AnimalRights.Net

    I know plenty of anti-animal rights folks who think that things like animal rights or ethical veganism are just shy of a religious cult, but I was a bit surprised to see a vegan arguing in court that this dietary preferences constituted a religious belief system. But that’s just what Jerold Friedman argued, unsuccessfully, in a lawsuit against his former employer, Kaiser Permanente.

    Kaiser Permanente offered a Friedman a full-time job and then retracted that offer after he refused to take a mumps vaccination; the mumps vaccination includes material derived from chicken embryos. According to Friedman, “Egg-laying hens suffer greatly in chicken factory farms, and the use of unborn chickens to culture the mumps vaccine causes further unnecessary death.” Apparently the extra unnecessary deaths of human beings that would result without the mumps vaccination don’t concern Friedman.

    Friedman has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit arguing that since veganism is a religion, his firing constitutes religious persecution under U.S. civil rights laws.

    Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald Sohigian flatly rejected this claim and summarily dismissed nine of the eleven cause of action against Kaiser Permanente outlined in Friedman’s lawsuit. (Friedman also accuses the company of lying to him by telling him that a TB test he took didn’t contain animal products, when in fact it is cultured in cow serum).

    Friedman’s lawyer is planning an appeal, saying, “We are confident that the Court of Appeals will hold Ethical Veganism as a religion or the functional equivalent of a religion. Not only Ethical Vegans, but all religious minorities would benefit from such a ruling,” said Friedman’s lawyer, Scott Myer.

    Despite Myer’s optimism it’s extremely unlikely that a court is going to hold veganism as a religious movement. Moreover, even if that happened it’s hard to see how it would help Friedman as laws against discrimination in the workplace don’t apply where the act of discrimination is a necessary part of the job, and clearly having a mumps vaccination and tuberculosis tests are extremely important for people working in health care.

Source:

Judge tosses much of ‘vegan’ suit; former Kaiser worker to appeal. Press release, July 17, 2000.

    You’d think they’d learn. The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade is already being sued by Jacques Ferber Furs under the civil provisions of RICO — essentially the fur store claims that CAFT is engaged in a conspiracy of illegal intimidation and harassment in order to drive legitimate enterprises out of business. CAFT, of course, denies the charge but since the lawsuit was filed there have been a number of incidents where people associated with CAFT have been arrested while attempting to or for allegedly planning to engage in illegal activities.

    In the latest incident, CAFT member Bhaskar Sinha was arrested in front of the Neiman Marcus store in San Francisco’s Union Square after allegedly confronting musician Ted Nugent and threatening to kill him. She is currently being held on a $20,000 bond charged with one charge of battery and attempt to terrorize.

    Nugent was in San Francisco to perform with Kiss Sunday night and went to Neiman Marcus to shop. After leaving the store, Nugent told police that he got into an argument with CAFT activists who were handing out leaflets denouncing the fur trade. Nugent told police that Shina threatened to kill him.

    The CAFT activists, meanwhile, claim Nugent spit on them and threatened them. A judge will get to start sorting the mess out today as Shina appears makes a court appearance. If Nugent’s claims hold up in court, this will be one more piece of evidence that will be used to drive the nail in the coffin of CAFT at its RICO trial.

Source:

Fur-for-All as Outspoken Rock Star Confronts S.F. Protesters. Mark Martin, Pervaiz Shallwani, San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2000.

    Last year animal rights activists joined protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization for allegedly not doing more to protect endangered species. Ironically, the European Union is trying to use the WTO mechanism to effectively force its regulations of animal agriculture on the United States and other WTO members.

    European agriculture is already relatively non-competitive, requiring massive state subsidies in many parts of the region to be profitable. In an attempt to make its agricultural products more competitive, European nations recently proposed that animal welfare issues be added to the WTO framework.

    The European Union has introduced proposed regulations that would determine the minimum space for battery hens as well as for animals being transported. The EU further argues that such regulations puts their farmers at a competitive disadvantage compared to farmers in countries that don’t have such regulations.

    Rather than dispense with expensive regulations that raise the cost of European-produced food, however, the EU proposes that European farmers be compensated for the additional costs that the regulations impose (in essence the EU is suggesting that it be rewarded for imposing economically inefficient regulations on its citizens). This is directly contrary to the basic framework of the WTO which calls for an end to government subsidies of agriculture.

    In addition, the EU wants the WTO to look at labelling food based on animal welfare issues. The labels apparently would inform consumers that the food was produced in countries that don’t have strong animal welfare laws.

    It would be the height of irony if a free trade pact which animal rights activists almost universally opposed ended up being a protectionist tool for the activists pet views on animal agriculture.

    Reuters had an interesting look a couple weeks ago at how scientists are using mice to better understand the human genome. The occasion was the 18th International Congress of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Craig Venter, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Celera Genomics — the company that recently played a key role in finishing the mapping of the human genome — announced that Celera planed on having a complete map of the mouse genome finished by the end of the year. The mouse would become only the second mammal to have its genome mapped.

    This will help scientists get a better handle on just how genes function. Because mice and human beings evolved from a common mammal ancestor, they share many genes. With both human and mouse genomes mapped, scientists can compare the two and arrive at a better understanding of the role that genes play in diseases.

    For example, Reuters reports that pharmaceutical companies are already mapping the functions of genes in mice by knocking out certain genes and then seeing what happens. In this way it’s possible to get a handle on how a gene functions in humans by seeing how it functions in human beings.

    ”The mouse is extremely important,” said Jan Hoeijmakers of Erasmus University, “because we can change any gene we wish and mimic exactly the mutation that causes disease in human patients.”

    Animal rights activists have long insisted that non-human animals are too different from human beings to be useful comparisons, but in fact mice and men are turning out to be very similar. According to Reuters, some of the early comparisons between already sequenced human and mice genes has found the genetic sequence so similar that it’s all but impossible to distinguish whether the genes are from a mouse or human. Obviously there will be many differences, but there will also should be a very large number of similarities.

    As Venter sums it up, “Comparative genomics is going to be the single most important tool going forward in analyzing genomes.”

    And, of course, it won’t stop at mice. Already there are plans to map the genes of other mammals species including the dog, cat, and rat.

Source:

Mouse Aids Navigating Gene Maze. Reuters. July 17, 2000.

    Activists protesting the meeting of the International Society for Animal Genetics conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota are being linked by police to two separate incidents in which canisters containing traces of cyanide were left at a Minneapolis-area McDonald’s as well as at at least two outdoor locations near the meeting place of the ISAG meeting. Along with being poisonous, cyanide is extremely explosive.

    Two firefighters and two McDonald’s patrons became slightly ill from fumes emitted from the cannister. Two suspects were caught on videotape leaving the canisters at the outdoor locations. Minneapolis police cited by the Associated Press claimed the individuals on the videotapes were recognized as being at the protest. Police also claimed a note was left at McDonald’s linking the cyanide canister to the protests, though the text of the note has not been released. Witnesses at the restaurant reported seeing several individuals leave behind the canister, but there was no word on whether or not the description of those people fit the description of those on the videotape of the earlier incident.

    Seventy protesters at the meeting were arrested on Monday, July 24, after clashing with police.

Source:

Police: Animal genetics protesters left traces of poison behind. The Associated Press, July 25, 2000

U.S. animal genetics parley sparks cyanide protest. Reuters. July 26, 2000.

    It’s kind of sad to see major media outlets get taken in by animal rights groups on such basic issues — in this case, what constitutes a physician. In this case the story revolves around Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine which is filing a petition with the Federal Trade Commission essentially arguing that claims made on behalf of milk in the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign are false. As PCRM president Neal Barnard laid out his case to the Associated Press regarding a “Got Milk?” ad featuring Britney Spears, “Britney’s ad might as well be captioned, ‘Oops, I did it again – sold out for an unhealthy product.”

    The problem is that the Associated Press story refers to PCRM as “a group of doctors opposed to dairy products” and the headline for the story on Yahoo! read “Docs Target ‘Got Milk?’ Ad Campaign” and on CNN “Anti-dairy doctors target ‘Got Milk’ campaign.” The only problem with this is that only about 10 percent of PCRM’s membership are actually physicians, and the group has been condemned for its anti-scientific rantings by the largest physician organization in the United States, the American Medical Association.

    If PCRM is a doctor’s group, then this site is about particle physics!

    The AP story also distinguishes between PCRM as a “doctors group” on the one hand and PETA as an “animal rights” group on the other, although PCRM was essentially a PETA creation with both Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco appearing as supporters on PCRM’s “Declaration of Concern and Support” (which included other prominent physicians such as Doris Day, Loretta Switt and singer Howard Jones!) Barnard himself has in the past served on the Boards of animal rights groups such as the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, coming onboard there after PETA’s successful 1987 takeover of NEAVS.

    PCRM isn’t some professional association concerned about American’s health, but rather an animal rights group bent on ending animal testing and the whole panoply of animal rights positions (and its stand on things like milk are equally intellectually bankrupt). It’s sad to see the mainstream media get taken in by PCRM’s public relations twist on animal rights.

The Labour government in Great Britain won’t win any friends among animal rights activists when it announces sometime in August that for the first time since the early 1970s, the number of animals used in medical experiments in the UK rose for two consecutive years. While courting animal activist votes in 1996, the Labour Party promised a special commission to reduce the number of animals used in experiments.

According to government figures, the number of animals used increased 1 percent in 1998 and could have increased up to 3 percent in 1999. Why?

Part of the problem is the way the UK counts the number of animals used in experiments. The big increase is occurring in areas of genetic engineering experiments. In many of these experiments an animals, such as a mouse, is genetically modified and then an experiment is conducted on the mouse. Under the way the UK measures the number of animals used in research, there is a strong possibility that the mouse will be counted twice — once when it is genetically modified and then again when the experiment is carried out.

Still even with this double counting problem, the sheer explosion in human knowledge about genetic engineering has probably led to an increase in the number of animal experiments being conducted in Great Britain and around the world. That should be hailed as a good thing, since it represents scientists getting ever closer to treatments for debilitating and deadly human diseases, but instead the Labour Party clearly fears the reaction from animal rights activists.

Meanwhile although the number of animals used for medical research is rising, it’s not rising nearly fast enough for medical researchers. More than 100 British scientists, including five Nobel Prize winners, recently signed a letter arguing that the UK’s onerous regulation of animal experiments was holding back important research that would inevitably be driven abroad unless the government streamlines the process. According to the letter.

Researchers using animals are already in a situation where overseas competitors can complete a series of experiments and be exploiting the results before permission to start would be given in the UK. If this situation persists or gets worse, as it has recently, it appears inevitable that a substantial part of the UK’s research effort, in many vital areas, will either become uncompetitive or forced abroad.

Animal rights activists such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection’s Michelle Thew reacted predictably that in fact the regulations don’t go far enough. “I’m staggered that they are calling for less animal regulation when the regulations we have aren’t working properly,” Thew said.

Professor Nancy Rothwell of Manchester University said that new paperwork requirements can cause research applications to run 50 to 100 pages in excruciating detail, and delay approval of research involving animals by 6 months or more.

Sources:

Red tape on animal experiments hold Britain back, say scientists. Nigel Hawkes, The Times (UK), June 13, 2000.

Animal testing appeal sparks protest. The BBC. June 13, 2000.

Second rise in animal experiments alarm ministers. Nigel Hawkes. The Times (UK). July 24, 2000.

The latest meeting of the International Whaling Commission all but turned into a rout for anti-whaling forces and likely presages the sort of battles that will be fought around the world in coming decades over the best way to preserve endangered species.

It’s only slightly oversimplifying to say that the fight over whaling boils down to two incompatible positions — on the one side are countries and activists who maintain that whaling is simply wrong regardless of whether or not whales are endangered. On the other side are nations that advocate hunting whales as part of long term plans to sustainably maintain whale populations.

For those opposed to whaling under any circumstance, the main problem is that the IWC has been too successful. In 1986 it imposed a worldwide ban on whaling, although the ability of the IWC to enforce that ban is pretty much non-existent. Japan has in fact resumed hunting small numbers of whales on the pretense of doing so for purely scientific purposes and Norway opposed the moratorium in the first place and largely ignored it. Despite this, in large measure the conservation effort worked and many endangered species of whales have come back with a vengeance.

Now Japan, Norway and other nations say that the science is on their side — whale populations have recovered to a point to sustainably allow a resumption in commercial hunting. But many of the nations on the IWC oppose whaling because, as the BBC summed it up, “they regard whaling as inhumane, unnecessary, and deeply unpopular with their electorates.”

The Japanese representative to the IWC blasted this “no whaling at any costs” view, pointing out the hypocrisy of the Australian position given that Australia opposes any resumption of whaling but on the other hand slaughters millions of kangaroos each year. “Perhaps if we renamed minke whales the ‘kangaroos of the sea,’ the Australian public would support” a resumption in whaling.

Ultimately regardless of who is right about the scientific case, the IWC’s steadfast insistence on no whaling ultimately may backfire and result in less protections for whaling. As the even the IWC secretary, Dr. Ray Gabmell, told BBC News, the pro-whaling nations are likely to leave the IWC if it maintains its ideological opposition to the resumption of whaling. Whaling outside the purvey of the IWC would almost certainly be worse for the whales than hunting under the aegis of the IWC.

“I would think it much better that it was brought within international regulations and oversight,” Gambell said. “I think the commission will need to move forward on measures which would allowed controlled whaling, otherwise it will lose credibility. If the commission cannot set its house in order, people will start to ask: ‘Why do we need it at all?’”

This is not dissimilar to the issue currently facing species preservation plans in the United States, such as for wolves, where activists fight to bring a species back but then fight tooth and nail any attempt to control their population through hunting. Unfortunately, if political communities know that once an endangered species recovers that they will have no means to control its numbers, this creates an enormous disincentive to preserve endangered species, as well as leaving the impression that preserving endangered species is not about science but about Green sentimentality.

Around the world the self-interest of communities is being used to spur efforts to save endangered species, but the irrational attempt to ban culling and hunting of species once they have recovered threatens to reverse that progress.

Sources:

Australia accused of whaling hypocrisy. The BBC, July 2, 2000.

Whaling ban stans – for now. The BBC, July 6, 2000.

Whaling commission struggles to survive. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Whale sanctuary rejected. The BBC. July 4, 2000.

Controversy swells around whaling commission meeting. ENN. June 29, 2000.

    In an interesting development in cloning, a cloned cow in Japan gave birth naturally to a healthy calf. The researchers responsible for Dolly the sheep managed to get her to give birth, but this appears to be the first confirmed incident of a cloned cow giving birth.

    ”There have been arguments over the fertility of cloned cattle but the birth can be seen as a convincing answer,” Koichi Yamamoto, deputy director of the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center where the cow gave birth, told the BBC. “Kaga No 2 is feeding its calf and it shows that cloned cows can recognise their own babies and may have maternal instincts.”

Source:

Cow clone gives birth. The BBC. July 11, 2000.

    The other day while satirizing the folks at Animal Rights 2000, I mentioned that Robert Cohen (who likes to call himself the NotMilk Man), promised to build a 17-foot turkey, fill it with red-colored Karo syrup, and slit the artificial turkey’s throat in front of the White House to protest Thanksgiving. Aside from the sheer nuttiness of such a venture, I was intrigued after finishing that piece about how Cohen would manage to still be alive come Thanksgiving 2000.

    See, back in November 1999 Cohen made a big deal of going on a hunger strike to protest the U.S. government’s approval of rBGH, a hormone given to cows which many activists thinks causes cancer and other maladies. The evidence isn’t on their side, but Cohen filed with the FDA to have rBGH banned because of new evidence he claims proves the hormone is dangerous. In fact, Cohen promised that he would continue his hunger strike until the FDA removed rBGH.

    In online diary Cohen kept of his plans for the hunger strike, he wrote:

Next Sunday, November 7th, I will begin a hunger strike.

I will not end that protest until POSILAC is taken off of the market.

    And only a few days into the hunger strike,

My pledge, I will not eat until Monsanto’s poison is taken out of our food.

    The FDA completely squashed his attempts to get rBGH banned, so reading his promise for Thanksgiving, I was curious how we was going to survive more than a year on a hunger strike and still be healthy enough to carry out his plan. Silly me, Cohen went off his hunger strike at the end of May, even though Monsanto is still putting “poison” in our food. What happened?

    Lets parse the message Cohen wrote on his web site on May 29, 2000, announcing the end of the hunger strike:

I have accomplished all that I am capable of.

    Translation: Cohen never got nearly the amount of publicity he anticipated. Maybe in a different country he might get more coverage, but when you’ve got PETA running around threatening to hand out dismembered animal toys to children, you’ve got to do a lot more than just stop eating to get attention. The unique nature of his hunger strike, where he was not necessarily eating but was, by his own account, consuming liquids that would have provided a substantial number of calories probably didn’t help either. Add to that the exhaustive number of studies on the safety of rBGH and there simply was never much news coverage of Cohen’s plight (which, I’m sure, he’ll ascribe to a conspiracy by Monsanto), despite his attempts to make it look like he was willing to starve himself to death to make a point.

I possess the secret study in which laboratory animals got cancer from Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. That study was authored by Richard, Odaglia, and Deslex, and if I release the study I will go to jail. … Is going to jail worth revealing the horrors of what happened to lab animals?

    I wonder if he mentioned this at AR 2000. It would have been amusing to watch Cohen get up and tell a bunch of animal rights activists that no, really, animal tests can tell whether or not a given compound might cause cancer in human beings. If there was anything incriminating in this study, Cohen would have arranged for its publication a long time ago.

Today I end my hunger strike, and will continue to spread the word of truth.

    I’m certainly glad Cohen decided not to kill himself over his silly position on rBGH, but I doubt we’ll be hearing much truth from him anytime soon. In a recent update to his web site, Cohen announced he was going on a speaking tour “including a nighttime appearance in a comedy club.” Sounds like the perfect venue for his message.