Confessions of an Animal Rights Terrorist by Karen Levenson;

Author:Karen Levenson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590566220
Publisher: Lantern Publishing & Media

33

AD HOMINEM

October 2006

“I NEED YOU to represent me in a debate,” Liz tells me once I've hung up my coat on an office coat peg and plopped into a chair beside her. Without looking up from her computer screen and the image of a pile of dead pit bulls taken at a Toronto animal shelter, she continues: “I planned to go myself, but the mayor's office just called. They're squeezing me in.” Both her hands do a palms-up as she shakes her head at a close-up of the carcasses. “Animal Control's killing hundreds of perfectly wonderful dogs who have never hurt anyone. Ontario's fucking pit bull legislation.” She turns to me, almost as an afterthought. “The debate's on Talk Ottawa.”

It takes a moment for Liz's words to sink in. “TV?”

“Local TV.”

“Local in Ottawa!”

“Are you up for it?”

My last formal debate was in grade school. I don't remember the topic or whether I won. I do remember I was terrified.

“What do you think?” Liz asks, backing up her chair to face me. I'm about to answer when Stephen strides into the room, grabs the back of a conference table chair, and pulls it across the room, positioning it beside Liz. “I just told Karen about the debate,” Liz tells him.

“And?” Stephen installs himself into the chair. He leans forward; his eyes meet mine.

I close my eyes, bite my upper lip, surrender my fate to the gods, and nod.

“Well, that's certainly good news,” Stephen says.

I turn to Liz. “Who'll I be debating?”

“Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette.”

Céline Hervieux-Payette! Her name sends my jaw dropping like a free-falling elevator. Céline Hervieux-Payette: the pearls, the headband, the blond pageboy hair. Hervieux-Payette is Québec's number one seal hunt fangirl! Her smile may spread across the senate chamber like a rising tide, but when it comes to the seal hunt, you could sharpen a fillet knife on her charm. When a Minnesota mother mailed Canadian senators a letter expressing horror that Canada's “appalling” seal hunt had not ended, and adding that because of it her family would be cancelling their Canada vacation, Senator CHP jumped on the Minnesotan faster than a Saint-Tite rodeo rider onto the back of a terrified bronco. What she found “appalling,” Hervieux-Payette replied, was the US's “daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of prisoners—mainly blacks—in American prisons, the massive sale of handguns to Americans, and the destabilization of the entire world by the American government's aggressive foreign policy. . . .”1 It felt to me like bashing a puppy on the head with a Boston Globe for peeing in the kitchen.

“The seal hunt is almost never debated live by Canadian politicians. That's what makes this debate so important,” Liz says.

“Live!” I sputter.

“That's why Stephen's here to prep you.” With that, Liz slide-walks her chair back to her desk and begins finger-tapping her computer keys.

Stephen pulls his chair closer. “The main thing you need to know is the seal hunt is not about bringing jobs to rural fishing ports. It's not about protecting cod.

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