No Animals Were Harmed: A Conversation with Dan Mathews

by Lin Orndorf

I have always had a huge soft spot for animals.  Cats, dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, birds, squirrels, and horses have been part of my life in one way or another at one time or another.  My cats and dogs over the years have been rescues, including the three cats and two dogs my partner and I share our lives and home with currently.

Yes, I love animals and hate to see or hear about them being used, abused, mistreated, or harmed in any way. 

When I was a junior in high school I read two books that affected me deeply; Animal Liberation by Peter Singer and The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams.  The former is a non-fiction expose on animal abuses from vivisection to factory farm practices while the latter is a novel about two lab dogs, Snitter and Rawf, who escape into the English countryside. Both tackled the nearly unmentionable subject of animal exploitation. 

Unfortunately, it was an issue that seemed too big and ugly for me change. It’s also an issue that most of us would rather not think about as it is the stuff of nightmares. Over the years, I have quietly cheered or simply smiled when I would hear about lab animals being freed or testing banned or animal abusers being arrested. 

In April, I read another book addressing animal rights and am again considering what more I can do to ease, reduce, or eliminate the suffering of other creatures.

Committed by Dan Mathews is as much about the animal rights movement as it is a personal, honest, and often times humorous memoir by a man who has worn his compassion for animals on his sleeve for most of his life.  Well, sometimes he wears it as a 7-foot rabbit suit.

Dan Mathews is the Senior Vice President of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  In 2007, Mathews was one of Out Magazine's "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America.  His job takes him around the world in an effort to reduce and eliminate animal cruelty.  He has met and worked with numerous musicians, actors, and other celebrities along the way to creating a safer world for animals.

I met Dan Mathews while he was in Asheville for a reading.  We shared vegan nachos, coffee, and conversation at Rosetta’s Kitchen. So, no animals were harmed during the interview.  That’s a step towards be kinder toward animals.

I told Mathews that I had gotten a copy of Committed (just out in paperback from Atria Books) only two days earlier.  I’m not a fast reader; the book was almost impossible to put down because it was fascinating, fun, and downright queer.

“I wanted to make it kinda breezy, there’s too many serious books about animals already, the politics, philosophy, religion, and all the grotesque details…I thought there needs to be a book that captures the spirit of PETA, the spirit of the movement.  That’s what really drove me to do it.  I didn’t plan on it being so gay.”

Mathews has included his own life’s story in Committed, from growing up gay, punk and vegetarian to working at McDonald’s, Disneyland and shoplifting to studying history in Rome while modeling, acting and turning tricks to pay the rent.  There’s something for everyone and, in my opinion, it lives up to the Lily Tomlin quote on the cover, “Smart, silly and downright readable, with unstoppable spirit.  Like David Sedaris but with a mission.”

“Any good memoir is kind of from an unapologetic point of view.  My favorite ones are like that. They’re not really trying to reach any one particular person…That’s what I tried to keep foremost in my mind; that I wasn’t writing it for gays, I wasn’t writing it for animal people, I was just writing it as my tweaked outlook on the world,” Mathews explained of his approach.

In telling his story, he is also telling the story of PETA, the plight of animals, and PETA’s crusades for animal rights.

In 1985, Mathews started working for PETA as a receptionist.  He spent his days answering phone calls and letters. He soon found himself involved in an action at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to stop the funding of the Gennarelli head injury lab at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Mathews says, “I was just really glad to be involved.  I never really planned to do what I’m doing.” Mathews move up the ranks at PETA, in part because of his ability to brainstorm and make good use of the connections he made while answering calls and mail.

Mathews helped create many of PETA’s campaigns.  One example is the album, Animal Liberation, made with Wax Trax Records.  All the songs were about animal rights. It featured Wax Trax artists, the Smiths, and Nina Hagen provided an original song, Don’t Kill the Animals, which was a duet with Lene Lovich.  The Nina Hagen single garnered a lot of publicity and airplay.

“These campaigns have to be topical.  Our worst enemy is invisibility,” Mathews said.
Many celebrities involved in PETA have been gay or gay icons.  Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, Sandra Bernhardt, Boy George, and others have all contributed, in one way or another to PETA’s work for animals. 

Mathews said, “We’ve always been the training ground for gays.”

In his book, Mathews tells a parable from his life of how he came to be an advocate for animal rights.  When he was in ninth grade, Mathews was beaten up at school, called a fag, and laughed at while lying on the floor with the wind knocked out of him.  A few weeks later while fishing with his dad and some other men, he caught a flounder. One of the other men laughed at him and the fish as he stomped on it and ripped the hook out of its mouth.  For a brief moment Mathews saw himself in that stunned and injured fish as it struggled for air on the boat deck.

“Growing up when I did, before Ellen and Will and Grace, if you were gay you were the biggest outsider.  You didn’t know there was a community.  You felt like you were the only person out there and the world seemed a little crazy.”

Mathews, as an outsider, was bullied. He saw animals being bullied, including a pregnant cat being stoned by older boys when he was in third grade.  He courageously rescued the cat from the same kids who tormented him.  That was his first action in a life of animal activism.

He couldn’t believe that people had so little regard for animals that they would “grind them up” for food, “torture them in laboratories,” or “take their fur for a stupid fashion thing.”

Mathews felt alone in his thinking about animals, he told me, “I just thought, ‘I think I’m just a fucking alien and the world is upside down.’” 

We talked about the parallels and correlations between people who abuse other people and those who abuse animals.

Mathews explained his views, “The same people who were beating me, were the ones beating their dogs.  People that gay bash, people that beat their wives or girlfriends or their kids, it seems to me, have an inferiority complex. They need to feel higher up on the totem pole. Especially when there’s something they don’t understand, it makes them feel elevated in their weak minds… When they hurt animals, it makes them feel better about themselves in a twisted way.”

 Advocating for animal rights may be a logical interest for the LGBT community.  In our own community’s history, lesbians and gays were subjected to horrific medical procedures, verbal and physical abuse, and social injustice.  We often still are.  So, speaking up for injustices and harm done to another creature is an easy leap to make.

He says that because he’s in the public eye, “I should be out whenever I’m in the public realm.  So, if it’s People magazine, or whatever, I’ll work in a story about how the same people who beat me up [for being gay] were the same ones abusing animals…It shows people…here’s someone who doesn’t care about mentioning he’s gay.”

While reading Committed and doing research for this article, I discovered that PETA has concentrated some of their efforts on North Carolina.  For one thing, the Tar Heel State has too many under-funded over-burdened animal shelters.  Hundreds of animals were poorly cared for and, worse, many were being put down by means of small archaic gas chambers, agonizingly slow paralytic drugs, or a .22 caliber bullet.

Mathews confirmed what I’ve learned, “Yeah, especially in the northern part of the state.  It’s the same in any rural area.  Shelters go unfounded.  It’s a part of city government that gets ignored and animals suffer miserably as a result.”

PETA has a whole department dedicated to domestic animals.  They help shelters and animal welfare agencies across the country.  The Community Animal Project delivers doghouses to dogs chained up outside, plucks terrified cats from trees, and works with local law enforcement to ensure that companion animals are cared for properly and rescued from abusive situations. PETA’s mobile spay/neuter clinic travels to low-income neighborhoods and performs about 25 low- or no-cost sterilization surgeries a day. 

PETA also makes use of “cloak and dagger” techniques in undercover investigations and infiltrations.  Mathews has been involved in many of these actions, including gaining access to a fashion show disguised as a priest.

In WNC, PETA was instrumental in ending neglect, abuse, and suffering at a large “no-kill” shelter in Hendersonville.  All Creatures Great and Small (ACGS) was investigated and cited repeatedly.  For more than a decade, PETA fielded serious complaints from volunteers, employees, and visitors alleging cruelty and terrible neglect at ACGS.
 
PETA's seven month undercover investigation revealed blatant, ongoing violations of state animal protection laws, health and environmental laws, laws applicable to charitable contributions, and laws applicable to payroll and income taxes.

Illness was rampant among the 400 dogs and 300 cats that were warehoused in an inadequate facility. Animals sustained injuries daily—the majority of which were ignored, no matter how severe or painful.

Shortly after the public release of PETA's investigation, animals languishing in the shelter got the help they needed. The NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services transferred the remaining animals—almost 300—into pre-approved animal shelters and adoptive homes then closed ACGS for good as a result of ongoing, persistent violations.

“No-kill is really a misnomer.  Most people don’t realize that it just means ‘somebody else kills’ if they close their doors or it means they have all these animals that they don’t provide appropriate care for, or they take in animals that are too aggressive to be with other animals,” Mathews explained.

Raising animals for food is another of PETA’s causes.  Chickens, pigs, and cattle are subjected to incredibly cruel treatment from birth to butchering, especially in factory farms where much of the animal “handling” is mechanized purely to reduce costs and increase profits.  PETA promotes vegetarianism and veganism as a way to reduce animal abuses.  Becoming vegetarian is a common way people become involved with PETA.

Eating meat, according to Mathews and many others, is “death for no reason.  I think the only reason to kill an animal is in self-defense.  Farms that are smaller where a family actually tends to animals [are] better than a factory farm…but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what people buy.  It’s a nice idea but…it’s a smokescreen.”

Dan Mathews mentions some of the atrocities of raising animals for food in Committed and PETA has more information on their website. But many people, myself included, don’t know about this aspect of where our food comes from.  We’d rather ignore it, not think about.

“It’s easy to do…there’s so much bad news anyway.  That’s why I try to deal with issues in creative ways…get people hearing about it in ways they don’t expect.”

I asked him for an example of those creative ways and about ongoing campaigns.

“Like with KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) we had Pamela Anderson (a long-time PETA member) write to the Kentucky Legislature to remove the bust of Colonel Sanders from the capitol because of the cruelty it represents.  Then we pushed it to the press as ‘the battle of the busts’.”

Committed is a great way to learn about PETA and issues of animal cruelty and rights.  It is a breezy romp through the life of an activist who has had one interesting adventure after another. It will inform you, little by little, about why animal exploitation is bad and how it hurts us all.

If you are concerned about animals and want to make a difference visit PETA’s website for more information and resources to the world better for animals.