March
1995
Letter
from the Editor: Ordinary People Behaving Badly
By Martin Rowe
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The protest is 1,000 people strong: people standing and sitting in the
road. Demonstrators tie themselves to telegraph poles and lamp posts
to block the road. In front of the mass of people on a plastic chair
sits their leader, Mrs. Tilly Merritt. She is joined briefly by a fellow
protestor, Mr. Denis Dunn.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about this scene, not even
perhaps the number of people involved. The protest is in Brightlingsea
on the East coast of England, and is focused on stopping the live export
of veal calves to Europe. Veal calves in Europe are still kept in insufferably
cramped crates where they cannot turn around to clean themselves and
where they are forced to lie in their own feces, starved and anemic.
These crates have been banned in Britain since 1990.
What is perhaps remarkable is that, for a movement often stereotyped
as the fad of naive youngsters out to knock the Establishment, the
intensifying
protests against such abuse are a reminder of how compassion isn’t
the preserve of the young or disenfranchised. Mrs. Tilly Merritt and
Mr. Denis Dunn are 78 years old. Mr. Dunn, a retired orthopedic surgeon,
is quoted as saying, “I am here because I am against using animals
for food and particularly exporting them.” One of the leaders
of the protests at Shoreham, further down the coast, is Mrs. Beryl Ferrers-Guy,
55. No ring-nosed, hippie-hangover she, but a highly respectable former
Conservative party councilor. She pours scorn on the media and police’s
statements that militant terrorists have taken over the protests. “It
is media hype that we have been infiltrated by any of the so-called
militant or extremist element.” Instead, “There is a tremendous
feeling of community spirit,” she relates about the protestors.
“We are bound together by utter disgust at what has been happening
here, particularly at our treatment by the police.”
Police have been out in numbers, removing doctors, accountants, businesswomen,
mothers and grandmothers and other such socially divisive elements
from
the streets. A woman was recently crushed to death under the wheels
of a truck carrying live cargo to slaughter in Europe. Her son saw
her
die; but the tragedy has only increased sympathy for the sons of other
mothers of other species going off to be slaughtered. The woman’s
father and sister were arrested for trespassing, her boyfriend charged
with criminal trespass after chaining himself to the wheels of a plane
carrying calves, and her son’s cousin has vowed to continue the
fight.
While there has been violence and unacceptable threats have been made,
the vast majority of the people involved are simply stirred by outrage
at the suffering of fellow animals. Many have not been on a demonstration
in their lives, and are amazed to find themselves there at all. But
they are, and they are being effective; for the trade in veal calves
to Europe has fallen from around 40,000 to 10,000 calves a month. Moreover,
while I am sure a large proportion of these people are not vegetarians
and probably wouldn’t call themselves animal rights activists,
they have set in motion a powerful force that will make it impossible
for them to eat veal from the veal crates of Europe, or then veal slaughtered
in the UK, or then beef, or then pork... And given that these events
have been picking up steam and that so many have been mobilized in
only
a short time, who knows where this whole thing will lead to?
All of this began quietly a year ago when a Compassion in World Farming
press conference reduced a famous British actress to tears after a
video
was shown about what goes on. There followed programs and articles,
as well as protests, but nothing on the scale of the last few weeks.
People have seen and heard what goes on and that has been enough. It
was enough for Mrs. Ferrers-Guy, enough for Eddie Wassell the taxi-driver
and for Roberta Hyland the nurse, enough for Margaret Henderson (aged
43), who was introduced to animal rights protests by her mother (aged
67), to bring her son (aged 11) to the gates of Coventry airport to
register their outrage. It was enough for them to forget to be polite
and unassuming. It was enough to forget that respectable people don’t
protest and that ordinary folk can’t change things anyway. It
was enough to forget to deny the daily abuse that accompanies veal
production.
Because these ordinary people are behaving badly, bad behavior is being
stopped. We should learn from that.
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