By Alan Herscovici, October 1998

Alan Herscovici, a Montreal-based writer and consultant specializing in environmental issues, is the author of "Second Nature: The Animal-Rights Controversy" (Stoddart, 1991.) Raised in the fur trade, Herscovici now serves as executive vice-president with the Fur Council of Canada, a non-profit, national industry association with members representing every sector of the Canadian fur trade. The views expressed are the author's.

Few of today's ardent young crusaders were even born when the first "shock" images of the seal hunt were broadcast by Radio Canada more than thirty years ago, in 1964. Magdalene Island hunter Gustave Poirier later testified that he was paid by the film crew to torment seals for their cameras. The wave of international protest he helped to unleash, however, would soon generate more money than Poirier and the entire Canadian seal hunt had ever produced.

Brian Davies, a Canadian army recruit and recent immigrant from Wales, led the New Brunswick SPCA's first "Save the Seals" campaign in 1965. By 1969 (heady days of student revolt and anti-war demos) Davies spun off his own International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and set to work wooing US and European media coverage. But it was only in 1976-77 that the seal-hunt protests reached their full intensity, with the arrival of Greenpeace and Brigitte Bardot on the ice.

By then, new regulations (and the extension of Canadian territorial waters) had already addressed most of the original conservation and animal-welfare concerns. Scientists no longer worried that the seal stocks were endangered, and the killing grounds were monitored by an annual parade of veterinary pathologists. But dramatic images of brutish hunters clubbing fluffy white seal pups had became a powerful symbol of modern man's supposed insensitivity to nature.

As Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore later told me: "What the seal hunt represented was the paramount focus for public attention on the need to change our basic attitude and relationship to nature and to the species that make it up...it fundamentally came down to a question of morality."

In other words, the issue was no longer how many seals were killed, or how, but whether we ought to hunt seals at all. Few understood that this raised a much more troublesome question: "Do we have the right to kill any wildlife or, for that matter, any animals at all?"

This is precisely the question posed by Australian philosopher Peter Singer in his 1975 best-seller Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals. Protesting the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat meat, Singer wrote, "is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbours not to sell their houses to blacks."

Singer's book became the manifesto of a radical new movement that opposes any use of animals, even for food or medical research. According to Ingrid Newkirk, founder of the Maryland-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA): "Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals."

Many of these ideas were explored over one hundred years ago by the American reformer Henry Salt (Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, 1894.) Much earlier, Leonardo da Vinci, Pythagorus, and other notables are said to have adopted various forms of ethical vegetarianism. Through most of human history, however, vegetarianism was usually more a matter of necessity than morality.

By the 1970s, western society had changed. The great majority of the population was urban. And there was television, a fickle medium where emotional celebrities trump dry scientific reports, and complex issues are reduced to competing soundbites - the electronic equivalent of a protester's placard. Television also plays tricks with context: slaughtering methods that are perfectly legitimate among people who wrest their livings from land and sea indeed become "shocking" when projected into pristine suburban living-rooms.

Above all, television thrives on controversy. And television coverage provided publicity for well-oiled fund-raising drives which, as seal-protest veteran Stephen Best observed, heralded the arrival of the "professional animal-rights activist."

The protests climaxed in 1983 with a European Community (EC) ban on the import of "whitecoats" and "bluebacks", the skins of young harp and hooded seal pups. Seals taken by aboriginal people were officially exempted from this law, and Canada sought to appease European sensibilities by stopping the hunt of young pups. By then, however, negative publicity had effectively destroyed established markets for all sealskin products, ending a way of life for many coastal Newfoundland, Quebec, and Arctic Inuit communities. For the emerging animal-rights movement, this was only a beginning.

Using media, political, and fund-raising skills honed during the seal wars, animal-rights activists have launched campaigns against eating meat, eggs, or dairy products. They reject the use of natural fur, leather, wool (sheep are nicked), or even silk (worms are boiled). They abhor hunters and fishermen, and want animals out of research labs, circuses, and aquariums. They have called on doctors to stop prescribing drugs like Premarin, which is produced from the estrogen-rich urine of pregnant mares. Some activists even worry about eating honey, using seeing-eye dogs - or keeping pets.

Yet what has the animal-rights movement really accomplished? Virtually none of the money they collect is used to fund humane shelters, develop better animal husbandry methods, or find cures for diseases. Instead, donations pay the salaries of professional organizers, subsidize more fund-raising, and fuel sensationalist campaigns against animal-use industries.

Despite what most people (including many journalists) still believe, this movement does not seek reforms to improve the treatment of animals we use. According to the Animal Alliance of Canada, animal rights "goes to the roots of the problem to extirpate exploitation at its source, rather than initiating half-measures and treating symptoms rather than causes, as the animal welfare/humane movement has traditionally done."

Responsible trapping (farming, research, etc.) standards reinforce consumer acceptance of animal-based products and services. So animal-rights campaigners ignore the wide range of improvements which have already been made by industry, often in cooperation with traditional animal-welfare organizations. They cite unresolved problems or occasional abuses as proof that reform is not possible.

The question remains why some people feel so passionate a need to dictate what the rest of us should eat, wear, think, or do.

Animal advocates may consider themselves more ethically evolved than most of us. "The Activist", a newsletter published by Toronto-based ARK II, recently advised: "If our friends, family, or co-workers want to laugh at us [for speaking out for animals], then let them. They are the unfortunate ones, for they don't have the sensitivity and compassion that would allow them to do the same."

The sensitivity and compassion of animal rights doesn't embrace Inuit hunters or Newfoundland fishermen, however, except in the most paternalistic sense: "They should do something else." Nor does it take much account of those suffering from AIDS and other diseases which medical researchers are working to cure.

Ironically, animal rights is often described by its advocates as an extension of the civil rights or feminist movements. "Speaking for the animals", however, offers some definite advantages over these models for the leadership: the oppressed cannot question their policies. Human supporters have little say either, since many large animal-rights groups don't bother with voting memberships or elected Boards.

Having dispensed with democratic procedures in their own ranks, it is not surprising that many animal activists now propose "direct action" to impose their views on the rest of society. ARK II invites readers of their newsletter to join the Animal Liberation Front Support Group and publishes the "ALF Guidelines". These include: "to inflict economic damage on those who profit from the misery and exploitation of animals." Research facilities, farms, meat and fish packing plants, and hunting outfitters have been recent targets of ALF vandalism and arson in Canada.

The militancy of animal activism may prove its undoing. Harold A. Herzog Jr. reported in the November issue of American Psychologist that media coverage of animal-rights issues increased dramatically through the 1980s, but has declined significantly since 1990. Journalists generally try to avoid promoting extremist groups; they become more cautious as they learn more about the real animal-rights agenda.

But decreasing press coverage may also reflect a more ominous change of tactics: animal-rights groups are abandoning noisy street protests as professional activists devote more of their attention to infiltrating government legislative committees and targeting school children with the assistance of sympathetic teachers.

To generate publicity, animal activists are returning to well-rehearsed themes. As it has done many times since 1984, the International Fund for Animal Welfare is once again calling for a British boycott of Canadian tinned salmon to protest the continuation of the seal hunt. The fact that Pacific coast salmon fishermen live a continent away from the Atlantic seal hunt will probably not be highlighted in IFAW fund-raising letters.

So long as they can pose as idealistic crusaders, contributions will flow into the animal-rights coffers. According to Stephen Best (now with the International Wildlife Coalition), "today the animal-rights movement is in every sense of the word an industry." Best portrays animal-rights campaigns as "products" to be marketed through "promotion." He also believes that "the public is more likely to respond to more radical and extreme positions than conservative ones."

Dan Matthews, PeTA's whiz-kid campaigner, brushes aside criticisms of his media stunts with the observation that "people don't want to be informed, they want to be entertained." (People Magazine, February 13, 1995.) With well-meaning contributors pouring more than $10 million into PeTA's bank accounts each year, perhaps he just can't resist being smug.

But if Matthews and Best are right, perhaps it's time that animal activists were held more accountable for the accuracy and impact of their campaigns - just like any other industry.