Where the Fur Flew

Ever since the Beverly Hills fur initiative lost, I’ve been hearing from animal activists. They’ve been after me like a pack of dogs at a pig farm.

They’ve growled in anger and whined in dismay at comments I made some weeks earlier about the silliness of their effort to label fur coats with descriptions of how the animals were killed: hanged, shot, strangled, hugged to death or smothered in kisses.

One or two of the activists, in a response that could only be compared with foaming at the mouth, went so far as to describe me in terms so crude they’d make a gunnery sergeant blush.

The primitive nature of their replies didn’t surprise me, for while they’ve been schooled in the ethical treatment of minks, the ethical treatment of humans is apparently something beyond their abilities to understand.

What did surprise me was the timing of their verbal attack. Why, after the fur initiative went down, did they suddenly turn on me?

It was a puzzlement until I was informed that CBS radio commentator Charles Osgood used a portion of my column on the day of the vote to spoof the initiative. Since it coincided with the initiative’s defeat, the animal activists blamed me for the loss.

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The referendum went down by a vote of 3,363 to 1,908, once more manifesting the wisdom of the people in the face of an assault that has been compared to the shrill dissonance of an anti-abortion campaign.

“They’re what we call zealots,” said Max Salter, a former mayor of Beverly Hills. “They know they’re right and everyone else is wrong.”

The special election that gave everyone outside of Southern California a good laugh ended up costing the city $60,000. That’s not a lot when one considers that the average price of a house in Beverly Hills is $500,000. But it still would have meant a great deal to the 2,000 residents of the city who, despite the affluence around them, live in poverty.

Those who favored the fur initiative spent $75,000 and gave it everything they had, including endorsements by such gifted intellectual humanitarians as the comic Buddy Hackett. Those opposed to it spent about $80,000 saying what Salter said in a very few words, a series of opinions apparently held by a majority of voters.

My part in this festival of idiocy was to suggest some weeks earlier that those with energy to burn ought to direct their fiery rhetoric toward more critical goals.

For instance, Charlton Heston, Mr. Rifle himself, the president of the NRA, lives in Beverly Hills and might well be lobbied to quit that gun-loving organization and denounce its policies as unwise and dangerous.

If the 1,908 people who voted to label fur coats marched against firearms with the same vigor displayed in the drive to save minks, the synaptic connection might be made in Heston’s brain that guns are bad. Both people and animals would benefit from that.

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We live in a world of extremes, where rage on the one hand compels us to act but fear, on the other, limits those crusades in which we are willing to participate. Loving animals is easy, fighting the NRA isn’t.

True, violence is the nature of our society, but the fur initiative trivialized its existence by turning it into comedy. What should have been high drama became a cartoon.

I suffer true believers poorly. I’ve seen too many of them. I remember those who marched for racial purity and those who screamed against school integration; those who trampled on civil rights for the sake of political safety and those who killed in the name of life.

Extremism was once celebrated as the mantra of a people in turmoil and is celebrated again as the mantra of a people in fear. What we fear, I think, is what we are becoming, a society desensitized to pain, a culture hardened by bloodshed.

Having said all that, I’m still trying to find a message in the laughter and turmoil that surrounded the fur initiative. Perhaps we’ve learned from the vote in Beverly Hills not how much we love or hate animals but how deep our animosities are toward each other; how much we love or hate ourselves.

In the sense that we are concerned with an otter’s well-being, we are concerned with us: the animal within.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com