THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Animals’ Watchdog : With fellow activists, Ava Park has disrupted the Rose Parade, picketed McDonald’s and temporarily shut down a Newport Beach fur salon. Her overriding goal: to stop what she calls ‘the institutionalized abuse of animals.’

Wearing a restrained suit and with her dark hair fastidiously coiffed, Ava Park is poised, calm, almost prim as she describes the sinking pain when a policeman put a stun gun to her legs and dragged her off to a paddy wagon.

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That was at UCLA in 1989, at one of the first big demonstrations of Orange County People for Animals, the animal-rights group Park founded. Although she spends her days publishing somber informational brochures for starchy law firms from her corporate high-rise office, at night, in less plush quarters across town, she plans tactics for her OCPA’s next political demonstration.

Her demonstrations are nothing if not diverse. With a core group of followers, Park has disrupted the Rose Parade, picketed McDonald’s franchises and temporarily shut down a Newport Beach fur salon. She has infuriated hunters by crashing their awards banquet and has staged protests outside the homes of animal experimenters. Her demonstrations have landed her in handcuffs more than a few times and, to her delight, have put her and the animal-rights message on national TV.

The activism has one overriding goal: to stop what Park and other activists call “the institutionalized abuse of animals”--including meat eating, the use of animals in research labs, hunting, the fur industry, horse racing, bullfights, zoos and rodeos. The 7-year-old, 2,032-member OCPA is the only one in Orange County that addresses this spectrum of animal issues.

To her supporters, Park is charity itself, a compassionate, learned and highly organized crusader whose work will one day be celebrated for the same reasons abolitionists are now honored. To critics, she is a fact-twisting zealot with an ax to grind, an anti-business and anti-science scofflaw whose philosophy is far from airtight.

“I don’t think the woman is objective,” says Robert F. Phalen, a UC Irvine professor who has often clashed with Park over the issue of animal experimentation. “She has an organization with its own goals, and she brings up isolated bits of information that support her point.”

Park, 39, of Costa Mesa, sloughs off such criticism and points to her group’s guiding principle: that animal abuse is an insidious form of violence that ultimately affects people.

“We systematically teach our children to be desensitized to violence, and we start with animals,” she says. “It’s well documented that you don’t have to eat animals to live, but we teach children to kill them and eat them.

“Then we take them to the zoo or circus and teach them it’s OK to put living beings behind bars and to whip them through flaming hoops for our amusement. With each step, we’re teaching our children to be desensitized to violence. By the time they grow up, it’s not so difficult to make that jump toward being violent to humans.”

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By her reckoning, Park came a bit late to the animal-rights movement, having been a meat-eater until her early 30s. But she was 10 when, as she says, she “first became sensitive toward the suffering of living beings.”

“I had one of those little turtles you can buy at Woolworth’s,” she recalls. “It was a cold day, and I wanted to keep him warm all day while I was at school, so I turned the heater on next to him. By the time I got home, the poor thing had completely fried to death. All the water had evaporated. It hurt me so badly I couldn’t even cry. I was so devastated.”

She was a gymnast at Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, and after graduating in 1972 she married and moved to Salt Lake City. There, she worked at a suicide prevention clinic for two years while taking college classes.

After Park and her husband separated without having children in 1983, she returned to Orange County and founded Carpenter & Park, a brochure-publishing business.

“As I did better and better in my business . . . I probably bought $100,000 worth of fur, and I loved shopping for leather shoes. At the time, I had no idea of the kind of suffering that went into the making of these items.”

But through these years, she says, she did have altruistic urgings, although she didn’t know that animals were to be the beneficiary.

“I always knew that after I took care of my own financial needs, I wanted to devote my free time to some cause,” she says. For a while, she considered social work with children.

The turning point came in 1984, while she was on a date with a medical student.

“He wanted to show me an experiment he was working on in a lab at UCI, and when I saw it, I was utterly horrified,” Park recalls. “There were eight or 10 cats lined up on a table . . . and they all had needles inserted into their heads in various positions. They were all perfectly conscious and aware, and obviously in a great amount of suffering. He said the cats would die in three or four days and were to be given no food or water.

“I had no idea that this sort of thing went on in labs. . . . Needless to say, we didn’t finish our date. I took a taxi home.”

After a few months of researching the animal-welfare issue, Park joined Last Chance for Animals, a West Hollywood anti-vivisection group, and soon became its newsletter editor.

She laughs as she recalls the first demonstration she joined.

“I didn’t consider myself a radical, or even a liberal. I still don’t--I’m a businesswoman and a registered Libertarian. And here I was, at this all-night vigil at a UCLA researcher’s lab. We were supposed to sleep on the steps of her lab in protest, and we did. By the time morning came, I’d decided this was going to be some serious work.”

Becoming a vegetarian, she says, also took some effort.

“I first stopped eating red meat, then poultry, then a year later, fish,” she says. “As a practical matter, I can’t count myself a vegan, because I do a lot of dining out with clients, and if there’s egg in the pasta, I won’t make an issue of it.”

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At the urging of fellow activists, Park founded OCPA in early 1988 to bring the movement to Orange County. With an annual budget of about $25,000, the nonprofit group, which has no paid employees, organizes 12 to 18 demonstrations annually.

Park took most of her fur coats--including a pricey Bill Blass sable cape--and burned or buried them at various events during the group’s early years. Later, the group picketed a variety of targets, including the Orange County Fair rodeo, a veterinarian whom OCPA members accused of incompetence, and even Northwest Airlines, which OCPA claims caused the death of animals through negligent transport procedures.

Having fended off some personal harassment, as well as a defamation lawsuit from the vet, Park admits that she is surprised how stressful animal activism is. She works at it three nights a week and on weekends and says that about three years ago, her nonstop schedule led to a sure case of burnout--she was too exhausted to get out of bed one morning.

Now, twice-daily meditation sessions and monthly massages help ease the stress, she says. She also recently took her first two-week vacation in five years--a driving trip to Northern California with Raffee, her kelpie.

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Park has become accustomed to defending her activism at some unlikely places.

“Some people are really threatened (by my beliefs),” she says. “I was recently at a very chic party in Newport Beach, and a beautiful, very high-maintenance woman approached me. She was so angry. She was draped in fur, leather and feathers. She strode up to me and began such an intense, really aggressive conversation. She said, ‘What you do is ridiculous. I’d as soon kill an animal as look at it.’ She was almost yelling at me.

“Some people want to engage me in a debate, but social events are a wrong place to do that. I always find myself trying to gentle them down.”

The saddest consequence of her commitment to animals, she says, has been the loss of some friends.

“These were people who were dear friends but who did not agree with my beliefs, even though I tried to keep my beliefs out of our relationship,” Park says. “Activism does take over your life. I work hard all day, come home and collapse. I don’t have much of a personal life, but I do get out to dinner occasionally with friends.”

Not having family, however, “does make me free,” she says. “People often call me asking me to rescue a trapped dog. During the Laguna fires, my phone was ringing 24 hours a day. I was always driving to Laguna to get a cat out of a house. I really couldn’t do that if I had a husband or children to keep.”

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The OCPA’s monthly meetings are typically attended by about 25 of the most committed members. “We talk about our events from tactical angles as well as the philosophical angle,” Park says. “We spend many hours discussing whether this is the right thing to do. Is this the right way to get our point across? How will the public feel about it?”

Within the movement, Park is admired for her thorough planning and variety of protests.

“Ava’s research into who she targets is tremendous; she picks the people who are the most blatant in their abuse and fraud,” says Aaron Leider of Last Chance for Animals. “I don’t know anyone who’s doing the work in the professional manner she’s done. She’s taken the principles that allowed her to succeed in business and put them to work in the movement.”

Joel Abramsohn, a friend and former neighbor of Park’s, says the old cliche is true: Park wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“There were times when she literally wouldn’t turn the hose on in the back yard if there was a stream of ants there,” he says. “It was, ‘Come on, you guys, move out of there. . . .’

“She really does do things in a high-minded way. When I first met her, she was driving a car with leather seats, but she sold it because of the seats. She puts her money where her mouth is.”

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Sometimes her money goes toward court fees. Park’s first arrest was the 1989 protest outside UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young’s office over animal experiments on campus.

“We had approached the chancellor many times, trying to get him to just meet with us to discuss our concerns,” said Park, who insists that her group always communicates its concerns through letters first. “But he wouldn’t grant us even an audience, so we had no other recourse. It was a passive resistance; we lay down on the floor. When the police arrived they were stun-gunning just about everyone to make them walk.”

Park was also arrested at what turned out to be her most gratifying demonstration. It was during the 1993 Rose Parade, where she joined six activists from other groups to protest General Motors’ use of pigs in its car-crash tests.

“We made banners saying ‘GM--Stop Animal Crash Tests!’ and went to the Rose Parade and put ourselves in the crowd,” she recalls. “When the GM float came down we jumped out in front of it, and two of our people jumped up onto the float and unfurled a banner. Since I was in front of the float, it had to stop.

“Just by chance, CNN was stationed right there. Then the police came, about 30 of them on foot and horseback. A great-looking cop grabbed me from behind and started to quash my banner up. I turned to him and smiled, pointed to our people on the float and said, ‘It’s taking you some time to arrest my friends; would you mind if I hold this banner for the cameras, just for a few seconds longer?’ And he looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ So I held it for CNN.

“We were arrested and hauled off to Pasadena city jail, where they gave us a lovely vegetarian lunch. And about two weeks after that, GM stopped its pig studies.”

As her demonstrations have grown, Park has earned the wrath of an increasing number of targets, including animal experimenters, restaurateurs and furriers.

“They disrupted one of our busiest shopping days and were not particularly polite about it,” said Dana Rosenberg, a spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus, whose Newport Beach fur salon was invaded last year by OCPA members on the day after Thanksgiving.

As part of the nationwide “Fur-Free Friday,” activists sat down in the salon and prevented any fur sale from taking place for about half an hour. Others roamed the store with a boombox, playing a loud tape recording of the cries of a fox reportedly caught in a leg-hold trap. Police eventually arrived to remove the protesters.

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The bitterest clashes, however, have concerned the use of animals in laboratories.

Vivisection, Park and others say, produces more misleading results and dangerous drugs than beneficial ones. Its practitioners, she maintains, fight to bolster its credibility only because it is a perennial generator of millions of dollars in grants.

“Vivisection has not advanced medical knowledge to the extent people believe it has. In fact, my job would be much more difficult if they could prove it is useful,” Park says.

Supporters of animal research cite heart-bypass surgery, which was developed on dogs, and other treatments as vivisection success stories. Phalen, the UCI scientist, says animal research is crucial to future medical advances, and he doubts even Park’s story of the UCI cats.

“I’ve seen hundreds of labs, and I simply do not see what Ava claims is happening,” he said. “I don’t believe that cats have been starved at UCI. Scientists use a very small number of animals, and most of those do in fact die, but to prevent the suffering and death of vast numbers of animals and people.”

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Although Park says the OCPA is an “above-ground” organization and commits no vandalism, she contends that the damage done to some research labs by other animal-rights groups is justifiable civil disobedience.

“People say groups like the Animal Liberation Front are terrorist and violent, but I don’t see it that way,” she says. “Violence is already being done to living beings in laboratories, and if the ALF goes into a lab and takes animals and destroys the equipment that would be used to do further violence to further animals, they are in fact preventing violence. Also, the ALF allows us to be considered the moderates. If they didn’t exist, I would be considered the radical.”

But Park disapproves of the vandalism that occurred last year at a Laguna Niguel fast-food restaurant, in which anti-meat slogans were painted on a wall.

“We focus on things that achieve goals. Aggravating some little shop owner is not in the best interest of achieving them.”

Park realizes that her ultimate goals will not be reached in her lifetime or even for hundreds of years. But she takes the long view.

“I have a vision of the planet as unfolding in the proper way, and everyone is operating at the level they’re supposed to,” she says. “We’re all developing spiritual beings. If they’re ready to hear the message, we’re there for them.

“Sometimes it’s a heavy burden to bear, but it’s more than offset by the peace of mind that comes from knowing you’re doing the best you can, that you’re walking as lightly as possible on the earth.”