AnimalRights.Net

Fox TV’s America’s Most
Wanted earned the wrath of animal rights activists for highlighting
two Animal Liberation Front terrorists on its February 6, 1999 show. The
show featured |Adam Peace| and |James Blackmon|, both of Utah, wanted
for their involvement in ALF bombings.

Peace, 21, allegedly participated
in the March 11, 1997 bombing of the Fur Breeders Co-Op in Salt Lake,
Utah, that caused over $700,000 in damage. Peace is one of the activists
apparently implicated by Josh Ellerman, who is currently serving 7 years
in jail for his role in that bombing.

Blackmon, 23, is also wanted for
allegedly participating in the Fur Breeders Co-op bombing. In addition,
Blackmon is wanted for a July 17, 1996, break-in at a mink farm in Utah
which did $200,000 in damage.

Animal rights activists were
none too happy with having their dirty laundry aired on national television.
New West Research’s Patricia Wolff wrote a scathing article that was posted
to an animal rights list claiming the show “targeted two animal liberationists
… and in so doing, smeared the entire animal rights movement.” Of
course since such large segments of the animal rights movement seem so
enamored of this sort of direct action, it seems a bit odd to blame America’s
Most Wanted for the animal rights movement penchant for defending even
violent extremists in their midst.

After all, AMW didn’t
force PETA president Alex Pacheco to say, “Arson, property destruction,
burglary and theft are ‘acceptable crimes’ when used for the animal cause.”

Wolff also lamented that the
“real criminals” – those who profit from the fur industry –
weren’t profiled. She complained that while a fur industry spokesman denounced
the destruction of the Fur Breeders Co-op as a “very violent and
terrorist-type act” there was “no mention of the violence of
and terrorism the fur industry commits against animals.”

There were also the pseudo-conspiratorial
claims from Wolff that seem a bit too common among animal rights
activists. Not understanding that society has an interest in punishing
individuals who place pipe bombs at legitimate businesses, Wolff claimed
“their [AMW’s] report is clearly politically motivated” (this
mirrors the line taken by some anti-abortion extremists about coverage
of abortion-related violence) and wondered “what role did the fur
industry have in all this?”

Uh, Patricia, they were the
victims of the bombing.

As animal rights activists
and extremist environmental groups gear up to seek an outright ban on
the transplantation of organs from non-human animals to humans, Americans for Medical Progress’s Jacquie Calnan wrote an excellent, widely published
op-ed on the importance of pursuing research on xenotransplantation and
similar technologies. She and AMP were subsequently attacked in a release
by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and
others.

Calnan’s op-ed, “Payton’s
hope” (available at http://amprogress.org/news/payton.htm) highlighted the problems of former Chicago Bear running back Walter
Payton, who recently announced he has a rare liver disease and may die
within two years if he does not receive a transplant.

As Calnan noted in her op-ed,
although there are 12,000 people on the waiting list for livers, only
about 4,000 such transplants are performed each year. In 1997 more than
1,000 people died while waiting for a matching liver. Calnan’s editorial
did an excellent job of highlighting animal rights hypocrisy, which is
why I suspect it was so quickly attacked. She repeated PETA celebrity
spokesman Bill Maher’s recent quote to US Magazine that: “To those
people who say, ‘My father is alive because of animal experimentation,’
I say ‘Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live.’
Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of trade off.” Someone
should send Maher a thank you note for so succinctly summing up the animal
rights philosophy.

Calnan mentioned the newly
developed device I mentioned a couple weeks ago that uses pig cells to
help keep some people alive while waiting transplants. The fact is this
technology is here today and it is already saving lives, so the animal
rights and extreme environmental activists have to fall back on two claims
to discredit the technology.

The first is that the risk
of passing diseases from non-humans to humans is too high. Animal rights
activists have released claim after claim trying to make this point, but
most of the more serious ones have later turned out to be baseless. On
the other hand, like any other thing human beings do, there is always
some risk associated with it – the risk of some new deadly disease crossing
from non-humans to humans will never be zero.

But if our society was that
risk-averse no pharmaceutical drugs or medical technology would ever be
approved since the risk of a calamity from any new technology is never
zero. If this sort of principle actually guided medical technology, certainly
technologies that we take for granted, such as vaccination, would never
have been allowed since the potential risks were only poorly known at best.

The second claim is that there
are more than enough organ donors to go around. At the end of her article,
Calnan ask for more people to become organ donors, which is a reasonable
position, but the critics of xenotransplantation seem to assume that those
organ donors are here today. A recent press release from the Boston-based
Campaign for Responsible Transplantation claimed, for example, that Xenotransplantation
advocates “use statistics and emotion to make their case … some 3,000
transplant patients die each year on in the U.S. … [but a ] US General
Accounting Office report … reveals a potential organ donor pool of 150,000
people. This is in stark contrast to previous estimates of 5,000 to 29,000
people annually … if these organs are secured, it would solve the national
organ shortage, and completely eliminate the need for animal organ transplants.”

As is the typical modus operandi with
these groups, however, this last claim is a distortion. The GAO report
was written to explore different methods of evaluating the performance
of Organ Procurement Organizations, who are assigned the task of procuring
organs and getting them into the organ sharing network. In order to do
that sort of evaluation, the GAO wanted a baseline of the upper bound of
eligible organ donors, which it estimated at 147,000 in 1994 using a technique
to estimate actual deaths and then adjust the figures to determine how
many of those deaths would have had harvestable organs.

The interesting thing is that
in the very next paragraph after giving this estimate, the GAO notes the
limits of counting potential organs this way, “we found that both
the death and adjusted-death measures [which are the source of the 147,000
figure] have drawbacks that limit their usefulness, however, including
lack of timely data and inability to identify those deaths suitable for
use in organ donation.”

First, this explicitly concedes
that the 147,000 figure was obtained using a method that the GAO admits
has an “inability to identify those deaths suitable for use in organ
donation,” which is the crux of the problem with human organ donation
itself. If it was too expensive and time consuming for the GAO to go back
four years and decide how many people were eligible organ donors,
imagine the difficulty in trying to harvest those organs on the spot.

It is one thing to look back
several years later and say there were say 40,000 automobile deaths and
of those 6,000 were potential organ donors. It is another thing to be
in place to actually obtain those organs (a severe problem in organ donation
is that even among those who have signed organ donor cards and are good candidates
to donate organs, often the organs are no longer usable by the time doctors
are aware of the potential donor or get permission from family members
to proceed. This is a situation that is unlikely to change significantly
in the near future).

In addition, the CRT release
failed to note that the number organ donors has increased over the last
few years – but the number of people eligible for organ donation has increased
even faster. I suppose if PETA had its way, this wouldn’t be a problem
since there would be no animal research and fewer people would be transplant
candidates since the medical knowledge to save their lives simply wouldn’t
exist, but barring this it seems clear that future advances in medical
science are going to continue to drive the demand for organ donation at
a much faster rate than the increase in donated organs.

If anything the GAO report
on the failures of Organ Procurement Organizations to obtain more organs
is evidence of just how difficult it is going to be to increase the level
of organ donation, and further emphasizes why xenotransplantation and
similar technologies will likely play a key role in the 21st century – provided animal rights activists aren’t given the chance to
halt this important advance.

In two separate trials over
the past several months, anti-abortion activists have been held accountable
in civil trials for their advocacy of violence under laws that may be
exploitable by those trying to stop animal rights violence.

In a Chicago trial last year,
Planned Parenthood and other groups won millions of dollars in awards
from activists who never actually committed acts of violence but did make
(often vague) statements supporting or inciting such violence. In the
recently concluded “Nuremberg Files” case, a jury delivered a
guilty verdict against an antiabortion web site that displayed “wanted
posters” of abortion doctors, along with personal information such
as addresses, phone numbers and even the names of the doctors’ children.

So what dos that have to do
with animal rights violence? A lot actually. In both cases lawyers relied
heavily on the civil provisions of the |Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations| (RICO) law. The RICO law was originally passed to allow
prosecutors to go after legitimate businesses that had been taken over
by the mob and used to hide criminal activity.

Along with the criminal provisions,
RICO included provisions allowing private individuals to sue groups and
individuals who illegally interfere with the operations of legal enterprises.

In its release after the trial,
the American Medical Association heralded the verdict and specifically
mentioned possible action “on behalf of biomedical researchers
targeted by an extreme faction of ‘animal rights activists.’” Assuming
the verdict in both the Chicago and “Nuremberg Files”
cases holds up on appeal, some animal rights organizations and web sites
could be ripe for similar lawsuits.

The most vulnerable groups would be
those posting Animal Liberation Front materials or materials in support
of ALF actions. There are several web sites that include instructions
on how to build incendiary devices along with the names and addresses of
fur farms and medical researchers. These individuals and groups are exposing themselves to an
extraordinary degree of liability under RICO.

Even the more “mainstream”
animal rights groups might not be beyond successful prosecution. In the
Chicago case, for example, several defendants were convicted based on
the following set of circumstances: a) they made rather inflammatory statements
about abortion doctors or clinics at one point or another, although they
never personally engaged in violence nor directly incited such violence;
and b) they ended up working in a broad coalition of antiabortion activists
that included both groups that condemned violence and groups that
advocated or at least sympathized with violence.

The jury in the Chicago case
agreed with Planned Parenthood lawyers who argued that the coalition of
groups met the standards of a criminal conspiracy under RICO.

I suspect the Supreme Court
may tighten up some of the requirements for such civil violations of RICO,
but it has already affirmed the fundamental tenets behind such suits.
Such laws could possibly be used to shut down animal rights groups and
sites that are clearly advocating violence.

Sources:

AMA Applauds Verdict Against Web Site That Threatened Violence Against Physicians. American Medical Association, Press Release, February 2, 1999.

Anti-abortion foes vow appeal. Maria Seminerio, ZDNN, February 3, 1999.

Limiting Web speech rights. Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 1999.

There have been a spate of
developments on the AIDS research front over the past few weeks. The biggest
news item was research purporting to demonstrate conclusively that the
HIV virus was spread from chimpanzees to human beings (hmmm…maybe there
are similarities between humans and non-humans after all.)

The evidence is from a chimpanzee
named Marilyn who died in 1985. According to Dr. Beatrice Hahn, whose
findings were published in Nature, although Marilyn had never been
used in HIV research and had not received human blood products after 1969,
simian immunodeficiency virus was found in Marilyn’s system.

The first known incident
of a human contracting AIDS, a Bantu man who died in 1959 in the Belgian
Congo, occurred in the same area where the particular subspecies of chimpanzee
that Marilyn belonged to resides. There is some speculation, though no
evidence at the moment, that the disease might have passed to humans through
the eating of chimpanzees which does occur in some parts of Africa (personally,
I think there is still far too much that isn’t known about HIV to start
saying this is how AIDS was transmitted to humans).

On a sour note, tests of
a live vaccine antidote for AIDS involving macaques failed when the animals
developed the disease itself. The live vaccine used genetically crippled
versions of the virus, but HIV is so wily that the virus managed to somehow
reconstruct itself and infect the target animals. As Dr. Ruth Ruprecht
of Boston’s Dan-Farber Cancer Institute said, “There is a real
risk of contracting AIDS from the vaccine itself.”

Some AIDS activists are still
pushing the National Institute of Health to approve limited trials of the vaccine in ill patients.
The NIH should approve such trials, but the outlook for this vaccine
is not good.

Finally, Scripps Howard environmental
writer Mitzi Perdue wrote an excellent article, “A different perspective
on AIDS,” on the role of fundamental research which did not address
animal rights specifically but was a good rebuttal of arguments that only
research that provides clear, immediate benefits should be approved. As
Perdue notes, the discovery that AIDS was caused by a virus was in many
ways an accident.

Among the happy coincidences
Perdue mentions is that research and development of techniques involving
viruses, and especially retroviruses, were relatively recent. If AIDS had
hit in the 1960s, the technology simply wouldn’t have been there to identify
it. As Perdue writes,

Dr. Ronald Bosch . . . sees this last point as an important lesson
about medical research. The research we had already done on viruses and
the immune system benefited humanity enormously by enabling us to detect
the AIDS virus as soon as we did. Bosch believes that the current AIDS
research will prove similarly valuable. “Some people argue that the amount
spent is disproportionate to the number who die,” he says, “but much of
it is basic virology and immunology research that may help combat other
diseases such as cancer.”

The bottom line is that medical
research does not follow a simple two or three step process from identifying
a problem to producing a cure. Numerous times over the past few decades
information gleaned from basic research experiments on animals that produced
no immediate benefit for human beings was later the key in understanding
important phenomenon. Any requirement that basic research fulfill some
utilitarian program of immediate beneficial results is simply bad science.

Sources:

HIV: from chimps to humans. Reuters, February 1, 1999.

Chimp research may help AIDS vaccine development. Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, February 2, 1999.

Expert conclude AIDS virus orginated from chipms. Daniel Q. Haney, Associated Press, January 31, 1999.

‘Live’ AIDS vaccine will not work, study shows. Reuters, February 1, 1999.

A different perspective on AIDS. Mitzi Perdue, Scripps Howard, January 26, 1999.

Modified HIV shows therapeutic promise. The BBC, January 29, 1999.

In another milestone giving
a peek at wonders to come, a 33-year-old woman was kept alive for 8 days
on an artificial liver that uses pig-liver cells to purify blood. The
woman was waiting for a liver transplant which she finally received.

“It was amazing we kept
this woman going for so many days – she was very, very sick,” Elizabeth
Fagan, professor of internal medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s
Medical Center in Chicago, told Wired.

According to Fagan, the woman
would have died without the device, which resembles a dialysis machine
but uses living cells. Contradicting animal rights propaganda about animals
and humans, Fagan noted that “pig livers are very similar in size
to a human’s, and the way the pig liver metabolizes hormones and chemicals
and toxins is similar.”

The success of the artificial
liver moves medical science one step forward to the day when permanent,
genetically engineered organs might replace or augment current human organ
transplantation. As such successes mount, expect animal rights activists,
extreme environmentalists, and others to step up their campaign to have
such procedures banned (on the other hand, the success of such technologies
will likely put another nail into the coffin of whatever slim possibility
the animal rights agenda has of succeeding merely through persuasion rather
than direct action and violence).

Source:

Part machine, part pig liver. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired News, January 28, 1999.

Stephen Budiansky, the former
Washington editor of Nature and currently a correspondent for The
Atlantic, is author of the recently published book, If A Lion Could
Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness, which
attacks the animal rights’ views of animal intelligence and consciousness.

In a December interview published
on The Atlantic’s web site, Atlantic Unbound, Budiansky
tells interviewer Katie Bacon,

One of the reasons I fundamentally
disagree with the animal-rights philosophy is that it seems to be based
on the notion that pain is the overriding factor in determining whether
an animal has rights … The idea that because animals can suffer pain they
therefore deserve equal consideration is a very limited view of the world.
And even more than that, sentience or consciousness is not the same as
a moral capacity, a capacity to anticipate the future, a capacity to have
thoughts about thoughts, a capacity to have an awareness of oneself as
an independent moral agent. These are things that result in different
experiences of the world, and I think they make it perfectly valid and
normal to make distinctions between us and other animals.

Budiansky complains that in
the animal rights movement, “there’s a wholesale misrepresentation
of what biomedical research is for and what it’s about. There are a lot
of misrepresentations of animal agriculture, too.”

What really concerns Budiansky,
however, is the “sentimental anthropomorphizing” that seems
so common among animal rights groups and activists (although Budiansky
concedes such anthropomorphizing is a “highly adaptive trait”
that clearly serves some important functions for a highly social species
such as ourselves).

Source:

The animal point of view. Stephen Budiansky, Atlantic Unbound, December 9, 1998.

Of all the things to worry
about in the world, the ongoing controversy over Hunting videogames and
their parodies has to be one of the silliest.

A group of hunters is still
upset over Simon & Schuster’s Deer Avenger game which
gives animals guns and has them hunt down human beings. It’s a semi-amusing
parody, but nothing to get worked up about.

Several groups of hunters
including Hunting Trail, Safari Club International, the International
Hunting and Fishing Museum, and Bowhunting.net among others announced a
boycott of Simon & Schuster over the game. Boycotter David Parker
told Wired the boycott is needed “to uphold our reputation
– that we do care for the environment, we do care for children and family
morals.”

Several gay/lesbian groups
also complained about an effeminate character in the game with suggestion
that the character amounted to gay bashing.

Come on guys, it’s a parody
of a video game – get over it already.

Sources:

Hunters blast away at videogames. Pete Danko, Wired News, February 3, 1999.

Videogame’s cheap shot. Steve Friess, Wired News, January 28, 1999.

The Texas Establishment for Animal Rights created quite a stir a couple weeks ago when it uncovered
a dastardly crime against animals taking place at a school in Lewisville,
Texas. It seems that the school system has for several years sponsored
a fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation in which students donate money
on behalf of a teacher. The teacher receiving the largest donations has
to kiss a pig brought in for the occasion (according to one resident,
last year the lucky winner got to kiss a pig at the halftime of a football
game with over 5,000 people in attendance).

TEAR was outraged at this
horror. Among another claims made in an email release by the group (titled
“Pig Tormented At High School”) “they [the school] are
teaching the kids that animals are somehow inferior to people and that
it is a punishment to have to kiss one.”

Although some of the activists
claimed pressure on the school was mounting to stop the pig kissing contest,
in fact it went forward and according to school officials I talked to
via email, at no point did anyone contemplating canceling the pig kissing.

Special mention goes to
an administrator at Delay who purportedly told the school’s principle,
“Maybe we should just roast the pig and see how they like that.”

Sources:

Urgent help…pig contest. Texas Establishment for Animal Rights, Press Release, January 26, 1999.

Urgent help…pig contest–correction. Texas Establishment for Animal Rights, Press Release, January 27, 1999.

Response on Kissing the Pig Contest. Bill Jones, E-mail communication, January 28, 1999.

• Busty ex-Baywatch Babe Blasts Animal Acts: Pamela Anderson
  Lee, a member in good standing of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote a letter to the National
  Association of Television Program Executives urging the organization
  to ban traveling animal acts such as that of Jack Hanna who makes frequent
  appearances on late night talk shows. In her letter, Lee says she
  “refuses to be a party to their [animals] suffering.” Someone might
  want to mention to Lee the large number of animals that have been killed
  testing silicone implants.

• According to an email posted on an animal rights mailing list, PETA’s
  Jane Garrison was arrested on Jan. 26 for trespassing at a private lake
  where coots, small migratory birds, were being poisoned and trapped
  by a local home owners association. The association obtained a permit
  from the California Department of Fish and Game to kill up to 200 coots
  which were eating the grass and defecating on the property.

• What will PETA do now? According to a Wall Street Journal report,
  almost all film sold in the United States contains ground up animal
  parts (bones from dead cows are ground up to create gelatin used in
  the film). I guess PETA will be on the lookout for vegan film for its
  next photo that purport to show animal cruelty.

Source:

‘VIP’ star backs animal display ban. Associated Press, January 31, 1999.

Kodak grinds cow remains, keeps costs close to the bone. Alec Klein, Wall Street Journal, January 18, 1999.