Animal rights activist leaving to fight battle on larger scale

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The cramped storeroom, with its low, pressed tin ceiling, looks at first glance like a child's fantasy of the perfect playroom.

Look at all the toys.

There's a huge pink pig, an array of dress-up clothes and animal masks, a large furry animal costume. And oh, look, there's a man in a suit wearing a dead fox around his neck.

There are, in fact, whole shelves of these relics of a fashion age, of a time before supermodels appeared in ads proclaiming "I'd rather go naked than wear fur."

The suited man showing off the animal fur is Gary Reese, the departing co-director and campaign director of Safe.

It is safe to assume, since Safe stands for Save Animals from Exploitation, that Reese is showing off this ghastly item in the interests of education.

Peer through the gloom at the furs and other assorted accoutrements of the animal rights movement and it begins to look more like a child's nightmare.

The pig, for example, stands alongside a crate barely bigger than its body size; it looks faintly demented.

The animal suit is a chimera, a fanciful assembly of body parts from various animals, designed to point out the perils of genetic engineering.

And then there are those furs. They constitute an odd sort of donation, from people who can no longer stand to have those beady glass eyes staring out at them from the depths of the wardrobe.

Reese had plans for these furs. A billboard made of fur, he thought, left out in the elements to slowly deteriorate.

But somebody else will have to work out the details.

Because Reese leaves today to take a job in Britain as senior campaign manager with Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), an animal welfare organisation to "provide a voice for farm animals."

Its goals include working towards an end to factory farming and the long-distance transport of animals.

It is, like Safe, albeit with far bigger resources and more staff, the 21st century face of animal rights and welfare groups.

It says a lot about the growth - and mainstream acceptance - of such groups that Reese has been able to make a career out of work which was, until quite recently, the domain of extremists and volunteers willing to chain themselves to railings.

Which is not to say that the softly spoken but steel-willed Reese is completely comfortable with the word "career."

"Career move?" he wonders in response to a question about climbing the rungs of the professional animal rights world.

"Well, I suppose what drives me more is an opportunity to campaign at international level.

"For me a career is what people do because they want to be successful [in terms of money and status]. Whereas I want to be successful in creating change, positive change."

Still, the 35-year-old, in his smart suit and tie with screen-printed cows' faces, is the very model of the modern animal rights movement.

But try out the name Buddy the chimpanzee on people, and most will remember the campaign that sought to free the circus chimp and his mother, Lola (who subsequently died in a shipping crate).

That was a Reese campaign. As was the one that brought to the public attention the fact that adult sows in New Zealand were locked in crates measuring 200cm by 60cm.

More recent was the stomach-churning story of tiny chicks being fed into a shredding machine at a Tegel Foods factory.

Reese was behind the push to make sure the public got every last gruesome detail.

With a background in student politics, an interest in resource management and an involvement in the Green Party in its early days, Reese has worked for Safe for six years, the past three in his present job.

He's learned, he says, "to shield yourself unconsciously. I don't cry and I am an emotional person. I have done occasionally, when Lola died ... "

He found, instead, that it was stories of human suffering that began to upset him.

"I think it was because I put up these barriers and you have to. You can't emotionally react to the animal suffering. But I didn't have those barriers for human suffering."

Which raises one of the questions often lobbed at animal rights workers.

When the Save Buddy campaign was estimated as needing around $80,000 in donations to rehouse him, why, some asked, should so much money be spent on a single animal when there was such human suffering?

Reese is too much the professional to respond to most questions in anything other than his calm, rational manner. This is the one that still has the effect of rattling him, ever so slightly.

"It is so wrong," he says, to compare the two issues. "And so demeaning to people like me.

"It's not about that, it's all about recognising that animals also have rights. We happen to think that we need a lot of improvement - and there are a lot of other people involved in human rights."

In any case, the image of animal activism has changed, says Reese.

He really doesn't, for example, want to have a photo taken which shows his very silly sheep's head computer cover.

"I think I represent Safe in a balanced way. Some people might be surprised to see an animal rights person wearing a suit."

But not too surprised to learn that the belt holding up the trousers, and the tidy shoes are made of a substance designed to look like leather, designed for the well-dressed vegan animal rights worker.

He's far too diplomatic, though, to baulk at my turning up to the Safe office in a leather jacket - the equivalent, you might imagine, of walking into a West Coast pub wearing a Greenpeace sticker (it was cold, all right?). "You know," he says, "you have to be understanding.

"You can't be too judgmental in this job. I think animal rights activists have been seen to be too judgmental in the past."

And too much in love with the activist part of the package, perhaps.

A creative campaign, says Reese, is always going to be more effective than an illegal one.

Which is not to say that his career has not had its moments. He's been shot at during the duck hunting season.

And, yes, he has chained himself to the odd barrier, but only when he had run out of options.

He's more likely now, he laughs, to see the inside of meeting rooms, offices and conference centres than a prison cell.

And, as he points put, if any of his three arrests had led to a conviction, he wouldn't be on that plane this morning.