On April, 15, 1980, the New York Times ran a startling full-page advertisement. In the middle of the page was a picture of a white rabbit with bandages over both eyes, next to two glass laboratory flasks. Across the top of the page three lines of heavy black type asked a single question: "How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?" The text began under the picture:
Imagine someone placing your head in a stock. As you stare helplessly ahead, unable to defend yourself, your head is pulled back. Your lower eyelid is pulled away from your eyeball. Then chemicals are poured into the eye. There is pain. You scream and writhe hopelessly. There is no escape. This is the Draize Test. The test which measures the harmfulness of chemicals by the damage inflicted on the unprotected eyes of conscious rabbits. The test that Revlon and other cosmetic firms force on thousands of rabbits to test their products.
The advertisement gave precise figures for the number of rabbits Revlon used. It quoted scientists who said that the test was unreliable and that alternatives to it that did not use animals could be developed. Then it asked readers to write to Revlon's president and report that they would not use Revlons products until Revlon funded a crash program to develop nonanimal eye irritancy tests.
Roger Shelley was Revlon's vice president for investor relations on the day the advertisement appeared. Later he said,
I knew the stock was going down that day, but more importantly I knew the company had a very significant problem that could affect not just one day's stock price trading, but could cut to the core of the company. In fact if it weren't really well handled, it would have such a deleterious effect that it could theoretically wipe Revlon off the face of the counter in drugstores and department stores.
Shelley was soon put in charge of the unenviable task of handling the problem. A smooth-voiced, immaculately groomed, and elegantly dressed representative of a corporation that prides itself on its refined image, he soon found himself talking to Henry Spira, a bushy-haired New York high school teacher who spoke with a broad accent that came from years spent on ships as a sailor in the merchant marine and on General Motors assembly line in New Jersey. Shelley saw that Henry's clothes were crumpled, that he rarely wore a tie, and that when he did, he seemed incapable of getting it to meet his collar. But that wasn't all that Shelley noticed: "There was not one ounce of product on his body that was produced by an animal, and that included his belt, that included shoes, that included everything...Here was a man who did what he said he would do."
Does living according to your beleifs help you to win a battle with a billion-dollar corporate giant? Could there be a more unequal contest than this one, which pitted a high school teacher working out of his own apartment agianst the flagship of the cosmetics industry? Those who had studied Henry's past record, however, would not have dismissed his prospects of success. They would have known that he had already tackled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, corrupt union bosses buttressed by hired thugs, the august American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the New York state legislature. If he had not always got what he wanted, his record was improving. So it was to prove in this case. Before the year was over, Revlon agreed to donate $750,000 to Rockefeller University for a three year research project aimed at finding nonanimal alternatives to testing cosmetics on the eyes of rabbits. It was the first step toward putting the words "Not tested on animals" on cosmetic products.
For more than a century, anti-vivisection societies had been campaigning against animal experiments without having the slightest impact. They were dismissed as cranks. While they put out their strongly worded leaflets condemning animal experimentations, the nunber of animals used in research grew from a few hundred a year to an estimated 20 million. Yet in his very first campaign, Henry brought to an end a series of experiments that involved examining the sexual behavior of mutilated cats. From there he went on to tackle such organizations as Revlon, Avon, Bristol-Myers, the Food and Drug Administration, and Procter&Gamble. Turning them to the even more intractable problem of suffering of animals used for food, he targeted the chicken producer Frank Perdue, several major slaughtering companies, the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and McDonald's. In twenty years, his unique campaigning methods have done more to reduce animal suffering than anything done in the previous fifty years by vastly larger organizations with millions of dollars at their disposal.
From the Preface to Ethics into Actions - Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, New York.
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