Boycotts Request Travelers to Add Politics to the Itinerary : Planning: A dozen campaigns are in effect worldwide. Here are tips for making effective choices before going, or staying away.

If you’re worried about state-sponsored wolf control programs, you can stay out of Alaska. If whale killing troubles you, you can stay out of Norway. If you’re troubled by black-market trading in rhino horns, you can avoid Taiwan. Conversely, if you believe travel boycotts are blunt pressure-group weapons that injure innocent bystanders, you can ignore the campaigns and visit anyway, as most individual vacationers do.

Either way, if you’re a traveler these days, in addition to planning an itinerary you probably may have some political decisions to make as well. As the year began, Zachary D. Lyons, editor and publisher of the Seattle-based Boycott Quarterly, counted more than a dozen ongoing campaigns that could affect the itineraries of politically inclined travelers.

What should a leisure traveler do if a boycott crops up on his or her itinerary? First, separate facts from suspicions and opinions. Decide if you agree with the cause, if it’s important to you and if a boycott seems a reasonable and effective way to exert influence.

If any of those answers is no, that’s that. If the answers are yes, then act or don’t. (And if you decide to join a boycott, keep in mind that no one will ever know it unless you declare your action to the boycotting group, the boycott target, or both.)

Within the United States, the most dramatic example of a travel boycott’s effectiveness is Arizona. From 1987-92, after Arizona’s governor and then its voters rejected a Martin Luther King holiday, a national protest gathered momentum. The boycott brought cancellation of more than 160 conventions and other gatherings. In November, 1992, the state’s voters reversed themselves.

The most effective campaigns have aimed to scare away convention planners, thus doing measurable economic damage. But arguments on both sides are often pitched to reach individual tourists, as well. Even though some highly political groups do refuse to employ travel boycotts--Amnesty International, for instance--it’s not hard for a traveler to get caught in rhetorical cross-fire.

Here’s an update on three tourism boycotts within the United States.

Alaska. The Alaskan wolf boycott campaign has gained massive publicity but brought no quantifiable loss in tourism revenues. The current boycott, backed by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, was launched in 1992 to protest a state effort to kill wolves, which often feed on caribou young. State officials say the program was designed to boost caribou numbers, which, while not threatened, were falling in some areas. The wildlife alliance argues that caribou numbers statewide are way up and that the state’s program was really designed to give hunters more caribou to shoot at in a convenient area.

While the controversy simmered, Alaska in 1993 surpassed 1 million arrivals from out of state for the first time. The number for 1994 is expect to near 1.1 million (thanks in large part to the state’s growing popularity as a cruise destination). But the boycotters can claim some gains. In 1993, state officials reduced the wolf program from three areas to one (a 4,000-square-mile zone south of Fairbanks and neighbored by Denali National Park), and limited the methods to trapping, rather than trapping and shooting.

The most recent development came Dec. 2. After a widely replayed video documented a grisly snaring in a state trap and prompted an outpouring of complaints, state officials temporarily suspended the program. But Alaska Wildlife Alliance associate director Sandra Arnold says the group will continue to back a tourism boycott “until there’s a permanent solution.” California. Various protests have been touched off by November’s voter passage of Prop. 187, which denies public education, social services and non-emergency health care to illegal immigrants. (A federal court judge has temporarily blocked its implementation.) Latino activists in Arizona and Colorado have suggested boycotting the state. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Assn. has announced that it will relocate its 1995 national convention, which had been set for Beverly Hills.

Some other anti-187 activists have suggested boycotting Disneyland as a symbol for all California, despite the fact that Walt Disney Co. took no position on the measure. After that idea was raised early last month, half-a-dozen other Latino and labor groups stepped up to oppose the strategy as unfair and counterproductive.

Lancaster County, Pa. The Pennsylvania-based International Society for Animal Rights has called for a boycott of the area, famed for its Amish farms, to protect the presence of many alleged “puppy mills,” in which protesters say dogs are bred in substandard and under-regulated conditions and killed as soon as they can reproduce no more. State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf has called Pennsylvania “the puppy mill capital of the world.” Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau officials say they have received “a few letters” on the subject, prompting president Harry L. Flick Jr., to compose a reply saying the bureau “has not investigated (nor do we intend to investigate) these alleged charges. . . . We believe dog breeding for commercial purposes is not a widespread practice in the county.”