Maria and David with Ken Wilkinson who flew a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain
the trade. Three different permits were needed to go there but I was denied them, until I dropped into conversation that I ‘knew’ the chief of police. I got my permits and filmed the horrible slaughter.” David’s existence was very hand-to-
mouth but he says he was spiritually motivated to do what he did – but was not averse to using theatrical tricks of the trade and challenging viewers directly – “the choice is yours.” In the same year he was determined to
expose Ethiopian civet musk production, used in some perfume. Haile Selassie was still in power and it was not an easy country for a European to explore . Any attempt to go in openly would have incurred extremely high taxes and so David went in undercover. “I went places where people gathered
and listened to the gossip until I eventually made contact with covert musk producers. I was able to visit their farms in the interior and film the depressing trade. They were mostly very small scale with about 15 cats held in tiny wire cages in a small shed. They were never cleaned out and their faeces simply fell through the wire to the floor, which attracted flies. To try and control their numbers the sheds are filled with acrid smoke and that is my abiding memory of these awful places. All this so small quantities of a waxy substance can be scraped from around their anuses where the musk glands are sited.” I can do no more than provide a
snapshot of a dedicated man who became known as the animal spy but his exposés were many and deserve a book: the barbarity of the Cape fur seal slaughter; 16,000 feet up in the Nepalese Himalayas to reveal the slaughter of musk ox (quiviut) for their fur (and getting lost in a leech- infected forest); snaring of elephants in the then Rhodesia for the ivory trade; and much closer to home, the appalling treatment of animals in UK lairages prior to slaughter and UK fox and mink farms. The ban on frogs’ legs from India was a triumph and the list goes on and on. David Whiting is utterly practical when
he talks about his work: “Photography itself doesn’t interest me a bean – it is
www.viva.org.uk 29
I hope I have been a catalyst, helping to bring about change. What Viva! is doing is a continuation of this
simply a tool to overcome my dyslexia, to help me spy on my enemy. Cats and dogs are the emotional side of the animal rights movement but it is the mass market I have always wanted to affect. It’s not just the slaughter – it’s the whole trade I want to stop. It is wrong for the animals it is wrong for people too. Vegetarianism is my religion.
“Dad (Dowding) told me never to take
anyone’s word for anything but to go and see for myself. That’s what I did and I hope I have been a catalyst, helping to bring about change. What Viva! is doing is a continuation of this and the work my mother wanted to do. It’s wonderful, wonderful that the fight goes on and that so many young people are now involved.”
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