COLUMN ONE : Creatures Great and--Equal? : Activists have changed the way we look at everything from mink coats to steaks. But as they claim broader rights for animals, some wonder where to draw the line.

In a century and a half of activism, the animal protection movement has transformed the national consciousness, altering evermore how mainstream Americans regard other creatures.

Today, the movement’s enthusiasm and aims are expanding as never before--but so are its troubles, including quiet but persistent grand jury crackdowns and rising debate about its idealized dreams for America, its tactics, its antics and its emotionalism.

Several million Americans are members or supporters of animal protection organizations, from the workaday men and women of humane societies to the more militant--or as they see themselves, visionary--animal rights crusaders. They are joined together by one of the most practical and sublime meditations of our modern culture: If we are all animals, what do the mighty owe the meek?

A new Los Angeles Times Poll found that half or more Americans surveyed agree with two principal tenets of the animal protectionist cause--they are opposed to sport hunting and the wearing of fur.

But the federal government, the scientific research Establishment, ranchers, breeders, furriers, the tradition-minded of the “wise use” resource movement and a good number of average citizens say they believe that the notions of animal protectionists have gone beyond reason and their actions too often have gone beyond the law.

Looking back, it is easy to inventory the gains of animal protectionists:

* Wringing out of the cosmetics industry pledges to abstain from using animals in tests.

* Advancing the cause of vegetarianism.

* Stigmatizing fur clothing and ivory and exotic leathers, as well as veal.

* Pushing hunters closer to the social margins.

* Challenging the traditional use of animals in scientific experiments.

* Forcing the tuna industry to save dolphins.

* Clouding many people, particularly children, with doubts about circuses, zoos, horse and dog racing and dissecting frogs in school labs.

Moreover, the movement has altered the very standing of animals in society. One way to measure the extent of this change is through the work of one woman.

Thirty years ago, before Jane Goodall popularized her field studies of African chimpanzees, it was commonly believed that animals did not have consciousness, did not use tools or communicate in something we can roughly call language. Today, many, if not most, Americans say chimps have all those characteristics.

Americans also generally recognize that whales communicate in elaborate song, that wolves organize themselves in complex family groups and that elephants grieve at the death of other elephants.

“Animals are like us in all important things--they feel pain, act with altruism, they talk and suffer fear. They value their lives, even if we don’t understand those lives,” said Ingrid Newkirk, chairwoman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, which is perhaps the most controversial leading-edge group in the animal rights movement.

The Times Poll of 1,612 Americans found that 47% of adults agreed and 51% disagreed with her premise.

Animal rights leaders said they are surprised that so many Americans shared what has been considered, until now, a radical view. “I’m flabbergasted,” Newkirk said.

Just as shocked are those who only recently began organized resistance to the protection movement.

In Portland, Ore., the National Animal Interest Alliance describes itself as a middle-of-the-road organization of dog breeders, hunters, researchers and ranchers. Executive director Patti Strand puts it this way:

“The humane movement was traditionally concerned with the humane treatment of animals. In the last 20 years, however, it has been taken over by animal rights leaders whose priority is neither the humane care of animals nor the prevention of cruelty to animals, but instead the promotion of a revolutionary value system which redefines man’s relationship with other animals. Animal rightists want to end man’s use of animals altogether.”

With all this as background, the future of animal protectionism may well lay in how activists fare on several key battlegrounds:

Research

Animal experimentation is the arena in which activists have toiled most vigorously for gain, where they find themselves most deeply divided, where they have suffered the greatest setbacks and engendered the most wrath.

Animal protectionists claim 20 million to 70 million animals suffer and die each year in research, much of it useless, repetitive and costly. They say scientists are trapped in an old-fashioned system in which animal research is a proven way to keep the grant money coming and meet the “publish or perish” requirement of academia. Meanwhile, the most significant advances in understanding AIDS and cancer have occurred outside animal labs.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal rights group, recently published a review by its president, Dr. Neal D. Bernard, in which he concluded that animal experiments often lead researchers in “precisely the wrong direction.”

More than half the drugs approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration from 1976 to 1985 were found to be more dangerous to people than animal testing and limited human tests first indicated, Bernard said, citing federal General Accounting Office research.

Similarly, animal protectionists argue that testing of consumer products on animals, for such things as the safety of cosmetics and household cleaners, is flawed and continued chiefly to limit liability from lawsuits.

After a four-year international boycott and publicity extravaganza, PETA succeeded last autumn in obtaining a pledge from L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics producer, to cease animal testing. Such campaigns have proved so effective that department stores now advertise “cruelty-free” products.

The range of views within the movement is extreme. The Humane Society of the United States represents the moderates, calling for three R’s in testing--reduction, refinement and replacement, but not abolition. PETA wants all tests banned, and some of its leaders express sympathy with those who break the law and raid labs, destroying research and freeing animals.

The biomedical research industry has responded with a vigorous campaign of its own. Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved by animal research, says the American Medical Assn. Two-thirds of the Nobel Prizes awarded since 1901 involved discoveries resulting from the use of animals.

Among the medical advances attributed to animal tests, the AMA reports, is heart-bypass surgery, which was developed on dogs. Treatments or cures for scores of other ailments have resulted from these experiments, including tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, arthritis, polio and mumps.

Who will live and who will die? This, against the photo of a monkey and a boy, has become a rallying cry for the scientists.

Raids on laboratories, including firebombings, release of animals and other vandalism, have been occurring in the United States for 15 years, embittering those in the research industry and gaining them a host of allies and sympathizers.

These groups, backed by the federal government, argue that the traditional, moderate humane movement has been taken over and radicalized by those espousing the belief that animals have the same rights as people.

In their report to Congress on “Terrorism Against Animal Enterprises,” the Justice and Agriculture departments said that since the 1970s, “the cause of animal rights (has become) a mainstream ‘single issue’ movement, in some instances competing for or displacing the agenda of traditional animal welfare societies.”

From 1979 to June, 1993, the report catalogues 313 extremist attacks on research institutions and secondarily meat producers and the fur industry. Of those, 46% occurred in California. Total losses were estimated at $137 million.

For the last several years, federal attorneys and the FBI have mounted a nationwide investigation of the animal rights movement. Grand juries have been convened in Washington state, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah and Michigan. Only one person is known to have been indicted, although three people were jailed for several months this year in Spokane, Wash., for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury.

Animal protectionists see themselves as victims of government witch hunting and say they believe that the power of moneyed research interests lies behind the federal probes. After all, they reason, if stopping domestic terrorism was really the government’s motivation, why are there no federal grand juries investigating the decade-long campaign of bombing of abortion clinics and the attacks on doctors who perform abortions?

Vegetarianism

Scientists and protectionists find themselves more or less in agreement in questioning humanity’s most deeply embedded relationship with animals--as a source of food.

Some old-line animal welfare organizations like the Humane Society of the United States preach a moderate line, encouraging Americans to reduce consumption of animals and to use their buying power to support “free range” animal production, as opposed to high-volume factory farms where animals live under harsher conditions.

“In this day and age, most people who have grown up with a meat-based diet aren’t going to give it up,” said Patricia Forkan, executive vice president of the Humane Society. “There are different paths you can take and still be a humane person.”

But the more impatient activists say they believe that only by challenging America’s eating habits head-on can the movement make further strides. “It used to be that people thought animals were stupid and dirty,” Newkirk said. “Well, only someone who is dirty and stupid would put a piece of corpse in their mouth and lick their fingers afterward.”

For some Americans, vegetarianism is a health choice; for others, it’s a matter of conscience. According to a Vegetarian Times magazine survey, 12 million Americans consider themselves vegetarians, a growth of 2 million over the past decade.

“The most recognizable pattern in food consumption behavior the last 20 years has been the shift away from animal products,” researchers Shida R. Henneberry of Oklahoma State University and Barbara Charlet of Iowa State University wrote in a 1992 issue of the Journal of Food Products Marketing.

Fur

It’s a familiar fight to many Americans: The wearing of fur now carries a stigma.

Both sides agree fur sales are down. Many in the industry--from trappers and ranchers to retailers--acknowledge the effects of protest, vandalism and cries of outrage. To wear fur on the streets today is to risk, even invite, confrontation.

But the issue is far from settled.

This season’s fashion magazines are loaded with advertisements for fur. Major clothing designers continue to show fur coats. And in the tight circle of high fashion, magazine photo layouts tend to follow the trends of advertising, thereby furthering the powerful suggestion that fur is fashionable.

During this holiday shopping season, an underground group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front planted arson devices at four major Chicago department stores that sell furs.

Pricilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, told a holiday anti-fur rally in New York that pressure from activists helped reduce fur sales from $1.8 billion five years ago to $600 million last winter.

Sandy Blye, executive vice president of the American Fur Industry, said that last winter’s fur sales were $1.1 billion, up 10% from the previous year. She attributed soft sales in the previous four winters to the recession and warm weather, not animal protests.

Are leather shoes and briefcases next? Maybe, but not soon. Many animal protection leaders have themselves reduced or eliminated the use of leather, but virtually all agree that Americans are not ready to feel guilty about their wallets and watchbands.

Pets

If you look down the path for a split among animal protection activists, this could be it.

One of the traditional, and largest, constituencies of the movement are pet owners. Leaders such as the Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory and naturalist author Roger Caras are closely associated with the idea that pets are part of the essential human experience and bring people closer to animals.

But pets are being called into question by others who are--depending on your view--in the vanguard or on the fringe of animal protectionism. These voices are still few in number, but there is growing circulation to their arguments that pets are a form of slavery and debase both people and animals.

In particular, these leaders challenge the time-honored practice of raising animals to purebred standards. To the chagrin of many breeders, even the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains an entry under “dogs” that is pointedly unfavorable to purebreds, suggesting “more people have come to value the relatively trouble-free mongrel or mixed-breed dog.”

Newkirk argues for an end to all reproduction of domestic animals as a step toward a pet-free society. Animals, she says, “are not cheap burglar alarms or living toys.”

The Future--Youth

The next generation, and the one after, holds the promise of accelerated change. At least that is the consensus view of animal activists.

Whether it’s Goodall, PETA or the Humane Society, those in the movement recognize children as their best hope to reshape America. As they see it, children have yet to be influenced by the economic interests of those who use, or if you prefer, exploit, animals.

Children’s literature and can-do manuals abound in the animal protection movement. PETA’s book “Kids Can Save the Animals,” instructs youngsters to call the toll-free phone numbers of department stores to protest furs and animal-tested cosmetics, to call sponsors and object to rodeos, circulate petitions for “violence-free” schools that do not use frog corpses for biology lab and to boycott zoos and aquariums and marine parks.

The youngest respondents in the Times Poll, ages 18 to 29, were more likely to oppose hunting and the wearing of fur than was the overall population. And 61% said they believed that animals are like people in “all important ways,” compared to 47% for the population at large.

Priorities

The suffering of a single creature hits hard in the heart. But does an animal rights advocate’s tearful empathy with the suffering of a sea otter in an oil spill then transform itself into political action on behalf of all sea otters? Or, if you aim to protect a wolf from a trap or a bear from a hunter, isn’t it just as important to fight for places for these creatures to roam?

Many times these days, the answer is no.

Gary Francione, a Rutgers University law professor and founder of the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic, is one of the foremost thinkers in the animal protection crusade, and he bemoans its “very strong strain of anti-intellectualism.”

He contends that leaders of the cause devote too little energy to defining the underlying moral principles of animal protection and engaging the minds, rather than the emotions, of Americans.

In particular, emotionalism opens the movement to criticism that it is ignoring one of the most vital issues for the long-term well-being of animals--the fierce and difficult fights over wild animal habitat.

PETA’s 234-page book for children devotes only three pages to habitat protection, and then only to tropical rain forests. It also devotes three pages to protecting insects by propping twigs into birdbaths so that trapped bugs can climb out.

Congress-watchers and environmental leaders say that animal rights activists almost never join in the coalitions lobbying for habitat expansion.

This is particularly notable because, over the years, activists have been contesting hunters for their place in the blue-ribbon conservation movement. Hunters have traditionally been a strong voice and financial contributor to habitat conservation and, in that regard, an ally to environmentalists.

So far, animal rights activists have no such credible voice in these debates and their finances go elsewhere.

“Does our sport have a future?” Hunting magazine asked in a cover story last year. Its biting response was that anti-hunters refuse to face up to the long-term threats of humanity on habitat.

“Yes, it is much easier for the anti’s to call us murderers than to effectively fight for habitat--and to admit their own responsibility for diminishing that habitat,” the magazine said.

Some activists accept the criticism and have resolved to broaden their vistas. The Humane Society of the United States will begin accepting bequests of property for habitat preservation in 1994. Reaching beyond its anti-hunting agenda for the first time, the Fund for Animals has promised serious financial backing for the $1.9-billion 1994 California ballot initiative campaign for parks and wildlife habitat.

“We’ve been absolutely overwhelmed with animal abuses over the years, so it was right to have put our energy there,” said Wayne Pacelle of the Fund for Animals. “But we wholeheartedly accept the principle that wild animals need habitat, and the movement is shifting in that direction.”

Times researchers Doug Conner in Seattle and Tracy Shryer in Chicago contributed to this story.

47% in Poll: Animals ‘Just Like Humans’

Nearly half of Americans say they believe that animals “are just like humans in all important ways,” according to a new Los Angeles Times Poll.

The nationwide survey of 1,612 adults, conducted Dec. 4-7, also found that 54% said they oppose hunting for sport, and 50% say they oppose the wearing of fur. The sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.

Follow-up interviews with selected respondents showed that those who say they believe animals are like people equated animals’ and humans’ emotions and even their reasoning ability.

Some said they believe that animals, like people, are entitled to basic rights derived from God or from society. “I feel they (animals) were put on this Earth for the same reasons that we were,” one respondent said, “and I think they are due the same rights that we have.”

But some who disagreed cited religious convictions, saying that people have God-granted control over animals for utilitarian reasons. “I don’t feel animals have a soul. . . . (They) were put here for our use, either for labor or eating or experimental purposes,” one respondent said.

The statement that animals are like humans in all important ways was made by activist Ingrid Newkirk. Forty-seven percent of those polled said they agreed with the statement; 51% disagreed. Two percent had no opinion. Support was particularly strong among women, 52% to 45%, and among people ages 18 to 29, 61% to 38%.

While the majority of those surveyed opposed hunting for sport, 41% favored it and 5% were undecided. Men supported hunting by a 53%-41% margin, but women opposed it, 65% to 30%. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 60% opposed sport hunting.

While half of those polled opposed the wearing of fur, 35% said they approved of using fur for clothing, with 15% undecided. Fifty-eight percent of women surveyed opposed the wearing of fur, while 27% supported it. Men narrowly favored the practice, 45% to 40%. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 57% opposed the use of fur.

Times Poll director John Brennan said the results show “more division than consensus in society on animal rights issues.”

Forty-six percent of those surveyed said they believed that the laws protecting animals from inhumane treatment are satisfactory. Another 30% said laws did not go far enough, and 17% said laws had gone too far.

THE TIMES POLL

Do you think law protecting animals from inhumane treatment in our society go too far, don’t go far enough or are adequate now? Too far: 17% Adequate: 46% Not far enough: 30% Don’t know: 7% *

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Animals are just like humans in all important ways.” Agree: 47% Disagree: 51% Don’t know: 2% *

Do you generally favor or oppose the wearing of clothes made of animal furs? Favor: 35% Oppose: 50% Don’t know: 15% *

Do you generally favor or oppose the hunting of animals for sport? Favor: 41% Oppose: 54% Don’t know: 5% Source: Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,612 adults taken nationwide Dec. 4-7. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Battle for Public Support

The animal protection movement has changed how mainstream America regards other creatures. But a debate is rising--even within the movement--about its idealized dreams for America: Should animals be put to any uses?