One Can Make a Difference (4 page)

BRIGITTE BARDOT

Sex Kitten and Matriarch of Mice

Brigitte Bardot's movies were the talk of the Western world. She made fifty of
them in twenty years, some light French farces, some sex romps on the beach,
perhaps none more well known than
Et Dieu Crea Eve
, or
And God Created Woman
. She was the epitome of the fantasy female. She was, however,
deeply unhappy in the role. And, although she stuck it out for twenty years,
she did it while fighting depression. At the age of forty, Brigitte Bardot took her
pouty lips and went home to the south of France, vowing never to appear on
the screen again. She had made the decision to do what her heart told her she
must: champion the cause of animal rights. No matter what directors said or did
to try to persuade her to return—and many tried hard to get her back—when
Madam Bardot said “non!” she meant “non!”

In 2006, I happened to go to Paris to protest Jean-Paul Gautier's use of
baby foxes as panels in a frock coat (the bodice of which was made of calves' hide
trimmed with lamb). Madam Bardot had been in the city a few days before,
on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation,
and had delivered a rousing speech to thunderous applause about the responsibility
to stop cruelty. Now, from her home outside St. Tropez, she heard on
the nightly news that I had been arrested. She immediately fired off a letter to
the jail and, more importantly, to Monsieur Gautier, asking him to be decent
enough to hear the animals' cries and creative enough to abandon fur designs.
As soon as I heard of her action, I was reminded that her sassiness, her independence,
and her activism belonged in this book.

I
had an unhappy childhood, but I have a happy childhood memory. When I was ten years old, I managed to rescue a tiny mouse who appeared at our dinner table. My father wanted to kill this little creature, but, luckily, she ran up my sleeve into my sweater. My parents thought that I was itching, that I had a rash. It was quite funny! Later on, during the night, I went downstairs and released her into our garden. I saved her! It was my first official animal rescue and one of the most fulfilling moments of my life, although I wasn't aware of it at the time.

My career in film was busy and exotic, but it was never very fulfilling. Of course, I have lots of memories of those times, but, honestly, they're more of a nuisance than anything else! I was often depressed by that way of life. Sometimes I couldn't really overcome my sadness during these cinema days. I couldn't imagine myself in such a world forever, and on occasion I wanted to simply stop living. I even attempted suicide, but, fortunately, I didn't succeed. I stayed in the business because I told myself, and my mother told me, that I needed money. I didn't have a dime, I was just a kid. I thought that I needed money to be able someday to protect animals. I had an affinity for all of them, little birds kept in cages so that they cannot stretch their wings and fly, rabbits who are killed to be eaten. This thought of how to help them began to consume my life.

When I was eighteen, I married the great French director, Roger Vadim, and we started making movies together. It was Vadim who told me about vivisection, animal experiments. That absolutely chilled and haunted me. He told me of how animals suffer in laboratories, in their cages. I found it shocking that humans could be so horribly cruel. This passion for animals carried over into movies. I loved the little animals in my films so much that I couldn't let them go and would keep them. I had a very small apartment in Paris, and one day I rescued a performing monkey from a production and took him home. He broke everything in the place, he ate all my makeup, and he soiled everywhere. I was very young then, about nineteen years old, and I became upset, even angry, but I felt sorry for him, too. I knew that he couldn't help it. I finally took him to a sanctuary for exotic animals where he was very happy.

All my life I've been touched by particular cases that I didn't understand fully but that I could feel so deeply. Stories about slaughterhouses shocked me even when I was small, but, as horrible as it made me feel, I didn't know what to do about it. Then, in 1986, I sold everything that had a monetary value to start my foundation for animals. People ask if that was a difficult thing to do. No, not at all! Well, it was a little hard to find myself selling the very first diamond that I bought myself!

It was difficult because my mother had told me to buy it and I remember the moment well. I must have been twenty-three or twenty-four years old. She warned me that it was best not to keep money but buy precious stones instead. She said if there is a war, if there are social problems, at least with a diamond, you can hide it on yourself, in your panties, and you can always survive with a precious stone!

So, we went to Mellerio's—a large French jewelry store, the equivalent of Cartier. I don't know if it's still there, in the fabulous Place Vendome in Paris. I paid for this diamond with my very first large fees from my films.When I sold it to support the work of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for Animals, I felt quite sentimental. I never wore that ring, it wasn't for wearing, but it was symbolic! But there it was on the auction block, and I knew I was getting much better use out of it than having it sit in a vault in a bank.

When I see people eating animals, I always say “Animals are my friends, and I don't eat my friends.” But I never forbid anyone to eat meat. I just wish that they would eat less if they're not going to be vegetarians. When I was a kid, we ate meat once a week. We ate fish, eggs, and pasta, and we didn't put meat on the pasta. We had meat only on Sundays, once a week. No one needs to eat meat morning, noon, and night. It's very bad for your health and it's really a horror for the animals, a dreadful industrial death, with conditions getting worse.

I quit the cinema thirty-three years ago, and since then I have had no help whatsoever in my animal protection work from the French government. None! However, I have had help from foreign countries. It is scandalous and sad. I must have seen fifty ministers, three presidents of the Republique, I forget how many representatives, yet the French government has never helped. They would do well to listen to the words of Leo Tolstoy, words that I believe in. He said, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” It's formidable and apropos in these frightening times, when we see more and more battlefields and more and more slaughterhouses opening up all over the world.

There's no relief at all for these poor animals that go to the slaughter. It's abominable. I think animals help us live; they've helped me live. It was only when I began to devote myself to protecting animals that I blossomed completely. Taking care of them, looking out for them, has given my life true meaning, a meaning I hope future generations can also experience. Young people are always a hope. More of them must realize that the animal is not an object for profit, not a toy for our amusement, hunted for sport, not some thing to be cut up for his fur. They may see that the animal has the right to live, just as we have the right to live. We, the animals, the plants are the whole, and the whole makes a chain, and if we break that chain, all of humanity will pay. That's it.

These days, I have horses, ponies, donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, geese, cats, dogs, ducks, and, like George Clooney, I have four domestic pigs. Wild boars come on my property in the south of France and have their young. I have doves and lots of pigeons. And guess what? I have mice! And I don't want them killed! Even my cats respect them because they understand from me that the mice behind my little desk must not be touched. They are
musaraignes
(like shrews, field mice), very small with very pointed noses. No bigger than my thumb. . . . The dogs don't hurt them either because they've been asked to leave them alone, please! When the mice come to eat, I give them little crumbs and pieces of this and that and nobody moves! It's quite extraordinary because they aren't tame. They came to live in my bedroom behind my little desk and believe me, they're happy there because nobody touches my mice! Yes, the first one I saved was when I was ten years old, and here I am, saving mice again!

For me it is a vocation. I live only for them twenty-four hours a day, because if I didn't have them, I would have killed myself a long time ago. That's the truth. When you love, you devote yourself, body and soul, for the love you have for something; it can be religion, it can be for older people, children, perhaps world hunger, or whatever, but one must do it completely, one cannot do it halfway. That's why I left everything behind to be completely available to try to protect animals anywhere in the world . . . because cruelty doesn't only occur in France; it's everywhere and with all animals.

Kisses to all who care.

DR. NEAL BARNARD

A Healthy Outlook

Dr. Neal Barnard fits the description of an ethical physician as perfectly as a surgical
glove fits the hand. I met him in the mid-1980s, when a scandal was erupting
over the U.S. military's plan to suspend dogs in slings, shoot them, have medics
practice emergency wound treatments on them, and then dispatch them. Dr. Bar-nard
offered to help research alternatives, and thanks to him, the Department of
Defense suddenly found 900 emergency-room physicians knocking on their door,
eager to offer their services to train the young military medics without the use of
animals. That helped win the case, and I will always be grateful to him.

An insightful, caring person and mentor to up-and-coming physicians, Dr.
Barnard gave up his individual practice to devote himself fully to the charity he
founded, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He is a prolific
author of books on the power of nutrition to prevent and combat disease, including
Food for Life
;
Eat Right
,
Live Longer
;
Foods That Fight Pain
; and
Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes
. His journey shows
that setting your mind to a problem can help fix it!

W
e didn't talk health food in North Dakota in the 1950s, especially those of us with families in the cattle business. My grandfather, uncles, and cousins all raised cattle, and roast beef, baked potatoes, and corn were our everyday fare. Except for special occasions, that is, when we ate roast beef, baked potatoes, and peas.

My father didn't care for the cattle business, and left it to go to medical school. Toward the end of college, I decided to do the same, and, while my medical school applications incubated, I took a job in the bowels of Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis. Located in an otherwise unused basement hallway, the hospital morgue was a desolate museum of medical tragedies.

No living person ever went there if they didn't have to. The telephone was a hefty brick-like device from the 1940s, and the place suffered from general neglect. My job was to assist the pathologists as they examined the bodies. One day, a man died in the hospital of a massive heart attack (probably from eating hospital food, but that's another story). To expose the heart, we removed a section of ribs from his chest—an indelicate procedure performed with a hefty garden clipper—and we set the large pie-wedge of ribs next to the body. The pathologist knew I was headed for medical school, so he made sure to drill the details of each examination into my head. Slicing into a coronary artery, he pointed out the atherosclerotic plaque that had choked off the blood supply to the heart. And he found more plaques in the arteries to the brain, the kidneys, and the legs. He explained that these came from the cheeseburgers and steak Americans use as staples, something I hadn't heard before. At the end of the examination, I carefully put the ribs back in the chest, cleaned up the body, and went to the cafeteria to see what was for lunch.As it turned out, the day's featured dish was ribs. Between the look and the smell, eating them was not an option. I didn't become a vegetarian on the spot, but that was the day meat began to lose its appeal.

All to the good, because, although I was unaware of it at the time, research studies had already begun to indict the foods my family raised for their contribution to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, and to roughly half of all cancer cases. In fact, Western diets, centered on meats and dairy products, have a more negative effect on health than any other single factor. Like me, American medicine paid little attention to any of this. When I finished my medical training, I took a job at St.

Vincent's Hospital in downtown New York. As I talked with my colleagues, I began to realize that we were good at diagnosis and reasonably good at treatment, but we were absolutely abysmal at prevention. We did nothing about heart attacks until they came through the emergency room doors. We did nothing about cancer until it showed up on a mammogram or blood test. Our collective task, as we saw it, was to clean up the wreckage of bad habits, bad genes, or bad luck. All the while, we neglected the most critical part of what doctors ought to be doing, and I resolved to change that.

In 1985, I started an organization called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) in order to bring prevention and nutrition front and center in medical practice. The original plan was to build a group of perhaps fifteen or twenty doctors who would opine on these issues, and I began to advertise for like-minded physicians. But this mission touched a nerve, and more and more doctors began to join. Today more than 6,000 doctors belong to PCRM. We conduct research studies, focusing on the power of healthier diets. While we do not discount the value of drugs, we would like to see the roles of “conventional” medicine (i.e., medications) and “alternative” medicine (i.e., diet changes) reversed.