AnimalRights.Net

If any animal rights group has a shot at unseating People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as far as sheer nuttiness goes, clearly it will be United Poultry Concerns. Like PETA, their press releases are often so far over the top that they sometimes read like parodies.

A couple weeks ago, for example, UPC put out a press release urging people to protest at the Delmarva Chicken Festival held in Machipongo, Virginia. This is a large festival sponsored by the poultry industry. Emulating PETA’s press release style, the headline that UPC chose trumpeted the fact that “United Poultry Concerns Will Protest at the Delmarva Chicken Festival of Sickness, Fear, and Death.” Sounds like the opening line from some third-rate splatterpunk novel.

UPC is also certain to cover all of its bases in its objections to the poultry industry so as to make sure not to leave out any group potentially offended by the poultry industry. The press release goes on to say,

What’s to celebrate? Poisoned Well Water? 4 billion pounds of raw waste a year? 14 million pounds of phosphorus? 49 million pounds of nitrogen? 600 million birds breathing toxic ammonia? A million tons of manure each year? Chickens fed cattle brains? Repulsive smelling fields? Decaying carcasses? Polluted water? Carpel [sic] tunnel syndrome? Salmonella? Campylobacter? Listeria? Arsenic? Pfiesteria piscicida? Cruelty to birds? Millions of gallons of slaughterhouse waste trucked to Maryland from Delaware? Endless killing? Being owned by gangsters?

Whew. Was that a press release or a stream of consciousness assignment for Introduction to English Composition? And don’t forget the alternative vision UPC offers,

By contrast, United Poultry Concerns will proclaim the benefits of a vegetarian diet: Respect for life. Less pollution. Less sickness. Less suffering. Less death. More beauty. More happiness. More health. More peace.

You too shall see the vegetarian promised land. They could start delivering on the “more peace” promise by leaving us omnivores alone.

Source:

United Poultry Concerns Will Protest at the Delmarva Chicken Festival of Sickness, Fear, and Death. United Poultry Concerns, Press Release, June 16, 2001.

Steve Milloy wrote an excellent opinion piece for Fox News today (Animal Rights, Research Wrongs) attacking People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other animal rights groups. One of the groups Milloy defends is the March of Dimes. Since animal rights groups claim animal research into birth defects has done nothing but waste money, lets take a look at the lies of an animal rights group, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and compare it to the reality of what the research community has accomplished.

Milloy notes that the March of Dimes 2001 National Ambassador is a six year old boy who is alive today because of lung surfactant therapy. Lung surfactant therapy was developed thanks to animal research that the March of Dimes helped sponsor. Briefly, when you breathe your lungs contract. Lung surfactant is the substance that makes them expand again. Many infants born prematurely do not produce enough lung surfactant, and as a result their lungs tend to collapse which leads to increased mortality.

PCRM has a different take on the role of animal research and the March of Dimes in finding an effective treatment for lung surfactant deficiency. On the CharitiesInfo.Org web site, PCRM claims,

8. Did surfactant therapy for premature infants depend on animal experiments as the March of Dimes claims?

No. Surfactant is a natural compound that allows the lungs to operate normally. It was discovered in experiments using animal and human lung specimens in the late 1950s. Although some animal lung specimens were used, human lung specimens could have been used alone. Three years after its discovery, researchers demonstrated that premature infants have no surfactant in their lungs, but that the substance is present in the lungs of more mature infants, children, and adults. Within a few years, trials had begun administering this substance to infants with lung problems. Human studies continue today to improve surfactant therapy for infants.

As with most animal rights lies there is a grain of truth to this account, but if human studies were all that was needed to create lung surfactant therapy, it is a bit odd that the most effective such therapy is made from the lungs of calves. Here’s the reality.

In the mid-1950s a Boston-area physiologist, John Clements, discovered lung surfactant. He soon figured out that the substance’s function was to prevent lung collapse. A few years later in 1959, Mary Ellen Avery, a Boston-area pediatrician, discovered that premature infants born with a disorder called Hyaline Membrane Disease lacked lung surfactant which was the reason their lungs were collapsing.

Now if you take the PCRM account at face value, that settles it. Lung surfactant was discovered, and researchers knew that surfactant deficiency was the major cause of lung collapse in premature infants. So it was just a simple matter of developing a treatment and applying it to babies, right? Not by a long shot.

PCRM notes that “within a few years, trials had begun administering this substance to infants with lung problems” (emphasis added). What they forget to tell the reader is that a surfactant treatment wasn’t actually approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration until 1989(!) Finding a way to treat surfactant deficiency wasn’t quite as easy as PCRM pretends it was.

The first major treatment available was due to extensive research in sheep, not human beings. Researchers in New Zealand and the United States demonstrated that giving pregnant sheep steroids increased the rate at which fetal lungs developed, which in turn led to the development of surfactant in the lungs more quickly. Clinical trials in humans bore out the usefulness of delaying premature labor 24-48 hours and administering steroids to promote lung growth.

The introduction of ventilators in the early 1970s specifically designed to prevent lung collapse was also an important boon for the survival rates of premature infants.

Research into finding a safe, reliable surfactant replacement therapy continued through the 1970s and 1980s, much of it highly dependent on animal research. In fact when the U.S. FDA finally approved two surfactant replacement therapies, animal byproducts were the major component of one of the therapies. The natural surfactant replacement therapy is most commonly made from the extracts of calf lungs, though pig lungs and human lungs are occasionally used as a source as well. There is a synthetic surfactant available, but studies in both human beings and animals have tended to indicate that it is not as effective as that derived from bovine sources. On reason offered by the differing efficacy is the presence of proteins in the natural surfactant replacement which are absent in the synthetic replacement.

Far from animal studies being irrelevant, they played a fundamental role in developing a viable surfactant replacement therapy. So PCRM, take a deep breath and relax. Thanks to animal research, premature infants can have the same luxury.

Sources:

Why animal experiments fail in birth defects research. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, undated.

Surfactant Replacement Therapy. Victor Chernick, Canadians for Health Research.

Hyaline membrane disease. Discovery.Com.

New Studies Of A Liquid Of Life — Lung Surfactant. Science Daily, August 23, 1999.

Natural surfactant extract versus synthetic surfactant for neonatal respiratory distress syndrome. Roger F. Soll, National Institutes of Health, February 1999.

Animal Rights, Research Wrongs. Steve Milloy, Fox News, June 29, 2001.

The National Animal Interest Alliance recently created a spinoff called NAIA Trust designed to engage in lobbying and other political activities (under tax laws, NAIA can’t engage directly in lobbying, but NAIA Trust was incorporated under a different part of the tax code).

Many parts of the NAIA Trust web site are still under construction, but it looks like it is going to be a great resource for tracking animal rights and animal welfare-related legislation.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is urging animal rights activists to protest an upcoming new series on Animal Planet, “That’s My Baby.” The show will focus on baby animals and has been soliciting animal breeders in some parts of the country for stories. According to a press release,

The proposed TV series… will undoubtedly lead people to buy or breed animals, at the expense of the millions of homeless animals who are euthanized in shelters every year. Instead of glorifying irresponsible breeding, Animal Planet should discourage breeding at all levels. Please don’t let unfortunate dogs and cats die for Animal Planet’s TV ratings.

If the focus of the show is going to be on small breeders there is plenty of evidence that animals purchased from such breeders are far less likely to end up abandoned than are animals obtained in other ways (such as from a retail outlet or from a friend or neighbor trying to unload an unwanted animal).

Source:

Animal Planet Irresponsibly Promotes Breeding While Millions of Homeless Animals Die. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, June 2001.

Seattle attorney Harish Bharti is currently busy soliciting clients to bring a class action lawsuit against McDonald’s on behalf of vegetarians. As you may have heard, McDonald’s for years maintained that its french fries were vegetarian, but it turned out they used a beef byproduct as part of the flavoring. A solicitation on an animal rights web site reads,

If you are a vegetarian and have purchased McDonald’s fries within the last 11 years believing them to contain no animal ingredients based on the deceptive media campaign by McDonald’s, you may be eligible to participate in this class-action lawsuit. Please complete, sign and mail your declaration directly to Mr. Bharti.

Hmmm… why should animal rights activists have all the fun? If McDonald’s was being deceptive when it forgot to mention that its “vegetarian” french fries actually contained an infinitesimally small amount o beef extract, that pales in comparison to the snow job that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the United States have been pulling off for the last couple decades.

If McDonald’s had half the temerity that HSUS does, they’d have been touting their Big Mac as vegan!

Source:

Class Action Suit Filed Against Deceptive McDonald’s. The Progressive Animal Welfare Society, Press Release, 2001.

Freelance writer Viktor Frolke has conducted several interviews with people associated with the animal rights movement for Salon.Com in which he throws softball questions and generally fawns over those he’s interviewing. Even with such a friendly audience, however, Peter Singer simply digs himself further into a whole with bizarre statements.

Before discussing Singer, though, its important to note the animal rights advocacy that Frolke slips into the introduction of the interview. Describing Singer’s views, Frolke writes,

His central argument is elegant and simple; a child might have come up with it. Humans are animals, therefore animals are in the same league as humans, and should be treated as such. By attacking what he calls “speciesism,” racism based on species instead of skin color, Singer raises the status of animals. (He is generally considered to be the founding father of the animal liberation movement and has turned quite a few meat eaters into vegetarians.) But, and this is the more controversial part, in raising the status of animals — or nonhuman animals, as he calls them — he effectively lowers the status of human beings, just as Charles Darwin did when he showed that all living things are biologically related.

I won’t dispute at all the contention that Singer’s philosophical views often seem like they were conceived by a child or perhaps a rebellious adolescent. But to compare Singer’s philosophy to Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an absurd claim. The claim that natural selection implies that human beings and animals are morally equivalent is just as spurious as the Social Darwinist views of the early 20th century that led to mandatory sterilization of retarded people and cast the poor and other as “unfit” from an evolutionary standpoint.

Animal rights activists would like to pretend that natural selection implies there are no substantive moral differences between species, but in fact evolution provides the converse — it offers an elegant explanation of why I value human beings I have never met far more than animals (such as my cat) who are an important part of my family.

Anyway, on to Singer. Singer is angry that people refer to him as a Nazi (Singer lost three of his grandparents to the Holocaust). The philosopher complains that there is an intolerance of dissenting views in the United States, and besides, they misunderstand his views on things like infanticide. But then Singer turns around and reinforces the worst aspects of his philosophy. For example, consider this exchange between Folke and Singer,

Frolke: Most proponents of the right to die would agree with your ideas about euthanasia. But you lose them when you suggest that it’s OK to kill a baby before it’s 28 days old, because until that time, it is not self-aware and “doesn’t have the same right to life as others.”

Singer: I wrote that in 1995. I have changed my position. Now I believe you should look at every individual case.

Frolke simply lets that go without a serious follow-up question. Shifting from a position that says its okay to kill any child before its 28 days old to saying that, after further consideration, such killings should be considered on a case by case basis, is hardly much of an improvement.

And again, Singer starts out by implying that he’s only concerned about preventing extreme cases, such as preventing massive medical intervention to keep alive an infant born without a brain, but then he turns around and endorses infanticide for what are trivial reasons.

Frolke: Maybe you’re not saying that the lives of disabled people are not worth living, but on a scale they’re closer to that point than you are.

Singer: There are so many more factors important to the quality of life. Maybe the life of a disabled person is much more worth living than mine. All I’m saying is that at birth you can’t tell that. It’s reasonable to say that a life with a serious disability has the expectation of turning out less well than a life without disabilities. And I’m not talking about intellectual disabilities. I can imagine that parents of a newborn that is paralyzed, that’s always going to be in a wheelchair, might decide that they don’t want that child and that they are going to have another one. That’s a decision I can understand.

This, of course, is why his critics accuse Singer of being a proto-Nazi. To say that its reasonable to consider killing an infant who is simply paralyzed and will require a wheelchair is abominable. It is incredible that a man with such a barbaric view is incredible.

Source:

“Professor Death”. Viktor Frolke, Salon.Com, June 25, 2001.

Jack Lessenberry, the Ombudsman for the Toledo Blade, wrote a fascinating profile of Michigan animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky for that newspaper. After reading some of the quotes from Yourofsky, its scary that anyone takes him seriously (but people do).

Yourofsky has spent quite a bit of time in jail for various animal liberation acts, including two months in a Canadian prison for releasing mink from a Canadian farm. Yourofsky tells Lessenberry that he is $30,000 in debt and lives mostly off of donations. “[I'm] an activist 24/7,” Yourofsky said. “This is what I do.”

It gets better. According to Lessenberry, Yourofsky supports a large tattoo of himself wearing a hood and “displaying the symbols of the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front” on one of his arms. In addition Yourofsky has an exaggerated sense of self-importance, telling Lessenberry that he doubts he will live to see the animal rights movement succeed because, “I really think I will be assassinated.”

Not that Yourofsky particularly thinks violence is a bad thing. “…we must be willing to do whatever it takes to gain their [animals] freedom and stop their torture,” Yourofsky said.

Would it be okay if an activist killed an “animal abuser”? “I would unequivocally support that, too,” Yourofsky said.

All in order to achieve Yourofsky’s ideal. “What we must do is start viewing every cow, pig, chicken, monkey, rabbit, mouse, and pigeon as our family members.”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals loves Yourofsky — they gave him $10,000 for an anti-fur ad which aired in the Detroit area dozens of times.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the scary part is that Yourofsky is taken seriously, especially in some of the public schools here in Michigan. As Lessenberry notes, “he is increasing demands on the classroom and lecture circuit.”

Source:

Activist devotes life to animal rights. Jack Lessenberry, Toldeo Blade, June 24, 2001.

While doing a Lexis-Nexis search for another article, I came across a report from the Daily Telegraph earlier in the year about a minor event which nonetheless speaks volumes about animal rights’ groups preferred method of discourse. The Daily Telegraph reported in January that Bruce Friedrich became upset with London mayor Ken Livingstone and threw a glass of water into Livingstone’s face after the mayor mocked Friedrich’s concerns.

Friedrich, a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals‘ activist, was attending a press conference being held in Washington, D.C., by the visiting mayor. Friedrich attempted to question Livingstone about a new policy which banned the selling of pigeon-feed in London’s Trafalgar Square.

Apparently having had enough of Friedrich’s animal rights pitch, Livingstone replied that he expected “to be up before a war crimes tribunal for his treatment of the pigeons” any day. At that point, according to the Daily Telegraph, “Mr Friedrich rose from his chair and threw a glass of water into Mr Livingstone’s face.”

Source:

Pigeon food protester tips water over Livingstone. Ben Fenton, The Daily Telegraph (London), January 19, 2001.

The Independent (London) reports today that two animal rights protests demonstrated against Huntingdon Life Sciences by sitting on the roof of the north London home of Alan Powell. Powell is a director of the Bank of New York which deals in shares of Huntingdon stock.

Source:

Rooftop Protest On Animal Testing. The Independent (London), June 22, 2001.

After an overwhelming victory in recent elections, the Labour Party recently surprised many observers by omitting the long-promised ban on fox Hunting from the Queen’s Speech.

The Queen’s Speech is part of the ceremonies that surround the opening of Parliament. Although the Queen reads it, the speech is in fact written by leaders of whatever party is in power and outlines the legislation which the government sees as most important in the coming session.

Many people on both sides of the hunting debate had expected the proposed ban to be featured in the speech, bug instead it was omitted. The best the Labour Party is willing to do now, apparently, is guarantee that at some point Parliament will be able to have a free vote on the matter.

The upshot is that this will effectively delay any work on a hunting ban, if not kill the whole idea outright for the near future.

Source:

MPs anger as hunt bill is axed. Charles Reiss, ThisIsLondon.Com, June 20, 2001.

Hunt opponents scenting blood. Alex Kirby, The BBC, June 19, 2001.