MAY 31, 2024 BY MERRITT CLIFTON 1 COMMENT
Tossed salad & the future of animal advocacy
LONDON, U.K.; CATALINA, California––Two of the biggest names in salad rocked the vegan, vegetarian, animal rights, and conservation worlds on May 29, 2024 with near-simultaneous announcements from 5,552 miles away that superficially had beans to do with each other, and only a tangential relationship to the price of eggs, but have everything to do with the future of animal advocacy movements.
“Hellmann’s has rebranded its Vegan Mayo as Plant Based Mayo, in a bid to boost its appeal to flexitarians,” reported Niamh Leonard-Bedwell from London, England, for The Grocer.
“Still 100% free from animal products”
Hellmann’s Plant Based Mayo “is still 100% free from animal products and suitable for vegans, certified by the European Vegetarian Union and the Vegan Society,” Leonard-Bedwell explained.
But an unidentified Hellmann’s spokesperson told Leonard-Bedwell that the company, a Unilever subsidiary, perceived “considerable headroom for growth” in vegan mayonnaise, “particularly from consumers who want to cut back on animal-based products without becoming fully vegan.”
Continued Leonard-Bedwell, “The brand’s consumer research found ‘vegan’ can be a barrier for flexitarians, who see ‘plant based’ as more inclusive,” according to the unnamed Unilever spokesperson.
“Hellmann’s is therefore relaunching the entire Hellmann’s Vegan range to Hellmann’s Plant Based.”
What it means
Translation: despite the political correctness factor involved in supporting the wholly vegan makers of Just Mayo, much of the plant-based consumer base does not mind if they go to Hellmann’s, if that’s what they find on their supermarket shelves, and will not let the vegan police stop them.
Unilever, owner of both the Hellmann’s and Best Foods mayonnaise brands, is the world’s largest maker of conventional egg-based mayonnaise, as well as Vegan Mayo now rebranded as Plant Based Mayo.
Committed to end culling newly hatched chicks
But Unilever has also since September 2014 led and funded a global initiative to end the culling of newly hatched male chicks, practiced by the egg industry worldwide because the males will not grow up to lay eggs.
Historically, male chicks were either raised as gamecocks or raised for the pot, but since the advent of bigger, faster growing “meat” poultry several decades ago, most male chicks are merely suffocated, stomped, or macerated alive soon after hatching.
Catalina Island
Catalina Island, off southern California, is globally best known as reputed point of origin of Catalina dressing.
Catalina dressing is a sometimes but not always vegan variant of traditional French dressing, often polluted by the inclusion of anchovies, so read the fine print on the bottles.
The earliest documentation of the existence of Catalina dressing actually dates to the 1957 introduction of bottled Catalina dressing by Kraft Foods.
Catalina Island at that time was known as an upscale resort, movie filming location, and spring training site for baseball teams owned by chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley.
European starling. (Beth Clifton photo)
War on “non-native” species
Fifteen years later, however, the Catalina Island Conservancy, formed in 1972, began an aggressive and well-funded effort to “restore” the 75-square-mile island to pre-European settlement conditions, whether or not the 4,000 human residents or anyone else favored the bloody effort.
The Catalina Island Conservancy by 1975 gained control of most of Catalina Island and almost immediately began reducing any and all “non-native” species to approximately the condition of anchovies in salad dressing.
Cattle, horses, bison brought for film use in 1924, black buck antelope, wild turkeys, pigeons, European starlings, house sparrows, bullfrogs, feral cats, rats, and pigs all have been targeted, shot from helicopters, poisoned, and occasionally rounded up and shipped off the island alive under intensive activist pressure.
(See “Buffalo Bill” Dyer, 83, led animal rescues from Santa Catalina Island.)
Pigs, goats, & bison
The most numerous casualties whose remains anyone counted were 12,000 pigs and 3,000 goats.
Some of the bison remain, but––all having been sterilized––not for long.
About 1,770 mule deer remain, as well. The mule deer have long been tolerated, being native to the California coast, but Catalina Island, though administratively a district of Los Angeles, is 22 miles offshore. Mule deer supposedly do not swim that far, meaning that somebody must have brought them, even if originally by raft or dugout canoe.
“Island ain’t big enough”
The Catalina Island Conservancy in February 2024 decided the island ain’t big enough for both mule deer and mule-headed bio-xenophobes.
(Bio-xenophobes are people obsessed with preserving “native species” at cost of exterminating everything else, including fully functional, evolving, and thriving ecologies that include “introduced” species.]
(See Science guns down excuses for hog-dogging & hits rationale for deer culls.)
That left deer defenders, including Los Angeles County board of supervisors member Janice Hahn, fighting an apparently hopeless uphill battle against intransigent “conservationists” despite science increasingly suggesting that the ecological argument for deer extermination stands up no better than carcasses shot from a helicopter.
Beat the odds, but no free pass
As Ph.D.-holding restoration ecologist Robert Kröger put it, as executive director of the pro-hunting organization Blood Origins, “The science does not support that to protect native plants, and meet recovery objectives, the number of deer––a species that have social and recreational values on the island––should be zero.”
Despite the odds, however, NBC Los Angeles reporter Missael Soto revealed on May 29, 2024, “The Catalina Island Conservancy scrapped its plan to eradicate the mule deer population on Catalina Island with a helicopter marksman,” following a unanimous vote of opposition by the Los Angeles board of supervisors.
This does not mean the deer have a free pass to survival.
“The Catalina Island Conservancy will rework its plan and consider using other methodologies previously dismissed to eradicate the estimated 1,770 deer on the island,” Soto said.
Farm Animal Rights Movement founder Alex Hershaft welcomed vegan food activist and investor Josh Balk into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame at the AR-2015 conference in Alexandria, Virginia.
Mayonnaise wars & battle for deer will continue
Both the battle for mayonnaise market share and on behalf of the Catalina Island deer will continue for quite some time, probably decades.
Both struggles meanwhile signify the mainstreaming of what as recently as 30 years ago was just “the animal rights movement,” a multi-fronted battle waged by a generation of activists carrying on and expanding the earlier efforts of the animal welfare movement of the preceding generation; the humane movement of the preceding century; and the anti-cruelty movement preceding that, when the primary goals were the abolition of human slavery and cruel and unusual punishments, with opposition to dogfighting, cockfighting, horse-flogging, and vivisection also occasionally mentioned.
The 1995 No Kill Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
“Animal rights movement” spun off “No-kill” movement
The “animal rights movement,” now all but moribund in the original multi-fronted, activism-centered form, spun off at least three influential descendants, all of them more focused on lifestyle changes and practical problem-solving than on protest.
First came the “no-kill movement,” addressing animal sheltering and animal care-and-control issues, recognized as such by name after the initial No Kill Conference in 1995.
Next came the “vegan movement”
Next came the “vegan movement,” expanding the earlier vegetarian temperance movement to eschew any consumption of animal products or byproducts, while dropping the “temperance” aspect.
The “vegan movement,” increasingly often identified as distinct from the “animal rights movement” since the first mentions of it appeared in mainstream media 1998, gained momentum after musician and composer Paul McCartney began using the term in public appearances in 2000.
Newest is the “compassionate conservation movement,” seeking reform of wildlife management away from the hunting-centered, bio-xenophobic direction of the century-plus since “wildlife conservation” began to separate as a cause from gamekeeping.
“Compassionate conservation”
“Compassionate conservation,” though advocated by many for decades, at last gained a name from Australian ecologist, ethologist, evolutionary biologist and feminist Arian D. Wallach in 2018.
While widely embraced, “compassionate conservation” has yet to became incorporated into the name of any major organization or conference.
However, the outcome of opposition to the Catalina Island deer culling by helicopter shows the growing strength of a cause which for more than 50 years failed to save even one animal who was not forcibly deported from the habitat where that animal and many generations of that animal’s ancestors were born.
(See Aussie prof’s video challenges “invasion biologists” on their own turf.)
Mainstreaming
All of these pro-animal movements, in original form, were relatively exclusionist, whether by intent or simply because people opposed to mainstream beliefs and practices are a minority by definition, who tend to cling together for support and safety––and tend to be suspicious of others, less intense in holding similar beliefs, who are perceived as diluting the purity of whatever the cause.
The “no-kill movement” helped to mainstream “animal rights” by re-centering a part of the “animal rights” struggle from the suffering of non-human primates and rodents in laboratories to the plight of comparably caged cats and dogs, usually perceived as pets, even when impounded as “feral” or for wreaking mayhem.
The “rescue movement,” emerging out of the “no-kill movement,” introduced a participant focus other than public protest.
Diluted focus, but won goal
As “rescuers,” people could “do something for animals” without becoming perceived as “activists,” and without having to become vegetarian or vegan, setting themselves apart from family and friends at the dinner table.
Certainly the “rescue movement” diluted the “no-kill movement” to some extent, and strayed so far from the “animal rights movement” that most people in “rescue” no longer see themselves as “animal rights activists” at all.
At least a plurality and perhaps a majority of the “animal rights” leaders of 30-40 years ago favored an end to manipulating dog and cat genetics to produce the purebred and linebred animals, including pit bulls, who are the focus of most “rescue” activity today.
Nonetheless, the “no-kill movement” and the “rescue movement” can together be credited with accomplishing one of the original “animal rights movement” goals: ending population control killing in animal shelters, 30 years ago still the third-leading cause of institutional animal killing in the U.S., trailing only slaughter for meat and laboratory use.
“Vegan movement” saved the “animal rights movement”
The “vegan movement” saved the “animal rights movement” from allegations of hypocrisy in opposing fur-wearing, vivisection, and sport hunting, among other targets, while many participants continued to eat meat.
The “vegan movement,” largely unawares, also saved what remained of the “vegetarian temperance” cause from self-suffocation through exclusivity.
But exclusivity also rapidly came to characterize the “vegan movement,” even before it had a name. The “vegan police” were already widely caricatured by “movement” critics as early as 1990, twenty years before the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World introduced the term “vegan police” to a much younger generation of activists.
Popeye gains strength from his plant-based diet. (From “Be Kind to Aminals.” See Direct action heroes for animals: Popeye, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop & Grampy)
“Plant-based” is antidote to exclusivity
“Plant-based” has emerged as the antidote to “vegan police” exclusivity, welcoming those whose diet choices, even if imperfect, tend toward achieving a more humane society.
Bear in mind that persuading ten people to eat even 10% less meat is the equivalent in impact of converting one person to becoming vegan, especially if those ten people continue to eat less meat, whereas the decidedly pro-vegan Humane Research Council discovered in a 2014 survey that approximately 84% of people who once give up meat later return to meat-eating.
Merritt & Beth Clifton with Henry the rooster.
How “compassionate conservation” will go mainstream remains to be seen. But the Catalina Island outcome for deer suggests that the process is already well underway, with political impact.
Exposing the Big Game 
