Animal rights activist has history with shark
By BRUCE RUSHTON, The State Journal-Register
July 15, 2007
Steve Hindi must have told this one a million times. Anyone would.
Cocky as all get-out, he hitched up his 17-foot aluminum boat and drove from Illinois to Long Island Sound in New York, aiming to land his first shark. After watching "Jaws" and reading a book called "Sport Fishing for Sharks," he figured he was ready.
A bass boat is no match for the Atlantic Ocean, and plenty of people dockside told him so.
"They said 'You're going to die - if the sharks don't kill you, the ocean will,'" recalled Hindi, who years later would become an animal rights activist dedicated to ending rodeos, including the National High School Finals Rodeo in Springfield.
Rough seas kept him in port for nearly a week. Finally, he awoke to glass-flat water. He had three six-gallon fuel tanks. He ran the first tank out of gas, threaded a mackerel just-so with dental floss so it would mimic a live fish and put his line in the water.
"There I was, sitting on my pedestal seat," he said. "It was gorgeous out."
A patch of seaweed caught his attention. Looking closer, he realized it was a shark. A basking shark, perfectly harmless, but Hindi didn't know that.
"It was larger than the boat," he said. "I was scared like I'd never been scared before. I laid down in the boat and just stayed there. After I hyperventilated for five minutes, a whale came up from behind and - pfssssst - blew a breath up in the air. My nerves were just shot. I've had it. I take my rod and start reeling in."
Instead of appearing natural, the bait was balled up at the end of his line. He figured he hadn't been fishing at all. Then he saw a shape following the hook.
Instinct took over. He started jerking the line, just like when a muskie followed his lure. Wham!
It was a mako shark, one of the fastest species in the sea and more than seven feet long. Unlike a basking shark, which dines on plankton, a mako shark has teeth. Big ones.
For five hours, Hindi fought the fish and his emotions. He was, after all, a sportsman, frayed nerves notwithstanding.
"It was the goofiest thing," he said. "I couldn't let him go, and I was afraid to bring him in."
Hindi glosses over the gunfire, saying only that he'd brought along a .357 Magnum. According to a 1984 story in The New York Daily News, he counted 32 shell casings on the bottom of the boat by the time the battle ended. The fish weighed more than 200 pounds, too heavy to haul aboard. So he tied a rope around its tail and turned for home.
Dragging a fish so large is a job for a 30-foot cruiser. Hindi tossed a piece of Styrofoam in the water and saw that he was barely moving. The seas went from calm to choppy. He tried flagging down a freighter. No luck.
Getting rid of the shark and running for shore wasn't an option.
"I'd taken the shark's life," he said. "I couldn't let it go. And nobody in the world will believe it if I cut it loose."
A couple in a sailboat spotted him and called the Coast Guard. Hindi was stubborn as ever when the Coast Guard captain looked down disparagingly at this fool risking his life for a dead fish.
"He just says, 'Skipper, cut that shark loose,'" Hindi said. "I said, 'Captain, that's OK. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but that shark's mine. You don't have to stay here. I'll be fine.'"
The captain dispatched a crewman to help Hindi haul his quarry into the boat. The trip back to port started as an escort but turned into a tow when Hindi ran out of gas. It was long after dark when he touched land again.
The tale demands comparisons with Ernest Hemingway. But Hindi wants no part of that.
"I always thought Hemingway was a putz," he says. "It's that bullfighting thing."
----------------
Hindi surely realizes how this fish story sounds to folks who know him as the guy who stopped a goose hunt with an ultralight aircraft. The guy who's been arrested and jailed. The guy who's been tracked by the FBI and suspected of making bomb threats.
The guy who says animals can talk.
"The problem is that people aren't smart enough to understand their language," he said.
Founder and president of a group called Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), the story shows Hindi was as driven then as he is today.
"I never left hunting," he said. "I'm just hunting different things now."
One target is the National High School Finals Rodeo, set to start in Springfield next weekend. For years, Hindi has been videotaping bulls being shocked, jabbed with sharp objects and otherwise abused at rodeos. He posts footage on the Internet and hits streets near rodeo venues in a truck equipped with giant video screens that show calves helicoptering in mid-air after being roped around their necks.
He claims several successes.
The Choice Hotels logo no longer appears on the National High School Rodeo Association's Web site, although the association says the company (which has not returned several phone calls from The State Journal-Register) has merely amended, not ended, its sponsorship agreement. Pigeon shoots haven't been allowed in Illinois since Hindi convinced the state attorney general's office that the shoots violated cruelty laws.
Pepsi removed its advertising banners from bullfighting arenas in Mexico after Hindi protested, going so far as to try speaking at a shareholders' meeting in New York state. Company officials met him outside, told him they'd received a bomb threat from Illinois and refused to let him in.
Hindi is used to that kind of treatment. In 2002, FBI agents followed him when he drove his video truck behind the Olympic Torch Relay in Albuquerque to protest efforts to make rodeo an Olympic sport. Federal agents told local authorities that Hindi's group was "potentially dangerous" and had made bomb threats, tried to incite riots and harassed police officers, an official with the Albuquerque Police Oversight Commission said in a letter to Hindi, who complained after being ordered to pull his video truck off the road.
Such accusations anger Jacquie Hindi, Steve's former-wife, who has known him since 1979.
"He has never, ever been a violent person," Jacquie Hindi said. "He may come off that way because he gets angry. I provoked him many a time when I was a young woman early in our married life and never did he lay a hand on me."
The couple divorced about eight years ago, but they remain friends and business partners. While he travels the country videotaping rodeos, she runs the rivet factory in Geneva they bought as a young couple with help from her father. Each year, Allied Rivet makes millions of rivets that hold together air ducts, toys and dozens of other products. Steve Hindi recalls paying about $240,000 for the business in the 1980s, about five years after the owner hired him as a shipping clerk.
"He brought it to the point of being a very successful, multimillion-dollar company," Jacquie Hindi said. "He's always been very passionate about whatever it is that he's pursued."
A Pennsylvania pigeon shoot during the late 1980s turned Hindi into an activist. Appalled by pigeons being shot by the thousands, he challenged the shoot's organizer to an anything-goes fight - no gloves, no weapons and no time limit. In 1990, he was arrested for kicking in the windshield of a car driven by a supporter of the pigeon shoot.
The way Hindi tells it, the driver struck him, bouncing him up onto the car's hood. While he clung to the hood, he says the driver accelerated, then hit the brakes so he would fall off. Instead, he stayed aboard and smashed the glass with a kick, then crawled under a nearby car as an angry crowd closed in. State police, he says, rescued him.
"I don't do things like that anymore," he said. "I was younger and crazier and just coming out of blood sports."
But the Pennsylvania protests introduced Hindi to something he's dealt with ever since.
"I really knew what it was like to be hated," Hindi said. "But I liked it. I enjoy being hated by people who hate animals."
Hindi was arrested again in 1996 for flying a motorized parasail near geese to disrupt a hunt in McHenry County. Ironically, he was charged under a law forbidding harassment of geese. A judge issued an injunction forbidding Hindi and other protesters from interfering with hunters. The next day, Hindi was back at the hunting grounds, scaring off geese with a megaphone. Outraged, the judge ordered him jailed for six months for contempt of court.
Today, Hindi describes the judge with unprintable words. He says the terms of the order weren't made clear to him. An attorney for a hunter who was accused of shooting at protesters during the goose hunt remembers Hindi as an earnest man doing what he thought was right.
"He wasn't trying to hide anything," said lawyer Steve McArdle, whose client was acquitted after McArdle called Hindi as a surprise witness and established that he did not have videotapes of the alleged crime. "He was, and apparently still is, a true believer."
At the time, Hindi came off as a hothead in a Chicago Tribune story about the hunter who allegedly fired over the heads of protesters.
"We're not going to sit here and be human targets," he told a reporter. "If the police don't do their job, I'm just liable to go in there and break his neck."
Hindi says the quote is accurate. He admits he isn't perfect.
A vegetarian who wears nylon belts and synthetic sandals, Hindi confesses that the seats in his Honda S2000 sports car are made of leather. He says he bought the car at the behest of his 16-year-old daughter, but only after the dealership told him that non-leather seats weren't an option. He said he'd like to become a vegan, but doesn't have enough discipline.
While he says he's mellowing with age, Hindi, 52, has his limits.
"I'm not going to tell you what to eat," he said. "But I will not sit down with someone who's going to eat veal."
--------------
Federal tax returns show that SHARK raises about $100,000 a year and has no paid employees. Hindi, according to the tax forms, works an average of 50 hours a week for the nonprofit organization.
"As you can tell, we're horrible fundraisers," Hindi said. "I'm not a social guy."
Hindi said he formed SHARK in the early 1990s (back then it was called the Chicago Animal Rights Coalition) because he wasn't satisfied with other animal-rights groups.
"The (animal-rights) movement does a lot of vegan potlucks and conferences, which are like social get-togethers," he said. "Really, all people want to do is hang around with protest signs. I don't react well to being spit on."
Hindi has harsh words for the Animal Liberation Front, an underground group that claims credit for cutting brake lines on lobster-delivery trucks and breaking into labs to free animals used in medical tests.
"They free the mink from the fur farm," he said. "Yeah, you're free to go out and starve and get hit by cars. They'll suffer slower deaths than if they were electrocuted for fur."
His take is different if activists free animals and provide them with safe homes.
"I don't have a problem with that," he said.
Kent Sturman, executive director of the National High School Rodeo Association, says Hindi and SHARK don't get the facts straight, but he gives them their due.
"They're pretty effective about getting out misinformation," Sturman said. "We follow the rules. We don't have huge amounts of injuries. Any injuries are dealt with immediately."
Hindi certainly has a way with words. He sprinkles profanities freely when he talks about people he thinks are abusing animals and government agencies that he believes aren't doing enough to prevent abuse. The insults can get colorful, bordering on taunts.
"What I really hate is bullfighting, all this macho stuff from these pink-stocking slipper boys," he says.
Ah, Hemingway.
Somewhere deep inside, the trophy fisherman lives, judging by how quickly Hindi corrects you when you say the northern pike he mentioned a few minutes ago was 24 inches long. It was 48 inches, he says.
That trophy and the shark he risked his life to land are long gone. He buried them near his house years ago.
But the memories remain. The sailboat that called the Coast Guard to save him, he recalls, was called the St. Jude - the patron saint of lost causes.
Surely, he must sometimes wonder what is feasible. After all, rodeos still flourish despite years of protest.
No, he insists.
"Nothing is hopeless," he says.
Bruce Rushton can be _reached at 788-1542 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
