What are Animals put on Earth For? - 21 January 2000

I don't know how it is with you but one of the minor irritations of the great boom, which is now longer than any recorded in the history of this country, is the huge increase in the number of advertising pages in newspapers and magazines.

This would be no trouble if they were neatly assembled as a package in, say, the middle of the journal so you could rip them out and settle down to read one page after another.

But obviously the advertisers and the publishers thought of that before we did and they want to have their ads bang up against any feature piece seductive enough to make you want to read it.

I've given up several magazines I used to take because the advertisements overwhelm the early and middle pages so much so that you can't find the index and are lucky if you can find the text - the pieces. I call this a minor irritation of the boom.

The major irritation is, of course, not being a multimillionaire like everybody else. Of all the advertisements the ones I scan least these days are the fashion ads.

I take less notice than I used to of men's fashions because, so far as I can see, they're mostly photographs of young men in over-sized jackets, a rumply shirt with a cardboard looking collar - open at the neck. They're by way of a pathetic protest against the now universal rule that by day men ought to dress like unemployed plumbers.

However, though all the ballooning fashion pages are more dismissable than ever I was brought to a halt one day this week by a screaming full page headline printed above a ravishing figure of a haughty young blonde smothered in a cloud of mink.

The headline said simply, shamelessly: "Fur is back."

As a matter of historical fact fur never went away in these parts. But there was a time - I don't know, six, seven years ago - when that headline would have been a red rag to the running of the bulls, a battle cry for the ever ready defenders of animal rights, which though not itemised or even mentioned in the Constitution of the United States are claimed for every four-legged inhabitant of the American wilderness and back street by just as many people as will leap - justly - to the defence of the rights of women, of the disabled, of blacks, of minorities even when they're in the majority.

Incidentally the last time anyone put out a pamphlet - a plea for the rights of man - was in 1795.

It was written by Thomas Paine, an English radical who came to America to start a little mischief by telling the natives to break with England and set up their own republic.

When they took him at his word he had no intention of getting into the fray himself and beat it back to England where he thought that there also a revolution might do some good. Prime Minister Pitt disagreed and had him indicted for treason.

He was smuggled out of England by William Blake - yes, the poet - and he arrived in Paris where, since they had a revolution in full swing, he simply joined them as a happy brother rebel, until one of their leaders said: "Hold it, this guy is an Englishman, ergo an enemy."

He was put in prison and he escaped the guillotine by a hair's breadth.

Well I hadn't meant to go on about Tom Paine but he does show the risks of getting too hot and bothered about the rights of man. If there is any significance in the fact that his mother was a corset maker I leave you to find it.

Well: animal rights. Fur is back.

The line recalled, I was saying, the crusade some years ago to make women or men wearing furs so obviously objects of public scorn that somehow, in ways never quite worked out, the makers of furs would hang their heads and go out of business.

Certainly the hue and cry was loud enough and sincere enough to give second thoughts to even women celebrities - movie actresses and such - who acquired an extra bit of celebrity by being photographed in what former President Nixon, speaking admiringly of his wife's attire, called "a good Republican cloth coat."

Well the crusade had people out on the streets insulting women, mostly verbally or even thwacking them on the pelt, and the movement did have the effect of making even famous fur manufacturers noticeably restrict their advertising for a time, letting the availability of their wares get known by word of mouth - mouth to chattering mouth.

Ah but there you have it in a word, the word "chattering". You have the reason why this crusade was brief and is now forgotten.

I did say earlier, did I not, that as a fact fur never went away in these parts.

I know that the same movement had a longer swing in England, a temperate country which, by definition, can afford the luxury of an anti-fur campaign. This was shown very vividly the other morning when I had a telephone call from a friend in London where he said it was "bitterly cold."

I keep tabs on the daily highs and lows, temperatures of London, and on the day he was speaking it was in London 36º Fahrenheit. At the end of this line I was looking out on Central Park - a dazzling day - brown earth, trees bare, brown stalks, too cold for snow. The temperature outside my window was 9º - 27º colder than my friend's "bitter cold" day.

There in a word - a number - you have the simple explanation of why the anti-fur crusade was bound to fail here as it would anywhere across most of the northern hemisphere.

And New York is fairly mild compared with, say, two thirds of the United States at this time, from here for 3,000 miles west.

My daughter, who lives 3-400 miles to the north called from Vermont the same day. She was going about her daily business, visiting the sick, conducting funerals - she's a parson - in 20 below zero, that is to say 57º colder than London. You think she ought to sport a good old Republican cloth coat?

While the anti-fur campaign was on I ran into a character right out of 19th Century America, so exactly out of Mark Twain that I couldn't swear on a Bible whether he wasn't indeed one of the great man's inventions.

A Missouri farmer, one of the fast dwindling minority of family farmers - since farming, hog farming in particular, has been taken over by giant corporations that have never seen a pig except on a platter as a roasted corpse.

The old man had lived by the big river and had more than his share of natural disasters - droughts, floods, tornadoes, tumbling farm prices - he was old enough to remember when the depression was not 1932 but 1922 in the farm belt when his neighbour - Harry S Truman, a struggling haberdasher - had gone bust.

Well about six, seven years ago it was the old man was hailed on the street by a campaigner waving a pamphlet about the shame of killing animals and then wearing their skins and furs.

The old farmer was a man of firm principle and lamentably simple convictions, simply stated.

"What's your quarrel, son?" asked the old man.

The young man put it to him directly: "What were animals put on earth for?"

The farmer looked at the man in a kind of dumb amaze, as if he'd been asked: "What is food for?"

The old man gave him much the same answer: "To eat and wear."

"But to do either you've got to kill them first."

"You speak nothing but the truth son," said the farmer, "but the killing part's why the good Lord gave me a sharp eye and a quick trigger finger." A thoughtful pause.

"I admire your strength of character, son, but we have a weak strain in our family that makes us susceptible to prime ribs, pepper steak, pot roast, corn beef hash and similar devilish dishes and I found that nylon and such ain't as cosy as camel's hair.

"Ever eat a camel son? We never had a vegetarian in our whole family - oh except one, my Uncle Leroy, poor fella. Died in his 25th year."

Well this enlightening dialogue was going on in the lobby of a small old hotel in the Mid West and by now I regret to say the crusader knew that his cause was hopeless and the old man was left to talk and smoke by himself.

Seriously the moral question never seems to have been settled, to the satisfaction of a majority anyway, though I suppose it does really turn on your answer to that simple question of the crusader: "What were animals put on earth for?"

The only animal rights devotee I admire without reservation is a woman, a friend who lives not far from here on the New Jersey coast - I hope the fact that she's a very beautiful lady does not affect my judgement.

She eats no meat of any kind, scorns the breeding of cattle, pigs, calves, lambs, any animal more or less imprisoned from birth.

She excludes game birds which have a wonderful time flying all over the place before - ping! - they die in a second.

Her ban also applies to fish: having watched fish being caught she doesn't believe in the neurologists' contention that fish feel no pain being hooked and speared and having their heads chopped off.

She wears absolutely no material made from animals. You'd not know it, she's a very chic, soignée young lady but somehow she's found and wears every sort of plastic or artificial material from top to toe.

At least she's consistent. Since she lives in this climate she doesn't go out on the perishing northern winter mornings slapping the sisters who are callous enough to wear fur.

She allows her husband to wear animal skins and leather and woollies, she even cooks him dinners - juicy with red meat. I think she's the only paragon I've ever known. Her husband, nestling into his fur collar after a delicious filet mignon dinner, thinks so too.

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