Brigitte Bardot, 91, movie star for 20 years, animal advocate for 52 years

Brigitte Bardot:  provocative on film,  but even more provocative for animals,  for more than twice as long

PARIS,  France––Brigitte Bardot,  91,  a fashion model for four years,  a film actress for 20 years,  and a full-time animal advocate for the last 52 years of her life,  died on December 28,  2025 of undisclosed causes at her home in southern France.

In declining health recently,  Bardot on October 25,  2025,  refuted rumors of her death on her X account.

“I don’t know which idiot started this fake news,”  Bardot posted,  “but I’m fine and not planning on going anywhere.”

Bardot had been hospitalized at the Private Hospital Saint-Jean in Toulon,  reportedly for minor surgery.

Early years

“Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in Paris on September. 28,  1934,”  summarized Jordan Mintzer for Hollywood Reporter.

The daughter of an engineer,   raised in a prosperous, traditional Catholic family,  Bardot “studied ballet at the Conservatoire de Paris,”  Mintzer continued.  “She was scouted by a family friend to model for Elle magazine,  whose cover she graced in 1950 at age 15.

“She made her film debut in 1952,”  at age 18,  marrying the director’s assistant,  Roger Vadim,  soon afterward.

Her rise to stardom came in 1956 with her fifth film,  Mintzer wrote,  “in And God Created Woman,  husband Roger Vadim’s directorial debut.”

She divorced Vadim,  her first of four husbands,  in 1957.

Saw 1955 film of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt

The following year,  in 1958,  through friends in the film business,  Bardot happened to see film of the annual Atlantic Canada harp seal hunt brought back from the Labrador front three years earlier by Harry Lillie.

Lillie (1903-1990),  born in Dundee,  Scotland,  was for a decade a maritime engineer before becoming a ship’s surgeon in 1936.

After World War II military service,  Lillie served aboard British whaling ships during the 1946-1947 whaling season,  then was one of two medical doctors serving the 25-vessel U.S.,  British,  and Canadian sealing fleet in the spring of 1948.

Lillie extensively exposed what he saw in “With Whales And Seals,”  published in the December 24,  1949 edition of the British Medical Journal.

Opposition to the seal hunt revived

Humane opposition to the Atlantic Canada seal hunt had already risen from time to time at least since circa 1900,  but had twice been disrupted by the outbreak of world wars.

The Nova Scotia SPCA in 1955 issued a statement of opposition to the seal hunt,  responding to the Lillie film,  but further humane concern revived slowly.

Finally,  in 1965,  the Canadian government sent New Brunswick SPCA inspector Brian Davies and Jacques Vallée,  then general manager of the Montreal-based Canadian SPCA,  to monitor the seal killing,  expecting to use their report to quell protest.

Davies and Vallée witnessed seal-clubbing for the first time on March 12,  1965.

Davies went on to found the Save The Seals Fund,  which in 1969 became the International Fund for Animal Welfare [IFAW],  leading opposition to seal hunts ever since.

(See International animal advocacy influencer Brian Davies dies at 87.)

Bardot began modeling faux fur in 1965

Bardot,  meanwhile,  could not shake what she had seen in Lillie’s film.  Alerted to animal suffering as an issue,  she became a vegetarian,  gave up wearing fur,  and began modeling faux fur in 1965.

But the turning point in her life came eight years later.

“During a movie,  on set there was a baby goat,”  she recounted.  “The owner said ′’Hurry up and finish your scene, because Sunday is my nephew’s communion and we have to do it on the skewer.’

“I bought the beast and brought her with me,  attached to a rope,  to my room in a five-star hotel.  What a scandal!  That day I made the decision to stop cinema and help animals.

“It was June 1973.  I was 38.”

“Only idiots never change their minds”

Elaborated Bardot in 2015,  “I have worn fur,  and I do not hide that fact.  But at that time, I had no understanding of it – I had no connection to the animal.  It was a time when no one had knowledge of the conditions under which animals were being bred and slaughtered.

“Only idiots never change their minds,  so when I was made aware,  it became patently obvious to me – indeed it became indispensable – that I put an end to my career,  which was all glitz and vanity,  so I might dedicate my life to this most urgent of causes.

“One of my first battles,  the one that is without doubt the most symbolic of my commitment,”  Bardot recalled,  “is the battle to protect seals against slaughter for the fur industry.

“We have also succeeded in having the sale of cat and dog fur banned in Europe.  However, this ban must be extended to all species,”  Bardot said.

“Fur is only of use to the animal who wears it.”

“Fur is only of use to the animal who wears it.”

Brigitte Bardot made her heavily publicized visit to the ice where seals were hunted in 1977.

Unable to rent a helicopter to visit the ice,  in violation of so-called “Seal Protection Regulations” introduced by the Canadian Ministry of Fisheries & Oceans,  meant to keep witnesses to the seal hunt away,  Brian Davies had already purchased and learned to fly his own helicopter,  taking Bardot,  film maker Stephen Best,  and several others out to the ice himself.

Recounted Paul Watson,  present representing Greenpeace,  “I first met Brigitte in March 1977 in Blanc Sablon,  Québec,  on the shores of the Labrador Sea.

“I had just been dragged through frigid slush between ice floes,  handcuffed to a winch line from a Norwegian sealing ship some 180 miles offshore.  I was hauled up the side of the ship and dropped back into the sea three times,  then winched aboard and roughly dumped onto a deck slick with blood and strewn with the freshly skinned pelts of hundreds of whitecoat seal pups.

“Before I could catch my breath, a dozen thuggish sealers dragged me through a gauntlet of gore,  kicking me viciously and spitting in my face.  I was taken to a cabin and locked in.

 “She was bundled in a pink parka”

“After a restless,  painful night,  the Mounties arrived and escorted me off the ship to one of my helicopters,  which had been granted permission to pick me up.  They also informed me I was being charged under the Seal Protection Act for approaching a seal hunt without a permit.

“Upon landing,”  Watson said,  “I stepped out of the helicopter.  A woman suddenly ran toward me,  hugged and kissed me,  and called me her hero.  She was bundled in a pink parka.”

A day later,  Watson continued,  “I flew her to our base camp on Belle Isle.  We flew through a whiteout until the cliffs emerged;  she was unfazed.  She posed with my crew,  friendly and utterly down to earth.

“Then she met the baby seals.  Stepping from the helicopter,  she lit up at the sight of a whitecoat pup,  lay down on the ice beside him,  and hugged the little fellow.  In that moment, Brigitte Bardot—cheek to cheek with a two week old seal—gave us the cover of Paris Match,  Bunte,  Stern,  and scores of magazines worldwide.”

Brian Davies,  also there,  testified that the “fur” collar and trim on Bardot’s coat were in fact faux fur.

Media lessons

Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau “tried to belittle her with a sexist remark,”  Watson recalled,  “and I learned a media lesson I would use for decades.

“The four elements of a powerful story are sex, scandal,  violence,  and celebrity,”  Watson wrote.  “The sealers gave us violence;  the government gave us scandal;  Brigitte gave us celebrity—and yes,  sex appeal.  The perfect four element story.”

Bardot appears to have learned a media lesson,  too:  that news coverage carries a lot more political clout than entertainment.

While the Genesis Awards presented annually from 1986 to 2018 by first the Fund for Animals,  later the Ark Trust,  and finally by the Humane Society of the U.S. mostly honored animal advocacy in entertainment,  the Fondation Brigitte Bardot from 2008 to 2013 sponsored Genesis Awards for both television and print news coverage.

The Brigitte Bardot ship

Bardot and Watson continued their association,  begun on the ice,  to the end of her life.

Watson on May 25, 2011 renamed the former Sea Shepherd Conservation Society fast interceptor and scout vessel that pursued Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in 2010-2011 the Brigitte Bardot.

The vessel had formerly been named the Gojira,  Japanese for “Godzilla,”  but the owners of the Gojira and Godzilla film monster trademarks had objected to further use of the names.

Launched as the Cable & Wireless Adventurer,  the vessel in 1998 set a record for powered craft by circling the world in 74 days.  Sold by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 2021,  it is now called the Merida.

Impact

The impact of Bardot’s 1977 visit to the ice was such that even 30 years later,  of 1,546 total items of mass media seal hunt coverage,  10% percent mentioned her,  even though she only once even returned to Canada.  Five percent mentioned Paul Watson;  2% mentioned Davies.  No other individual was mentioned in even 1% of the coverage.

The campaign against the seal hunt,  however,  also first put on display Bardot’s penchant––shared with many other animal advocates––for adopting impulsive and self-defeating tactics.

Maple syrup

Recalled a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals memorial,  “Bardot supported PETA’s call for a boycott of Canadian maple syrup until the massacre is ended.”

The self-defeating nature of that was twofold.

First of all,  maple syrup is not produced in Newfoundland,  the province most involved in the seal hunt.  Second,  public opinion in Quebec,  the province producing the most maple syrup,  was already strongly opposed to the seal hunt.

While there was some Quebec involvement in sealing at the far northeastern extreme of the province,  there were easily more people involved in maple syrup production in any given southern Quebec county than had any involvement in sealing.

Thirty-five years after Bardot’s first visit to the ice,  restauranteur Kim Côté of Kamouraska, Quebec,  on the south shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,  put a ‘Phoque Bardot’ burger of seal meat topped with foie gras on his menu.

“French tourists visiting his restaurant didn’t find it very funny,”  the CBC reported.

Suspended for 12 years,  the seal hunt was revived

After a 12-year suspension of the offshore phase of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt,  1984-1996,  the hunt was revived with higher quotas than ever.

The World Wildlife Fund,  while claiming to oppose a seal  cull,   in March 2003 endorsed the idea of a “sustainable harvest” at the quota level.

Bardot denounced the World Wildlife Fund position.  This brought almost the only global mass media notice that the 2003 Atlantic Canada seal hunt got.

But protest subsequently reawakened.

Returned to Canada in 2006

Bardot returned to Canada in 2006,  hoping for an audience with then-prime minister Stephen Harper.  Harper refused to meet with her,  but his intransigence helped to reignite the seal hunt issue in Europe.

The Atlantic Canada seal hunt continues to this day,  but in much diminished form.

“The allowable catch hasn’t been taken in the past 15 years,”  the government-owned CBC whined in May 2024.

“In recent years, approximately 30,000 harp seals have been commercially harvested annually,”  out of a quota set at 400,000,  the CBC said.

“The United States has had a ban on seal products since 1972,  the European Union banned seal products in 2009,  and the Chinese market also has restrictions,”  the CBC acknowledged.

The European Union seal products import ban also includes sea lions,  annually killed by the tens of thousands in a Namibian hunt resembling the Atlantic Canada seal hunt.

Seal Alert South Africa credited a meeting between Bardot and then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy for leading the European Union to protect sea lions as well as seals.

The Fondation Brigitte Bardot

After ten years of often frustrating activism as an independent outspoken celebrity,  Bardot in 1986 auctioned all of her jewelry and personal effects,  reportedly raising $837,000,  with which she  started the Fondation Brigitte Bardot,  incorporated in 1987.

The idea was to reinforce her work with an organization that could put sustained follow-through behind her campaigns.

The Fondation Brigitte Bardot,  reportedly now with a 30-member staff,  began rapid growth in January 1994 when Bardot fired director Liliane Sujansky,  replacing her with antivivisectionist Stephane Charpentier at the recommendation of her husband of 18 months,  Bernard d’Ormale.

D’Ormale was a close friend and advisor to Jean-Marie Le Penn,  head of the far-right French National Front Party.

Rocky start

Contributions to the Fondation Brigitte Bardot initially fell by two-thirds following the marriage.

Most of the falloff was attributed to the cancellation of four episodes of the foundation’s S.O.S. Animaux television program,  after Bardot denounced the slaughter of sheep during the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice in terms that many members of the substantial French North African community considered racist.

The loss of revenue came just after the Fondation Brigitte Bardot spent $256,000 in December 1993 to set up a no-kill shelter.

Bardot subsequently stepped up public fundraising,  but continued to put her own money into the Fondation Brigitte Bardot as well.

In 2009,  for instance,  she donated $320,000 in royalties from one of her songs used in a television commercial to the Fondation Brigitte Bardot.

“He is interested in politics;  I am interested in animals”

Bardot initially sought to distance herself from D’Ormale in public perception.

“He is interested in politics;  I am interested in animals,”  she told Nicholas Powell of the London Observer.

“I argue with Bernard,”  she said.  “I think the National Front is too extremist.  But I am forced to wear a ticket which is not mine.  If these rumors do me too much harm,  we will have to separate,  and I think it is unjust to have to spend my last years alone.”

The Feast of Sacrifice killings are mostly done by inexperienced heads of households,  whose ineptitude in 1995 provoked Bardot to decry the practice in the French cultural newspaper Figaro as a purported threat to civilization.

Convicted multiple times

For those remarks,  Bardot was in October 1997 convicted of allegedly inciting ethnic hatred and was fined 1,600 euros.

Opinion polls,  however,  showed most of the French public identified with Bardot’s perspective  if not for the same reasons.  Also,  the European Union began warning the faithful that any slaughtering for human consumption must be done according to regulation,  in approved slaughterhouses.

Bardot was convicted again on June 15, 2000 for making similar statements in a 1999 book,  and was fined 3,000 euros as a two-time offender.

Further convictions for the same alleged offense came in 2004 and 2008,  as the fine rose to 15,000 euros.

The “shark bait” that never existed

In 2021 Bardot was fined 20,000 euros for calling residents of Réunion Island,  a French territory,  “degenerate savages” with “savage genes” over a 2005 incident that never happened.

The fracas began when a Reunion Island resident named Jean Claude Cain set up a bait-and-hook trap to try to catch dogs who had allegedly raided his henhouse.

A dog became hooked,  but pulled the hook loose and ran away.  A single photo of the dog with the hook in his mouth,  distributed by tabloid newspapers with a fictitious claim that the dog had been used as live shark bait,  produced e-mail alerts and calls for boycotting Reunion Island from both the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society until mid-October 2005.

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society separately posted rewards for catching anyone in the act of using a live dog for shark bait.

Neither reward was ever claimed,  but tabloid media recycled the story for at least fifteen years,  detonating Bardot every time.

Cain meanwhile confessed what he had done,  explained why,  and in October 2005 was fined 5,000 euros for it.

Dog-eating in South Korea

Among the first targets of the Fondation Brigitte Bardot was dog-eating in South Korea,  joining a campaign already begun four years earlier by Brian Davies and IFAW.

Her call for an international boycott of the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul,  like practically every other animal advocacy boycott call since 1980,  badly backfired.

The South Korean dog meat industry for the next 20 years amplified claims that the campaign against dog-eating (and cat-eating) was just a racist plot of foreign devils seeking to undermine the South Korean economy.

“Even if eating dog meat is part of a country’s dining culture,  that habit must be stopped,  as we do not live in the Middle Ages anymore,”  Bardot told South Korean radio station anchor Sohn Suk-hee in a November 27,  2000 telephone interview.

“A cultured country does not eat dogs”

“I accept differences of culture in all countries.  I accept that many people eat beef,” Bardot said.  “But a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs.”

Said Associated Press,  “Bardot was exasperated and hung up when Sohn Suk-hee asked whether she knew that some westerners have talked fondly about eating dog meat on visits to South Korea.”

Said Bardot,   “French people,  German people,  and Americans never eat dogs.  If they ate dogs in South Korea,  it was most likely that South Koreans served them dog meat,  saying it was either pork or beef.  I no longer want to continue this interview.”

Reality,  though,  was that novelty-seeking tourists were frequent dog meat customers,  paying substantially more for dog meat than was,  or is,  the price of pork or beef.

Progress

Indigenous South Korean animal advocacy organizations inspired by two initially funded by Davies and IFAW meanwhile grew into a movement that early in 2025 brought the passage of a law calling for a complete end to the dog meat industry by February 2027.

“At that point,”  detailed Thomas Maresca for United Press International,  “penalties for violating the law will include up to three years in prison and fines of up to roughly $23,000 for those who butcher dogs.  Those who breed and sell dogs for meat will face up to two years in prison and fines of $15,000.”

French Polynesia

Seldom remembered is that Bardot,  while she may have been often impulsive and self-defeating,  was not a hypocrite.  Bardot began working to stop dog-eating in French Polynesia as soon as she learned about it,  just a few months after denouncing it in South Korea.

Nominally illegal anywhere in French territory since 1959,  dog-eating had remained common in French Polynesia,  with little or nothing done to stop it.

In 1989,  Bardot remembered,  she objected to the newspaper Paris Match,  “with virulent remarks that,  in spite of the prohibition,  dog meat was still consumed in French Polynesia.  I warned the tourists of the hell which hid behind heaven.

“This issue of Paris Match was not distributed in Polynesia for fear of losing tourism,”  Bardot said.

Bardot in 2019 reminded a newly appointed French High Commissioner in Tahiti of the law.  “It is unacceptable and shameful,”  Bardot wrote,  “that on a French territory,  world tourist paradise, there is still an illegal trade in abominable canine meat in the nose and the beard of the state authorities.”

On August 29,  2019,   two French Polynesian dog meat dealers,  the first to be prosecuted,  were convicted of violating the law.  The two received a three-month suspended prison sentence,  two years on probation, were fined a relatively nominal amount,  and were prohibited from keeping a dog for five years.

Opposed Beijing Olympics

Meanwhile,  Bardot,  PETA,  and SOS St. Bernard Dogs International in 2001 unsuccessfully petitioned the International Olympic Committee against giving the 2008 Olympics to Beijing because of the lack of Chinese national animal protection legislation.

PETA,  Fondation Brigitte Bardot,  and SOS St. Bernard Dogs media statements emphasized the cruelty associated with dog-and-cat-eating in parts of China, the preparation of some traditional Chinese medical treatments,  and the practice of feeding live animals to carnivores at wildlife parks which pretended to be rehabilitating tigers,  bears,  and other species for eventual return to the wild.

Disappointed

Bardot had been badly disappointed after then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin pledged to her in August 1999 that live feeding of any and all domestic animals to wildlife would be stopped.  Bardot had been reassured on November 15,  1999 by Zhang Jianlong,  director of the Department of Wild Fauna and Flora Conservation in the State Forestry Administration,  that all live feeding had stopped.

Bardot then asked Jiang Zemin to act equally firmly on behalf of bears kept caged at bile farms with tubes in their stomachs,  wildlife killed for body parts,  and the dog meat industry.

Unfortunately,  both the August and November announcements turned out to pertain to only one wildlife park,  and there only to mammals.

The call for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics was not endorsed by any organization actually working within China,  including IFAW,  then maintaining the largest foreign presence.

IFAW and the Animals Asia Foundation,  spun off from IFAW in 2000,  meanwhile helped to spark the fastest-growing animal advocacy movement ever,  with arguably now more participants in China than in the U.S.,  India,  and all of Europe.

While China still has no national animal protection law,  dogs were in 2020 reclassified as pets,  rather than livestock,  and both dog-eating and consumption of wildlife,  including for medicinal use,  have been officially discouraged since circa 2003,  receding from visibility in most of the nation.

Thailand & Vietnam

Bardot fought the dog meat industry in Thailand,  as well.  While dogs have never been commonly eaten by the Buddhist majority in Thailand,  impounded strays were formerly exported to Vietnam for human consumption.

Bardot in April 2013 appealed in an open letter to Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra to stop the traffic.  The Fondation Brigitte Bardot also helped to fund the Soi Dog Foundation to rescue dogs from the meat trade and to sterilize street dogs to reduce the availability of strays to dog meat dealers.

A year later,  in 2014,  Soi Dog Foundation director John Dalley brokered a five-year halt to legal commerce in dogs and cats among Thailand,  Vietnam,  Cambodia,  and Laos as part of a regional pact to eradicate rabies.

The deal got off to a bad start when in February 2015 a police officer in the Dong Da district of Hanoi stopped a truck hauling as many as 600 cats to slaughter.

Authorities crushed all of the cats to death in their cages beneath the wheels of the truck,  claiming fear of disease as a pretext,  even as Brigitte Bardot offered via the U.S. embassy to fund their rescue.

Many years of the Soi Dog Foundation educating public officials later,  the pact against transporting dogs and cats across national boundaries for human consumption has repeatedly been extended,  and is still in effect.

Spay/neuter in eastern Europe

Simultaneous with her entry into campaigning against eating dogs and cats,  Bardot in the late 1980s,  after the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe,  took up the cause of street dogs there.

Spay/neuter campaigns became the biggest and longest sustained Fondation Brigitte Bardot activity,  even after Bardot withdrew from street dog projects in Romania in 2002 due to encountering costly and persistent unchecked corruption.

The Fondation Brigitte Bardot mobile spay/neuter clinics were sent from Romania to neighboring Serbia in 2003,  but again Bardot was disappointed when Serbian municipal governments in 2005 massacred street dogs and cats in preparation for the Belgrade marathon and the European basketball championship tournament.

A similar experience followed in Bulgaria,  adjacent to both Romania and Serbia.  The Fondation Brigitte Bardot funded street dog sterilizations in Sofia,  the Bulgarian national capital,  but many of the dogs soon disappeared,  either the victims of poisoning,  or captured by “rescuers” who profitably rehomed the dogs as pets in western Europe.

SARAH

Bardot enjoyed more satisfactory results,  beginning in 2005,  in partnership with Ian Douglas,  founder of the Australian organization VetCharity,  and the Sikkim SPCA,  high in the Indian Himalayas.

The joint project began by starting a local branch of the Indian national Animal Birth Control [ABC] and rabies vaccination program.  Extended to Ladakh state in July 2006,  the introduction of ABC stopped the poisoning of street dogs there.

By April 2009 the Bardot/VetCharity initiative had evolved into the Sikkim Anti-Rabies & Animal Health Program,  SARAH for short,  an official part of the state Animal Husbandry, Livestock,  Fisheries & Veterinary Services Department.

SARAH within in three years had reportedly done 16,000 dog and cat sterilizations and
administered 29,000 anti-rabies vaccinations,  achieving an 85% reduction in human rabies cases.

Bardot by then was also helping to fund an ABC program run by Tibetan Volunteers for Animals.

Tibetan refugees’ dogs

At the opposite end of India,  the Fondation Brigitte Bardot helped to fund the Australian organization Vets Beyond Borders (formerly VetCharity) and Sermey Social Services to operate a pilot ABC program serving the dogs of Tibetan refugees at Sera Monastery South India,  named after the original Sera Monastery,  in Lhasa,  Tibet,  built in 1419.

While the original Sera Monastery is considered one of the three seats of Tibetan Buddhism,  it was reputedly in Sarnath,  near the Indian city of Varanasi,  that the Buddha delivered his first sermon,  circa 528 BCE.

Eileen Weintraub, founder of Help Animals India,  initiated the ABC program there in 2012.  The Sarnath ABC program reportedly continues with funding from both Help Animals India and the Fondation Brigitte Bardot.

Further support of ABC

Other Fondation Brigitte Bardot projects in India have included donating an animal ambulance to the Blue Cross of India in Chennai,  whose longtime chief executive Chinny Krishna pioneered and demonstrated the ABC concept;  donating an animal ambulance to the Visakha SPCA,  another early ABC practitioner;   and in January 2011 partnering with Vets Beyond Borders and the Animal Welfare Board of India to develop a National Training & Certification Program for Animal Handlers in India,  to teach humane dog capture,  handling,  and transport techniques to ABC personnel.

U.S. veterinarian Mark Johnson trained and certified the first 40 “master handlers” in March 2011,  each of whom was to train 20 more handlers within the year.

Also in 2012 the Brigitte Bardot Foundation allocated 5,000 Euros to help the Cambodian Animal Protection Association start the first spay/neuter program for cats in Phnom Penh,  the Cambodian capital city.

In September 2014 the Fondation Brigitte Bardot helped to fund the sterilization of 3,500 street dogs in Jaffna,  Sri Lanka.

Gadhi Mai

Bardot had already for several years been funding Animal Nepal to do dog and donkey rescue work in and around Kathmandu,  the capital city of Nepal.

Her work in Nepal,  however,  led to the Fondation Brigitte Bardot having a leading role in amplifying arguably the most spectacular hoax in the history of animal advocacy:  the myth of the magnitude of animal sacrifice,  buffalo sacrifice in particular,  at the Gadhi Mai festival held every five years in Baryatpur,  Nepal.

Far from being an ancient tradition,  the Gadhi Mai mass slaughter appears to have begun in 1999,  and never occurred at even a fraction of the magnitude claimed by local priests who profit by the sale of rendered remains of animals offered in sacrifice.

Drone video

Claims that the Gadhi Mai festival involved killing hundreds of thousands of buffalo,  plus other animals,  were distributed worldwide in unverified media reports,  picked up by animal advocacy groups,  and became both a major fundraising appeal topic for the animal advocacy organizations,  and a lucrative animals-for-ransom business for priests who were paid by some of the animal advocacy organizations to not kill animals they never had in the first place.

The organization Beauty Without Cruelty-India discovered in 2014 that the same local priests appeared to be selling the right to sacrifice each donated animal multiple times to absentee sponsors.

ANIMALS 24-7 meanwhile documented the extent of the exaggeration of the slaughter by counting animals and remains shown in drone video.

(See Beauty Without Cruelty-India exposes Gadhi Mai scam and Dog-eating in China & Gadhi Mai mass sacrifice in Nepal both near an end.)

Dog poisoning in Bali

More usefully,  but initially to little more avail,  Bardot on March 19,  2009 was among the first international voices to denounce dog poisoning in Bali in response to an August 2008 canine rabies outbreak on the geographically isolated Bukit peninsula.

The outbreak could have been eradicated through prompt intensive vaccination,  as Bali Animal Welfare Association founder Janice Girardi and ANIMALS 24-7 had advised the Bali government as soon as the first rabies cases were discovered.

Rabies was instead spread by dog meat sellers who were officially encouraged to capture dogs from Bukit,  transporting them alive to illegally operating dog meat restaurants in northern Bali.

“My foundation has been overwhelmed by calls and emails denouncing the horrible poisoning with strychnine of stray dogs and cats in what is known to be a paradise for tourists,”  Bardot wrote to Bali authorities.

“I beg you to stop this!”

“I beg you to stop this most cruel way of trying to solve the rabies problem,”  Bardot continued,  “and seek the help of the local animal welfare organizations and international experts in the field of rabies control.”

The Bali Animal Welfare Association had already been sterilizing and vaccinating dogs in high volume in the most populated parts of Bali,  but the poisoning campaign tended to kill the tamest,  most trusting dogs,  who included many of those who had already been sterilized,  vaccinated,  and had regular feeders and caretakers.

The Bali Animal Welfare Association sterilization and vaccination campaign eventually brought the rabies outbreak under semi-control,  but sporadic cases still occur,  continuing to spread through misguided official responses.

(See Bali: rabies is back. Vaccines can stop it. Killing dogs cannot. Will officials listen?

Lebanon

Even as Bardot herself came under frequent criticism and was repeatedly fined for her remarks about animal sacrifice done in connection with Islamic religious holidays,  the Fondation Brigitte Bardot in 2010 helped Animals Lebanon to close a zoo in southern Lebanon and fly Omega,  a 12-year-old chimpanzee,  to the Curitiba Sanctuary in Brazil.

Circa 2011 the Fondation Brigitte Bardot funded Beruit for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,  in the capital city of Lebanon,  to do spay/neuter work.

Afghanistan

More ambitiously,  and at greater risk,  the British-based Mayhew Home subsidiary Mayhew Afghanistan in June 2019 began a dog sterilization and vaccination project in Kabul with Fondation Brigitte Bardot funding.

The project had treated more than 22,000 dogs before the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan on August 20,  2021.

“Interestingly,”  Mayhew Afghanistan posted,  “the new authorities in Kabul deemed the project essential,  and Mayhew Afghanistan was asked to continue the work – perhaps the best endorsement of how positively the project was perceived in the city.

“The end of 2024 marked the conclusion of our five-year project to deliver a dog population management program in Kabul alongside our existing rabies vaccination program,”  Mayhew Afghanistan later updated.

“Our work in Kabul has now entered a transition phase,  with this vital work passing into the hands of the Ministry of Agriculture,  Irrigation &Livestock,  Kabul University,  and Kabul Municipality,  with whom we have worked over the last seven years.  Our latest dog sight survey in 2024 showed that 70% of dogs had been neutered and vaccinated against rabies in the sixteen central districts of Kabul.”

Dangerous dogs

Meanwhile in the U.S. and Europe,  Bardot earned a reputation for inappropriately defending highly dangerous dogs.

Perhaps the first was Taro,  a 100-pound Akita who mauled a 10-year-old New Jersey girl who tripped over him at a 1990 Christmas party.  Taro had previously killed a neighbor’s dog and had severely injured two others.

After a multi-year court battle,  Taro was rehomed in New York state,  where he died in 1999.

“His case led to a change in New Jersey law in 1994,  making it harder for towns to destroy animals,”  summarized Jackie Rothenberg for the New York Daily News.

“The responsibility for declaring a dog dangerous was taken away from a panel of dog experts and turned over to a judge.  In addition, a dog can’t be destroyed if it was provoked – and a town bears the burden of proving there was no provocation.”

Pit bull ate owner,  disfigured four-year-old

Bardot in August 2006 unsuccessfully opposed an ordinance in Geneva,  Switzerland,  requiring all dogs to be muzzled in public parks, adopted after an 18-month-old boy was badly disfigured in an unprovoked attack by a pit bull.

In August 2011 Bardot argued that a pit bull should not be euthanized after severely facially disfiguring a four-year-old girl in Boulogne-sur-Mer,  France.

The pit bull owner and the parents of the victim sued the local Society for the Protection of Animals for allegedly having concealed that the pit bull was rehomed after partially eating the remains of his owner,  said to have died of natural causes.

The pit bull,  originally named Ulk,  had reportedly been renamed Prince before rehoming.

Elisa Pilarski

Most notoriously,  after Elisa Pilarski,  29,  six months pregnant,  was disemboweled by her fiancé Christophe Ellul’s pit bull Curtis in the Retz Forest,  just north of Paris,  on November 16,  2019,  Bardot immediately accepted Ellul’s contention that Pilarski had instead been killed by a pack of 21 Poitevin hounds,  from among 62 of the rare hounds kept by the Paris-based Le Rallye de la Passion hunting club.

The hounds were released into the Retz Forest about half an hour to an hour after Pilarski’s death to hunt deer ahead of club members on horseback,  among them the local chief of police.

There is no record of Poitevin hounds ever killing a human.

Lawyer for Ellul

Neither was DNA from any of the 62 Rallye de la Passion hounds,  nor from any of Ellul’s four other pit bulls,  found on Pilarski’s remains.

The Brigitte Bardot Foundation reportedly offered Ellul the services of a lawyer,  asked the French government to immediately suspend “all hunt authorizations for this season,”  and opposed euthanasia of Curtis,  who went on to injure a female handler and Ellul himself in separate incidents while impounded.

As pit bulls are banned in France,  Curtis had been illegally imported,  using papers for another dog.

(See Case against fiancé for Elisa Pilarski death by pit bull may go to trial and Pit bull suspected of killing Elisa Pilarski struck twice more in five days.)

Moving elephants

Bardot campaigned on behalf of elephants on two fronts:  for conservation of elephants in the wild,  and––at least three times––for evacuation of individual elephants from inappropriate quarters in captivity to sanctuary in their native climates,  partially funding the relocations.

Most notoriously,  Bardot in January 2013 threatened to move from France to Russia if two 42-year-old tubercular elephants were euthanized at the Parc de la Tete d’Or zoo in Lyon,  by order of the city veterinarian.

In that case,  though,  the elephants were moved only to the Monaco royal family’s Roc Agel ranch in the Alpes-Maritimes region of southeastern France.

Ivory trade

Almost every animal advocacy organization in the world supported the 1989 Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species ban on transborder traffic in elephant ivory and other elephant hunting trophies,  but Bardot was personally blamed for it by the ivory and trophy hunting industries.

Twenty years later,  in August 2019,  a letter from Bardot to European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker was blamed by elephant-exporting nations for a European Union resolution recommending that elephants should remain in their “natural and historical range in Africa,  except in exceptional circumstances where … it is considered that a transfer to ex-situ locations will provide demonstrable in-situ conservation benefits for African elephants.”

Like the 1989 CITES resolution,  the 2019 European Union resolution,  was backed and negotiated by hundreds of animal advocacy organizations worldwide,  but Bardot’s prominence brought attention to the issue.

Wolves

Agence France-Presse in November 2015 comparably credited Bardot with an influential role in restoring wild wolves to the Białowieża Forest,  along the northern Polish border with Belarus,  after the former Communist regime exterminated the wolves there in 1964.

Bardot’s long record of wolf advocacy,  including unsuccessfully opposing wolf hunting in Sweden, featured an October 11,  2008 letter to then-Alaskan governor Sarah Palin,  urging her to stop wolf culls in terms that offended many of her conservative political allies.

“More than two years ago,”  Bardot began,  “I contacted your predecessor to denounce the cruelty of aerial wolf hunting.  Today I am shocked to learn that you firmly support this cowardly practice,  both morally and financially.

“You bring shame on women.”

“Your fight to keep polar bears off the Endangered Species list even though they are threatened by global warming demonstrates your total irresponsibility,  your inability to protect or even respect animal life,  but it’s true that for you,  a good animal is a dead one!

“By campaigning for drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,  you are putting an already fragile habitat at risk, as well as all the biodiversity of a sensitive area that must absolutely be preserved.

“Governor, by denying man’s responsibility for global warming,  by being a proponent of the right to bear arms and shoot anything that moves,  by making numerous declarations of alarming stupidity, you bring shame upon women and represent,  all on your own,  a terrible threat,  a true ecological catastrophe.”

Both Bardot supporters and Palin supporters loved it,  but it accomplished nothing on behalf of either wolves or polar bears.

Polar bears

Bardot had in 2005 fought furiously against polar bear hunting in both Greenland and Alaska.  Writing to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark,  of which Greenland is a territory,  Bardot reminded her that,  “I have been fighting for years to stop the ice shelf being stained with the blood of thousands of seals shamelessly exterminated in Canada and Norway.

“Your country also seems to want to leave its stamp on the ice shelf,”  Bardot charged,  “by causing the blood of these innocent bears to flow,  bears whose survival is already threatened by global warming.”

Bear rescues

Bardot in 2000 funded the evacuation of Bongo,  an Asiatic black bear,  from the failing Noah’s Ark Zoo in Milan,  Italy to the Glasgow Zoo in Scotland,  where he lived out his 32-year-life.

She went on to fund many similar rescues of individual bears from bad situations.

In 2002 the Bulgarian Parliament declared European brown bears,  smaller cousins of North American grizzlies,  a protected species,  who may no longer be hunted,  bought,  sold,  or displayed to a paying audience.

That left 25 so-called “dancing bears” belonging to gypsies and circuses homeless,  without means of support.  The Fondation Brigitte Bardot and the Austrian group Vier Pfoten (Four Paws) responded by founding a 2.7-acre bear sanctuary near the Rila monastery,  founded in the 13th century at the reputed site of the grotto of the 10th century animal-loving vegetarian saint John of Rila.

Bardot also helped to lead the campaign that restored European brown bears to the Pyrenees region of France,  beginning in 1996.

Letters of protest

Almost every day Bardot dictated and signed letters of protest against whatever animal abuses came to her attention,  for instance urging reform of the animal control department in Montreal,  Quebec;  endorsing the Irish Council Against Blood Sports campaign against hare coursing;  opposing feral cat hunting and cat fur sales in Switzerland;  and urging closure of the Macau Canidrome greyhound track in China,  which finally did close in 2018.

On multiple occasions Bardot condemned Australian schemes to kill feral cats.

“Your country is sullied by the blood of millions of innocent animals,”  she told a succession of Australian governments,   “so please,  don’t add cats to this morbid record.”

Monkeys & horses

“Throughout the years, Bardot championed many campaigns for PETA and PETA entities,”  the PETA notice of her death mentioned,  citing “opposing NASA’s cruel Bion project,  in which monkeys were implanted with electrodes,  strapped into restraint pods,  and blasted into space;  speaking out against Premarin,  which is made from the urine of horses who are confined in tiny stalls and repeatedly impregnated;  and calling for her native France to “lead the way” in boycotting imported horse meat,  following a PETA investigation that showed what Bardot called ‘the dreadful agony of American horses destined to be sent to European butchers.’”

Bardot endorsed French bills to stop the sale of horsemeat,  proposed in 2007 and 2009,  but neither bill advanced.

She also,  in 2013,  urged Belgium to continue rehoming retired police horses,  begun in 1991,  rather than allowing them them to be sold slaughter.

Hunting

Frequently criticized for “meddling” abroad,  Bardot scarcely ignored any animal issue in France.

From 1974,  when Bardot first denounced sport hunting,  to the present,  the French hunting population has declined from 2.2 million participants to 1.4 million,  of whom only about 100,000 are under 25 years old.

When France in November 2015 became the first European Union country to ban the import of African lion trophies,  French environment minister Ségoliné Royal addressed the announcement to the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.

“Considering that between 2005 and 2014,  France imported 351 lions for trophy hunting and personal purposes,”  observed Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle,  “this announcement was a welcome reprieve for lions,  whose population had declined 43% over the past 21 years.”

Foie gras & cockfighting

Few French vices are more notorious than the consumption of foie gras,  made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese.  France reputedly produces 83% of the world’s foie gras––and eats more than 90% of it––but Bardot denounced it at every opportunity.

Bardot also “campaigned for years to ban cockfighting in the Pas de Calais,”  the French region just opposite Dover,  England,  Daniel Foggo and Matthew Campbell reported for the London Sunday Times on January 22,  2006.

Exposing how British patronage keeps the estimated 5,000 coqueleurs of the Pas de Calais in business,  Foggo and Campbell noted that the Pas de Calais was exempted from the 1964 French law forbidding cockfighting,  possibly because cockfighting was traditional there,  but possibly also because it attracted––and still attracts––foreign exchange.

Bullfighting

Southern France,  even more than most of Spain and anywhere in Latin America,  is among the last redoubts of bullfighting,  a frequent Bardot target.

“Bullfighting is by no means a French tradition,  not any more than the sacrifices of Eid al-Adha,”  Bardot maintained.

While Bardot did not manage to stop bullfighting in France,  she did in September 2001 persuade Yuri Luzhkov,  mayor of Moscow,  Russia,  to prohibit a scheduled two-day exhibition of Portuguese-style bullfighting,  after having blasted him in 1998 for ordering the extermination of street dogs.

She was also influential in persuading the Spanish province of Catalan to ban bullfighting in 2010,  closing what were then the four biggest bullrings in the world.

In October 2013 the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and another French group,  the Committee of Animals in Peril,  reportedly rallied 700 activists to storm the bullring in Rodhilan,  France.

Gendarmes used tear gas to disperse the protest.

Pigeons

Bardot scarcely limited her activism to the cute,  cuddly,  and charistmatic.

On February 23, 1994,  for instance,  Bardot personally led a protest against the gassing of almost 1,000 pigeons in the town of Cahors,  France.

The protest had no visible impact there,  but a day later the Amsterdam Zoo announced it would collaborate with the Dutch national health institute in using a seedborne contraceptive called Nicarzabine to limit the Amsterdam pigeon population.

On May 1,  2009,  Bardot unsuccessfully appealed to then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in opposition to the slaughter of the entire Egyptian pig population of about 250,000 in response to an outbreak of swine flu originating among humans in Mexico.

The Islamic majority in Egypt,  about 90% of the total population,  neither eat nor otherwise keep pigs.  Pigs in Egypt were kept mostly by Coptic Christian rubbish collectors in the Cairo slums.

“Taking advantage of the global hysteria over the propagation of ‘Mexican’ flu, which has nothing to do with animals, in order to launch a campaign to exterminate pigs raised by a destitute section of the population is extremely cowardly,” Bardot scolded.

Bardot had no use for pig farming anywhere

Egyptian agriculture ministry director of infectious diseases Saber Abdel Aziz Galal suggested that the rubbish-eating pigs could be replaced by “new farms in special areas,  like in Europe.”

Responded Bardot,  “To want to kill all these animals and then later establish intensive piggeries where they will be packed tightly together and badly treated is unacceptable.”

In October 2015 the mayor of Ales,  France ordered the provisional closure of a slaughterhouse after Bardot responded to undercover video of cattle,  pig,  sheep,  and horse killing there by telling media that the scenes “recall the methods used in Nazi extermination camps.”

Karl Lagerfeld

Opposing seal slaughter to serve the fur trade was Bardot’s first animal advocacy campaign.  Setting an example by personally renouncing fur in 1965 was possibly her most influential action.  Fifty years later,  and perhaps even sixty years later at her death,  fur was still prominent among her concerns.

“Karl Lagerfeld’s fur-heavy fashion house,  Fendi, presented its first haute couture show in Paris,”  on July 15,  2015,  Agence France-Presse reported.

“Under the banner Haute Fourrure,  the house used animal pelts and skins in ever more extravagant ways.  Unsurprisingly,  animal rights activists gathered outside,  the majority of whom came from the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.”

Asked “What would you say in response to Karl Lagerfeld when he defends the use of animals by saying they are also exploited for consumption?,”  Bardot responded,  “I doubt very much that Karl Lagerfeld eats much mink,  fox,  or chinchilla.  It is important not to mix things up;  each battle must be waged in its own right.

“I live the life of a farmer”

“I live the life of a farmer,”  Bardot continued.  “I don’t see how I could wear Lagerfeld’s designs while feeding my goats.  I have respect for Lagerfeld as a man, but I would have so much more for him if he,  in turn,  respected animals.  We do not live in the same world.”

In December 2018,  two months before Lagerfeld died,  reportedly leaving $195 million to his cat Choupette,  Lagerfeld told Women’s Wear Daily that his company would no longer use furs or exotic animal skins,  such as python,  crocodile,  lizard and stingray,  because of the difficulty of sourcing such pelts ethically.

“Let Israel be a light unto the nations!”

Bardot lived to see the French parliament end the use of wild animals in live circus shows,  outlaw mink farming,  and order the end of marine mammal exhibition in 2021,  fulfilling others of her long-sought goals.

Bardot also lived to see Israel become the first nation to ban the fur trade,  also in 2021.

“I would like to thank you personally for your help and support promoting the law against the commerce of fur in Israel,”  Bardot wrote to the members of the Knesset,  the Israeli parliament.

“Let Israel be a light unto the nations in the choice between mercy and evil.”

Parting words

Parting words from Bardot,  offered by the Fondation Brigitte Bardot:

“Above all,  the public needs to open its eyes to the suffering that animals experience on a daily basis.  You don’t need a law to stop wearing fur or to stop eating animals.  The solution to putting an end to animal abuse is in everyone’s hands.

“Of course we have to keep addressing politicians in order to reinforce the regulations,”  Bardot acknowledged.

“My foundation does this every day,”  Bardot said,  “but it’s not enough.  I no longer believe in the promises of politicians,  who take orders from industry and powerful lobbies.

“Man is only one species of animal among millions of others,”  Bardot finished.

“In my view,  it is imperative not to consider animals as being equal to men,  but for man to leave other animal species alone,  for good.”

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