AnimalRights.Net

In separate cases appellate courts in New Jersey and Illinois have upheld statutes
designed to prevent anti-hunting activists from using protests to disrupt hunting.

In the New Jersey case, three New Jersey residents were represented by Anna
Charlton and Gary Francione of Rutgers Law School. Their lawsuit contended that
the statute unconstitutionally restricted the three resident’s right to free
speech. By restricting where and when the activists could protest against hunting,
the lawsuit argued, the state of New Jersey was unconstitutionally impinging
on their right to express their views to hunters.

The appellate court upheld the statute so long as it is used to establish standards
on the time, place and manner of anti-hunting protests rather than being used
to quash all anti-hunting protests altogether. As the court put it,

[t]his construction places a reasonable limitation on the reach of the Hunter
Harassment Statute in that it circumscribes the area where protesters may
not be free to express their anti-hunting ideas, while preserving areas outside
the immediate proximity of the hunting grounds for that purpose . . . By defining
interference as a form of physical impediment, coupled with the general and
specific intent requirements that solely implicate conduct, the statute is
not an overboard regulation of First Amendment rights.

In the Illinois case, a court there granted an injunction to the Woodstock
Hunt Club in Woodstock, Illinois, to bar members of the Chicago Animal Rights
Coalition from protesting on the road outside the club using megaphones, air
horns, sirens and other noisemaking devices. Chicago Animal Rights Coalition
member Steve Hindi was arrested in 1996 for flying a motorized paraglider over
hunters in order to scare away geese. Hindi was arrested and eventually sentenced
to probation for violating the hunter interference statute.

Previously the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a portion of the hunter interference
statute that unconstitutionally regulated the content of anti-hunting protests,
but upheld the portion of the statute that set time and place restrictions on
anti-hunting protests.

Which seems like an excellent compromise to me. Certainly animal rights activists
should have the right to protest hunting and to communicate their opposition
in public. On the other hand, this right to protest can be accommodated while
also preserving the right of hunters to hunt without activists intentionally
disrupting them.

The last time animal activists in Great Britain tried to ban fox Hunting with
dogs what looked like an easy win turned into an embarrassing debacle
for Tony Blair’s Labor government. Apparently it is not an embarrassment
Blair will easily forget as in a nationally televised debate Blair vowed,

It [fox hunting] will be banned. We will get the vote to ban
it as soon as we possibly can. We had one try last session. It was blocked
by the Conservatives in the House of Commons and the House of Lords
and we’re looking now at ways of bringing it forward in a future session
that allows people to have a vote and actually carry it through.

This pleased the International Fund for Animal Welfare which wants to ban hunting altogether in the United
Kingdom by Jan. 1, 2000. According to Mike Baker, executive director of
the IFAW, “Hunting wild mammals with dogs is cruel and unnecessary and
the government has recognized that it has no place in a modern Britain.”

Alex Slack, 29, of Salt Lake
City, Utah, killed himself while awaiting trial on state and federal charges
alleging he participated in raids on Utah-area mink farms. Slack had also
been a major suspect in the firebombing of a Tandy Leather store several
years ago.

Like other suspected and convicted
animal rights terrorists, however, Slack claimed only to be a spokesperson
for the Animal Liberation Front.

The Primate Freedom Tour continues
to wind its way across the country. In a stop at the University of Southwestern
Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center, animal rights activist Jennifer
Schneider compared the facility to a concentration camp.

“As a descendant of the Jewish
people, I must speak out against the primate concentration camp at New
Iberia (and) the scientific fraud of primate research,” Schneider said
in a prepared statement.

Although the Tour hoped to
get researchers involved in a debate, the Iberia Research Center refused
to take the bait. “It is not our purpose to debate the issues,” said veterinarian
and New Iberia director Thomas J. Rowell. Not that Rowell didn’t do a
good job of deflating the animal rights claims with brochures and media
interviews that led to highly favorable coverage.

A reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate highlighted the important work being done at the facility by
noting that, “research at the center has helped to ensure the safety and
efficacy of polio vaccines, led to the development of vaccines for hepatitis
and types of pneumonia and influenza, as well as contributed to knowledge
about Creutzfeldt-Jakob and mad cow diseases, he [Rowell] said.”

After repeating the typical
animal rights cant about alleged animal abuse at primate facilities,
the Advocate noted that,

Similar stories were told by other protesters,
although none knew of any specific examples of mistreatment of animals
at the New Iberia facility. Rowell calls some of the protesters objections
“a complete misconception.” “You have, what, a sixth-grade school teacher
that’s leading the effort?” he asked. “I’m not sure what experience he
has in science and what we do in the line of research support.”

In fact, the New Iberia’s handling
of the tour is almost a textbook case in how to defuse animal rights activists.
Rowell wisely chose to hold a press conference about the Primate Tour
a few days before the protesters arrived so that the media would be well
aware of the type of research and monitoring that goes on in his facility.

In addition, Rowell tried
to kill the activists with kindness. At his press conference he told the
assembled reporters that Primate Freedom Tour members had a right to protest
his facility and said an area near the research center would be made available
for the protesters. During the protest the university offered the protesters
water coolers, portable toilets and awning to block the sun, but the activists
refused the offer. Tour research director Rick Bogle refused the assistance,
saying, “We cannot accept it because the money they used to
purchase it has blood on it … it came from the sale of innocent primates
into torture and death .. it’s blood money.”

Fur Commission USA, which represents
over 400 fur farms, recently issued a press release on the Jacques Ferber Inc. lawsuit against the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, the Animal Defense League, and Vegan Resistance for Liberation. Under the civil provisions
of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), Ferber
alleges that these three groups as well as four named individuals engaged
in a series of acts that amounted to a criminal conspiracy to
interfere with a legitimate business enterprise.

As I’ve mentioned before,
RICO was originally meant to help prosecutors go after legitimate businesses
that were used as fronts by organized crime, but it is the civil provision
of the act that has gained the most notoriety. Pro-choice groups recently
won big victories in two separate civil cases against pro-life groups
and individuals that advocated or approved of illegal acts against abortion
clinics, but did not actually participate in such illegal acts. Juries
in those cases agreed with the plaintiffs that even though the defendants
did not commit illegal acts, by their advocacy of illegal acts they were
part of a conspiracy that did commit such acts and as such could be held
liable for the illegal acts.

The Fur Commission USA release
noted that since 1995 Ferber was subjected to almost weekly protests by
animal rights groups and on April 24, 1999, “vandals wearing hoods
smashed the store window.” Ferber argues that the three animal rights
groups and the four individuals named in the suit engaged in a pattern
of harassment intended to intimidate the company and ultimately force
it out of business. The Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that juries should
be allowed to decide whether or not this sort of activity constitutes
extortion.

Ferber might have an even
stronger case than did the pro-choice groups if Fur Commission USA’s information
is accurate. It quotes one of the activists named in the suit, Brett Wyker,
but in a footnote at the end of its release claimed:

In January [1999], Wyker e-mailed FCUSA’s Terry Platt: “hey,
what did oyu [sic] think of the Fur Farmers convention in WI? FUR IS DEAD
AND YOU’LL BE SOON!”

The convention in question
was the International Mink Show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where several
masked animal rights activists tried to gain entrance to the show. According
to Fur Commission USA, among those activists was Gary Yourofsky, an activist
recently jailed in Michigan for releasing mink from a farm there, and
CAFT’s John Paul Goodwin.

These sort of links between
those who commit illegal acts and nominally nonviolent groups and individuals
is exactly the sort of evidence that led to the pro-choice plaintiffs
to win their cases. Lawyers in those cases produced evidence showing
all sorts of connections between the allegedly nonviolent activists pro-live
activists who did commit crimes and told the jury that it
was absurd to claim that the two were not part of an organized, illegal
attempt to shut down a legitimate business.

Ferber’s lawsuit is apparently
at a standstill while lawyers try to find and serve the four individuals
named in the lawsuit, but once that is taken care of this will be an interesting
test case of the RICO statute. If it can prevail it could be the beginning
of the end of common practices used by groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and others (in much the same way that pro-life groups
have had to radically alter their tactics in the last decade). On the
other hand, since animal rights issues have a far lower profile than abortion
issues, this case might not receive nearly the same treatment as the case
against the pro-life groups did, and could potentially lead to another
round of judicial review of the RICO statute.

On June 22, Mary Tyler Moore appeared with about 100 young people on Capitol
Hill to lobby for increased funding for juvenile diabetes. Moore, chairwoman
of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, told the Senate Appropriations Committee,

What gives us all hope at JDF is the promise of research and the commitment
of this Committee and you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Harkin, to make doubling
the NIH budget over the next five years a top national priority … Look
around this room once more, listen to the voices of the children who will
tell you their stories today, and when you retire to your deliberations, promise
to remember them—promise to remember the more than 16 million people
who, like me, have diabetes.

Is this the same Mary Tyler Moore who is a People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals favorite for her many pro-animal rights stances? Along with some
anti-fur activism, PETA has championed Moore for endorsing its anti-Premarin
campaign. PETA and Moore object to Premarin, a hormone replacement therapy for
post-menopausal women, because it is derived from the urine of horses that PETA
claims are mistreated.

The money she is asking to go to studying juvenile diabetes would, of course,
include extensive funds channeled to animal research. The Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation is solidly behind a recent report made by the Congressionally mandated
Diabetes Working Group. That report offers numerous recommendations on how to
proceed with research on diabetes, a significant portion of which will involve
extensive use of animals. For example, the DWG notes that there are still enormous
unknowns about diabetes’ effects on cardiovascular disease:

Little is known, for example, about how diabetes causes arteriosclerosis
and cardiovascular disease. However, advances in the exciting area of genetic
research may soon make it possible to develop animal models with both diabetes
and arteriolosclerosis, or other cardiovascular abnormalities. Such animal
models, which closely mimic human diabetes, could help answer many questions
about the disease.

In fact just about every recommendation the DWG makes, from increased research
on obesity to more funding for basic research on cell signaling would rely heavily
(as does most such research) on experiments with animals. The Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation itself recognized the importance of this when it recently collaborated
with the Harvard Medical School to launch the JDF Center for Islet Cell Transplantation
at Harvard Medical School. Islet transplantation involves replacing the body’s
insulin-producing cells that are destroyed in Type I diabetes when the body
express an immune reaction to the cells. Such research, which so far has produced
some tantalizing insights but no medically viable treatment in humans, has involved
extensive tests on animals.

All of which makes Moore the typical animal rights Hollywood hypocrite who
latches on to the movement as a nice, safe, and oh-so politically correct cause
and never even bothers to think about the contradictions of being in league
with PETA which actively opposes everything she’s trying to accomplish
with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

Prior to giving her testimony, Moore told CNN, “I think it’s going
to be very difficult for the people in Congress to listen to these children
tell them what it’s like to live with a chronic disease like diabetes
and not remember it.” Maybe people in Congress might find it difficult,
but Moore’s friends at PETA won’t. They list the Juvenile Diabetes
Foundation as one of several dozen health-oriented charities that “starve,
cripple, burn, poison, and slice open animals to study human diseases and disabilities.
Such experiments have no practical benefit to anyone.”

Just weeks after Gary Francione threw in the towel on the Rutgers Animal Law
Clinic after blaming the supposed conservative, anti-animal rights environment
on American campuses, one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools
announced that for the first time it will offer an elective class focusing on
animal rights.

Harvard Law School will offer its first animal rights course next year. Harvard
went out and hired animal rights activist attorney Steven Wise to teach the
new course. Wise, a past president of the Animal Legal Defense Fun and current
president of the Center for Expansion of Fundamental Rights has litigated numerous
animal rights cases at the state and federal level.

In its press release on the course, Harvard Law School quotes extensively from
the course description of the class written by Wise, which bears repeating:

[students will] learn that non-human animals are not legal persons and have
no legal rights. They do have a small number of legal protections. We will
review some of these protections and delve into the difficulties of attaining
standing to litigate in the interests of nonhuman animals. However, for the
last 25 years, demands that at least some other animals be given at least
some fundamental legal rights have been rising.

We will discuss the sources and characteristics of fundamental rights, why
humans are entitled to them, why nonhuman animals have been denied them, whether
legal rights should be limited to humans and, if not, what nonhuman animals
should be entitled to them under the common law, and to which legal rights
they should be entitled. Finally, we will examine in detail the arguments
for and against the entitlement of chimpanzees and bonobos to the common law
rights to bodily integrity and bodily liberty.

The last paragraph is especially interesting since the stated purpose of Wise’s
Center for Expansion of Fundamental Rights is to extend fundamental rights to
chimpanzees and bonobos.

Although a few other law schools offer courses on animal rights, Harvard’s
decisions could pave the way for the widespread adoption of animal rights courses
across the country. As Pamela Frasch, who teaches an animal law course at Northwestern
School of Law of Lewis and Clark College, told the Associated Press, “Everybody
I know that teaches animal law was absolutely thrilled to hear that Harvard
was going to offer it. It’s just reality that if Harvard is going to teach
it, that other schools that might have looked askance at it as a legitimate
area of study might take another look.”

Alan Ray, Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for academic affairs, defended
the course by saying, “It took a 13th Amendment to the Constitution for
us to outlaw slavery at a time when people were treated as property because
of the color of their skin. There are occasions in the law for taking a very
fundamental look at the treatment of other living things.”

With Princeton’s hiring of Peter Singer and Harvard’s hiring of Wise,
the day will not be too far off when our universities will find scientists on
one end of campus victimized by animal rights terrorists while legal professors
on the other side of campus teach students that the violent activists are simply
modern day abolitionists.

Procter and Gamble recently announced that it would end all animal tests on
all “current beauty, fabric and home care, and paper products.” That
decision was initially hailed by some animal rights groups such as People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which tried to take credit for P&G’s
decision.

In Defense of Animals suggested, however, that the whole thing might be a sham.
In a response to P&G, IDA’s Elliot Katz said,

It has been their [Procter & Gamble’s] competitive nature in the
past that has led to enormous suffering, and it is inherent corporate greed
that is allowing them to continue torturing animals on future products. There
is always apprehension that such grand statements are made for public relations
reasons as opposed to concern and compassion for the animals. Because they
have been disingenuous in the past, there is reason to be leery now.

The sticking point seems to be Procter & Gamble’s apparent intention
to test new ingredients and new products formed from old ingredients on animals.
The proposed solution offered by some animal rights activists is typical of
these groups’ mentality. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
suggested in a press release that, “P&G [should] wash their hands of
animal testing for good by using only combinations of the thousands of ingredients
already proven safe, which do not necessitate further animal testing.”

The Associated Press recently
ran a long profile of the Texas cattlemen who have the dubious distinction
of spending large amounts of money in an effort to keep alive a lawsuit
against Oprah Winfrey for disparaging remarks she said about beef on her
show several years ago. Winfrey already successfully defended herself
in a civil lawsuit brought by the cattleman, that in this writer’s opinion
made the Texas beef industry look very bad. Winfrey may show poor judgment
in relying on someone as unreliable as Howard Lyman for dietary advice,
but the same right to free speech that lets the industry and others show
the animal rights claims are nonsense also protects those who hold other
opinions.

According to the Associated
Press story, the cattlemen have spent close to $6 million pursuing the
case against Winfrey – currently they are appealing the result of the
civil trial on several grounds – and are willing to spend even more get
a court to hold Winfrey liable for her comments.

Charles Babcock, an attorney
for Winfrey, says that he does not see Winfrey giving in any time soon
either. “We feel this is a meritless lawsuit,” Babcock said.
“A jury decided it is a meritless lawsuit. The court of public opinion
says it is without merit. The trial judge said it is without merit. We
think the court of appeals will agree, but if not, we’re ready to go do
it again.”

The whole business carries
a lot of the stench associated with the |McDonald’s| lawsuit against activists
who passed out pamphlets in the United Kingdom accusing McDonald’s of
doing everything from producing food that caused cancer to destroying
the environment. Under British libel laws that heavily favor plaintiffs,
the so-called “McLibel” case became the longest running trial
in British history and when it was all said and done McDonald’s won an
award for a paltry $96,000.

Like the McDonald’s lawsuit,
the cattlemen’s obsessive pursuit of Oprah Winfrey is the sort of intimidation
tactic I would expect to see from animal rights activists.

The Primate Freedom Tour is
rolling through the United States, spreading misinformation about medical
research involving primates and generating a fair amount of controversy
even within the animal rights movement.

The tour travels across the
United States stopping at primate research facilities long enough to protest
and grab a bit of media attention. In large measure, however, the tour
has backfired on its sponsors due to the tactics they have adopted.

Along with the typical animal
rights tactics — one protester locked himself in a cage for three days
outside of a Coulston facility — members of the Primate Freedom Tour
have protested outside the homes of researchers working at primate facilities
and released the home addresses of their targets in press releases. In
several cases police have come close to arresting primate tour members
and a University of California of Davis researcher was arrested recently
for allegedly assaulting protesters outside his home.

Such tactics have garnered
the tour a wave of negative publicity, helped out by press releases form
the tour itself that emphasize the group’s militant stand and tactics.
By July 1, Suzanne Roy and Eric Kleiman, program director and research
director respectively at In Defense of Animals, had enough and issued
a “Personal statement against certain tactics of Primate Freedom Tour”
attacking the militant tactics which, Roy and Kleiman correctly perceive,
only work against the animal rights movement.

As Roy and Kleiman write,

A number of years ago, the A[merican] M[edical] A[ssociation]
developed an action plan for neutralizing the animal rights movement.
Its strategy was to portray animal rights advocates as extremists and
terrorists … We believe the Tour is certainly making the jobs of A[mericans
for] M[edical] P[rogress] and other similar groups easier. Their attempts
to portray all animal advocates as extremist fanatics, engaged in a terroristic
‘jihad’ that must be constrained by the police … are certainly being facilitated
by the Tour’s organizers.

Roy and Kleiman are certainly
right about the ethics and media effect of home protests, but their own
statement itself belies the claim that animal rights activists are being
falsely painted as extremists and terrorists by the AMP and AMA. The fact
is that most animal rights activists and organizations are extremists
as evidenced by the fact that Roy and Kleiman had to release their comments
as a “personal statement” and make very explicit that their views don’t
reflect that of In Defense of Animals, which is one of the sponsors of
the Primate Freedom Tour. Since the Tour began, Roy and Kleiman are the
only two individuals to my knowledge to issue such a statement and no
animal rights organization has come out with any statement containing
anything but praise for the Primate Freedom Tour.

This silence is deafening
and yet Roy and Kleiman would have us believe that the extremists who
would protest at a researchers home represent a small minority of animal
rights activists and the rest of the movement is unfairly associated with
this tiny fringe of the movement. Please, give it a rest already. This
is as believable as the constant refrain that the Animal Liberation Front’s
acts of destruction don’t represent the animal rights movement, even though
all but a handful of animal rights groups refuse to condemn such actions
and most express their sympathy with the terrorists.