Brian May: ‘I always promised myself that if I had the opportunity, a little later in life, I would spend some of my life trying to improve the lot of animals, trying to change things, so that we treat them with respect.’

The Badger’s Best Friend
Brian May Stands Up Against A Speciesist Backlash

By Duncan Strauss
Host, ‘Talking Animals,’ at NPR affiliate station WMNF-FM, Tampa, Florida; online at www.talkinganimals.net

Say what you will about Queen—for every five folks who worship at that altar there’s probably one or two ready to spit on it (and those two camps intersected a bit when the Paul Rodgers edition of Queen was unleashed)—animal lovers of all stripes would be hard-pressed not to adore Brian May.

In the last couple of years, the Queen guitarist has emerged as a high-profile, very vocal animal advocate, launching his own animal protection campaign, Save Me, named after the May-penned Queen song.

When he was a guest November 3 on “Talking Animals,” May discussed his passion for animals and animal issues, noting that he’s ratcheted up his actions and outspokenness—stepping into a new international spotlight—but that his passion in this realm is hardly new.

“It’s longstanding,” he said of his interest in the radio interview, “but I haven’t been as active as I am now, until the last couple of years. Yeah, I always felt very strongly about animals—you can tell that in some of the songs.

“But I always promised myself that if I had the opportunity, a little later in life, I would spend some of my life trying to improve the lot of animals, trying to change things, so that we treat them with respect.”

May’s quest to encourage kinder treatment of animals could scarcely be more removed from celebrity lip service or the activist dabblings of a dilettante. This guy took on fox hunting when a new government announced its intention to overturn the ban on the practice.

Wait, are you saying May spoke out, criticizing the politicians who wanted to revive fox hunting—one of the most deeply ingrained traditions in the U.K.?

Yeah, I am saying that. And boy, did those politicians—and others—respond in kind, attacking in a myriad of ways, from verbal cannonballs (one prominent Tory wrote “this is a subject that needs to be debated by those who know about it, rather than a rock celebrity who has not chafed his hands on anything other than a guitar neck”) to far more refined, if insidious, ammo.

Speaking of the hostility that has greeted his animal rights advocacy, Brian May observes: ‘…in this world, yeah, I’ve [taken] a lot of pretty serious abuse, and some of it’s very subtle. They can work on you in mysterious ways and really discredit you. You have to really be on your toes. You have to be very resilient. I think I’ve adapted.’

The bombardment initially stunned May. “It took a bit of adjusting to,” he recalled, “because I’ve been a musician all my life, and it’s a fairly gentle world. People can say  ‘you’re crap’—they don’t like your music, which can upset you, but that’s about the worst they can say.

“But in this world, yeah, I’ve [taken] a lot of pretty serious abuse, and some of it’s very subtle. They can work on you in mysterious ways and really discredit you. You have to really be on your toes. You have to be very resilient. I think I’ve adapted. It doesn’t affect me as deeply as it used to, but it still affects me. I get up in the morning wondering where the next bullet is going to come from in a sense, especially if I’ve just made an announcement, if I’ve just been on TV or whatever—there’s going to be a big backlash every time.”

Like badger backlash, aka the Badger Controversy. By which we mean there’s a badger cull in Britain proposed for next Spring—and hotly debated well before that. What do the cull proponents have against the badger, a striking, often-cartoonishly charismatic member of the weasel family?

Well, they accuse the badgers of functioning as a significant agent in the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), the incidence of which has steadily increased in Britain in the last few decades, particularly in the southwest portion of England and Wales.

Badgers: Culprits in the spread of bovine TB? Brian May rejects this notion as a specious—and possibly speciesist—claim: ‘Really, the cow-to-cow tranmission is the main thing.’

The issue exploded into a full-blown controversy in the past year, when the disease necessitated the slaughter of approximately 30,000 cattle in the area—and the badgers, which are alleged by at least one faction to carry bTB, were blamed for this and the attendant multi-million dollar price tag for the process, including testing the critters and compensating the affected cattle farmers.

But pro-badger all the way, Brian May rejects this as a specious—and, possibly, speciesist—claim. “People look at the badger, and what has been said is that the badger spreads bovine TB,” he observes in an even, soft-spoken voice that, at the moment, also seems to shout “balderdash.”

“Now, it’s a long discussion, but basically, the bovine tb came with the cows. That’s what happened. When we started importing cows, bovine tb came with them. The wild badger population got infected, so now they’re what’s called a vector—they can spread it—but they’re not the principal means of spreading it. Really, the cow-to-cow transmission is the main thing.

“Now we have a new government that’s very much farming dominated and they’ve all decided to get rid of all the trials of vaccinations that were going on under the last government, and they want to kill the badgers, basically. And all the scientific evidence that’s been amassed says that this is not going to work. Not only that it’s cruel and immoral, but also that there’s no way it’s going to work. And you can prove this quite easily.”

It’s probable that if, 99 percent of the rock star population were to speak that critically, effectively dismissing the government’s position on a monumental issue that’s so uniquely emotionally-charged and science-based, the response from some polished, government spokesperson would be equally dismissive in a world-weary manner, looking down their nose as they read a prepared statement. If they even bothered to respond.

Ah, but Brian May is pretty inarguably in the other one percent for one thing, he holds a PhD in astrophysics. So he’s conversant with research and scientific findings in a way that’s probably unmatched by, let’s say, Blackie Lawless.

“That’s what I can bring to it,” he acknowledges about his doctorate. “What I can bring to it is that I do understand the science, I can read a scientific paper and find the flaws in it. And that kind of gets under people’s skin, as you say.  They go, ‘What’s he doing here?’ I’m here because I care. I have no other agenda, except that I don’t want animals to be abused.”

Access the complete interview at the Talking Animals website archive