Haydain Neale, 1970–2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
Peeve Patrol
Newsstand: November 23, 2009
The Making of a Medley
A small group of activists gathered outside the Royal Ontario Museum on Saturday to highlight the often-ignored plight of dinosaurs in captivity around the world. The energetic protesters from Dinosaurs In Need, Ontario, carried signs proclaiming "dinosaurs are people too" and pleading for help to "save steggy." A petition was available to sign, and copies of the group's newsletter, the T-Rex Times, were handed out to passersby. Children were targeted with small dinosaur-themed toys.
D.I.N.O is a splinter group of Improv In Toronto.
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ROWR! (ThrashThrashThrash)
It seems very appropriate that someone in favour of dinosaurs should be wearing a Beatles t-shirt.
great, making light of real protests.
Was it a ROM marketing strategy? It should have been.
please don't judge anyone's protest to be less important, or real, than your own.
Getting people engaged in any way is good, apathy has become a well organized machine. ;-)
@Svend
apathy has been engaged through mockery
DINO and Anonymous probably got people who otherwise may never have seen themselves as protesters, out protesting. They're probably more inclined to protest a srs bns issue when the opportunity arises than they would have been.
Was this actually a big event? I admire the enthusiasm from this group in their effort to start up an Improv Everywhere-esque thing but did it work?
I'm normally up for this but I found protesting dinosaurs a bit, ah, amateur.
It worked, certainly. Although the group started out small, I think only 5 or 6 people in the beginning, it quickly grew to 20+, including a couple of people who just joined on the spur of the moment.
The point of the demonstration, I'm assuming, was to engage with the public, to make them stop and react to something that was somewhat of a normal thing to see but at the same time not. Something that would make people look twice and question. In that sense it was definitely a success, the group were very vocal and energetic, much more so than a genuine protest. There was a lot of reaction from and interaction with the public, which is what I tried to focus on in the photographs above.
I'm not sure what amateur would mean in this context to be honest, there was certainly nothing professional about the event, but I'm not sure how there could have been. I thought the idea of protesting for dinosaurs was spot on, it wasn't ridiculous enough for most passersby to reject the idea on the spot, you could see people grinding gears for a second or two while trying to decide if the group were genuine or insane.
Regardless of what the point actually was, look at how many smiles they got! Personally, I tend to fall into my intense 'get me where I'm going as quickly as possible' scowl far too easily when walking around downtown. I love when stuff like this interupts me and makes me grin. Lifts my whole mood!
Judging from Miles' shots, it certainly looks like they accomplished this.
"Dinosaurs are people too" hahaha. Awesome.