PETA's Agent 007: A James Bond for the Animal Rights Movement

By Dan Mathews, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2007.

The following is an excerpt from chapter 9 of Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir" by Dan Matthews (Atria Books, 2007). Matthews, a long-time activist for PETA, took to sneaking into media attended events and stealing the headlines with his animal rights message. This episode has Mathews telling the story of how he dressed up like a Catholic priest to sneak into a fashion show in Milan.

The Café Odeon is a bustling Art Nouveau hangout around the corner from where the narrow Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich, in the shadow of the Alps. It hasn't changed much since it opened in 1911. The curved wooden bar with brass coat hooks underneath is surrounded by a few tightly arranged rows of polished marble tables around which the efficient servers twist and bend while holding aloft trays of drinks that never seem to spill.

Like most structures in Switzerland, there's a lot going on within a very small space. Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini drank within these ornate walls, as did Mata Hari, the stripper who made exotic dancing socially acceptable in Paris before she was put on trial for espionage during World War I. "Harlot, yes, but traitor, never," she said before being riddled with bullets by the firing squad. During World War II, all sorts of spies met in neutral Switzerland at the famed Odeon to exchange information. Loving a theme, this is where I arranged my Sunday morning rendezvous with the prolific undercover agent behind many of PETA's intercontinental exposés.

For example, when world leaders convened in Rio de Janeiro for the environmental Earth Summit, they locked out any discussion of the meat trade's central role in deforestation, drought and the contamination of rivers and bays. To draw attention to this, my friend Julia and I -- she dressed as a cow and I as a blood-spattered butcher -- burst out of the Summit's bathrooms and into the dining area where I "slaughtered" her with a giant steel meat cleaver bearing the message, "Earth Summit Solution: Vegetarianism." The officials upon whose table we leapt weren't pleased, but the previously bored reporters were; they interviewed us at length about the issue, even having us repeat the message on TV in their various languages. The image even made the front page of the Washington Post style section the next morning. Smuggling the simple costumes inside was easy, and to get the massive metal blade past the Summit's rifle-toting soldiers, we merely wrapped it in cardboard, plastered it with "Delegate" stickers snagged from an official reception, and said it was a pie-chart.

A more subtle masquerade worked at Gillette's world headquarters in Boston's enormous Prudential Tower. In order to breach security here, my colleague Peter and I dressed as janitors and wheeled a large television right past the guard desk and into an elevator going up to the cafeteria. We plugged it in by the cash register in front of a line of dismayed executives and held an impromptu screening of PETA's fresh undercover tape showing how the company blinded and poisoned rabbits and rats to test everything from shaving cream to Liquid Paper. We ended up in jail, but Gillette soon stopped using animals.

Sitting and waiting at the little table at the Odeon, I sipped my second coffee and pondered the most recent caper. I had arrived in Zurich, the distinguished Capitol of banking, from Milan, the hedonistic capitol of fashion. There, dressed as a Catholic priest, I had gained entry into fur designer Gianfranco Ferré's packed runway show.

With my rusty Italian, a serene smile, and wearing pretend reading glasses, I explained at both check-in desks that I wasn't on a list, but that "Mr. Ferré is a patron of our parish and invited me at the last minute for good luck." It worked. I limped in among the 800 air-kissing guests with a banner rolled up in my rigid black pant leg which read, "Thou Shalt Not Kill: Don't Wear Fur." When the show started, I calmly unfurled the sign and overtook the catwalk, in a blizzard of flashbulbs, sending a pro-animal message around the world via the paparazzi jammed by the dozens on the three-tiered platform directly in front of me.

Ad campaigns are prohibitively expensive for a charity, especially one targeting so many powerful industries; hijacking an adversary's media event to reach the public usually only costs a few bruised limbs -- and a few bruised egos.

The confused models clogged up behind me, and the blaring music stopped cold, replaced by the clamor of buyers and editors scampering from their carefully selected seats throughout the grand salon for a better look at what was causing the ruckus. I didn't chant any slogans or scream any epithets, but rather kept in clergy-like character and gave a stern Father Knows Best scowl at the gathering throngs like they were pitiable sinners for promoting the ungodly fur trade. If only they knew I wore this get-up for Halloween, I thought. The perplexed security men tried to snatch my banner and prod me off the runway, but I wouldn't budge.

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Dan Mathews is the director of PETA's international campaigns and author of Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir" (Atria Books, 2007).

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