AnimalRights.Net

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is asking the federal government to remove the dairy
requirement from the food pyramid because large numbers of minorities
are lactose intolerant. PCRM is getting support for its efforts from Rev.
Jesse Jackson, former surgeon general Jocelyn Elders, and the Congressional
Black Caucus Health Braintrust.

The food pyramid recommends
two to three daily servings of dairy products. The PCRM recommendations
claims are a bit bizarre. First, although minorities are disproportionately
lactose intolerant, there are plenty of white folks that suffer from lactose
intolerance as well. I personally know about half a dozen people who are
not minorities and severely lactose intolerant – the kid next door vomits
rather violently if he eats cheese. One of my family members cannot drink
milk without getting sick and as a child I had similar, though milder,
problems with dairy products (even today although I can tolerate it, I
cannot stand milk). The food pyramid guidelines were never meant to be
universally applicable to everyone.

Second, most people suffering
from lactose intolerance generally have milder symptoms and often only
intermittently; only a small percentage suffer from the severe symptoms
PCRM is complaining about. But this doesn’t seem to phase PCRM’s |Neal
Barnard| who told the Sacramento Bee, “Milk shouldn’t be required.
It should be optional. It has health risks and takes a particular toll
on certain people.”

But that is also true of almost
any food. I cannot drink orange juice without experiencing stomach discomfort.
A friend of mine has to avoid sulfates or risk potentially fatal consequences.
Other people can’t eat peanuts. The list goes on and on. If the goal is
a food pyramid that takes into account any food that “takes a particular
toll on certain people” it is going to have to be as big as the real
pyramids in Egypt.

Besides as many dieticians
point out, PCRM’s recommendations aren’t likely to be all that more appealing
to people than dairy. Certainly people can get their recommended daily
allowance of calcium from broccoli or beans or even sardines, but as UC
Davis Medical Center dietitian Craig Petersen puts it, “very few
people will consume enough vegetables to get the calcium they need.”

Source:

Calling food pyramid biased, group fights dairy requirement. Stephanie McKinnon McDade, Sacramento Bee, March 17, 1999.

As Easter gets closer, many
newspapers and news services are covering People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals‘ “Jesus Was a Vegetarian”
campaign. PETA has been paying for billboards around the country proclaiming
“Jesus Was A Vegetarian” and garnering lots of controversy.
In addition PETA has sent letters seeking the support of Christian evangelists
including Jerry Falwell; no word on whether PETA might interest Falwell
in a “Tinky Winky Was a Vegetarian” campaign.

Thankfully there’s been a
lot of good comments coming from religious authorities. Sister Sylvia
Schmidt, executive director of the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, told the
Daily Oklahoman that “dumping guilt on people about eating or not
eating meat is not what Jesus is all about.”

Several people have attacked
the theological and historical claims of PETA’s Bruce Friedrich, who is
directing the campaign. One might sum up the consensus by saying “Bruce
Friedrich Isn’t a Historian.”

As Dave Henry, editorial page
writer for the Amarillo Globe-News, pointed out, one doesn’t have to be
a biblical scholar to read several positive references to fishing in the
New Testament. Friedrich apparently believes these are later interpolations
into the text. Similarly, the PETA web site on the matter claims the narrative
describing Jesus multiplying fish was a later interpolation by Greek scribes.
Without going into a long debate about Biblical scholarship, it should
be pointed out that this sort of textual criticism opens the New Testament
open to a lot more challenges than simply Jesus’ dietary habits.

PETA also makes a lot of hay
over the fact that Jesus is described eating on several occasions, including
the Last Supper which, by tradition, would have included lamb – and yet
the New Testament doesn’t give us complete menus for these meals. Which
is hardly remarkable – although I eat meat, I don’t always relate what
I have at every dinner in letters to friends. I would be especially loathe
to do so if I had to painstakingly transcribe by hand such menus
as the original authors and their copyists had to do with the New Testament.

L. Michael White, professor
of classics and director of religious studies at the University of Texas
at Austin, summed up the PETA’s campaign rather succinctly: “This
is just another cause making bad use of Scripture. I’d say to them: You
can’t make the Bible do that.”

Source:

“Jesus was a vegetarian” ad makes critics cross. Reuters, March 4, 1999.

In some good news on the animal
rights terrorism front, hunger striker-extraodinaire Barry Horne recently lost an
appeal of his conviction for a fire-bombing campaign in the United Kingdom.
Horne, 46, was sentenced in 1997 to an 18-year prison sentence for the
bombings.

Horne’s fellow UK animal rights
activist and former spokesman Anthony Humphries was recently sentenced
to spend 7 years in jail for conspiracy to cause explosions and possession
of explosives. Humphries planned to firebomb drug firms that tested on
animals.

Closer to home, two Michigan
women were sentenced for their role in a raid on a Canadian mink farm.
The two women, Hilma Ruby and Patricia Dodson, plead guilty and were sentenced
to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay $34,000 apiece in fines for releasing
1,540 mink from the farm. According to the Canadian Mink Breeders Association,
this marks the first time a Canadian court has handed animal rights activists
jail time for a raid on a fur farm.

Sources:

Their only crime was compassion… Frontline Information Service, Press Release, March 18, 1999.

Two Jailed in Canada Mink Farm Raid. Associated Press, February 22, 1999.

Animal activist loses appeal. The BBC, February 26, 1999.

One of the shibboleths of the
animal rights movement is that eating meat is unhealthy and contributes
to diseases such as cancer. But a new report from the ongoing Nurses’
Health Study suggests at least some of those claims may not prove to be
true.

Researchers compared the diet
of women in the study who didn’t have breast cancer with the almost 3,000
women in the study who did have breast cancer. What they found was surprising
– there was no association between consumption of fat and breast cancer.
In addition, researchers found that women who ate large proportions of animal
fat were at no greater risk of breast cancer than those who didn’t.

As the researchers summed
up their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
“Our research indicates it’s highly unlikely that women who consume
a low-fat diet are protected against breast cancer. Equally it appears
a high-fat diet also poses no increased risk for the disease.”

There are some limits to study,
though. It only looked at a 14-year time period, and the results of low
fat diets may require longer than 14 years to show any decreased risk.
In addition, the study didn’t look at women with extremely low fat intakes
of 10 percent or less of total calories.

There is one bright spot for
animal rights activists in the study, though – it does contradict results
of animal studies which found associations between high fat diets and
cancer.

Source:

No link between dietary fat and breast cancer, study shows. Brenda Coleman, Associated Press, March 9, 1999.

Even if they don’t lead
immediately to treatments in human beings, the announcement of two recent
advances in genetic engineering of organs provides more evidence of the
sort of technologies likely to hit the mainstream of medical technology
before the end of the next decade.

In mid-February researchers
announced in Science News that they had successfully transplanted
bladders grown in the lab into six beagles. The scientists grew the bladder
cells around a plastic form to make it take the shape of the bladder and
then implanted the artificial bladders in the dogs. Within three months
the artificial bladders were completely active and some of the dogs have
had the bladders for almost a year with no problems.

Obviously getting the technology
to work in human beings is a whole other problem, but these experiments
are doing for this technology what the early animal experiments on organ
transplantations did – they suggest solutions and help scientists better
understand the problems they will encounter when seeking to grow human
organs in the lab.

In a related story, Canadian
researchers are hoping to take that step of translating animal experiments
into a treatment for human beings sometime this year. Researchers there
expect for the first time to use a genetically engineered pig liver to
keep a human being alive while waiting for a liver transplant from a human
being.

Pharmaceutical company Novartis,
which has been harshly criticized by animal rights activists for its efforts
in genetic engineering, is reportedly ready to spend up to $1 billion
to develop a viable pig liver. To avoid the risk of spreading disease
from pigs to human beings, the pigs will be raised under special conditions
to assure they are disease free. The pigs are isolated from other animals
and housed in a sterile environment. The pigs are fed by hand to avoid
microbes that might pass from pig to pig while suckling.

The impetus to move forward
with this technology is especially strong in Canada which has a rather
low rate of human organ donation – only 12.1 donors per million people
compared to the U.S. with 17.7 donors per million people.

As I noted two weeks ago,
the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation attacked Americans for Medical Progress for highlighting former Chicago Bear running back Walter Payton’s
recent announcement that he has a rare fatal liver disease. The CRT attack
on AMP, however, seemed like an act of desperation. They tried to throw
everything but the kitchen sink at AMP – xenotransplantation might not
work, it poses a risk of transmitting disease across species, it could
be avoided by increasing the donor pool, etc.

There are many responses to
these claims (CRT doesn’t seem to keep up with recent scientific advancements
in genetic engineering) but as far as I can tell the bottom line is this:
animal rights activism in the medical experimentation field has been successful
largely to the extent that it has engaged people’s sympathies against
hurting animals, especially unnecessarily. But that play on emotionalism
is a double-edged sword, since most people are openly “speciesist”
who, when it comes down to it, will find the suffering and pain of Walter
Payton far more compelling and worthy of alleviation than that of a pig
whose death could save Payton’s life.

What seems to anger CRT to
no end is that AMP gave them a taste of their own medicine with their
focus on Payton. I say more power to them.

Animal rights activists
have been agitating at Cornell University to ban animal |dissection| and
several weeks ago attempted to disrupt a biology lab class. In February,
Cornell president Hunter Rawlings sent an excellent letter to Cornell
Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, politely making the case
for the continuation of the animal dissection policy.

Cornell already offers students
in most classes alternatives to animal dissection. Only students taking
physiology courses must perform animal dissections. According to Rawlings,
though, even when offered alternatives, most students prefer the live dissections. Of
525 students who took Cornell’s introductory Biology 103, for example,
only 20 chose not to participate in the dissections.

Rawlings also noted that,
contrary to the student activist’s claims, classes were informed a week
prior to the dissections of the upcoming dissections and instructed to
discuss the matter privately with their instructors after class if they
wanted to choose an alternative.

Finally, Rawlings punctures
the oft-made claim that available alternatives to animal dissection are
more than adequate to completely replace live dissection. Rawlings wrote,

It is also important to note that many of the Biological Sciences
faculty agree that existing alternatives to dissection are almost universally
inferior to the level of quality appropriate for Cornell courses or are
otherwise unacceptable … In many cases, and in certain upper level courses,
they say, adequate alternative materials are simply not available … While
alternatives are available in the introductory general biology course,
I cannot accept your position that the university must adopt a policy
that all Cornell courses offer an alternative to animal dissection when
such a requirement is determined by the responsible faculty member to
be an essential element of the course of instruction.

In response to Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s claims that milk consumption doesn’t
help prevent osteoporosis, the National Dairy Council issued a press release
pointing out PCRM’s long running difficulties in giving accurate information.

As the NDC points out, “the
claim the group is making does not represent the total body of available
science. It is an erroneous conclusion based on a single study limited
to a narrowly defined population. The study, by its authors’ design, was
not constructed to show cause and effect as this group would want you
to believe. Rather, it was constructed as an epidemiological study intended
to generate observations and hypotheses that may lead to further study.”

PCRM misrepresented a study?
No, you don’t say.

The Texas Establishment for Animal Rights is quickly establishing
itself as the nuttiest of the nuttiest when it comes to AR groups. On
March 13 and 14 it will protest a Civil War reenactment held on a farm
in Texas. Are animals going to be killed or tortured? Nope, according
to a TEAR press release the problem is that “hundreds of men dressed
in civil war regalia, along with horses, cannons, rifles and mortars
will descend on the farm scaring the petting zoo animals, the farm animals,
the migratory waterfowl and birds.”

Is the Taliban going AR? The Taliban, the strict Islamic fundamentalist
group currently holding power in war-torn Afghanistan recently announced
it was banning the wearing of leather jackets. According to the Associated
Press, “Taliban soldiers used knives to slash the leather jackets
young men were wearing in Kabul today, saying the jackets were prohibited
under Islam, witnesses said.” How long before PETA puts up a “Mohammed
wore synthetics” billboard?