New student group brings ‘sexy’ back to animal-rights advocacy

When people think of the word “sexy,” animal-rights advocacy doesn’t usually come to mind.\nBut members of Revitalizing Animal Well-being, a new activist group on campus, hope to change that.\nMany animal-advocacy groups focus on the actual cruelty and torture of animals. Co-presidents and founders Courtney Wennerstrom and Deborah Strickland knew that to attract students, they would have to take a different approach. Wennerstrom said they set out to make animal advocacy seem fun – and even sexy – with events, such as this year’s Canadian love-letters campaign or next year’s planned Kissathon, to address seal slaughter off the coast of Newfoundland.\nIn an attempt to stop the killing of baby seals for their fur in Canada, members of Revitalizing Animal Well-Being are sending boxes of chocolates and a love letter to Canada’s prime minister in hopes that flattery will persuade the bureaucrats.\nRevitalizing Animal Well-Being members started collecting signatures on Valentine’s Day in Ballantine Hall and the Indiana Memorial Union. They now have collected about 800 signatures and plan to mail the letter this week.\nAccording to the letter, its intention is to render the prime minister “so overwhelmed by our love that (he) will immediately stop this senseless slaughter” of seals.\nThe group says that every year about 350,000 baby “white coat” seals are killed for their fur. \n“A year ago, I learned about the seal slaughter, and I was horrified,” Wennerstrom said.\nWhen Wennerstrom decided she needed to fight seal slaughter, she attempted to join an animal-activism group on campus. \nBut, as she soon found out, there wasn’t one. She said she couldn’t believe that 30,000 students did not care about the treatment of animals. So Wennerstrom and Strickland this year co-founded Revitalizing Animal Well-being.\nMembers of the group want “sexy” to be fun without objectifying women, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’s recent ad campaigns featuring photos of scantily clad women, Wennerstrom said. She said that to make any kind of advocacy sexy, it must “revitalize the way we think about intellectual life.”\nThe IU group’s community coordinator, Kara Kendall, said the group was good for anyone who cared about animals and wanted to have fun. She said not to expect the stereotypical animal-advocacy agency.\n“The most important thing is that RAW aims to be very inclusive,” Kendall said. “You don’t have to be a card-carrying vegan.”\nRevitalizing Animal Well-being was not formed to deal only with the seal slaughter issue, but also local animal rights issues and human-animal relations. Wennerstrom said a common misconception of animal advocacy was that animal advocates do not care about the needs of humans. To denounce this rumor and spread good-will, the group has partnered with Middle Way House to connect victims of domestic violence with their pets after the victims have left their homes.\nRevitalizing Animal Well-being will hold a meeting to recruit new members at 7 p.m. Thursday in Ballantine Hall 006.