Activists Steer Concerns to Auto Makers : Protests: From car shows to the Rose Parade, environmental and animal rights groups are showing up to decry alleged abuses.
Environmentally sensitive automobiles were up front. Environmentally sensitive activists were out back.
The two came together in a carefully choreographed moment Saturday at the opening of the nine-day Greater Los Angeles Auto Show.
As auto lovers surged into the Los Angeles Convention Center to gaze at a display of alternative-fuel vehicles that are probably a decade away from showroom floors, animal lovers rushed in behind them to protest car-manufacturing abuses they claim are taking place right now.
While car buffs on the exhibit hall floor crowded around the gleaming, stylized Dodge Viper GTS coupe, a group decrying the loss of real animals’ rain forest habitat unfurled banners next to the hall’s doors.
In what is fast becoming a new automotive tradition, technology and ecology were mixing it up again.
At the Indianapolis Auto Show last week, activists protesting General Motors’ use of animals in crash tests parked a GM car in front of the Indiana Convention Center, filled it with charcoal briquettes and wads of newspaper and set it on fire. At a Baltimore auto show last year, six activists were arrested in a similar protest.
Last year’s Los Angeles show started with the arrest of a protester dressed as a pink pig who handcuffed herself to a pink Cadillac.
Saturday’s protests resulted in no arrests, but about a dozen animal rights activists were ejected from the Convention Center when they tried to drape banners around several GMC pickup trucks.
Members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Last Chance for Animals were wrestled off revolving display platforms by GM security guards at the opening of the popular auto show.
Protesters distributed flyers accusing the huge Detroit car maker of being “the only auto maker in the world still using live animals in cruel, unnecessary crash tests.”
GM officials were unavailable for comment Saturday, but a GM spokesman last week denied that animals are still used in safety testing.
Saturday’s incidents followed efforts by some of the same activists to climb on the GM float during the Rose Parade.
It also coincided with a quieter protest outside the downtown exhibition center by members of the Rain Forest Action Network. They complained that the parent company of Mitsubishi, a Japanese auto maker, owns a logging interest that is destroying Chilean and Brazilian forests.
Both sides shrugged off opening day as business as usual.
“The security people were very nice,” said Bill Dyer of Venice, who was dragged off a car platform as he screamed, “General Murderers!”
Kevin Donahue, an Auto Show spokesman, said neither protest disrupted the exhibition of 650 new cars and trucks from 40 manufacturers. Sponsors expect the event to attract up to 600,000 patrons.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal, really,” Donahue said.
