Framing Cruelty: The Construction of Duck Shooting as a Social Problem

Lyle Munro 1
Monash University

Australia's Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) sees duck-shooting as a social problem and as an injustice with moral, legal and environmental consequences. A small animal liberationist group, CADS has succeeded in dramatically reducing the numbers of duck shooters in Victoria, which is the home of duck-shooting in Australia. The Coalition=s framing work with the public via the electronic media involves three parts: a diagnosis (assembling claims), a prognosis (presenting claims) and a motivational frame (contesting claims), all of which construct hunting as a cruel, anti-social act that ought to be banned. In this article, television news bulletins and feature stories from the 1993 and 1994 campaigns are analyzed to show how CADS makes and sustains its claims. In addition to 90 pages of transcripts of news commentaries and descriptive accounts of the visuals, the data include tape-recorded interviews with some of the duck liberationists involved in the campaign.

For the last decade, conservationists have been confronting duck hunters on the wetlands of Victoria, the home of duck-shooting in Australia. In 1986, a handful of protesters took on 90,000 shooters in an attempt to draw media attention to the alleged indiscriminate slaughter of Australian wildlife. In the most recent campaign in 1994, the number of shooters had fallen to 21,000 while the number of rescuers in the Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) had risen to 300. The Coalition attributes the transformation of the duck-shooters into an endangered species to CADS' media campaign, particularly the television images which bring the Coalition=s anti-duck-shooting protest home to viewers every duck-hunting season. This paper examines the way the Coalition=s protest has been framed to attract media attention in ways that promote its anti-duck-shooting cause.

I have argued elsewhere (Munro, in press) that the media distort and reflect the Coalition=s protest in ways which are, in the final analysis, advantageous to the anti-duck-shooting campaign. In this paper, I explain how CADS, a small social movement organization with limited financial resources, is able to mobilize public support against the much more powerful gun lobby. It does this by making its duck-rescue operation newsworthy and by shaping media discourse in ways which enhance its animal welfare/conservation message. This is a singular achievement given the central importance of media discourse in framing issues which can both help and hurt a social movement=s campaign. Rootes succinctly explains the dilemma for social movement activists, "A movement may seek to exploit the media=s insatiable appetite for novelty and spectacle, but no movement without a very broad social base and very considerable resources of power can hope to dictate the terms of the transaction or its outcome" (1984, p. 6).

Nonetheless, some social movement organizations are more successful than others in shaping media discourse. As I show in this paper, CADS is one such activist group with a demonstrable record of success in influencing the media. How does it do this? According to Klandermans (1992, p. 88), social movement organizations profoundly affect media discourse by framing issues, defining grievances and staging collective actions that attract media attention. Coalition activists believe that this is how their relationship with the media works. Put simply, Aman shoots duck@ does not appeal to the media in the way that the metaphorical Aduck (liberationist) shoots man@ does. The Coalition has succeeded in making the images of duck rescue more emotionally compelling than the gun lobby=s counterimages of duck-shooting as a manly, recreational outdoor sport. To understand how this is achieved, it is necessary to describe the protagonists and the background to what the media have dubbed the "Duck Wars."

Protagonists

There are three main protagonists in the ADuck Wars@: Australia=s native waterbirds, the shooters who hunt them and the animal liberationists and conservationists who seek to protect them.

Native Waterbirds

A standard fieldguide describes the freckled duck (Stictonetta naevosa) as follows, "... uniformly colored with large (crested) head and dish-shaped bill. Male, uniform dark brown to black; head covered in small white or buff freckles... Female paler; obscure freckling" (Simpson & Day, 1994, p. 58).

The freckled duck is one of the most endangered species of waterbird on the Victorian wetlands. It features prominently in the Coalition=s annual Acasualty list@ following the opening of the hunting season. It is also one of the 10 rarest waterfowl in the world and is therefore a suitable Arepresentative@ of the non-human animals in ADuck Wars."

In ancient times, ducks were seen as Aprophets of the wind@--an appropriate metaphor for the duck-rescue operation which has been described as the most action-packed, hands-on animal rights campaign in Australia (Action, 1994, p. 10). The banning of duck-shooting as a blood sport would be a major political and symbolic victory for animal liberationists in CADS, who see the protection and rescue of wildlife as a social justice issue. The exploitation of ducks, like other animals exploited by humans, represents Athe suffering of innocents@ (Jasper & Poulsen, 1995), which animal liberationists want to end.

The Rescuers

Before CADS was officially formed in 1989, its anti-duck-shooting campaign was conducted under the auspices of Animal Liberation Victoria, which still serves as CADS' headquarters. Like Animal Liberation Victoria, CADS advocates non-violent direct action and is opposed to the more militant, though non-violent tactics of its British and North American counterparts in the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the Coalition Against Sport Hunting. These animal liberation groups sabotage hunts and are often involved in confrontations with hunters. By contrast, the Coalition=s tactics involve only minor harassment of duck shooters during duck-rescue operations; sabotage is limited to using whistles and sometimes light planes to frighten off the waterbirds and confiscating or retrieving injured birds, but not attacking shooters or damaging their personal property.

In recent years, the Coalition has distanced itself organizationally from Animal Liberation Victoria, preferring its own loose, non-bureaucratic operational style to the latter=s more formal committee structure. In this way, it embodies the characteristics of Aaffinity groups@ which are small groups of about 10 people who autonomously decide the nature and extent of their participation in direct action (Sturgeon, 1995, p. 39). Thus, while CADS is not affiliated with Animal Liberation Victoria, it subscribes to its philosophy, as outlined by the latter=s former president, Peter Singer (1975, 1990). It reflects the worldwide animal movement=s focus as a Amovement for social change based on issues of social justice and our moral duties to others@ (Finsen & Finsen, 1994, p. 281).

The Hunters

Of the many pro-hunting groups that make up the gun lobby in Australia, the Sporting Shooters Association (SSA) is the most prominent in defending duck shooters. The SSA was formed in 1948 and is Australia=s largest firearms lobby group, with more than 50,000 members. There are several other pro-gun and pro-hunting groups in Australia which claim the right to bear arms based on the conviction that hunting is a safe, legitimate and socially acceptable sport. About 80 percent of Australia=s estimated 132,000 licensed duck shooters live in Victoria.

The image of hunting is clearly changing. As one hunter lamented in the Sporting Shooter magazine:

Once we wore the White Hats and were heroes, a lacy perhaps of Hemingway and Ruark and the rest....(Today) we wear Black Hats and our numbers are dwindling away....The pressure against us is unrelenting on every front. You=ll try and avoid telling people about your hunting exploits. Years ago people would listen enthralled; now you=re a bloody disgrace, a social misfit who ought to be shot (Crook, 1995, p. 3).

In less dramatic terms, in Western Australia the government banned duck-shooting in 1990, and in Victoria, where the government recently extended the season, an early 1993 editorial in the Age newspaper described duck-shooting as an obscenity that should be outlawed.

Nonetheless, hunting devotees find occasional support in the published work of contemporary scholars and writers (see, for example, Ortega y Gasset, 1972; Leahy, 1991; Wolfe, 1993; Dizard, 1994). Of these defenders of the hunt, the sociologist Alan Wolfe argues the most provocative case. AHunting@, he acknowledges, Ais no doubt cruel. But...animal rights advocates lack appreciation for the symbolic meaning of human practices such as hunting...we are sometimes cruel to animals in order to give our lives meaning@ (Wolfe, 1993, pp. 89-91). Wolfe dismisses Ran=s (1983) suggestion that the often-stated pleasures of hunting--exercise, communication with nature, camaraderie, and satisfaction of the well-aimed shot--could all be satisfied by bushwalking with a friend armed only with a camera. What hunters seek, suggests Wolfe, are Athe sensual pleasures of violent sport@ (1993, p. 89), a claim ominously echoed by Jack Katz (1988) in his study of deviance, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil.

It is precisely hunting=s association with societal violence involving firearms that is behind a growing community movement against violence. Yet, for various reasons, the Coalition=s campaign has not explicitly exploited the anti-gun sentiment. It has chosen to construct duck-shooting as a social problem because cruelty to animals is involved. While hunters see ducks as objects, rescuers regard them as Asubjects who feel the world@ to use Birch=s apt description. A social constructionist approach will be used in this paper to explain how CADS constructs duck-shooting as a social problem which has moral, legal, and environmental implications for society.

The Social Construction of Duck-shooting as a Social Problem

Social constructionism has only recently been used as a theoretical framework for studying the claims of environmental and animal rights activists= in their defense of nature. Yearley (1992) and Hannigan (1995) used a social constructionist perspective to analyze environmental problems as social problems while Henkel (1995) focused on factory farming as a case study in claims-making by a social movement organization.

These sociologists make a convincing case for studying the claims, the claims-makers and the claims-making process in environmental and animal rights campaigns rather than the objective conditions of environmental degradation or animal exploitation per se. Social constructionists emphasize the subjective dimensions of social problems, which put the claims that people make, not the putative objective conditions, at the center of the analysis.

According to Best (1995), contextual constructionists recognize that claims emerge at particular historical moments in particular societies. For example, Henkel (1995) shows how the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM) appealed to a wider audience by expanding the domain of the factory farming problem beyond animal suffering and cruelty to include issues which appealed directly to people=s self-interest such as human health and the environment. Social movement organizations in the animal rights movement like FARM and CADS may choose different strategies and tactics to achieve their goals, but within the social constructionist perspective, the process of claims making is essentially the same.

According to Hannigan (1995), the process involves the three central tasks of assembling, presenting and contesting claims. Assembling claims involves discovering and naming the problem (e.g., duck-shooting is morally, legally and environmentally reprehensible); presenting claims means that the campaigners have to command attention and legitimate their claims (e.g., CADS has promoted its media campaign as a duck-rescue operation which is more newsworthy than an anti-hunting protest); finally, contesting claims is about invoking action and mobilizing support (e.g., CADS has used a rescue frame and dramatic television images to appeal to the better instincts of potential supporters).

Core Framing Tasks

Using a framework similar to Hannigan=s, Snow and Benford (1988) identify three main tasks for social movement organizations: diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing. Diagnostic framing identifies some condition or event as problematic; in the Coalition=s case, the diagnosis that duck-shooting is wrong is based on the claim that it is morally, legally and environmentally unjust. The prognosis is closely linked to the diagnosis; the prognostic task is to spell out what is to be done to solve the problem. For the activists in CADS, this means identifying strategies and tactics which will result in the banning of duck-shooting.

Thus, in its diagnostic and prognostic framing work, the Coalition has to make a successful claim that duck-shooting is wrong and then to do something about it. In the Snow and Benford model, the third task, motivational framing, involves the Coalition in mobilizing support for its cause. Motivational framing is an Aelaborate call to arms or a rationale for action that goes beyond the diagnosis and prognosis@ (Snow & Benford, 1988, p. 202).

For CADS, the key mobilizing strategy is to use the mass media, principally the electronic media, to promote its campaign as a rescue operation rather than a conventional animal rights/conservation protest. Television coverage is crucially important to the Coalition; CADS has hired the services of a media monitoring agency, Rehame Australia, which provides it with summary reports and video recordings of radio and television coverage of issues related to their campaign. Activists study these reports, particularly television footage, with a view to improving their campaign tactics. Likewise, their opponents in the Sporting Shooters Association are understood to make use of Rehame Australia=s services. For the protagonists, the public relations battle is a respectability contest waged through the electronic media.

The Rehame news stories (n=46) and features (n=4) which tell the story of ADuck Wars@ represent a visual record of the two duck-shooting seasons in 1993 and 1994. For Coalition activists, television=s representation of their protest is the most potent weapon they have in their campaign to outlaw duck-shooting. This paper shows how the Coalition constructs duck-shooting as a social problem by attending to the framing tasks suggested by Snow and Benford (1988) and more recently by Hannigan (1995).

Diagnostic Frame: Assembling Claims

The Coalition=s campaign literature gives three main reasons for its anti-duck-shooting protest: (1) cruelty; (2) rare and protected birds are illegally shot; and (3) lead pollution damages the environment (Levy, 1989: 6). It is unusual for an animal rights group to base its animal advocacy on mainly environmental grounds; in its opposition to duck-shooting, only cruelty is explicitly an animal welfare issue, albeit the most important one in the Coalition=s defense of wildlife. The Coalition claims that up to 30 percent of the birds shot by hunters are crippled and die a slow and painful death.

The argument against cruelty makes it possible for the Coalition to base its diagnostic framing on moral grounds by calling upon widespread public sentiment in favor of kindness to animals. The environmental arguments against duck-shooting broaden the Coalition=s diagnostic frame to include conservation (of protected species) and ecological (lead pollution) concerns without diminishing its animal liberationist objective. Activists argue that lead pellets do not discriminate between game and protected birds, and even government authorities acknowledge that the birds die a painful death after digesting the pellets. Cruelty, therefore, remains the Coalition=s central grievance against duck-shooting.

Cruelty to animals is the single most important argument activists use to mobilize public support. As one activist explained, A...people recognize cruelty as cruelty. There=s no excuse for cruelty, I can=t think of one. Our society and just about all religions don=t accept cruelty. That=s a good basis for an organization@ (Interview 9, December 22, 1994, p. 3).

The Coalition=s campaign director, Laurie Levy, argues that it is partly the reaction of the duck shooters= children to animal cruelty that has caused the average shooter to relinquish the gun:

I don't know how many duck-shooters over the years have told me that: >It wasn=t you that stopped me, it was my kids.= And again, that=s the power of the media at work (Interview 4, October 18, 1994, p. 6).

The Coalition=s critique of duck-shooting as Aa cruel, cowardly, violent and anti-social act...very much a male macho activity@ (Levy, 1989) strikes a responsive chord in a society weary of violence. Under these circumstances, it is not difficult for Coalition claims-makers to convince potential supporters that compassion and non-violence are better alternatives to the cruelty towards animals and environmental damage that duck-shooting represents. And television is the medium best suited to communicating this message, for as Roshco points out (1975, p. 101), Aa symbolic protest is news management by the socially invisible@ (quoted in Kielbowicz & Scherer, 1986).

Prognostic Frame: Presenting Claims

In prognostic framing, the social movement organization specifies what is to be done about the grievance identified in the diagnosis. Snow and Benford (1988, p. 20) point out how prognostic framing is meant not only to suggest solutions, but also to identify strategies, tactics and targets. To be successful in their claims making activities, social movement organizations depend heavily on the print and electronic media for publicizing their grievances and keeping them visible (McCarthy, 1994). For the Coalition, the promotion of its cause via the media is part of its strategic thinking rather than one of its tactics. Media coverage is the Coalition=s prognosis of how it can most effectively discredit duck-shooting and literally disarm its adherents.

Rochon (1990) argues that a social movement=s power is determined by its militancy, size and novelty while according to Koopmans (1993), militancy is the most direct power since radical protests, especially when they are violent, invariably attract media attention. The Coalition=s strategy of non-violent opposition to duck-shooting and its small size relative to the gun lobby suggest that without the novelty of Aduck rescue@, its campaign would have little appeal to the electronic media. One activist pointed out:

The visual pictures of what we do are far stronger than reading it in black and white or hearing about it on a radio; nothing could compare to those (television) pictures, particularly some of the media we=ve had where they=d be followed up with the wounded birds and shown them being rehabilitated. Things like that, it touches most people (Interview 7, November 15, 1994, p. 11).

According to Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992, p. 374), television images are a more subtle form of meaning-construction than facts or information. Cottle (1993, p. 131) also emphasizes the importance of television news "...at a deeper cultural level in which widespread, if rarely articulated, structures of feeling towards nature and the environment are mobilized." What people see and feel are typically more important than what they read or think. While the demands of conciseness (Herman & Chomsky, 1988) ensure that the complex arguments of animal rights are rarely or even superficially addressed in the medium, the emotive issue of animal cruelty is nonetheless effectively conveyed in the graphic images of ADuck Wars@. As Levy points out:

Two pictures come out of every season--a hunter dressed as a soldier carrying a semi-automatic and shooting at a defenseless bird. Or there is the single image of a rescuer coming out with a wounded bird. The second of concern and compassion will always beat an image of violence (Levy, 1994).

In relying on the media as its main prognostic tool, the Coalition, in common with other interest groups which utilize the mass media in their causes, runs the risk of its message being distorted. Several theorists have warned activists of the dangers inherent in media-driven campaigns (Rootes, 1984; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Gamson 1992; Tarrow, 1994). As a former television cameraman, Levy understands how the medium works, as well as how to exploit the camera to the best advantage. In this, the Coalition is perhaps unique as a social movement organization in that its leader is a former media professional adept at using the media.

As the main strategy in its anti-duck-shooting protest, the Coalition=s objective is to use the media against the interests of the gun lobby. One very revealing result of the Coalition=s success in ADuck Wars@ is that in the 1993 and 1994 video coverage its representatives were responsible for 18 percent of the spoken lines compared to 8 percent for the hunters and their spokespersons. The fact that the Coalition has achieved more than twice the airtime available to its opponents suggests that it has been successful in framing its objection to duck-shooting as a social justice issue with moral, legal, and environmental dimensions that have wide appeal for the viewing public. Gamson et al. (1992) argue that the media are an arena for symbolic contests in which participants measure success or failure not by how the messages are read by the audience, but by their prominence in the news and how well media discourse tells the story they want told. The Coalition believes its narrative of ADuck Wars@ is favorably represented in news broadcasts and feature stories. In choosing to frame its collective action as a rescue operation rather than a conventional anti-hunting or animal rights protest (as with the Hunt Saboteurs), the Coalition has guaranteed media interest and hence the opportunity for mobilizing support for its cause.

Motivational Frame: Contesting Claims

In Snow and Benford=s (1988) model, the third task--motivational framing--is how the social movement organization mobilizes people to take action on behalf of its cause. Motivational framing is essentially Aa call to arms@. For the Coalition, the key mobilizing strategy is to frame their campaign as a duck-rescue operation, since the notion of rescue resonates well in a culture which values kindness to animals and where the connotations of saving (animals=) lives in the tradition of the Red Cross strikes a responsive chord. Levy frequently invokes the metaphor of a Awar zone,@ especially during the pre-season buildup to the campaign:

We will be in the water with the hunters at first light and we will be going about our job of rescuing wounded birds. I see our role as being similar to the Red Cross; we go into a war zone to help the innocent victims (Levy, ABC National Television, March 18, 1994).

As a public relations exercise, duck rescue has an appeal which a conventional political protest, say against the gun lobby, does not. Furthermore, the idea of duck liberation is sufficiently novel to attract media and public attention. The task for the Coalition is to frame their anti-duck-shooting protest in a way that will motivate people to participate and not alienate potential sympathizers.

The motivation for participation in the campaign, as in the larger animal rights movement, is framed in terms of social justice and rights discourse. The animal rights movement is primarily a moral protest on behalf of animals (Jasper & Nelkin, 1992). Peter Singer=s Animal Liberation (1975, 1990) provides many activists worldwide with an ethical basis for their non-violent, direct action against cruelty towards animals. The book is a clarion call for people, individually and collectively, to protest against the exploitation of animals specifically in factory farming and animal experimentation. Animal Liberation is both a philosophical treatise on and a practical guide to how we should treat animals. In the case of hunting, Singer elsewhere (1995) sees hunting as the ultimate form of speciesism, in contrast to hunters who claim that it is essential for good conservation (Dizard, 1994). For the Coalition, the challenge is to produce motivational frames that will inspire people to speak out against duck-shooting. Motivation is a prerequisite for action mobilization:

For people to take action to overcome a collectively perceived problem or >injustice,= they must develop a set of compelling reasons for doing so. Motivational framing addresses this need...(and) entails the social construction and avowal of motives and identities of protagonists (Hunt, Benford & Snow, 1994, p. 191).

Images of Duck-shooting in the Media

According to Snow and Benford (1988), motivational frames function as Aprods to action@. Jasper (1990) argues that animal rights activists use Amoral shocks@ to propel people into action on behalf of animals. As a moral protest, the animal rights movement must tread a delicate path for fear of alienating potential sympathizers who may not be up to occupying the high moral ground which a fully ethical treatment of animals demands. As a primarily hands-on, activist group, the Coalition is careful to avoid the moralistic language of their more radical colleagues in the movement and opts for a motivational frame based on dramatic images of duck rescue. It claims that these images are largely responsible for mobilizing public opinion against duck-shooting.

In a recent paper, Jasper and Poulsen (1995) argue that Snow and Benford do not show in detail how framing occurs, because they implicitly assume recruitment to movements is via personal networks of those who share the activists= underlying world views. Jasper and Poulsen (1995) claim that in the case of animal rights protests, at least, this assumption may be unfounded. Their study suggests that moral shocks rather than pre-existing social networks are more salient in the recruitment of animal rights supporters. The most important single factor in their recruitment was found to be reading, followed by a combined category which included reading, listening and watching television. According to Jasper and Poulsen (1995), animals have extraordinary potential as condensing symbols, which they define as Averbal or visual images that neatly capture--both cognitively and emotionally--a range of meanings, and convey a frame, a master frame, or theme@. They point out how images such as caged puppies are presented by protest organizers as a Asuffering of innocents@ master frame in order to convey the Amoral shock@ needed for the first stage in the recruitment of strangers. Television news stories and features are well equipped to produce these kinds of images. It is for these reasons that the Coalition uses the electronic media as an indispensable resource in its recruitment of strangers.

For CADS, cruelty is the master frame which it believes resonates most with the media and the general public. This is clearly illustrated in some of the television footage following the opening of the duck season, when CADS members ritualistically and symbolically display dead and injured birds as spectacles of suffering in public places. An example from a March 21, 1994 two-minute television news item, the second story after the lead, follows. The source is Analysis (1994), Story 19, AFine Fight@, ATV 10 TV News, 5.00 P.M. The left-hand column is taken from the news stories while the italicized comments on the right are the authors:

Laurie Levy (CADS):

This is a very young signet and obviously it can't fly, yet it has been shot through the neck.
Levy holds a dead bird to the camera while other protesters display dead birds outside the Victorian Premier=s office. In the background are members of the public and camera crews are filming the scene.

Reporter:

Predictably, the annual display of protected birds following the opening of duck season in the wake of last weekend=s shoot-out, 115 birds including swans and rare freckled ducks, were dumped outside the Premier=s office. They were collected mainly from Lake Buloke just outside Donald in central Victoria, where a surprisingly small number of hunters, perhaps no more than 2000, battled it out against an increasing number of protesters.
Shot of dozens of dead birds on the footpath; some are held up to the camera by different protesters. The dead birds are carefully lined up in the fashion of the war dead and in keeping with the Coalition=s designation of the wetlands as a Awar zone@. A large bloodstain is clearly visible on the footpath - cross to a lake scene where a shooter carries a dead bird from the water and another successfully downs a duck which skims across the water as it falls. The shooter wades out to collect the bird as three rescuers - two female and one male - follow in hot pursuit.

Laurie Levy (CADS):

Duck-shooting is not a sport and that=s why duck hunter numbers are dropping; the public perceives duck-shooting now as being an anti-social, male, macho activity and duck-shooting is coming to an end.


Levy appears in close-up outside the Premier=s office to invoke the image of duck-shooting as a shameful activity.


Snow and Benford (1988) argue that a successful campaign must be relevant to people=s lived experience, or Aplausibility structures@, to use Jasper and Poulsen=s (1995) terminology. For these reasons the Coalition was particularly pleased with the favorable coverage it received in an early morning feature program (Good Morning Australia), which boasts an audience of many thousands. The story is unique in that the presenter is unashamedly on the side of the duck liberationists, as her opening remarks indicate. As the report continues, the pro-animal slant gets stronger, with an anthropomorphic reference to waterbirds who Atalk to one another@ and an anti-hunting stance made explicit with references to Athis extraordinary assault@ on Athe unsuspecting victims of this bloody sport@.

In this program the presenter (Michelle) interviews Claire, an animal activist who runs an animal shelter. It is the longest story (7 minutes, 15 seconds) in the entire 1993-94 coverage totalling 50 stories (46 news stories and 4 feature stories). This excerpt is worth quoting at length since it captures the message and images the Coalition seeks to promote in its relationship with the media. The source is Analysis (1993), Story V, AWildlife Rehabilitation@, Good Morning Australia, March 22. The left-hand column is taken from the feature story while the italicized comments on the right are the author=s.

Michelle:

Dawn, all over Victoria the wetlands resound with the noises of a ritual older than mankind itself. Waterbirds awake, talk to one another and reaffirm their territory before taking flight into the new day. One morning of the year, this peace and tranquility is shattered in the name of sport, when thousands of shooters open fire, releasing several hundred tons of toxic lead into our environment whilst killing and maiming thousands of our native water fowl. To be here and experience this extraordinary assault on our environment can be likened only they say to a war zone, except in this war, only one side is armed. For eight years now, animal welfare groups have been making their annual pilgrimage to the wetlands. Confrontations like this are a familiar sight, with rescuers tolerating the most extreme conditions in order to alleviate what pain and suffering they can for the unsuspecting victims of this bloody sport. While hundreds of rescuers are braving the elements out on the wetlands, people like Claire Davies are on call 24 hours a day to receive the injured and the shocked.
Atmospheric music (not used in news bulletins) suggests a mood of tranquillity. The scene is of a golden sky at sunrise filled with waterbirds. The lake reflects the yellow sun as a flock of birds flies above in close formation. Gunshots ring out on the reporter=s mention of Ashattered@ tranquillity. Shooters fire skyward as a bird falls to the ground. Rescuers look on from the shore. A shooter wrings the neck of one bird as heavily armed hunters and their dogs cruise the lake in their motor boats. A lone shooter dressed in battle fatigue and armed with a shotgun loaded with cartridges surveys Athe war zone@. Levy points angrily at one shooter and approaches him armed only with his walkie-talkie. He confronts a middle-aged shooter who challenges Levy=s right to be on the water. The next image is of Levy loaded up with injured birds as he attempts to return to shore. He slips and falls as he does so. On shore, he displays several dead birds to the media.

Cross to the animal shelter at Berwick, outside of Melbourne. The reporter, speaking in hushed tones, introduces Davis who is holding a small, injured bird which has an attractive white and brown head and black wings.


Feature stories of this kind are seen as instrumental in the Coalition=s mobilization campaigns. Activists claim that dozens of people phone their headquarters offering support following favorable television coverage of their protest. There can be no doubt that the mistreatment of animals--domestic and wild--strikes an emotional chord with most people (see Munro, 1993-94, pp. 15-16).

Animal rights philosophers are aware of the importance of emotions in mobilizing support for the movement. Tom Ran put it most succinctly when he wrote: APhilosophy can lead the mind to water but only emotion can make it drink@ (1986, p. 40). As I have argued, television is the quintessential medium for maximizing emotion and therefore a powerful resource for social movement activists. Yet sociologists have tended to neglect the role of emotions in social movements (Groves, 1995).

In the Coalition=s case, duck liberationists have successfully exploited a medium not available to earlier generations of animal liberators. Furthermore, they have used emotion in a way that is perhaps unique to the modern animal rights movement. According to Groves (1995, pp. 458-59), in the animal rights movement today:

The emotional rubric of justice and rights for animals represents a break from its nineteenth century counterpart in the humane tradition (since)...emotions in the animal rights movement took on a different meaning when men, as opposed to women, adopted them; sympathy or caring for defenseless victims became objective, rational and legitimate.

Groves points out that men=s participation was a useful resource for overcoming the emotional deviance experienced by most of the activists in his study.

There is an element of this in the Coalition=s media campaign, which has effectively deviantized duck-shooting as an anti-social, Amale, macho activity@ thereby legitimating duck rescue as the compassionate alternative. Whether the changing meaning of emotions can be attributed to men=s participation in the duck rescue operation is not clear, since the majority of rescuers are women. Laurie Levy is careful to avoid gender connotations when he describes the potent television images that he claims ensure the success of the Coalition=s campaign:

Two pictures come out of every season--a hunter dressed as a soldier carrying a semi-automatic weapon and shooting a defenseless bird. Or there is the simple image of a rescuer coming out with an injured bird (Levy, 1994).

Here Levy identifies the three main protagonists in the ADuck Wars@ without any specific reference to gender, although the images themselves reveal that the duck shooters are all men and the rescuers are mostly women.

I have argued that the CADS campaign is a case study in the management of emotions, and emotions are explicit in the key tasks identified by Hannigan (1995) for constructing social problems. First, in assembling claims about duck-shooting, the Coalition diagnosed the problem as primarily a moral issue involving the rights of sentient beings not to be cruelly slaughtered or injured. Cruelty, and its opposite, kindness, are clearly concepts which provoke emotional reactions in people. Second, in presenting its campaign largely via the media, the Coalition has succeeded in making Aduck rescue by duck liberationists@ newsworthy. Finally, in contesting the rights and wrongs of duck-shooting, the motivational frame adopted by CADS centered on the idea of rescue with its specific appeal to compassion towards non-human beings.

As noted above, animals are unique in symbolizing, both cognitively and emotionally, a range of meanings for humans. For many people, however, television images of duck-shooting as an anti-social, cruel sport strike an emotional chord. The moral shocks associated with the sight of injured and slaughtered birds ensure that attitude change takes place at an emotional rather than cognitive level, which for the Coalition Against Duck Shooting makes television the most potent ally in the construction of duck-shooting as a social problem.

Notes

1. Correspondence should be sent to Lyle Munro, Faculty of Arts, Monash University Gippsland Campus, Churchill, Victoria, 3842, Australia. E-mail: LyleMunro@arts.monash.edu.au.

2. Charles Birch is an eminent Australian scientist and author of Raining Compassion for Humanity and Nature (1993) and Feelings (1995). He used the phrase in a radio broadcast to promote his latest book.

3. There was no official duck-hunting season in 1995 because of the effects of a prolonged drought.

References

Action. (1994). Duck rescue: Saving lives and changing attitudes. Animal Liberation Magazine, 47, 10-11.

Analysis. (1993, 1994). Television news and current affairs on the 1993 and 1994 duck-shooting season and the protests against it. Unpublished transcripts of the television coverage filmed by Rehame Australia, Melbourne.

Best, J. (1995). Images of issues: Typifying contemporary social problems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Cottle, S. (1993). Mediating the environment: Modalities of TV news. In A. Hansen (Ed.), The mass media and environmental issues. Leicester: Leicester University.

Crook, J. (Ed.). (1995). Hunting: A critical perspective. Melbourne: Gun Control Australia.

Dizard, J. E. (1994). Going wild: Hunting, animal rights and the contested meaning of nature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts.

Finsen, L. & Finsen, S. (1994). The animal rights movement in America: From compassion to respect. New York: Twayne.

Gamson, W. (1992). Talking politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Gamson, W. Croteau, D. Hoynes, W. & Sasson, T. (1992). Media images and the social construction of reality. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 373-393.

Groves, J. M. (1995). Learning to feel: The neglected sociology of social movements. The Sociological Review, 43, 3, 435-461.

Hannigan, J. (1995). Environmental sociology: A social constructionist perspective. London: Routledge.

Herman, E. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon.

Henkel, K. (1995). Down on the farm: Rationale expansion in the construction of factory farming as a social problem. In J. Best (Ed.), Images of issues: Typifying contemporary social problems (pp. 239-256). New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Hunt, S.A., Benford, R.D & Snow, D.A. (1994). Identity fields: Framing processes and the social construction of movement identities. In E. Larana, H. Johnston & J. Gusfield (Eds)., New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp. 185-208). Philadelphia: Temple University.

Interviews. (1994). Animal liberationists and their campaigns. Transcripts of unpublished interviews with members of Animal Liberation Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Jasper, J. (1990, December). Moral dimensions of social movements. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Jasper, J. & Nelkin, D. (1992). The animal rights crusade: The growth of a moral protest. New York: Free Press.

Jasper, J. & Poulsen, J. (1995). Recruiting strangers and friends: Moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests. Social Problems, 42, 4, 493-512.

Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions of doing evil. New York: Basic.

Kielbowicz, R. B. & Scherer, C. (1986). The role of the press in the dynamics of social movements. In K. Lang, G. Engel Lang & L. Kriesberg (Eds.). Research in social movements, conflicts, and change (pp. 71-96). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Klandermans, B. (1992). The social construction of protest and multiorganizational fields. In A. D Morris & C. McClurg Mueller (Eds.). Frontiers in social movement theory (pp. 77-103). New Haven: Yale University.

Koopmans, R. (1993). The dynamics of protest waves. American Sociological Review, 58, 637-658.

Leahy, M. (1991). Against liberation: Putting animals in perspective. London: Routledge.

Levy, L. (1989). Weapons and violence in Australia: Towards an end to gun lobby violence against Australia=s native waterbirds. Melbourne: Coalition Against Duck Shooting.

Levy, L. (1994, March). It=s Laurie Levy season. La Trobe University Newspaper, (Feature interview).

Levy, L. (1994, October). Interview 4: Animal liberationists and their campaigns. Unpublished transcript of interviews with activists in Animal Liberation Victoria.

McCarthy, J. D. (1994). Activists, authorities and media framing of drunk driving. In E. Larana, H. Johnston & J. Gusfield (Eds.), New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp. 133-167). Philadelphia: Temple University.

Munro, L. (1993-94). A decade of animal liberation. Current Affairs Bulletin, 70, 7, 12-19, Sydney: WEA of NSW in Association with the University of Sydney.

Munro, L. (in press). Narratives of protest: Television=s representation of an animal liberation campaign. Media International Australia (forthcoming).

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1972). Meditations on hunting (H. B. Wescot, Trans.). New York: Scribner=s.

Ran, T. (1983). The case for animal rights, Berkeley: University of California.

Ran, T. (1986). The struggle for animal rights. Clarks Summit, PA: International Society for Animal Rights.

Rochon, T. R. (1990). The West European peace movement and the theory of new social movements. In R. Dalton & M. Kuechler (Eds.), Challenging the political order: New social and political movements in Western democracies (pp. 105-121). Cambridge: Polity.

Rootes, C. (1984). Protest, social movements, revolution. Social Alternatives, 4, 1, 4-8.

Simpson & Day (1994). Field guide to the birds of Australia. London: Christopher Helm, Ltd.

Singer, P. (1975, 1990). Animal liberation: A new ethic for our treatment of animals, London: Jonathan Cape.

Singer, P. (1995). Guns and animals: An animal liberation perspective. In J. Crook (Ed). Hunting: A critical perspective (pp. 68-72). Melbourne: Gun Control Australia, Inc.

Snow, D. A. & Benford, R. D. (1988). Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization. In B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi & S. Tarrow (Eds.), From structure to action: comparing social movement research across cultures (pp. 197-217). International Social Movement Research, a Research Annual, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Sturgeon, N. (1995). Theorizing movement: Direct action and direct theory. In M. Darnovsky, B. Epstein & R. Flacks (Eds.), Cultural politics and social movements. Philadelphia: Temple University.

Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in movement: Social movements, collective action and politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Wolfe, A. (1993). The human difference: Animals, computers and the necessity of social science. Berkeley: University of California.

Yearley, S. (1992). The green case: A sociology of environmental issues, arguments and politics. London: Routledge.
 

For Abstracts of all issues, including the most current, click Article Abstracts

To order Society & Animals Journal, go to our secure online ordering page

You can Search the online issues of Society & Animals, as well as the entire Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA) website,
for topics and keywords of your interest: