American hunting lobby sought an alliance with Big Tobacco against animal rights activists
United Conservation Alliance wanted Philip Morris to fund its public relations crusade against a growing anti-hunting movement.
Back in 1992, Burson-Marsteller sent a proposal to Philip Morris on behalf of their client United Conservation Alliance to fund their public relations campaign against a growing anti-hunting movement in the United States.
Burson-Marsteller is a marketing firm known for doing damage control for the world’s worst corporations. An environment editor at The Guardian has this to say about them:
“The world's biggest PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family.
Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India, BP after the sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker in 1967 and the British government after BSE emerged. "In the past few years it has acted for big tobacco companies and the European biotechnology industry to challenge the green lobby and counter Greenpeace arguments on GM food.”
Additionally, Burson-Marsteller’s Canadian sector tried to align First Nation peoples with logging company clients against environmentalists protecting old growth forests from being clearcut.
[This is something we see a lot in the trophy hunting industry. Marketing firms and trophy hunting groups work overtime to make is seem like rural communities across Africa are their allies in battles against trophy hunting regulations.]
Philip Morris also employed Burson-Marsteller, which built the National Smokers Alliance on their behalf. Philip Morris is the world’s largest, and perhaps worst, tobacco company.
The tobacco corporation is known for marketing their cancerous products to children, enabling illicit trade, funding biased research, harassing independent scientists, and building fake grassroots support against government regulations.
United Conservation Alliance was another Burson-Marsteller client. The group’s mission was to “coalesce the conservation groups, hunting-, fishing- and trapping-rights organizations, sporting goods manufacturers, the outdoor media, and the biomedical community” so that they could “finance the relentless effort required to overcome the legal, political, propagandistic and, increasingly, terroristic actions of the antihunting movement.”
The alliance comprised of many American hunting lobbyists including the likes of Quail/Ducks Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Safari Club International, Field & Stream, and National Rifle Association.
Burston-Marsteller tried to sell United Conservation Alliance’s mission to Philip Morris by stating that their “basic premise for existence so closely matches one of your major public affairs objectives.”
It noted that there was common ground between these groups, saying that the “issues of privacy and individual rights are at the very core of the movement against hunting and smoking.”
[Isn’t it interesting that a group so concerned about privacy and individual rights would be one of the most vocal crusaders against a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion?]
There would be “significant opportunities to mobilize [sportsmen] to support [Philip Morris’s] interests in privacy (and other issues) by supporting the organization speaking out on their rights” according to the proposal.
The proposal recommended a public affairs program called RIGHTS IN OUR SIGHTS sponsored by Philip Morris.
Philip Morris would provide the funding and United Conservation Alliance would go to work with Burson-Marsteller to implement the public relations campaign.
Objectives of the campaign included promoting hunters’ rights and “allowing no negative media coverage or restrictive legislation to go unchallenged.” They would “create confusion among the ranks of animal rightist and other organizations through communications activities that attack their vulnerabilities.” Importantly, the campaign would recast “debate on human rights vs. animal rights.”
If successful, this public relations program would provide Philip Morris with “an organized group to mobilize to support privacy legislation.”
According to other documents, Philip Morris expressed that there would be benefits to partnering with the hunting lobby but ultimately declined due to lack of available funds. However, United Conservation Alliance was listed as an ally in a Philip Morris memo in 1995.
Philip Morris also donated $55,000 to Safari Club International in a greenwashing stunt that involved feeding the hungry in 1999. The tobacco company’s grant tracker demonstrated that they planned to use the stunt to generate media attention.
And there was some publicity generated that helped better Philip Morris’s image. For instance, a Philip Morris representative joined a Montana radio show to discuss an OSHA initiative to ban workplace smoking and referenced the partnership with Safari Club International as an example of how the tobacco company cares about people and the environment.
There you have it. Another prime example of the hunting lobby allying with anti-environmental corporations known for spreading disinformation and fighting against human rights.
Yet we’re still supposed to believe the narrative that hunting is conservation and anyone who disagrees is some sort of ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’ – just like those scientists and public health officials that spoke out against the lies coming from Big Tobacco.