Animal-Rights Issues Become TV’s Pet Project

The hunting season is ending and Maggie O’Connell has proudly bagged “a beauty.”

“Yesterday he was a beauty,” Joel Fleischman snaps self-righteously about the deer that O’Connell has shot. “Today he’s a dead animal strapped to the back of a truck.”

Later, Fleischman himself will load shells into a shotgun and take aim in the Alaskan wild, bringing down a grouse.

The series is “Northern Exposure,” the episode “A Hunting We Will Go.” And its airing on CBS (at 10 tonight, Channels 2 and 8) is evidence anew of how the animal-protection debate--from hunting to vivisection to fur wearing--is increasingly surfacing in mainstream television.

The climate is such that one Los Angeles company, Eagle/Horowitz Productions, is circulating a proposal in TV circles for a weekly reality series that would feature stories concerning animals and animal-rights issues.

Interest in animals, beyond the usual pet stories, does seem to be broadening via TV.

It was only 12 days ago that the volatile issue of scientific research on animals was the theme of NBC’s “Quantum Leap,” with time-traveling Sam Beckett inhabiting the body of a seemingly doomed research chimp named Bobo at Cape Canaveral.

Although executive producer Don Bellisario had adamantly vowed that the controversial episode would take no sides, the hour was decidedly pro-Bobo and arguably a statement on behalf of animals. “It was really a sort of chimp’s-eye view,” observed Shirley McGreal, chairwoman of the Summerville, S.C.-based International Primate Protection League. “So anyone who saw it was going to be rooting for the chimp.”

The same principle applied to this season’s premiere of the usually benign ABC sitcom “Family Matters,” which featured a character rescuing an orangutan from a science laboratory. In addition, testing on animals was rigorously debated on a recent episode of Ron Reagan’s syndicated talk show.

On the news and documentary front, meanwhile:

* KABC Channel 7’s Christine Lund recently presented a compassionate, aggressively reported three-part series on the tenuous status of America’s wild horses, and KCBS Channel 2’s Jim Lampley reported about dolphins, from the water.

* On Nov. 24, cable’s TBS will air “Mysterious Elephants of the Congo,” a documentary calling attention to the continuing plight of the African elephant. Wildlife documentaries abound; in contrast to others, though, this one will display an 800 number through which viewers can lobby President Bush and others to retain an international moratorium on ivory trade scheduled for renewal in March.

* Shortly before being canceled, NBC’s “Expose” aired a devastating report on so-called safaris organized in the Southwest for the benefit of so-called hunters who find sport in slaughtering declawed, relatively tame big cats that have been sold off by zoos and circuses. Trophy seekers shoot some of these cats in their cages. And previously this year, “Expose” profiled a woman who videotaped appalling treatment of animals at a South St. Paul stockyard.

On the celebrity front, Peter Falk and Alec Baldwin have recently taped public-service messages for animal-rights groups. Baldwin narrates a video cataloguing alleged animal mistreatment by circuses and traveling acts. It is being used to protest a special titled “The All New Circus of the Stars & Side Show,” set to air Nov. 29 on CBS. Citing her “respect and concern for animals,” Cassandra Peterson, professionally known as Elvira, rejected a $10,000 fee to appear in the special.

On another front, it was a couple of seasons ago that “Designing Women” on CBS presented an episode grabbing the coattails of the anti-fur-wearing movement. But it was only last summer that a columnist for Fur Age Weekly affirmed that movement’s inroads when she complained that TV commercials for the re-release of the children’s movie “101 Dalmatians,” by featuring the story’s fur-wearing villainess, left the impression that “people who wear fur are heartless.”

No one is heartless in tonight’s typically thoughtful, witty and poignant “Northern Exposure”--hunters, carnivores or otherwise. That is one of its many strengths. There is, instead, an irony and an ambiguity that echo life.

“We’re not trying to sell someone a bill of goods,” said co-executive producer Joshua Brand. “I expect to get a call from the NRA (National Rifle Assn.) saying it (the episode) endorses hunting. I don’t think it does.”

Nor does it oppose it. Written by Craig Volk, it instead shows the characters of “Northern Exposure” in most ways being true to themselves, as always, with the debate over hunting as their stage. Fleischman initially lectures, but the episode doesn’t. It offers, as Brand notes, a statement that “things are complicated.” If not things, people.

Fleischman (Rob Morrow), the miserably transplanted New York doctor, is appalled by the love of hunting displayed by his friends O’Connell (Janine Turner), Holling Vincoeur (John Collum) and Chris Stevens (John Corbett).

“What gives you the right to be the murderer of animals for your own pleasure?” he demands, ignoring the fact that he eats meat from animals killed for his dining pleasure.

“I’d rather get my brains blown out in the wild than wait in terror at the slaughterhouse,” Holling tells him later. Chris defines the “thrill” of the hunt more savagely: “There’s nothing like putting the breaks on something that’s moving.”

Fleischman, making a U-turn a bit too abruptly, decides to find out for himself, and is then transformed by the experience into a gung-ho Queens version of trigger-happy Ernest Hemingway.

When finding that the bird he shot is only wounded, however, the compassionate physician again takes over. Instead of finishing off his victim, a horrified Fleischman attempts to save it. It seems that, like most of us, he can abide taking a life only in abstraction. He loved the hunt, and especially the killing, he tells O’Connell. “It was the dying I couldn’t take.”

You’re moved. Not that this trauma necessarily will linger long with Fleischman, who remains inconsistent but human.

As the television and animal kingdoms increasingly merge. . . .