I once got a cat from the Humane Society. As anyone who has done this knows, it's not easy. You must be interrogated by an “adoption counsellor,” who will grill you on your lifestyle, make you sign a contract swearing you will neuter your new pet, and force you to lie that you will never, ever let it run around outside. This is how I acquired Tigger, a horrid ill-tempered animal that bit everyone it met and lived to a spitefully old age, despite the fact I let it run around outside. In retrospect, Tigger should have been drowned at birth.
But, of course, that would be unthinkable. Right now, the Toronto Humane Society is up to its gunnels in surplus cats. But instead of quietly gassing a few of them, it's running a giant PR campaign to find every single one a good home. That's the way it's done these days. This week, Dalhousie University said it's replacing the rabbit trim on its graduation gowns with fake fur. In deference to popular opinion, most universities stopped using real fur long ago. It's only a matter of time before our Supreme Court justices throw out their hallowed ermines.
The animal rights movement is the logical extension of the great rights movements of the past century. The fight for equal rights for women, blacks, the disabled, gays, and other groups has educated us to empathize with the suffering of beings unlike ourselves. You may not believe that animals are people, too, but you no doubt believe that they are entitled to a certain ethical consideration.
Look how far the animal extremists have moved the needle. In her day, my grandma wore a fox stole complete with head, glass eyes and pointy little teeth. Today, I wouldn't dream of wearing fur, even decapitated fur. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about zoos, except so far as they promote awareness of animal conservation, and I disapprove of circuses with animal acts. Although I am a full-bore carnivore, I prefer to avoid thinking about where my hamburger comes from. I think my vegetarian friends have a point, and I secretly believe that, if I were a better person, I'd be a vegetarian, too.
Sure, the animal-liberation types are crazy. But I seem to have internalized a good part of their message.
“It's like any social justice movement,” says Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “It was true with the suffragettes. You have people who write letters and teach the public and you have people who are more militant and don't have the patience to wait 10 or 20 years for the change.”
PETA is among the most successful advocacy groups in the world today. As a master of the media, it's brilliant at thinking up stunts so outrageous that they'll be deplored on prime-time television. In this way, it leverages a slender PR budget by a factor of many thousands. In Canada this spring, for example, it dreamed up a billboard showing a pretty woman and a pig, with the slogan, “Neither of us is meat.” The billboard played off the infamous murder of dozens of women on a B.C. pig farm, and was launched after authorities warned that the pigs might have eaten human remains. That one made the CBS Evening News.
In Europe, PETA is having similar success with a travelling exhibition that equates the slaughter of animals for food with the Holocaust. “Society is in denial that innocents are being tortured in their own back yards, and that is the very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible — the belief that we can do anything we want to those we decide are different or inferior,” said a spokesman.
The comparison is vile. But it also contains a grain of uncomfortable truth: Animals are more like people than we sometimes like to admit.
The activists, of course, don't want us to eat animals at all. In the meantime, they've successfully hounded big chains such as McDonald's and Burger King to lean on their suppliers and make slaughterhouse practices more humane. Now their biggest target is Kentucky Fried Chicken, which they accuse of inciting all manner of chicken torture. They want KFC suppliers to gas their chickens, rather than cut their throats. They want better living conditions for the chickens.
To battle KFC, PETA has enlisted support from prominent U.S. blacks, not only because KFC has a lot of outlets in black neighbourhoods, but also because they “have a natural empathy for others who are oppressed.” Both the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and leading black scholar Cornel West have written protest letters on behalf of PETA. “Although most people don't know chickens as well as they know cats and dogs, chickens are interesting individuals with personalities and interests every bit as developed as the dogs and cats with whom many of us share our lives,” wrote Mr. West.
PETA's latest campaign claims that eating animals makes you fat and impotent. “Lose the boobs — go vegetarian,” says a billboard that features a tubby man with breasts.
Those claims, of course, are absurd. I find it difficult to believe that eating chicken wrecks your sex life, or that today's McNuggets were once interesting individuals. Then again, I once would have found it difficult to believe that every orphan kitty deserves to be supported by the state. Nowadays, I find it perfectly reasonable. After all, I hung on to my own demented cat (oops, companion animal) until the day it finally toppled over from advanced senility, to my great relief. It seemed like the only humane thing to do.
mwente@globeandmail.ca
