Fur Is Dead: The PETA Ad Banned By The British Censors

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Since its formation in 1912, the British Board of Film Classification – or the British Board of Film Censors as it was formerly and more accurately known – has banned 985 individual titles from release in the UK. Such bans are technically advisory for theatrical releases – BBFC decisions can be overturned by local councils, though most of the time that it has happened, the councils have banned films that the censors have passed rather than allow films that were refused a certificate. But for those people who smugly claim that the BBFC can’t actually ban anything when we talk about banned films, well, yes they can. For home video, where most films in the pre-streaming days would go directly without any theatrical release, the BBFC is a statutory body under the terms of the 1985 Video Recordings Act, and banned titles cannot be released or sold anywhere.

We tend to think that the days of banned films are effectively over – since BBFC head James Ferman was forced out of office at the end of the 1990s, the Board has operated a policy that adults should be allowed to watch whatever they want. But there is a proviso, a handy get-out clause: if a film is deemed to be ‘harmful’, it can still be cut or refused a certificate. Harm can come in many ways – films have been banned for encouraging ‘abusive’ sexual activity, mostly BDSM, or for coarsening the viewer by trivialising death and injury. They’ve been banned for hate speech and encouraging illegal activity, for lacking informed consent and, most contentiously, for being grossly offensive. Films that range from Human Centipede 2 to Last House on the Left, Gestapo’s Last Orgy to Murder Set Pieces.

Since the turn of the century, 35 titles have been banned. They include porn films, documentaries about marijuana cultivation, horror movies, animated and experimental films. And the censorship doesn’t end with feature films and adult movies: over the decades, the BBFC has banned ads, trailers and even video cover art. Amongst the 35 titles banned since 2000 are a handful of documentaries, several DVD extras, a video game and an advertisement. It’s the latter that we’re looking at today.

Fur Is Dead is a 30-second commercial produced by the controversial animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – or PETA as they are better known. PETA is an organisation that likes to shock and cause outrage, either through the whole “I’d rather go naked than wear fur’ campaigns featuring sort-of-nude celebrities – some of whom seem only too happy to wear fur if they are paid to do it – or through a series of extremist and offensive ads that compare eating animals to the Holocaust, slavery or cannibal killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, or making unfounded claims about milk causing autism – not to mention asthma, anaemia and cancer. It seems that for the organisation, no amount of outrage is too much – and of course, each scandalous and offensive ad campaign simply results in more press coverage.

Ironically, PETA’s devotion to animal rights doesn’t extend to their so-called shelters, which have a higher kill rate for animals than any other organisation’s – if a dog or cat ends up at a PETA shelter, its days are numbered – in the single digits. In 2014, 80% of ‘rescued’ animals in PETA shelters were put down and PETA activists even snatched a chihuahua from its owner’s porch and killed it the same day. You might reasonably question how this is ethical treatment.

The BBFC and PETA clashed in 2002 when the ad entitled Fur is Dead was submitted for approval. The ad was supposed to run in cinemas but PETA – possibly not understanding the complexities of the submission process – actually requested a video certificate. The ad had already been pulled from circulation in the USA in the wake of 9/11 – a rare moment of social awareness from the organisation, who perhaps realised that there really is such a thing as bad publicity. The plan was to show the ad in London cinemas, presumably aimed at overseas tourists – the British public had already overwhelmingly rejected fur by this point.

What was the problem? Well, the ad is available to watch, and you can check it out in the video above.

You can probably see why this was a bit problematic. It’s not just that the violence is quite brutal – in itself, that wouldn’t be a problem. But it appears without any context or condemnation – in fact, you might think that the ad celebrates the act of violence, given who it is promoting. And this would appear, unannounced, in a block of cinema ads and so was theoretically more likely to cause serious offence that if it had appeared in a stand-alone narrative feature.

That fact that it is available online might seem to make a mockery of the BBFC ban, but remember: context is everything. Within the confines of a documentary setting like this, or even as a stand-alone video on YouTube, it is less likely to appear unexpectedly and without prior knowledge of what it was about. So that, apparently, makes it safe.

In any case, the BBFC refused the ad a certificate on the 17^th of June 2002. As banned films go, it is one of the less well-known, even amongst anti-censorship campaigners. But it perhaps represents the ludicrous power that the censors still have to decide what we can and cannot see, even down to advertisements.

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