THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 20, 1996 TAG: 9603200034
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ROCKVILLE, MD. LENGTH: Long : 204 lines
RIGHT BEFORE the turnoff to the headquarters of People for the Ethical Treament for Animals, the stop sign has been altered with white paint and a stencil. STOP . . . KILLING ANIMALS, it says.
PETA, the world's largest animal-rights organization, believes that animals are not here for humans to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment.
The 80 or so staffers who work at the low-key office building in Rockville, a Washington suburb, are quite sincere about it. Not always passionate, but sincere. They save passion for flamboyant demonstrations - raids on Calvin Klein's office, stripping to their underwear on city streets, pies in Ronald McDonald's face.
Sincerity is for every day.
That sincerity will arrive in Hampton Roads in June, when PETA moves its national headquarters from Rockville to the former CI Travel building on Front Street in downtown Norfolk.
PETA has already contacted Hampton Roads restaurants, offering large orders and 100 new customers if the menu includes foods without any animal products. PETA has already championed NASA Langley, asking Congress to divert federal funds from monkey experimentation in California to Langley's student internship program. PETA has already protested the circus at Scope.
What will come next?
Nothing, insist PETA staffers. The focus is on national and international campaigns, they say, like persuading Gillette to stop testing products on animals, like persuading designer Karl Lagerfield to drop fur, like convincing millions of women to avoid the estrogen replacement Premarin.
Well, OK, they admit, they'll do some education and outreach in Hampton Roads. ``We don't just concentrate on the area we're in, but we are aware of our surroundings,'' says Lisa Lange, who develops the flamboyant demonstrations that have gained PETA fame.
PETA's new surroundings are nearly next door to Eastern Virginia Medical School and its primate research lab, and World Lab Animal Liberation Week comes up the end of April. PETA has never actually released any lab animals, but it sometimes serves as spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front, an underground group that has.
Sport fishing is another new target of animal activists, and the Outer Banks bluefin tuna fishery has been attracting fishermen from all over the United States and several foreign countries. Watermen put out to sea from Hampton Roads nearly every day, and PETA's efforts on behalf of lobster rights landed the group some prime-time coverage recently.
Still, if any local campaigns are in the works, no one at PETA is talking about them.
The offices on Rockville's side street are easy to miss. Not flashy at all. Only a tiny sign at the far end of the industrial parking lot says PETA.
The gray steel doors have a security camera trained on them, and the receptionist must buzz visitors in. Even some of the interior doors have keypad locks.
The walls are plain white, jazzed up with animal-rights posters and some certificates from the city of Rockville, praising the group for community service.
Most offices have screen doors - to keep staffers' pets from roaming. Staff members are allowed to bring pets to work with them. On a recent day, a deaf Great Dane/Labrador mix limped slightly as he searched a conference room for his companion human, and kittens napped in an office where PETA's writers turn out press releases.
The biggest rooms are devoted to paper. PETA has 20 pre-assembled packets on various topics, ready to be mailed to teachers, schoolchildren, reporters or anyone else who asks.
Videos. Posters. Fact sheets on 80 different animal rights topics. A small staff to open up to 500 pieces of unsolicited mail every day. One day this month, PETA received a record 1,200 pieces of mail.
The newest poster takes viewers on a tour of animal research labs. It pictures a monkey cowering from the camera, with the word ``crap'' tattooed across its forehead. A severed monkey hand used as a paperweight. A rabbit wearing a gas mask. A cat with one eye partially closed and draining.
Media Manager Jenny Woods calls the poster ``a dose of reality,'' a response to the kinder, gentler lab portrayed in a poster recently released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
PETA prides itself on getting undercover people with video cameras into labs, factory farms and other places where animals are, in the group's terms, exploited. Want a tape of ``Force-feeding Ducks for Pate''? ``Three Rings of Abuse''? ``The Cruel Reality of Rodeos''? Just ask.
PETA might be easy to brush off as a bunch of kooky animal lovers. But this group has clout. Its impact on the fashion industry alone has been tremendous. Designer after designer has fallen to PETA's demands that fur be taken off the runways.
Other giants have also fallen. The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games has agreed not to release live birds at the Olympics opening ceremony. Mobil Oil Corp. capped its exhaust stacks. L'Oreal, the world's largest cosmetics company, stopped testing products on animals.
Celebrities and supermodels line up to endorse PETA's philosophies. Kim Basinger posed nude for European anti-fur billboards. Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder donated about 200 autographed items to raise money for PETA. Martina Navratilova hugged a turkey in an ad pushing vegetarian Thanksgiving dinners.
The owner of the Houston Rockets wrote to NASA criticizing its animal experiments, saying his team didn't want a name associated with violence. Disney devoted a whole page to PETA's anti-fur campaign in a French booklet promoting the movie ``101 Dalmatians.'' Cruella De Vil doesn't stand a chance.
Woods likes to show off the fur room at headquarters.
``People send in their fur coats,'' she says. ``We have thousands.''
Leopard, mink, fox, rabbit, even a chimpanzee fur coat. Woods holds up a full-length sable. ``It's a huge walking wall of fur that Mary Tyler Moore doesn't want to wear anymore,'' Woods explains. Painted on the back, by a New York artist, is a fox face and the words ``Fur hurts.''
Moore will star in a PETA promotion in April. Woods is busy now trying to get the major women's magazines to interview Moore on the set.
Big stars mean big publicity, and PETA doesn't do anything small. As the largest animal rights organization in the world, PETA marches like an army of ants across all opposition. Of course, ants have never stripped to their underwear just to get their picture in a major newspaper.
Lisa Lange has. As the head of PETA's campaign office, Lange masterminds the flamboyant protests and raids that will spread the organization's message via the 6 o'clock news.
``We do what we can to get media coverage,'' she explains. ``We utilize costumes and things that are colorful.''
Of course, costumes are optional in the Lady Godiva campaign. In several major cities, an activist has stripped and ridden a horse down the street to draw attention to the campaign against Premarin, an estrogen replacement taken by 8 million women worldwide. PETA says the drug is made from the urine of pregnant horses. To get the urine, the horses are confined in stalls and their foals taken to slaughter, PETA says.
``We're pushing, with our Lady Godiva campaign, to change the labeling (on Premarin),'' Lange says. ``We want it labeled as horse urine, with the hidden ingredient of cruelty.''
Lange once stripped to her underwear in 12-degree weather to protest fur. ``Street theater,'' she calls it. ``PETA antics.''
``It sounds like we expect so much from people because we're talking about a lifestyle change. It's our job in campaigns to show people how easy it is,'' she says. ``We're trying to be the friendly how-to people.''
The police are not often amused. More than once, PETA antics have ended behind bars. Film at 11.
Woods has seen the business side of cell doors. She spent two weeks in a Pennsylvania jail on trespassing and theft charges. Her crime was running into a field to rescue pigeons that were being shot as they were released from cages for a community fund-raiser.
A white pigeon that escaped the shooting landed on the roof of the police van and rode with Woods to jail. Symbolic, she says. During the two-week sentence, ``They did a very nice vegetarian menu in jail.''
Woods is so sincere, leaning across the lunch table. So is Eilene Cohhn, PETA's director of special events and projects, who is dining on eggplant.
Eschewing meat sounds easy enough. Have some cheese, a bran muffin, a mustard dip instead. But most PETA people don't eat animal products, either, and that means the egg whites in muffins, the milk in cheese and the honey in mustard sauce. Tofu is big in this part of Rockville.
Woods is also sincere about her clothing. No leather, no fur. No wool, either. No down jackets. No nonsense.
Woods carries cards in her purse to hand out to people she sees wearing animal skins.
``Some people refuse to take it,'' she says. ``It's funny the reaction you get. It's important to do it nicely because that's good p.r., but if I don't do it, I feel like I've let down the animals.''
WOODS did let down the animals once upon a time. It was a life-changing moment for her. A radio station was asking listeners to send in boxes of cicadas, dead or alive. Cicadas, those big-eyed bugs that crawl out of the ground every so often and sing shrill love songs all day and all night.
Woods felt that it was cruel to cram the bugs into boxes. She called PETA for advice.
``I knew, with their ethic, they wouldn't laugh at me, and they didn't,'' Woods says. ``They didn't make me feel like a freak for calling about a bug.''
PETA told her to call the radio station and complain, to say she'd stop listening if they went through with the bug collection. But Woods was too timid to call. The radio station collected bugs, and Woods started reading ``Animal Liberation,'' a book that PETA staffers sometimes refer to as an animal-rights bible.
Now Woods walks up to total strangers to ask them to stop wearing fur, handles publicity for the organization, arranges interviews with top media and top celebrities.
``It's nice to know that PETA can put you in touch with people who feel the same way you do,'' she says.
Mary Beth Sweetland excels at getting in touch. Under her direction of PETA's research and investigations division, every member of Congress is aware that NASA plans to spend $27 million on a joint Russian-American experiment (Bion project) to study weightlessness in humans by sending brain-wired monkeys into space this summer.
Instead of spending money on ``Russian welfare,'' Sweetland suggests, why not fund Langley's graduate student internship program, which has lost funds over the past few years.
Sweetland's staff is also trying to stop the Nature Conservancy's use of wire snares to kill unwanted animals on its property, cities from poisoning starlings and crows, and the federal government from using just Premarin in its studies of estrogen replacement. The list goes on and on.
``We have a lot of work to do,'' Sweetland says, ``and not enough people to do it. But it sure is a wonderful place to work.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
MICHELLE FRANKFURTER
ABOVE: Shauna Helton of PETA and her dog, Birdman, have lunch at the
national headquarters in Rockville, Md.
BELOW: Peter Wood shows off a fur coat donated by Mary Tyler Moore;
the painted coat is used in protest demonstrations.
JENNY WOODS, PETA MEDIA MANAGER
Photo
In a French booklet promoting ``101 Dalmations,'' Disney devoted an
entire page to PETA's anti-fur campaign. The movie's villains
intended to make fur coats out of the dogs.
by CNB