A Dogged Defender of Animals Puts It All on the Line

Gina Lynn has three cats, two dogs, six arrests and three pending court cases--all for the love of animals.

It’s all the 23-year-old Cypress waitress can do to earn a living, between court appearances and animal rights demonstrations that sometimes take her across the country and frequently land her in jail.

While Lynn suspects mainstream America sees her as a fanatic or a crackpot, she invokes the mantra of civil disobedience in fighting for what she sees as the stolen civil rights of Earth’s other beings.

“People can call us crazy, and that’s fine with me,” said Lynn, who was recently sentenced to 50 hours of community service and fined $775 for occupying the UC Irvine chancellor’s office during an April protest over campus animal research.

“They called Martin Luther King Jr. crazy. They called Henry David Thoreau and Susan B. Anthony crazy. They all practiced civil disobedience and fought for what they believed in and they changed society.”

As a matter of principle, Lynn has refused to comply with court orders to stay away from the places she has protested in return for probation and will not pay court-imposed fines.

“I refuse to reward the system for prosecuting nonviolent activists,” said Lynn, whose fledgling Animal Rights Direct Action Coalition has targeted animal research, dolphin shows and the sale of fur coats in Orange County and beyond. “I’m not going to pay a fine because I was exercising my First Amendment rights.”

Lynn traces her outspoken empathy for animals to the age of 4, when she first visited the Huntington Beach Pier.

“It was the first time I had ever seen anybody fishing,” she said. “All the way down to the end of the pier and all the way back, I screamed at every fisherman I saw. I told them they had no right to take those fish out of the water and they should put them back.”

She became a vegetarian at 12.

“I had read ‘The Mother’s Tale,’ a short story about cows going to slaughter and everything they go through up until they are slaughtered. It was the first time I’d thought about it and I thought, ‘Jeez, this is what it takes to make my hamburger? Forget it, I don’t want it.’ And so I stopped eating meat.”

Lynn shuns anything made of leather and will not use products that were tested on animals. But she also acknowledges the difficulty of rejecting all products, such as some automobile tires, that contain animal byproducts.

“You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. You can’t be perfect, but you can be consistent.”

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After spending her teenage years at sporadic animal rights demonstrations, Lynn has steadily increased her level of activism the last several years. She has even persuaded her mother, a 55-year-old secretary, to join her in several protests. They were both arrested in May during a protest of the dolphin show at Knott’s Berry Farm.

“She raised me to love animals and question the norm, to be different. So I educated her about the issues and got her involved.”

Lynn’s first arrest was at a February 1995 protest at UC Santa Barbara. Joined by a small band of activists from throughout California, Lynn helped block a truck that was delivering 10 rabbits to a research lab. “They were scheduled to be vivisected in the lab, during a class,” she said.

She was convicted of a misdemeanor and given a $500 fine that was later suspended.

With three court cases nearing trial and ambitious plans to continue demonstrations, Lynn said she is lucky to have an understanding employer. But she gave fair warning.

“I told the guy who interviewed me for this job: ‘I’m an animal rights activist and I get arrested sometimes and I have to take days off to be in court and to do demonstrations.’ He said, ‘I totally respect that you’re telling me this ahead of time and we’ll work with you on this.’ They’ve been great. I thought they’d never hire me.”

Lynn finds it difficult to survive on earnings that fluctuate between $500 and $1,000 a month. She lives in a tidy Cypress subdivision where she rents a room from a sympathetic couple who help care for her pets when she travels to a demonstration or spends the night in jail.

Her longest stint behind bars came last month when she spent three days in a Los Angeles County jail. Lynn and 16 other activists had formed a human chain to block the entrance to the Beverly Center Bullock’s department store to protest fur coat sales. She refused to post bail or be released on her own recognizance, but was released anyway because the jail was overcrowded. A trial date is pending.

As her activism grows, Lynn has put aside future concerns. She realizes the courts may deal with her more harshly as her convictions pile up, but she remains undeterred.

“This is all I do, and all I want to do. It’s really the only thing I have any energy to do. There are billions of animals suffering every single day. I don’t feel like my life can compare to that,” she said.

“I get very discouraged and very depressed sometimes because I think it’s not going to change. I don’t think I’m going to see the end of animal suffering in my lifetime; I’m not that naive. But it’s not going to make me stop.”

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Profile: Gina Lynn

Age: 23

Residence: Cypress

Education: La Mirada High School graduate

Background: Animal rights activism began at age 15 with Last Chance for Animals in Los Angeles County; after moving to Oregon, she took part in protests organized by Action for Animals; since returning to Southern California, she has protested hospital and university research labs, rodeos, circuses, dolphin shows and the sale of fur coats; last April, she founded the Animal Rights Direct Action Coalition.

On Orange County activism: “It’s tougher to get a receptive audience here because people are a lot more conservative and a lot of people turn their noses up at anybody who is doing anything different. It’s also tougher in the courts.”

Source: Gina Lynn; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times

Los Angeles Times