Animal Rights Activists Get a TV Hearing

The efforts of animal rights activists are finally paying off at the media box office. More strong evidence arrives Thursday.

That is when the CBS series “48 Hours” delivers a powerful, disturbing and visually jolting program (8 p.m. on Channels 2 and 8) that defines some components of the wide, eclectic movement to protect animals from abuse--if not death--at the hands of humans.

That ongoing--and often controversial--campaign has been steadily growing in strength and intensity in recent years. But now, almost suddenly, it seems to have exploded in the media’s consciousness. And when the media pay attention, so does the public.

One reason for the recently elevated profile is surely the ever-surging energy and media savvy of the animal welfare movement itself, which, like all special-interest groups, has learned the lessons of television.

Another is “Gorillas in the Mist,” the popular, finely made movie (accompanied by a large publicity burst) about enigmatic Dian Fossey’s campaign to preserve the endangered African mountain gorilla.

There was also that amazing, TV-attended event in Alaska, where traditional enemies temporarily set aside their animosities and cooperated in the rescue of those California gray whales trapped in the ice.

Mainstream entertainment TV has been getting the message too: Witness the subplot on last week’s episode of “Roseanne” that echoed the student-rights story of Jenifer Graham. A Victorville, Calif., high school student, Graham’s biology grade was lowered from an A to a C over her refusal to dissect a frog because she believed that killing animals for research, food, clothing or sport “harms the God in everything.”

CBS is still mulling over an Eagle-Horowitz Productions proposal for an after-school special about Graham, whose suggestions for an alternative to dissection were rejected, and whose battle to have her original grade restored is unresolved.

Ignorance and insensitivity still linger.

Graham was named the area’s “most obnoxious person” in a reader’s poll conducted by the local paper in her community. When it comes to “obnoxious,” however, nothing could top last Friday’s repeat episode of ABC’s “Mr. Belvedere,” in which the Owens family had the responsibility of care-taking someone’s highly destructive cat, which was never shown. The family resolved the problem by gluing the cat’s toy ball to the street. Later, when the owner returned, she was handed an envelope with the cat’s remains.

Big laugh. Heh heh.

In the area of sensitivity training, however, the potential impact of Thursday’s “48 Hours” should not be underestimated, even though the series has a minuscule audience by prime-time standards.

The hour opens with Last Chance for Animals, an organization that doesn’t shrink from breaking the law. We watch its members invade a UCLA medical lab and make off with test animals. “Humane treatment and an animal in a laboratory are a contradiction. . . ,” says the group’s leader, actor Chris DeRose, who is arrested for the break-in.

Another segment deals with a firm that tries out surgical instruments on anesthetized dogs. Its owner was the target of an alleged bombing attempt by an animal rights activist.

We also watch animal rights proponents attempt to disrupt hunters. We hear the debate over the allegedly deplorable treatment of calves raised for veal. And we hear from doctors who say animal research is essential, and from a woman who says medical research on animals saved her life.

There, also, in Quakertown, Pa., is Oscar Moreno. Friendly and open. Loving family man. Lots of well-cared-for animals at home as pets. Moreno and his wife, however, operate a laboratory that uses animals to test ingredients for detergents, colognes and cosmetics, the ingredients that can cause the animals agony. He says: “There’s no feeling for these animals here in the laboratory. They’re a tool.”

He injects a substance into the esophagus of a rat, then into the eye of a rabbit. It isn’t pretty.

“Does it concern you,” asks reporter Bob Faw, “that an animal would be put in discomfort--sometimes even pain--so that a woman can have a perfume, that for reasons of vanity, animals must suffer?” Replies Moreno: “You do worry about it. But . . . when I come in here in the laboratory, it doesn’t bother me anymore.”

You wish, at that point, that “48 Hours” had probed further by visiting a cosmetics firm that doesn’t rely on animal testing. How can such testing be essential for one and not the other?

You wish, also, that “48 Hours” had gone further in seeking out reputable medical authorities who maintain that in many cases there are viable alternatives to research on animals. And you wish that the show had not blurred the distinction between hard-line anti-vivisectionists and those merely advocating more humane treatment of research animals.

Moreover, the “48 Hours” format itself--with its heavy reliance on frenetic action and movement--carries a built-in distortion. Hence the relative overemphasis Thursday of a small minority--the animal rights commandos and even an alleged bomber--at the expense of more mainstream elements of the movement.

That movement is diverse, with CBS estimating its membership at about 10 million Americans.

One highly vocal element missing from the program is the anti-fur crowd. “We left it out, in part, because it is the most widely covered and most of the country already knows about it,” senior producer Steve Glauber said by phone from New York.

Was Glauber concerned that the program would be too graphic for comfort? “We edited it with the 8-to-9 time period in mind,” Glauber said. “Much of the material we considered grotesque, we took out. But you have to show some of these things.”

The program’s final segment--a visit to a Kansas City animal pound--is perhaps its most heartbreaking, as we watch a clock tick away the final minutes in the lives of dogs scheduled to be killed by lethal injection at the end of the day. “48 Hours” monitors the eleventh-hour efforts of pound employee Diane Hardman to find a home for a dog to which she has become particularly attached.

The irony is that Hardman--who estimates that she has had to order the destruction of perhaps 90,000 animals in her 10 years at the pound--is herself a compassionate animal lover.

“I’ve become so attached to these animals, and yet I have to make the decision,” she said by phone from Kansas City. “It just tears me up.”

Hardman said she has a recurring dream about an injured animal that she tries to save, but can’t locate. “Most people think that we enjoy killing these animals, but it’s just the opposite,” she said. “I’ve gotten to the point where I just have to find another line of work. I have to get out.”

An option unavailable to the animals.