An interesting conversation has arisen within the animal protection world since the death of global superstar Brigette Bardot. She was known throughout the world as a beautiful bombshell of the silver screen, but she was also a very active member of the animal rights movement. However her death has also started a wider discussion within the animal protection movement, as the vast majority of her life appears to be spent supporting very outdated, rascist and upsetting comments about most groups within society.
Whilst she was a movie star, her popularity got to be too much for her and she moved away from being a movie star and it seems she tried to use her stardom to raise awareness for issues that were important to her. Her primary focus became animal welfare activism, including her joining protests against seal hunts in 1977 and then moving on to eventually establish the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986. She also sent letters of protest to world leaders over issues such as dog extermination in Romania, dolphin killing in the Faroe Islands, and cat slaughter in Australia. Needless to say, these are all very important issues that benefited from her activism, but unfortunately it appears that was where the good deeds came to an end.
Bardot regularly aired outspoken views on religious animal slaughter, which is not an issue on it’s own: Slaughter of any kind is not akin to good animal welfare or beneficial for animal rights. The issue however seems to be that she would couple these remarks with incredible rascist comments, and throughout her life she was a very outspoken supporter of right-wing politics that encouraged this hateful way of thinking. Bardot’s degrading comments about ethnic minorities, immigration, Islam and homosexuality resulted in a number of convictions for inciting racial hatred. French courts fined her six times between 1997 and 2008 for her comments, particularly those targeting France’s Muslim community: In one case, for example, a Paris court fined Bardot €15,000 (around £13,000) for describing Muslims as “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”.
Bardot was also not a celebrated parent, and her controversial comments about her child (calling them a cancer, as one example) further adds to the image of Bardot as just not a good person. Whilst I do believe that people are complicated – a person can do incredibly good and generous things for other people, yet be horrible to their own family members – it seems to me that the only good thing to come from Bardot has been her movies and her animal activism. In every other aspect of her life, she was problematic, controversial and, in my opinion, not a nice person. It does make me doubt her intentions a bit when she was very clear on the fact that she was a vegetarian, not a vegan, which just suggests to me that she was fine with exploitation but drew the moral line at slaughter?
This has therefore raised a lot of questions within the animal rights world. Can we celebrate a person like Bardot, who did a lot of work for raising awareness for animal rights through her activism, and still condemn her for the hatred she spread against other people? From what I have seen online about this discussion, a lot of people are having trouble trying to separate the few good things she did, from the very many terrible things that she did. I do not agree that someone deserves to die for their views, but I do believe that hateful and harmful views should be challenged and stopped as much as possible. Despite being punished for her harmful remarks multiple times, this seemed to do very little to encourage Bardot to challenge her ways of thinking at all, which suggests to me that she likely saw nothing wrong with what she was saying.
For me personally, it seems very clear that the harm she did very much outweighs the good that she did. Whilst I do think there is a time and place to celebrate what Bardot did for animals and for raising awareness around a lot of issues through her animal activism, she seemed to care very little for her fellow humans and she should very much be criticised for the comments that she has made over her life.
I also think it is interesting that for so many animal activists, whilst animals are their main focus, they do also care for their fellow humans and speak out about exploitation across society. Whilst I am vegan for the animals, I am not ignorant to the wider issues that animal agriculture raises, including the impact that animal agroculture can have on local communities acros the world. I do not support exploitation on any scale, which is why I also try to avoid buying clothes from fast fashion brands, or try to ensure that my food is produced from an ethical manufacturer. I do know that it is not posible to have concious consumerism under capitalism, and that exploitation is inevitable in a capatilist society, but I (as do many within the vegan movement) try their best to limit their impact on these industries as much as possible. After all that is the main message of veganism: Do as little harm as possible.
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