AnimalRights.Net

The British newspapers The Sunday Mercury and The Times (London) both ran stories this week featuring supporters of fox hunting threatening to carry out Animal Liberation Front-style actions if the government goes ahead and bans fox hunting.

Here’s how the Times summed up the various ideas being put forth by some pro-hunting extremists,

One plan is to immobilise a motorway by covering a stretch with a ton of pop rivets that would slash vehicle tyres. Other ideas include dumping sand into sewers to block drains, and pouring dye into Welsh reservoirs that supply the Midlands. Severn Trent Water has stepped up its security. Such action, and a massive campaign of civil disobedience, is expected to follow any government announcement to ban or curtail hunting. The hotheads are operating under the loose banner of The Real Countryside Alliance and have issued leaflets and a poster with a Green Union Flag and slogans such as “rural rebellion” and “free country.”

The Sunday Mercury reported that some pro-hunt acts of violence had already occurred. According to that newspaper,

Four Labour MPs, including junior agriculture minister Elliot Morley, have had their constituency offices attacked by a group of militant pro-hunt supporters — believed to be from the RCA — led by a balaclava-clad woman. It has also been blamed for defacing the famous hillside white horses in Oxfordshire and North Yorkshire with giant graffiti figures of huntsmen and hounds.

Aside from the fact that this sort of nonsense is indefensible, like animal rights terrorism it will prove self-defeating. These sorts of actions do not gain sympathy for a cause, but only further alienate people who might agree with hunters and marginalize the fox hunting movement. Mainstream groups should denounce these sort of tactics.

Sources:

‘We’ll attack water supply’. Paul Malley, The Sunday Mercury, September 15, 2002.

Hunt hotheads plan disruptive action. Valerie Elliott, The Times (London), September 16, 2002.

Farm USA’s Alex Hershaft recently distributed a press release announcing the 20th annual celebration of World Farm Animals Day. The release had an odd title, “Activists bring the slaughterhouse to America’s streets.” Is that some sort of commentary on the movement’s penchant for terrorism and destruction? Hershaft has, after all, made it clear that activists who espouse violence are more than welcome at his annual animal rights convention, and no sort of criticism of such activists will be permitted therein.

The press release was filled with several dubious claims, but smartly avoided publishing any statistics on the number of farm animals killed in 1983, when the event began, to 20 years later

When World Farm Animals Day began in 1983, Americans ate a total of 180.9 pounds of meat per capita every year. For 2003, the USDA projects Americans will eat 193.6 pounds of meat per capita. But, of course, for farm animals the situation is (from Farm USA’s perspective) far worse.

Beef consumption during those 20 years declined from 74.2 pounds in 1983 to an estimated 62.0 pounds in 2003. The problem, of course, is that this means total chicken consumption skyrocketed from 34.5 pounds in 1983 to an estimated 53.3 pounds in 2003 — and it takes a lot more chickens to provide that additional 18.8 pounds of meat than it does cattle. The total number of farm animals has exploded just in the United States.

Yet, according to Farm USA,

Growing awareness of the adverse health consequences of meat consumption, including the largest recall of ground beef contaminated with E. coli, is driving consumers to meat alternatives offered by mainstream producers in local supermarkets.

Certainly there is a rise in the popularity of vegan and vegetarian products, but Farm USA makes the mistake of associating that with a total rejection of meat, which is simply not happening (my family, I suspect, is typical — we buy plenty of meat substitutes along with our chicken and turkey).

Moreover current estimates put the total number of farm animals worldwide as likely doubling this century as the per capita incomes in the underdeveloped world increase to developed world levels.

Farm USA also makes this odd warning about foot and mouth disease,

The foot-and-mouth and mad cow epidemics have devastated the European meat industry and threaten to have a similar effect in the U.S.

But, of course, the foot-and-mouth and mad cow epidemics have been a boon for American animal agriculture which has been exporting meat to make up for the problems in Europe. Neither Mad Cow nor foot-and-mouth have yet to rear their heads in the United States despite the wishful thinking of some animal rights activists.

It won’t be too long before Hershaft is issuing the press release for the 30th and then the 40th and so on observances of World Farm Animals Day.

Source:

Activists bring the slaughterhouse to America’s street. Farm USA, August 25, 2002.

A study of 2,041 Swedish and Norwegian 15 and 16 year olds found mixed results from the small number of such teens who were classified as “low meat eaters” including vegetarians.

The studies main finding was that the subgroup identified as consuming little or no meat were not healthier than the teens in the group who were not “low meat eaters.” Such teens were just as likely to smoke, drink alcohol, or do drugs as their meat consuming peers. Their was also no statistically significant difference in their weight, body mass index or opinion about their weight.

Ironically, health issues were actually more important to the omnivorous teens than to the vegetarian and near-vegetarian subgroup. The “low meat eating” subgroup also reported being depressed more frequently than did the omnivorous teens.

The researchers had a number of speculations about the differences, but the bottom line is that they’re studying so few vegetarians and near-vegetarians that the best the researchers could offer is speculation. Most such studies end up like this, surveying a large group of individuals and then subsequently producing studies on the small number of vegetarians. It would be interesting to see a large scale study of vegetarian teens.

Source:

Teens who eat less meat no healthier than others. Reuters, September 10, 2002.

The Register-Guard (Oregon) made the mistake recently of publishing an article in which it quoted the manager of local Noti’s Greener Pastures Poultry as claiming that chickens don’t have feelings. Karen Davis responsded with a letter in which she begged to differ and described her personal relationship with her favorite chicken.

Noti’s manager Aaron Silverman told the newspaper that,

If you spend time with chickens, you realize pretty quickly that they don’t hae feelings and emotions the way horses or dogs do. I’ve even had pigs that pout, but I have never seen a chicken pout.

That slight of the chicken was just too much for Davis, who describes her close personal relatinship with her chicken, Viva,

My nonprofit organization, United Poultry Concerns, grew out of the bond I formed with a chicken named Viva who escaped being slaughtered in 1987. From Viva, I learned many things. For example, when you hold a chicken close to your heart and she squirrels her neck around your neck and buries her face in your hair, she often purss like a cat. If you have — as I do — a yard full of hens and roosters, you learn quickly how emotional these birds are.

Whatever you say, Karen.

Source:

Chickens have feelings. Karen Davis, letter to the editor, The Register-Guard (Oregon), September 7, 2002.

Great Britain’s rural affairs minister, Alun Michael, will likely soon propose a compromise bill on the contentious issue of hunting foxes with dogs that would bring such activities under national anti-cruelty statutes, but leave the details up to local tribunals.

Under the compromise proposal that appeared to be shaping up after three days of hearings conducted by the rural minstry, what constitutes cruel fox hunting would be established nationwide, but enforcement and delineation of acceptable hunting practices would be left to local tribunals. Any infractions against such laws would be outside of the criminal law and those violating them would not have criminal records.

The other proposal that was advanced by laywer Gordon Nardell would institute a Scottish-style ban on all fox hunting with dogs, with some exemptions for using dogs to flush out foxes so they can be shot.

During the last legislative session, the House of Commons voted for a complete ban on all fox hunting with hounds, while the House of Lords voted for an alternative bill that would allow fox hunting ot continue but under greater regulatory oversight.

As many as one million sporters of fox hunting are expected to turn out later this month to protest in favor of continued fox hunting with hounds.

Sources:

Compromise bill on hunting ‘within weeks’. The Daily Telegraph (London), September 12, 2002.

Hunt tribunal plan. Charles Clover, The Daily Telegraph (London), September 12, 2002.

United Press International environmental reporter Dan Whipple wrote an op-ed about environmental terrorism that soft pedaled the phenomenon based largely on Whipple’s inability to actually do any research on the topic.

According to Whipple,

Despite a bonfire of publicity, and apocalyptic warnings from property rights activists and congressional committees, the list of ELF’s “accomplishments” is small: Two “actions” in 1996, three in 1997, eight in 1998, three in 1999, nine in 2000 and four in 2001.

In fact, ELF committed at least 22 actions in 2001 causing at least $1.6 million in damage (the actual damage total was probably closer to double that). How do I know this? Because the North American Liberation Front Press Office published a report listing all 2001 actions. Apparently Whipple prefers to just pull his numbers out of the air rather than go to the source.

Moreover, Whipple wonders if ELF terrorism is really terrorism,

Having pulled up a few survey stakes myself, I’m not in a position to take the high moral ground. But is it terrorism? Is even burning a restaurant — and we all know how tough it is to find a good restaurant — on the same level as blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Okla., or leveling the World Trade Center?

Is burning down an abortion clinic or a black church the same thing as flying a plane into a building? Of course not, but it is nonetheless still terrorism, as is environmental terrorism.

I also find it odd that UPI has hired as an environmental journalist someone who admits engaging in illegal acts to disrupt logging. Would they hire someone who admitted illegal acts in anti-abortion protests to cover women’s issues?

Whipple continues,

There is an enormous difference between principled civil disobedience — including monkeywrenching — and murder. The word “terrorism” has been thrown around too loosely.

I wonder if he’d feel that way if people burned down his house or the office where he works because of ideological reasons. Somehow, I doubt it.

Source:

Blue Planet: Ecoterrorism redefined. Dan Whipple, United Press International, Sept. 13, 2002.

After last year’s terrorist attacks, my first reaction was shock and horror and my second reaction was wondering if People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would be stupid enough to try to put an animal rights spin on the tragedy.

And, of course, they did. The following is a press release that was posted to PETA’s web site sometime between the evening of Sept. 11 and the morning of Sept. 12. Somebody at PETA had the good sense to yank this off the site sometime later on Sept. 12, but not before I’d already posted a copy to this site’s discussion group.

That this was PETA’s initial reaction to the 9/11 attacks speaks volumes about that organization’s priorities — note that at a time when the phone system in and out of New York was brought to its knees by the heavy volume of traffic, PETA was urging people to call repeatedly if necessary to urge mayor Rudolph Giuliani to make animal rescue a high priority.

New York City’s Animals Desperately Need Your Voice

——————————————————————————–

Obviously our hearts go out to every human being affected by the tragedy at the World Trade Center. This terrible tragedy has serious repercussions for animals, too. Due to the tremendous loss of human lives, there will undoubtedly be many animals left orphaned. Other animals are trapped in buildings that have been evacuated and to which people have learned they are unable to return. PETA’s headquarters is receiving calls from desperate New York City residents whose companion animals are trapped inside now vacated apartments, some so close to the World Trade Center that the animals inside can only be highly traumatized by the explosions, the sirens, the noise, the shaking ground, the smoke, and now the unexplained absence of their families. We know of at least one 13-floor building, 120 Greenwich Street, practically across the street from the World Trade Center, where more than 20 dogs and an undetermined number of other companion animals are locked inside apartments without food or water or comfort.

These animals need your immediate help.

Mayor Giuliani has a poor record when it comes to animals. In 1998 he refused to allow desperate New Yorkers whose apartment building’s scaffolding collapsed, the opportunity to tend to or rescue their beloved animals for more than five days, leaving animals to become dehydrated and starving.

Please urge Mayor Giuliani to set up a task force to locate and rescue animals in need. To many of this disaster’s victims and their families, these beloved animals are members of the family and would be a great source of comfort.

PETA and other animal protection groups are willing to send trained rescuers into the buildings to take the animals out, if given the chance. We will sign waives of liability in the event of any injury or death. United Animal Nations (UAN.org), can offer assistance with mobilizing volunteers and rescuing and caring for abandoned animals.

Mayor Giuliani’s address is:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani
City Hall
New York, NY 10007
Tel.: 212-788-9600
Fax: 212-788-7476
E-Mail: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html

If you have a difficult time getting through to Mayor Giuliani due to phone line trouble, please don’t give up; keep trying.

Ingrid Newkirk appeared on CNN’s Crossfire on Sept. 6 to defend People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ latest billboard campaign urging Americans to lose weight by becoming vegetarians. But in the course of an exchange with Crossfire co-host Robert Novak, Newkirk offered an interesting admission about meat eating,

NOVAK: Ms. Newkirk, this is first time I’ve been on with you, and I’m a 71-year-old healthy American. I eat meat all the time. I even eat meat when I go to seafood places, and, you know, …

NEWKIRK: Fish meat. Fish is meat.

NOVAK: What is wrong with having a good steak? I don’t, either, overeat. What’s the problem with that?

NEWKIRK: Well from a health perspective, anything in moderation, I suppose, you can get away with. From a cruelty to animals perspective too, not only when…

NOVAK: I don’t like animals much, though.

See, even Newkirk agrees that a diet with moderate meat consumption can be healthy (it certainly hasn’t killed Novak yet, despite absurd claims by Newkirk later in the show that in order to live past 70 people needed to become vegetarians.)

Not so insightful were Newkirk’s claims about the history of human consumption of meat, this time in an exchange with Paul Begala,

BEGALA: I wonder if you’ve done anything to call attention to the fat polar bears who, you know, they subsist on a diet of meat up there, and they’re all fat. Are you going to move polar bears into veggie, too? Isn’t it, simply, natural for people to eat meat, just the way it is for some animals to eat meat?

NEWKIRK: They don’t say — anthropologists say that we started out, you know, picking berries and getting vegetables and fruits and things like that. And then, the first time we hit a Brontosaurus over the head, I think we fell in love with the taste of meat, and it sends us to the emergency room ever since. The more we’ve eaten, the sicker we’ve become as a nation, and so…

In fact the available evidence indicates that early human beings ate far more meat than that found even in American diets. They also ate plant-based foods as well, but Newkirk is completely off the wall trying to write meat out of the diet of early human beings (and, of course, homo sapiens never existed contemporaneously with Brontosaurs).

Still, Newkirk’s recognition that a diet including meat can be healthy is a good step forward for her.

Source:

Transcript, CNN Crossfire, Sept. 6, 2002, 19:00.

Led by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, several animal rights groups filed suit on Sept. 5, 2002 against the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to require industry to perform animal toxicity studies on almost 3,000 chemicals.

Joining the lawsuit are the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. According to a PCRM press release on the lawsuit,

At an estimated cost of $16 million each year for the EPA to administer, the H[igh] P[roduction] V[olume] program calls for thousands of duplicative animal tests that are not predictive of human harm. Available alternatives that are more sensitive than animal tests, such as in vitro genetic toxicity tests, are not being required, and the program does nothing to limit human exposure to known toxins.

PCRM is also suing on behalf of several individuals they claim were harmed by chemicals that tested out as safe in animals. Though the details of these cases reveal more than a few problems for PCRM. For example,

Plaintiffs John Gentry and Scott Mishler were exposed to toxic substgances at work and both have suffered serious illnesses. Mishler, a former journeyman electrician, is no longer able to work due ot illnesses caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid containing an HPV chemical slated for re-testing. Tests done in 1984 and 1995 showed that the chemical, trixylenyl phosphate, does not kill rats, yet phosophate-based hydraulic fluids can cause severe damage to workers’ nervous system.

This is an almost laughable description that cynically takes advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about phosphates and hydraulic fluids.

Trixylenyl phosphate is a trialkyl/aryl phosphate (TAP). PCRM forgets several important facts about tirxylenyl phosphate. First, it is one of the less dangerous TAPs in animal studies, and mice and rats are the least sensitive to TAP exposure. The LD50 dose for TAPs in rats, for example, is 5,190 mg/kg compared to just 1,500 mg/kg for cats.

The claim that “trxylenyl phosphate, does not kill rats, yet phosphate-based hydraulic flucis can cause severe damage to workers’ nervous system” is odd. Trialkyl/aryl phosphates are known to cause neurological problems in animal studies. Much of the research into the ill effects of TAPs, however, have focused on tri- o-cresyl phosphate. More research into neurological, carcinogenic and other effects of TAPs is definitely needed.

Or take this case which PCRM is also pursing,

Plaintiff Rosa Naparstek, a resident of New York City, has multiple chemical sensitivites syndrome, an environmental illness caused by toxic chemicals in the environment. Many HPV chemicals used in soaps, shampoos, perfumes, detergents, bleach, paints, glues, carpeting and gasoline caused Neparstek to experience headaches, dizziness, nausea, and muscle and joint pain.

Thankfully, federal courts have generally barred any sort of expert testimony about multiple chemical sensitivity on the grounds that it fails to meet the Daubert test of scientific validity. The odds of Naparstek prevailing are in the range of zero to none.

Reading between the lines, this lawsuit appears geared more to impressing animal rights activists and generating headlines than a serious challenge to the EPA’s HPV testing regimen.

Source:

Doctors sue EPA to halt toxic testing on animals. U.S. Newswire, September 5, 2002.

The Sunday Telegraph (London) reports that despite the efforts of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Huntingdon Life Sciences has attracted several market makers for its stock in the United States which puts it closer to a full listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

HLS stock is currently traded on the NASDAQ Over The Counter Bulletin Board. In mid-August, Oklahoma-based Legacy Trading completed a 30-day period of trading in HLS shares. As a result, now market makers in the United States can trade in shares of the stock without needing to fill out lengthy forms about the company.

Since then, the Telegraph reports that Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Knight Securities, MH Meyerson & Co., Hill Thompson Magid, Frankel & Co., Paragon Capital Markets and Herzog Heine Geduld have jumped on board to deal in small volumes of HLS on the OTC board.

Now, HLS will have to meet certain financial requirements to attain a listing on either NASDAQ’s national market or its small cap market. The stock has been trading in the $2-$2.50/share range. Minimum bid price for a national market listing is $5/share and for a small cap listing is $4/share (which a stock has to maintain for 90 consecutive trading days prior to the listing).

HLS’s profitability is in its own hands, but as long as it is able to meet its financial goals it looks like SHAC has lost its momentum in preventing shares of the company from being listed.

Source:

US traders back Huntingdon. Lauren Mills, Sunday Telegraph (London), September 8, 2002.