Quit, Lassie, Quit! Good Dog

Pat Derby wouldn’t just free Willy, she’d put him out of work.

Derby is co-founder of PAWS, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, which just completed its third annual conference at the Beverly Garland Hotel.

Sixty-five animal activists were there the first night of the three-day event, including Ben White of Sea Shepherd and Friends of Animals, who has been known to jump into the net with dolphins as they are being captured. (White says he tells his mother about such activities only after he returns from his missions.)

Kim Basinger couldn’t come--she’s pregnant and was having a bad day--but she and husband Alec Baldwin sent items to be auctioned off to benefit the cause.

Derby is a former animal trainer who gradually began to despise what she did for a living. She wrote a book, called “The Lady and Her Tiger,” that articulated some of her reservations about the business of teaching animals tricks.

Hollywood hated it.

“I never ate lunch in this town again,” she says, with a laugh.

PAWS has an animal sanctuary in Galt, near Sacramento, where Derby and partner Ed Stewart care for abused and abandoned elephants and other former performers. They also have two tigers and a mountain lion, all confiscated in drug raids.

“Our main priority,” Derby says of PAWS, “is to get animals out of traveling shows. There’s no way an animal can travel and display any natural behavior or meet any of its basic needs.”

In Derby’s view, the only good circuses are organizations such as the Pickle Family Circus and Cirque du Soliel that eschew animal acts.

The press kit for the conference includes a booklet titled “The Circus: A New Perspective”--a guide to how you can keep the traditional circus from coming to your town. “Remember when you are talking to the media about the circus, you need to emphasize the dangers of the circus to the public,” the media-savvy booklet advises. To help you do so, it includes four pages devoted to recounting recent instances when circus animals, especially elephants, ran amok, with sometimes fatal results.

“Stomped to death by Jumbo” is admittedly a hell of an attention grabber.

But on the first night of the conference, the emphasis wasn’t on the circus, it was on animals in movies and TV. Derby is concerned, very concerned, about Disney’s recent live-action animal movies, “The Jungle Book” and “Operation Dumbo Drop.”

“I’m opposed to them moving away from the venue that worked so well for them,” she says, praising Disney’s “wonderful cartoon animal shows,” which have the virtue of employing no real animals. She is so vehemently opposed, “I am prepared to go to war with Disney.”

Disney can be sure that Derby will be watching it like a hawk, looking for any evidence that animal actors are being mistreated. And, in her view, animal training, with its emphasis on isolating the animal and making it dependent on its human trainer, is almost always bad for the animal, even when it’s accomplished nonviolently.

“It’s an industry,” she says. “And as soon as an animal becomes an industry, you open up a window of opportunity for the animal to be deprived and abused.”

So Derby has a dream. It looks like Amy, the big, sweet-tempered gorilla in the movie “Congo.”

Amy isn’t a real gorilla. She’s animatronic--a hairy robot, if you will--and that’s what Derby thinks all animal actors should be. No surprise, then, that PAWS honored special-effects master Stan Winston last Thursday night. Winston, a four-time Oscar winner with a studio in Van Nuys, created the dinosaurs for “Jurassic Park” and much of the penguin army for “Batman Returns,” using combinations of techniques.

“I want to see Stan Winston be the animal trainer of the future,” says Derby.

Much of the talk before Winston got his award is about the recent loss of Stoney, an elephant who used to entertain guests at the Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Last year, Stoney pulled a hamstring while standing up on his hind legs in a casino show. And, PAWS says, the hotel responded by secreting the injured elephant away to a maintenance shed. Despite the group’s efforts to rescue Stoney, the animal was badly hurt while being moved and died last month.

Hotel officials denied to local reporters that Stoney was abused in any way.

PAWS is currently boycotting all Las Vegas hotels and casinos that use live animals in their shows. The shirt that Basinger sent over to be auctioned was inscribed “In memory of Stoney.”

No wonder Winston is greeted like someone who has found the cure for cancer. Animatronic animals never have a bad day. All their whimpers are programmed. Alluding to the many industry awards that he has won, Derby assured him: “You’ll never be in company that respects you more.”

Winston responded that he is especially pleased to be honored because he, too, is an advocate of animal rights, although “fairly quiet about it.”

Winston told stories about his remarkable machine beasts. He recalled that the premiere of “Batman Returns” was picketed by activists who feared the penguin army was being mistreated. In fact, Winston said, there were some real penguins, but the avian actors were treated better than the human ones, who were half-frozen much of the time because the set was supercooled to accommodate the Antarctic birds.

Winston said he knew he had achieved sufficient realism when one of the genuine penguins fell asleep with its head nestled against one of his robotic models.

At the moment, Winston is making robotic lions for another movie. He was recently bitten (not seriously) by a trained lion named Sudan, he said, and for a moment, he wanted to chide the animal: “I’m here to help you. I’m building the robot.”

Someday, he said, he would like to make a film about animal rights. Although Winston is more popular with this crowd than the inventor of the veggie burger, he risked offending some by suggesting that animals have a place in film if treated humanely and that they can serve an important educational function.

“There are a lot of stories that have to be told,” he said, “and sometimes they are the only ones who can tell the stories.”

But Derby is unconvinced. She is happy that “Free Willy 2” stars a fake whale. She wouldn’t allow live animals to be used even in a movie about her own life as an animal activist.

The repentant animal trainer would have Winston make her mechanical lions and tigers and bears and beloved elephants. “Animatronics is the only way that’s safe.”