These labs are often like bunkers now,” says Dan Matthews, a PETA spokesman, acknowledging that one of his organization`s aims is to make such research as close to prohibitively expensive as possible. ”Now animal researchers spend a lot of their money on security instead of research.”
Many scientists who a dozen years ago were admired publicly for their research and who proudly showed their work with animals are now forced to work in isolation behind locked gates.
”We have research farms that used to be points of pride, that we encouraged the public to visit,” says Steve Kopperud, executive director of the Animal Feed Foundation. ”Now we`ve taken down all the signs that would suggest what the farms are or where they are, and we have surrounded them with night lighting, motion sensors, extra fencing and security personnel.”
Capturing the kids
On another front, PETA has succeeded all across the country in getting its members into classrooms as volunteer speakers. They speak against biomedical research on animals, advise children of their right to refuse to participate in classroom dissections and generally proselytize, effectively, for the PETA cause.
The medical and research Establishment now argues that too many children are growing up without the benefit of the sort of hands-on science, such as dissection, that they feel often serves to spark an interest in science careers. They fear too many children are growing up hostile to using animals in biomedical research.
”Young minds are so susceptible,” says Lee Krulisch, director of the 13-year-old Scientists` Center for Animal Welfare, organized to try to counteract animal-rights propaganda.
”They relate everything they see and hear about animals with their dogs and cats at home, and if they think that biomedical research is evil and cruel, they will simply turn their backs on science.”
Krulisch`s group and others, like the Foundation for Biomedical Research and the American Medical Association, are trying to get doctors and scientists into schools to give their side of the story.
Zoos get it too
Zoos and aquariums have been under siege, too, by animal-rights groups who declare these institutions have no right to keep wild animals in captivity. Rather than raids, however, zoos and aquariums are subjected to pickets, publicity campaigns and lawsuits filed by animal rightists.
The zoo and aquarium world last fall cheered when the New England Aquarium in Boston struck back. Deciding it had been repeatedly threatened and maligned by three Massachusetts animal-rights groups, the aquarium filed a countersuit against them.
The countersuit charges that two pending suits against the aquarium are based on claims the three animal-rights groups know are groundless. It also says the animal rightists have defamed the aquarium in their own fundraising literature with false information.
Other American zoos and aquariums, including the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, have joined the suit by entering friend-of-the-court briefs to support the Boston aquarium`s charges. The Boston aquarium is seeking $5 million in damages. If the countersuit is successful, it may tighten the legal conditions by which animal-rights groups can sue such institutions.
Efforts to identify the people who support or take part in animal-rights activities have been somewhat sketchy. But two recent demographic studies offer some clues. Both showed people active in the cause to be overwhelmingly female (nearly 80 percent). They are more likely to be college-educated and middle-class, and they tend to be unmarried and childless. About 65 percent are in their 30s, 40s or 50s.
One of the surveys, commissioned by the anti-animal-rights group Putting People First, showed that the activists at an animal-rights march in Washington were overwhelmingly urban. The other survey, done by social-science researchers at Utah State University, showed that subscribers to the animal-rights magazine Animals` Agenda were not so skewed toward city-dwellers and matched the urban-rural split of the U.S. population, about 73 percent to 27 percent.
Celebrity backers
Many people believe the animal-rights movement here and in Western Europe (where it is even more radical and violent than in the U.S.) is a product of urbanization.
Nearly 50 years ago, Wisconsin naturalist Aldo Leopold lamented that many bad decisions affecting the environment had been made by government and industry policy-makers who, as urbanites, no longer knew or understood the natural world.
But opponents of the animal-rights movement lament that we may risk making monumentally poor decisions regarding biomedical research, agriculture and the environment if we are swayed by the animal-rights arguments.
”For two million years we were hunters; for ten thousand years we were farmers; for the last hundred years we have been trying to deny it all,”
writes Stephen Budiansky in the opening of his recently published book, ”The Covenant of the Wild.” His book is a passionate attack against the animal-rights movement and the ignorance upon which he says it feeds.
Tom Regan, a University of North Carolina philosopher and a spiritual guru of the animal-rights movement, epitomizes the absolutist fervor of the movement.
In his 1980 book, ”The Case for Animal Rights,” Regan says,
”vegetarianism is morally obligatory, and . . . we should not be satisfied with anything less than the total dissolution of commercial agriculture as we know it.”
Many of the 2 percent of Americans who live on farms and feed us, as well as provide the commodities that make up the most valuable portion of our export industry, are truly stunned at such talk. They are bewildered, too, by the seemingly growing acceptance by non-farm Americans of the animal-rights credo.
Among those who have come to identify themselves with the cause are a number of celebrities, including rock `n` roll legend and vegetarian Paul McCartney, country singer k.d. lang (who has starred in a TV spot titled
”Meat Stinks”), and TV actresses Rue McClanahan (”Golden Girls”) and Roseanne Arnold (”Roseanne”).
”Big corporations pay millions of dollars for name recognition,” says PETA`s Dan Matthews, ”but we have celebrities who publicize us free. We`ve made it almost fashionable to stand up for animals now.”
But in recent weeks, farmers have begun building a backlash against such celebrity-driven publicity. Their primary target: actress Candice Bergen, star of the hit TV series ”Murphy Brown.”
Bergen is an animal-rights advocate and vocal supporter of PETA. On TV, as Brown, she has been drinking coffee from a mug emblazoned with the PETA logo. That has struck a raw nerve with farmers.
”PETA represents to farmers the worst of the animal-rights movement,”
says Joyce Hach, an executive of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.
The farmers` anger at PETA probably stems from incidents in Iowa that got national media coverage last year, Hach says.
At the Iowa World Pork Exposition last May, PETA protesters attacked the 19-year-old Iowa Pork Queen and smeared her face with a cream pie. ”It`s time she woke up to the cruelty she represents,” says Robin Walker, a PETA member. Then in August, PETA ran a full-page ad in the Des Moines Register, comparing the meat industry to the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee killer who dismembered and cannibalized some of his 17 victims.
”If any farmers had any second thoughts on what PETA`s agenda was,”
Hach says of the Iowa incidents, ”those settled it.”
So when the PETA mug turned up on ”Murphy Brown,” farm groups around the country decided to strike back with a publicity stunt of their own, called ”Mugs for Murphy,” enlisting other groups that have been targeted by animal rightists to join them.
For weeks, Bergen and the ”Murphy Brown” production company have been inundated with coffee mugs from the U.S. and Canada. The mugs bear logos of farm organizations, agricultural supply companies, universities,
pharmaceutical research laboratories, pet organizations, zoos and just about any institution or business that deals with animals.
”We just think Miss Bergen might like to advertise some other of her fans besides PETA,” Hach says.
Warned Kopperud of the Animal Feed Foundation: ”Studios should at least remember: Folks in agriculture watch lots of TV, buy movie tickets and shell out hard-earned dollars for sponsor products.”
