The Unbridled Activist : In Chris DeRose’s World, Animal Studies Are Inhuman--and He’ll Do Most Anything to Stop Them

With his unshaven, stormy face, tensed, street-smart body and motorcycle gear, Chris DeRose looked somewhat out of place in the airy room of pink tablecloths and sparkling wine glasses. Nevertheless, the founder and president of Last Chance for Animals, an animal rights organization, lowered himself into a booth at the pretty Westwood restaurant at lunchtime, and the ordeal with the menu began.

The perky waitress recited the day’s specials, ending with the osso buco, or veal shank, “which is wonderful.”

DeRose is a vegan, a strict vegetarian who eats no animal or dairy products. He and the waitress finally settled on some angel hair pasta with fresh tomatoes. Hold the Parmesan.

Charm, With a Bite

Finally he broke into a soft, gentle grin. Turning on his considerable charm, he said to her, his manner teasing, his message serious: “You know how you said the osso buco was wonderful? It’s not. It’s awful.”

He did not have to spell it out for her--how modern veal comes from calves that have spent their lives virtually immobilized and fed a liquid diet. She caved in immediately, saying the management made her promote it since it was the most expensive thing on the menu.

Over lunch, DeRose proceeded to other matters, talking about his central focus and goal--the abolition of animal research, which he calls “a scientific fraud” and “a multimillion-dollar big business”--jerking his thumb over his shoulder at one point toward nearby UCLA Medical Center and speaking of “the atrocities going on over there.”

The waitress caught his sidelong glance as she stood at the next table extolling the wonders of osso buco, and broke into an exasperated giggle, hissing to him, “You make me paranoid, I swear.”

Last Chance for Animals, founded in 1985 when it split off from a group called Second Chance for Animals in a dispute over tactics, claims about 300 active members with a list of several thousand to call on for demonstrations and other actions in Southern California. It is one of about 7,000 animal rights and welfare groups in the country that claim a combined membership of 10 million.

Unlike some groups that are simply for more humane treatment of animals, Last Chance is for the abolition of vivisection, which the group defines as the use of non-human animals in research, testing and education.

As short-term goals, however, DeRose said, they often seek to enforce or toughen existing regulations. For example, they want an end to the selling of pound animals, strays and pets for research; they support the right of students not to dissect animals in the classroom; they want inspection by neutral outsiders of research facilities.

While not wanting to single out Last Chance or DeRose for comment, Richard Schaefer, director of community relations at Loma Linda University, described animal rights groups as “well-meaning” but said they “in general have presented a caricature of what’s really going on in medical laboratories. They’ve misled or unintentionally misled the public in their efforts.”

Often acting in coalitions, Last Chance demonstrates, seeks publicity, commits acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and supports more militant groups, such as the underground Animal Liberation Front, which have resorted to violent or criminal acts.

They also investigate reports of abuses, cultivate informers within targeted institutions, and stake out people and places, sometimes on 24-hour watches, often trailing them by car.

“We’re one of the few groups that does surveillance,” DeRose says.

They are gadflys who run ads such as a recent one in the Hollywood Reporter warning people that the check they write for charity may be supporting an institution that engages in vivisection, and that such research is “not transferable to humans” (a hotly and widely disputed statement). The ads lists charities and the animals they use.

When City of Hope held two fund-raising dinners at the Century Plaza in July honoring community leaders, Last Chance members came out for both occasions. Dressed in evening clothes, they distributed booklets that looked like program tributes but were a rundown, with pictures, of alleged animal experiment abuses at the medical facility.

In the course of their activism, they sometimes find themselves on both sides of the law, at times getting arrested, at times aiding law enforcement and regulatory agencies. DeRose has been arrested 11 times, he said, and has been charged with misdemeanors such as trespassing and disturbing the peace.

“I haven’t been convicted yet,” he said.

Come September, he is scheduled to go on trial as one of the UCLA Eight, eight Last Chance activists charged with breaking into the vivarium at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute on April 21 during World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week.

(As a result of their activity that day, videotapes and photographs of cats with electrodes implanted in their heads and spines were smuggled out and publicized in electronic and print media.)

Waiting for Charges

On the other side of the law, for months Last Chance has impatiently waited for two San Fernando Valley kennel operators and their employee to be charged with obtaining animals for commercial purposes under false pretenses, assuring pet owners that homes would be found for their animals and selling them instead for animal research.

Sounding weary at the mention of Last Chance, Deputy City Atty. Martin Vranikar said his office, which has “fielded over 300 phone calls from Last Chance,” expects to file charges of petty or grand theft this week against Barbara Ruggiero, Frederick Spero and Ralf Jacobsen, two dealers licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell animals for research, and an employee, all of whom operated out of two Valley kennels, Budget Boarding and Comfy Kennels.

It started with Last Chance members following up phone calls from suspicious pet owners. They staked out the kennels, scoured the “free to good home” ads in back issues of the Recycler for potential victims, and organized the pet owners, who broke into the kennels and reclaimed some of their animals.

They put a 24-hour watch on the kennels, tracked the missing animals to unwitting buyers at Cedars Sinai Medical Research Center, Loma Linda University and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda and demanded their return.

Some animals were reunited with their owners; others had already been destroyed in research. Last Chance members gathered evidence for the law enforcement agencies and testified at hearings, cooperating one minute with agencies they criticized the next.

There was even a car chase, DeRose said, as they trailed Ruggiero. DeRose is scheduled to be a witness for the prosecution when Ruggiero is tried in Ventura County on Sept. 12 on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and reckless driving, both charges relating to an incident where DeRose alleged she tried to run him down with her van.

From start to finish, the highly dramatic modus operandi by which Last Chance pursued the case has been pure Chris DeRose. He says he’s been in the movement for eight years.

At 40, he talks of pulling back, enjoying life, having a relationship, going out with friends, putting his acting career back on track, settling down, always after “this next thing” in the movement.

For the past three months, he says, his rent and phone bills have been paid anonymously, but “they’re Last Chance people. I have an idea who they are.”

Movie in Australia

He made a movie last year in Australia, a prison film called “Ghost of the Civil Dead” that has not been distributed here. The most recent work he’s had here, he said, is a trailer for a film in production, “Madder Blue.”

He says he has put what money he’s had into the movement. Clearly he has not put it into decorating. He lives in a somewhat dreary one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood where the price is right on the rent.

The decor consists of a body-building glossy of himself on the wall; a poster from a movie he starred in, “Crackdown”; a drawing of a primate, photos of chimps, a few teddy bears, a couple of motorcycle helmets and gloves; books on health, nutrition, healing, drama, pilot manuals.

The reading matter on the end table consists of periodicals called Animals’ Agenda and NAVS (the National Anti-Vivisection monthly).

‘Cruelty Free’ Products

The kitchen area is full of “cruelty free” products: Kleen, the Golden Lotus line, Bon Ami, Dr. Brenner’s soap for the dishes.

“I keep white vinegar and lemon juice and salt for scouring, disinfecting for the bath. Why no ammonia, no oven cleaner, no Drano? Because they still pour that stuff in rabbits’ eyes every day,” he said, just as they also test cosmetics and medicines on animals for safety on humans. “They’re doing it as we sit here.”

For similar reasons, like many fellow vegans in Last Chance, he has no leather goods in his closet, with the exception of a pair of 15-year-old cowboy boots he has not given up.

Of the pilot manuals on his bookshelves, he says, “I used to fly.” He used to devote time to his antique gun collection. He used to devote time to a girlfriend, and admits he has driven more than one woman away because of his obsession.

Calls Keep Coming In

By 10 one morning, for example, there were 20 “movement” calls on his message machine. When he returned from lunch, there were 14 more.

He is full of restless energy. He does not sit still for long, and in conversation he is on the move too, off on a verbal car chase, up this topical alley, jumping lanes and taking U-turns with tense and chronology, not exactly proceeding in a straight line.

“Intense” is how he describes himself.

“I couldn’t sit still in a jail,” he says, “but put me on the mountain and I can. I went to Fiji once and I could sit still, but if I’m jogging and I hear a pig squealing at the hotel because it’s getting killed for dinner that night, then I become intense again.”

There is something initially incongruous about all that macho energy and toughness, the kind of stuff that single-handedly mows down the bad guys or rides into town with a posse, all centering in on saving the life of a rabbit or a mouse.

Justice in His Life

But as DeRose talk about his life, it seems consistent. It fits in with his concept of justice, and he refers to the issue of animal rights as “a human/animal issue, a real big social problem.”

He tells a sketchy life story, especially where his early years are concerned, of poor neighborhoods in and around New York and of spells in orphanages. The short form boils down to “I’ve been kicked around.”

If you really want to get into the deep stuff with him, he will probably tell the grade school story about the bully who was extorting 10 cents a week protection money from the other kids. DeRose, then 11, refused to pay, saying of the circumstances of his refusal, “I had a wise mouth.”

And a small body. The bully beat him up badly in the playground.

Remembers the Nightmare

“It hurt so much, but I couldn’t cry. I remember looking up at people just standing there watching me. It was a nightmare, like ‘Twilight Zone,’ seeing them just watch. I swore from that day on, I would never be that apathetic toward any kind of pain. The biggest stigma was not the physical pain but knowing no one would do anything.”

He alludes to “a lot of traumatic things” when he was 17: some lost or squandered savings, a hit-and-run car wreck with him at the wheel, drunk and totaling three cars, juvenile hall, some more scrapes, and a judge who took him by surprise.

“The judge felt I’d done enough. He struck the record and said, ‘I hope you do well. Make the best of it.’ Here’s a guy I didn’t even know who gave me a break.”

In and out of college, and a failed stab at being a cop. Some work as a private investigator.

A Longtime Scrapper

There are many episodes and most of them involve some kind of run-in with authority.

He is a scrapper, he’ll admit, but only when it involves standing up for somebody: “I don’t like anybody getting hurt.” He does find it hard, he said, to always adhere to the nonviolent principles of his heroes, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Henry Thoreau.

In 1975, he said, he and a buddy came to Los Angeles and DeRose decided to stay and see if he could break into acting.

“My first job was a bouncer at an Irish pub. Everybody was bigger than me. I had a can of beer every other day. I knew nothing about nutrition on those days--just beans and white bread,” he said.

Would Eat Differently

Now he speaks like a true Southern California believer, saying with a straight face, “If there is one thing in life I would want to change, it’s the way I ate.”

He did pretty well with acting, he says, taking lessons, making guest appearances on television series, doing occasional movies.

And he got involved with animal rights.

There was an episode where he took a stray dog to the pound, and before he knew it he was being asked to sign papers acknowledging the dog might be used for research. His reaction was strong enough, he says, that the shelter people called the cops.

“When that dog looked up at me,” he said of that day at the pound, “I moved immediately from animal welfare to animal rights.”

‘Not an Animal Lover’

And yet he says repeatedly, “I’m not an animal lover.” He has no pets.

“To me, an animal lover is someone who loves an animal before people, and it’s all kootchie-kootchie-koo.”

This from the leader of a group full of loving pet owners, who occasionally laughingly commiserate with each other about the futility of trying to coax their cats and dogs onto the veggie bandwagon.

“I got into it for moral and ethical reasons. We should not take any species, race, religion and subjugate them. As the years went by, I found out that research does not extrapolate to human beings. I found it out from reading doctors journals.

“It’s a big multimillion-dollar industry. But if it wasn’t a fraud--which it is--and even if it did work--which it does not--I would still fight it just as vehemently as now. I don’t know how people can go on in their lives and not do something to try to stop this.”

The other night he and his fellow activists were out trying once more to stop it.

For several weeks they had been investigating rumors of animal torture in Glendale. DeRose and five others gathered at the Tarzana office, a no-frills “movement” place with plenty of gruesome pictures and literature.

They armed themselves with walkie-talkies, earplugs, binoculars and cameras and took off in two cars for their second visit to the Glendale address.

Recorded License Numbers

Within minutes the first car was parked near the site--a run-down frame house. With binoculars trained on the cars pulling up, Last Chance began recording license numbers.

About 25 tense minutes passed before the second Last Chance car peeled into the lot. DeRose got out and said tersely, “We had a little emergency we had to take care of.” And then, to people’s baffled looks, he explained, “Some kids were throwing a dog up and down.”

Ready to take the animal if necessary, Last Chance checked it out, and only when they saw the kids were just playing a little rough did they leave. On to the stakeout.

DeRose deployed two teams--one for the parking lot and alley behind the house, the other out front; one man would stay at the wheel in the parking lot.

Radio Communications

They took off. A few “do you read me’s” came over the radio; a porch light went on at a neighboring house; DeRose radioed the team in front, “Come on over here to this parking lot. Don’t be seen.”

DeRose and his partner were seen, however. There was an angry confrontation with a neighbor who warned them to get out and stormed into his house. Assuming he was calling the police, the group split, one of them explaining, “Chris got mouthy. You know how he is.”

They had accomplished part of their mission, however. DeRose found cages out back: roosters and chickens in one, maybe rabbits or something in the other--impossible to see. He shot a photo with a flash, aiming blindly into the cages, and scooped up samples of animal waste from the mystery cage. Holding up a plastic bag he said, “We can have it analyzed” as a means of identifying the animal.

Back in Tarzana, they reconnoitered. Should they go again? Should they report it? What was the law in Glendale? And what animals were in those cages?

To answer that question, they got out the bag with the sample, one dark pellet, in it.

Holding it up to the light, scrutinizing it, they hazarded guesses--rabbit, goat, something else.

Gradually, they became conscious of the absurdity of the situation and fell out howling with laughter at themselves as DeRose made the final identification.

It was not a sample of animal waste, but--”look, there’s even a stem!”--a boysenberry.