Monthly Archives: May 2005

Why PETA Stopped Its \”Holocaust On Your Plate\” Campaign

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In April, Brownsville, Texas, KFC manager John Olivo greeted three protester from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals by turning on his sprinklers as the three approached his restaurant.

Olivo told the Brownsville Herald,

They [the protesters] already hit me in McAllen. I was already waiting for them here in Brownsville.

The PETA protesters also faced one especially active counter-protester, David Ingersoll, who had his children passing out anti-PETA pamphlets, and high school students yelling insults from the windows of their bus.

PETA\’s Chris Link told The Brownsville Herald,

It hasn\’t been quite like this in other parts of the state. It\’s a rarity that we get this.

The odd thing is that, of course, PETA has compared the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust, but what is its current proposal for improving chicken welfare — gassing chickens to death in large chambers.

According to the Brownsville Herald,

\”We\’re out of here today to raise awareness about the chickens,\” said link, a Baltimore native. \”All we want them (slaughter houses) to do is gas the chickens instead of killing them.\” [Apparently Link is a bit confused about a lot of things].

PETA suggests a \”controlled-atmosphere\” killing, using gases such as nitrogen and argon to kill the chickens.

The gas chambers would ensure a painless death for the birds, PETA reported in its web site. Slaughter houses currently use an electrical stun method or cut off the birds\’ heads.

So that\’s why the group backed off its Holocaust claims. It\’d be a bit difficult to wander the country claiming meat eating is just like the Holocaust while simultaneously arguing in favor of gas chambers for chickens.

Finally, Link told one of the most bald-faced lies I\’ve seen even for a PETA member. Link actually told the Brownsville Herald that,

Almost all (PETA\’s) money goes directly to fund animals. Every dime goes directly to helping animals whether it\’s through demonstrations (or) to raise awareness.

Uh, Chris, have you read PETA\’s tax returns lately?

Source:

PETA gets rude welcome in Brownsville. Gilberto Salinas, The Brownsville Herald, April 14, 2005.

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Joan Dunayer Withdraws from Friends of Animals Conference Because Opponent of Animal Rights/Eco-Terrorism Invited As Well

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In April, Joan Dunayer announced she was withdrawing from the Friends of Animals\’ July 9-10 conference because organizers dared to invite Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center as its keynote speaker.

In a letter to other activist, Dunayer writes,

I\’ve withdrawn, in protest, from participation in Friends of Animals\’ July 9-10, 2005 conference, at which I was scheduled to speak. I refuse to participate because the conference will feature Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as keynote speaker. Director of the SPLC\’s Intelligence Project and editor of the SPLC\’s quarterly Intelligence Report (IR), Potok is a virulent speciesist and opponent of nonhuman rights.

As described by the SPLC\’s website, the Intelligence Project \”monitors hate groups and tracks extremist activity throughout the U.S.,\” providing \”comprehensive updates to law enforcement, the media and the public.\”[1] The Project uses \”high-tech online tracking as well as solid fundamental investigative techniques.\”[2] For some time now, the SPLC has been casting animal rights activists as terrorists and hate-mongers and monitoring their activities.

Potok\’s IR portrays animal rights advocacy in an entirely negative light. A synopsis of the 2002 anonymous IR article \”From Push to Shove\” reads, \”Environmental radicals and animal rights activists say it\’s \’ludicrous\’ for the FBI to call them the No. 1 domestic terror threat. But their rhetoric and increasingly extreme criminal actions are making the \’eco-terror\’ label stick.\”[3] The article has sensationalistic headings such as \”A Growing Radicalism,\” \”At the Hilton, Violence is Cheered,\” and \”Targeting Scientists, and Others.\” The text abounds with pejoratives applied to animal rights advocacy. For example, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty employs \”escalating violence,\” uses \”terroristic tactics,\” and \”sets a new standard for eco-terrorism.\” Even lawsuits filed against factory \”farmers\” are \”attacks.\” The article refers to Chris DeRose as the \”boss,\” not president, of Last Chance for Animals and to Peter Singer as a \”long-time darling of many eco-radicals.\” According to the article, the Farm Animal Reform Movement holds its annual animal-advocacy conferences in \”surprisingly highbrow\” settings. \”But the discussions are down and dirty.\”[4] (By Potok\’s own admission, the SPLC gathered information on activists at Animal Rights 2001.)[5] A 2003 SPLC article on PETA\’s \”Holocaust on Your Plate\” campaign is titled \”Hate in the News: PETA Turns Holocaust into Pig Pen,\” as if drawing connections between racist and speciesist atrocities–and deploring both–constitutes hate.[6]

IR articles express no objection to the ongoing violence that humans perpetrate against countless nonhumans and no concern whatsoever for those victims. In the language of IR, vivisection labs against which activists campaign are only \”perceived as abusing animals\” (emphasis added).[4] All of IR\’s expressed sympathy is for those who abuse nonhumans or profit from such abuse–from vivisectors, mink killers, and pig enslavers to hunting guides and pelt dealers. IR portrays nonhumans\’ abusers as the innocent victims of animal rights \”terrorism.\” Vivisectors are \”scientists.\”[4] Huntingdon Life Sciences \”tests drugs.\”[4] (IR omits the information that HLS also uses nonhuman animals to \”test\” everything from industrial chemicals to mascara.) Animal rights activism caused cat vivisector Michael Podell to abandon what IR terms his \”AIDS studies.\” In the manner typical of pro-vivisection propaganda, IR states, \”Scientists say that some research, like Podell\’s, cannot be done with computer modeling or with human subjects.\”[4] Podell\’s cat victims did not, of course, have AIDS; they suffered from artificially induced Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, a very different disease. IR favorably describes and quotes the vivisection-promotion group Foundation for Biomedical Research.[4]

Mark Potok clearly is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the cruelty and injustice of vivisection, the pelt industry, food-industry enslavement and slaughter, and other forms of speciesist abuse. He\’s an active foe of animal rights and animal rights advocacy. It\’s an understatement to say that Potok has no genuine understanding of animal rights and is not an appropriate keynote speaker for an animal rights conference.

Friends of Animals does a disservice to nonhuman animals and their advocates in hosting Potok, giving him positive publicity, and presenting him as a credible spokesperson with regard to animal rights. I no longer will participate in the FoA conference because I no longer believe that participation is in the best interests of nonhuman animals. Further, I advise animal advocates to be wary of Potok and the SPLC.

Its interesting that Friends of Animals is willing to host a speaker who is opposed to a segment of the animal rights movement, while Dunayer can\’t apparently stomach even the hint of a dissenting view.

Source:

Joan Dunayer Withdraws, in Protest, from Friends of Animals Conference. Joan Dunayer, Letter, April 14, 2005.

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PCRM Sues OSU — Wants Photographs and/or Videotapes of Spinal Cord Injury Course

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In April, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against Ohio State University\’s board of trustees seeking photographs and/or videotapes of OSU\’s three-week long Spinal Cord Injury Research Techniques Course.

The course teaches students methods of injuring the spinal cords of laboratory animals so they can be used in animal models of such injuries. According to The Columbus Dispatch, 189 rats and 60 mice are injured as part of the course.

PCRM requested information from OSU about the course, and OSU turned over some written records about the course. But PCRM\’s suit argues that it needs access to the photographs and/or videotapes in order to evaluate whether or not animals are being treated properly.

In its lawsuit, PCRM claims,

It is of significant societal importance that all U.S. and Ohio taxpayer-funded medical research performed by a noncommercial scientist at, through, and in conjunction with a public university is subject to public accountability and scrutiny.

By withholding the requested information, OSU is preventing the public from meaningfully and thoroughly understanding the process by which taxpayer-funded animal research, which purports to help humans, is conducted.

In its original communication to PCRM refusing to release any photographs or videotapes, OSU said that such records were OSU\’s intellectual property, which is one of the exemptions to OSU\’s public records law.

Source:

Doctors sue OSU for videos of spinal research on rats. Darrel Rowland, The Columbus Dispatch, April 12, 2005.

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Dog Genome Expected to Enhance Cancer Research

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In December, the BBC published an interesting article on the role that the decoded dog genome may play in helping to understand and treat cancers in human beings.

Initial work on sequencing the dog genome was finished in the summer of 2004. Human beings and dogs share many of the same cancers, including bone cancer, skin cancer and lymphoma.

Ironically, thousands of years of human-influenced breeding of dogs means it will be relatively easy to discover which genes contribute to cancer in dogs. Because of the way dogs have been breed, there is little genetic variation within purebred dogs and many breeds of dogs began with a very small number of dogs, so they had little genetic variation to begin with.

As geneticist Matthew Breen told the BBC, this means that cancers in dogs are likely \”being switched on by very few genes — maybe even just one — which exert a very large effect.\”

This provides an excellent example of why animal models are often superior to using human models of a disease. As the BBC notes,

In order to figure out where a cancer-causing gene is located in an animal\’s genome, scientists use genetic \”markers,\” which are sequences that differ slightly between different dogs and have a known location on a chromosome.

When disease-affected animals consistently have a certain marker, and healthy animals do not have it, then there is a good chance that a disease gene is located very close to that marker.

These analyses are difficult to do in humans, because geneticists need to look at DNA samples from many people in an affected family in order to pin down the gene\’s location.

Most human families are too small – and have too few generations alive at the same time – for a sufficient number of samples. Dog families, on the other hand, have short generations and many offspring.

Such a technique was used to locate a gene in German shepherds that is responsible for kidney cancer, which also turned out to be a recently identified suspect in kidney cancers in human beings.

Source:

Dog genome boosts cancer research. BBC, December 29, 2004.

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Bash the Toxic Toads?

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Cane toads are poisonous, ugly-looking large toads that are a major problem in parts of Australia. Brought in early in the 20th century in an effort to control crop-destroying can beetle populations, the population of cane toads soon exploded and became a major pest itself. According to the BBC, there are as many as 100 million cane toads in Australia today.

Since animals such as fresh water crocodiles, dingoes and kangaroos can die from eating the toxic toads, reducing and/or eradicating them is a high priority.

Nonetheless, not everyone appreciated Liberal MP David Tollner\’s suggestion for dealing with the toads — people should take bats to the toads as Tollner and others did when he was a child.

Tollner said,

We hit them with cricket bats, golf clubs and the like. Things were a bit different, most kids had a slug gun or an air rifle and we would get stuck into them with that sort of thing as well. If people could be encouraged to do it rather than discouraged the better the chance will be of stopping the cane toads arriving in Darwin and other parts of northern Australia.

Australia\’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal\’s immediately condemned the suggestion and said anyone who bashed cane toads with bats would be fined and/or jailed for animal cruelty. According to The Associated Press, animal welfare groups in Australia would prefer that the toads be killed by freezing them (now there\’s an efficient way to deal with 100 million cane toads).

Tollner\’s solution was endorsed, however, by Environment Minister Ian Campbell who told reporters,

I would encourage anything that has a practical effect on stopping cane toad numbers. I remember as a child growing up in Brisbane I used to shoot them with my air rifle. That was relatively ineffective, I can report.

The reader must, at this point, be wondering how Tollner and Campbell avoided becoming serial killers given the animal rights can that cruelty to animals is an accurate predictor of violence against people.

Sources:

Toxic Toad Problem? Join The Club. Associated Press, April 14, 2005.

Australia MP targets toxic toads. Phil Mercer, BBC News, April 11, 2005.

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PETA vs. Ringling Bros.

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The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star published a story in March on the ongoing debate between Ringling Bros. and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In the profile, Ringling Bros. accuses People for the Ethical Treatment of animals of putting forth a fictional representation of the circus, while PETA accuses Ringling Bros. of being one of the cruelest circuses and of being \”Baby Killers\” after a young elephant at the circus died in July 2004.

PETA\’s Brandi Valladolid told the Daily Free Lance-Star,

We\’ve been protesting Ringling Bros. for a very long time. Ringling Bros. is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to animal welfare and animal care.

. . .

[Parents should not bring their children to a Ringling Bros. circus because] Kids pick up on things we don\’t think they see. They see the animals getting whipped. They see the ringmaster hitting them. It teaches a very dangerous lesson — that it\’s OK to abuse animals; OK to exploit them for entertainment.

Meanwhile Ringling Bros. spokesman Darin Johnson told the newspaper that PETA\’s web site attacking the circus is filled with misinformation. For example, Johnson says video footage there distorts the events surrounding the birth of an elephant at the circus. According to the Daly Free Lance-Star,

He [Johnson] said the online video of the birth only shows the calf being pulled away from the mother for its own protection and doesn\’t show it being returned to her when she calmed down.

Johnson said the calf was taken away, checked and returned, just as human babies are examined by doctors then returned to their mothers.

Johnson also told the Daily Free Lance-Star that online video at PETA\’s site purports to showing elephants being whipped by Ringling Bros. employees, but that the video is in fact not of Ringling Bros. elephants or employees. The Daily Free Lance-Star quoted Johnson as saying,

They took footage from every zoo and animal park in the world and spliced it together.

Source:

PETA decries circus\’s ethics. Michael Zitz, March 25, 2005.

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Company Says Sex Selection for Cattle Should Arrive Soon

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XY Inc., a Colorado-based biotech company, has developed a technology that allows for sex selection of non-human mammals, including cows, and is in the process of making the technology commercially available.

XY Inc. signed a deal with Canada\’s L\’Alliance Boviteq that will see Boviteq set up a Canadian laboratory to commercialize sex-selected sperm and embryos from cattle.

Once available commercially, the technique would be of great use to dairy farms who want to increase the odds that a cows will give birth to heifer calves which can be used in milk production.

XY Inc.\’s process is 90 percent accurate, but is costly because of the time it takes to sort sperm to get the correct sex. The research laboratory that Boviteq will develop will focus on speeding up the separation time so that the technique is commercially viable.

Source:

Sex selection on horizon for cattle. Capital Press, Chip Power, April 2005.

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Viva! Says Plant-Based Diet Promotes Better Sex Life, But Nutrition Expert Says Not So Fast

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In March, Viva! brought its campaign claiming that a vegetarian diet is key to a vigorous sex life to Scotland. The groups claimed that eating a vegetarian diet can prevent impotence and baldness, but a nutrition researcher suggested the group\’s claims should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Viva! director Juliet Gellatley told the Sunday Herald,

People are much more savvy now than they were 10 years ago. Over that time the medical evidence has become much stronger, not just that vegetarians lead a longer life, which they certainly do, but also that they lead a healthier life.

But Dr. Jane Scott, a professor of public health and nutrition at Glasgow University, told the Sunday Herald that the group was vastly overstating the evidence,

It\’s hard to tease out the effect of diet as opposed to the other aspects of a person\’s lifestyle. A lot of studies focus on cultures that don\’t eat meat, but then they might not drink or smoke either, and this is quite important. . . . [And some conditions are largely genetic] The chances are, if your dad was bald, you will be bald too. As for claims that a vegetarian lifestyle cures impotence, I would be extremely dubious and would like to see some proper evidence.

Come on, proper evidence? How would that advance the vegetarian snake oil salesmen?

Source:

Forget Viagra . . . vegetables are key to a longer sex life. Paul Dalgarno, Sunday Herald, April 10, 2005.

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Colorado Dog Sled Operation At Center of Controversy Over Fate of Unwanted Sled Dogs

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Krabloonik, a Colorado-based dog sled outfit, found itself in the middle of a public controversy in April after letters-to-the editor in local newspapers accused it of killing some of its dogs with a gunshot to the head and then disposing of the bodies of the dogs in a pile of waste.

In an op-ed published in the Aspen Daily news, Krabloonik owner Dan MacEachen admitted that the organization killed dogs that were either at the end of their working lives as well as pups who turned out to be incapable of pulling sleds. MacEachen maintain in his op-ed however, that the dogs were killed humanely and that the whole process was legal under Colorado\’s animal welfare laws.

A former employee of Krabloonik\’s claimed that the business killed up to 35 dogs annually in this manner, though MacEachen said the actual number is much lower.

A number of other dog sledding outfits contacted by the media said that while this method of killing used to be the norm, that it is no longer widespread within dog sledding outfits.

Four-time Iditarod winner Martin Buser told The Aspen Daily News, for example, that if he needs to euthanize a dog he calls in a veterinarian who administer\’s a lethal injection. Buser maintained he had not had to euthanize a dog in several years.

Lynda Plattner, who runs a 300 dog sledding outfit in Alaska, has started up a nonprofit called Alaska\’s Iditarod Sled Dog Retirement Foundation whose goal is to provide a retirement program specifically for Iditarod dogs. Plattner told Denver\’s ABC 7,

There is no other animal in the world like them, and based on that fact alone, they deserve to continue to receive the best care possible long after their competitive days are over.

In response to an inquiry from ABC 7, the American Humane Society confirmed MacEachen\’s interpretation that euthanizing dogs with a gunshot to the head was legal in Colorado, but AHA head Marie Belew Wheatley added that, \”It is inconceivable to me that a business enterprise that profits off the work and loyalty of these dogs would fail to seek another more compassionate end for these animals.\”

Given the heat dog sledding already receives from animal rights activists, you\’d think dog sled outfits like MacEachen\’s would not want to hand them an issue on a silver platter like this.

Source:

Krabloonik defends culling of pack. Chad Abraham, The Aspen Times, April 5, 2005.

Controversy over treatment of sled dogs. Chad Abraham, Vail Daily, April 9, 2005.

Humane Association Criticizes Shooting Dogs In Head. ABC 7, The Denver Channel, April 5, 2005.

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NBC News Interviews SaveToby.Com Proprietors

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In April, NBC News correspondent George Lewis interviewed the two college students behind SaveToby.Com, which is competing with BonsaiKitten.Com for the title of web site most hated by animal lovers.

The site features a picture of a rabbit and the claim that unless the site\’s proprietors receive $50,000 by June 30, 2005 that Toby will be killed and eaten,

I am going to eat him. God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive $50,000 into my account.

If animal lovers were smart, they\’d just ignore this sort of silly nonsense, but instead they post horrified e-mails that circulate until finally the issue is big enough that George Lewis interviews those responsible for NBC News.

According to one of the unnamed partners behind the site,

We\’ve been getting tremendously varied responses. Many of which include death threats almost on a daily basis.

The unnamed individual maintains, however, that the site is not a hoax,

No, not at all. As a matter of fact, it\’s very serious. If we don\’t get $50,000, we are going to eat the rabbit.

The odd thing is that people care so much, especially given that its perfectly legal to eat rabbits.

What\’s the next step? Is someone going to set up a picture of a lobster with the claim that \”I\’m going to eat this lobster if I don\’t receive $50,000 in my account?\” Fine, go ahead and eat Toby already.

But people fall for this crap and the result is that SaveToby.Com\’s operators claim they\’ve received $20,000 in cash (which I find hard to believe), and have a book deal — all of which they owe to the idiots circulating these stupid e-mails about the horror of the web site.

Yeah, that\’s showing \’em. You have to think that the BonsaiKitten.Com folks are kicking themselves for not starting a \”we\’re going to eat this Bonsai kitten if we don\’t receive $50,000\” campaign. Anyone for BonsaiRabbit.com?

Source:

Fur files over rabbit death threat. George Lewis, NBC News, April 11, 2005.

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