John Brown's Bunny

[December 6th, 2006] It seems congratulations are in order to In Defense of Animals: Nearly a year of picketing, spitting and paint-throwing outside Schumacher Furs has achieved results (for more on this story, see page 15). The store, which had allegedly battled back with signs and threats of its own, is finally hightailing it out of downtown. No longer will Southwest 10th Avenue be tarnished by the peddling of animal skins. Of course, some other location will now be tarnished by the peddling of animal skins. So downtown Portland loses a merchant, and Schumacher gets a parking lot. No price is too high for such progress.

Such is the warped logic of some local (and national) animal rights advocates who have dedicated themselves to the belief that extremism in the defense of fuzzy critters is no vice. But it is now a crime, thanks to President Bush's signing last month of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The law says that if you torch your local furrier or cosmetics-testing facility—or even suggest that the thought has crossed your mind—you will be spending some time in another sort of facility. So the moment couldn't be more ripe for Your Mommy Kills Animals, an evenhanded, wide-ranging documentary that examines how matters reached this sorry state on both sides of the furry divide.

The incendiary title is taken from a PETA comic book (shown above) that delights children with images of "a cute animal and a formerly cute animal," as comedian Drew Carey puts it after a horrified examination. But one of the shocks provided by Curt Johnson's debut film is the discovery that, in fact, PETA itself kills animals. A lot of them: Internal records show the organization (which declined comment) destroys more than 60 percent of the dogs and cats it takes in, a natural result of the conviction that we should give animals liberty or give them death. Mostly it's death.

Not every group comes off as such lethal hypocrites. The British-founded groups Animal Liberation Front and Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty both offer representatives who make an eloquent case for battling animal testing laboratories, and who identify themselves with a tradition reaching back to the abolitionist and suffrage movements. (Watching their teams chant "Puppy killer!" outside the homes of cosmetics investors, I half expected a chorus of "John Brown's bunny lies a-moldering in the grave.") Johnson follows the SHAC troops—including Portland native Josh Harper—as they battle federal indictments. Harper's story is particularly wrenching: He is serving a three-year sentence in Sheridan Federal Correction Institution for operating a website. Apparently, our government thinks this guy is the No. 1 terrorist threat to America.

But one of the first rules any lawyer learns is, bad cases make bad law. And if you've been running a website that publishes the home addresses of Huntington Life Sciences workers alongside celebrations of pipe-bombing, let me suggest you might have a bad case. Your Mommy Kills Animals paints a dire portrait of the state of American civil liberties, but it also makes clear that the protesters outside Schumacher Furs not only are failing to save animals—they're not doing your freedom of speech any favors, either.