Animals as electoral candidates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Animals as electoral candidates have been found in a number of countries. Often, the candidacies are a means of casting a protest vote or satirizing the political system — voting for an animal above "real" politicians often embarrasses those politicians. Other times, it is simply done for the entertainment value.
There are often obstacles to animals being nominated as candidates — electoral regulations may explicitly require candidates to be human (or equivalent wording), or may require candidates to do things which animals cannot reasonably do (such as sign their name legibly on a legal form). On some occasions, however, animals have been accepted as candidates, and have even won office, although this usually happens only in small towns where the result is not considered important.
[edit] Examples
- Caligula, the Roman emperor, named his horse consul.
- Pigasus the Immortal, a boar hog that the Yippies nominated as a candidate in the U.S. presidential election, 1968.
- Cacareco, a rhinoceros at the São Paulo zoo, was a candidate for the 1958 city council elections with the intention of protesting against political corruption [1]. Electoral officials, of course, did not accept Cacareco's candidacy, but he eventually won 100,000 votes, more than any other party in that same election (which was also marked by rampant absenteeism).
Today, the term "Voto Cacareco" (Cacareco vote) is commonly used to describe protest votes in Brazil. In 2002, the eccentric candidate Eneas Carneiro, known for shouting and cursing adversaries on TV, was elected for the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil with the largest number of votes in history. [2] The people, tired and disgruntled of the "serious" candidates, gave him 1.5 million "cacareco votes".
- Cacareco's candidacy inspired the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, nominally led by Cornelius the First.
- Tião, a bad-tempered chimpanzee, was put forward by the anti-establishment Brazilian Banana Party (Partido Bananista Brasileiro) as a candidate for the Rio de Janeiro mayoralty in 1988. The campaign's slogan was "Vote monkey - get monkey" (because people were tired of voting for one platform and then seeing the elected officials implementing another one). Tião received over 400,000 votes, coming third.
- Katten Mickelin (a cat) was the leader of Ezenhemmer Plastic Bags and Child Rearing Utensils Party.
- New Zealand's McGillicuddy Serious Party entered a goat in a local Waiheke Island election, but their attempt to have a hedgehog stand for Parliament was unsuccessful.
- United States left wing film maker Michael Moore attempted to get a potted ficus tree onto the ballot in a local election
Several animals in the US have been elected mayors of small towns such as Rabbit Hash, KY whose mayor is a black lab named Junior Cohcran, and Lajitas, TX, whose mayor is a beer-drinking goat named Clay Henry III.
