AnimalRights.Net

In a stunning turnaround due in large part to a misunderstanding over procedural maneuvers, the International Whaling Commission voted 19 to 18 this month to readmit Iceland.

Iceland quit the commission in 1992 and has had its efforts to rejoin the commission blocked by countries angered at Iceland’s plan to recommence commercial whaling in 2006. According to the New York Times, Iceland’s readmittance was largely the result of the Swedish delegation misunderstanding a procedural challenge by Antigua and Barbuda. In its confusion, the Swedish delegation ended up mistakenly voting in favor of a motion that led to Iceland’s readmission.

“We were not prepared in substance to accept Iceland as a member,” Carl Erik Ehrenkronoa of the Swedish Foreign Ministry told the Times, “but it happened anyway.”

As the Times notes, whaling countries are using the same tactics that anti-whaling forces used to enact the worldwide ban on whaling. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous anti-whaling countries joined the commission and the result was the ban.

Now Japan and other pro-whaling countries are encouraging (and, in some cases, outright bribing them) to join and tip the scales the other way. In the lead up to the ban, it was countries such as Switzerland and Austria who joined and tipped the balance toward the ban on whaling. Now countries like Benin, Gabon and Mongolia are joining, and all are solidly in the pro-whaling camp thanks to Japan’s promises of aid to such countries in exchange for their votes on the commission.

Iceland’s readmittance is a likely turning point, given that Iceland says that in 2006 it will join Norway in openly defying the worldwide ban on commercial whaling.

Overturning the ban on whaling is a long way off, given that it would take a 3/4 vote of the commission, but Rune Frovik, spokesman for a Norwegian whaling association told the Times that there was still a lot of value in just a simple majority,

You can do a lot with a simple majority. For many years, the commission has passed what we call hate resolutions calling on Norway and Japan to stop whaling. Soon they might not be able to pass those resolutions.

This change should make the next meeting of the IWC a bit more interesting.

Source:

Iceland joins whale panel, giving whalers stronger say. Walter Gibbs, The New York Times, October 20, 2002.

In June, Ohio State University researcher Michael Podell left his position after a sustained campaign directed against him by animal rights activists. Activists claimed that his research, which involved looking at FIV infection in cats who were administered methamphetamines, was cruel and unnecessary. The research, in fact, produced important findings about the progression of HIV-like illnesses as well as HIV-related dementia.

OSU didn’t effectively defend Podell from animal rights activists while he was at the university, but have decided that they will continue the research that Podell started. Podell conducted his research as part of a grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

OSU President Karen Holbrook said that, “Projects such as this one facilitate the design of treatments for humans and animals alike against many deadly viral diseases.”

Protect Our Earth’s Treasures, an animal rights group that regularly protested against Podell, announced that it will renew its protests beginning Nov. 1 until the university abandons such research.

POET director Rob Russell told The Columbus Dispatch, “It’s still the same wasteful project it was before.”

Source:

HIV Study That Uses Cats Will Continue At OSU. David Lore, The Columbus Dispatch, October 30, 2002.

Kudos to the Center for Consumer Freedom for publicizing an August decision by the Florida Elections Commission to charge Farm Sanctuary and its co-founder Gene Bauston with 210 counts of violating Florida election laws.

The Florida Elections Commission web site doesn’t have much in the way of details on the case, but a Center for Consumer Freedom press release said the commission voted 9-0 to bring the charges alleging that,

. . . [Farm Sanctuary] illegally acted as the ballot committee’s cashier, accepting donations from Floridians on behalf of the “Amendment 10″ campaign’s PAC, and unlawfully promising those donors a federal tax deduction for their campaign contributions.

Farm Sanctuary co-founder Gene Bauston was also personally named as a defendant by the Commission, which found probable cause that Farm Sanctuary’s actions were “willfull.” This distinction indicates that Mr. Bauston and Farm Sanctuary were fully aware that their actions were illegal.

Amendment 10 is the Florida ballot proposal to amend the state constitution to ban pig “gestation crates.”

The Center for Consumer Freedom noted in its press release that while the Florida Elections Commission decision only pertains to actions involving Florida voters, that Farm Sanctuary has apparently been playing a shell game with donations that likely violate election and tax laws.

Basically, Farm Sanctuary appears to have been actively taking in tax free donations using its nonprofit status, and then turning around and donating large sums of money to Floridians for Human Farms which is a political action committee to whom donations are not tax deductible. According to the Center for Consumer Freedom, Farm Sanctuary has donated more than $465,000 to Floridians for Humane Farms since September 2000. That makes Farm Sanctuary the single largest source of funds for Floridians for Humane Farms.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has an excellent dossier (PDF file) of documents pertaining to this case.

Source:

Biggest Financer of “Amendment 10″ Campaign Charged With Election Finance Abuses. Center for Consumer Freedom, October 2002.

According to the Associated Press, about 80 people who identified themselves as members of the Collective Front of Anarchist Vegetarians were arrested at a Mexico City McDonald’s on October 16.

The activists marched through downtown Mexico City, protesting at various restaurants, handing out leaflets and blocking traffic. Members of the group also spray-painted animal rights slogans on a McDonald’s before they were arrested.

Source:

Vegetarian protesters arrested after march targeting McDonald’s. Associated Press, October 18, 2002.

Back in March the Menomonee Falls Village Board approve a change to its ordinances that eliminated the term “owner” from animal-related ordinances and replaced it with the term “guardian.” But now, the Village Board is having second thoughts after hearing from its attorney that the change could have unforseen legal consequences.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

Village Attorney Michael Morse said Monday that, under current common law, an animal is property and that guardian is a legal term that refers to people.

“I couldn’t guarantee that some clever lawyer wouldn’t apply aspects of the term guardian to a situation involving pets,” he said. “I don’t believe the trustees ever intended those consequences.”

The board is apparently considering “guardian/owner” which would seem to simply further muddy up the legal waters.

Source:

Falls might change pet ‘guardian’ terminology. Kay Nolan, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 22, 2002.

Back in August 2002, two animal rights activists were indicted in Massachusetts after they allegedly threatened to burn down the home of Marsh Insurance manager Robert Harper Jr. Today, 9 additional individuals with links to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty were indicted on various charges related to their harassment of Harper and Marsh.

According to a press release from the Attorney General’s office, the indicted individuals include,

• Ryan Kleinert, 17, of East Brunswick, N.J., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, threats to burn a dwelling, stalking in violation of restraining order and criminal harassment, and four counts of conspiracy.
• Jacob Conroy, 26, of Seattle, Wash., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, threats to burn a dwelling, stalking in violation of restraining order, criminal harassment, and four counts of conspiracy.
• Ryan Smith, 19, of Billerica, indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Laura Lungarelli, of Gilford, N.H., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Lisa Lotts, 23, of Allston, indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Alexandra Doane, 18, of Foxboro, indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Lauren Gazzola, 23, of Bethel, Conn., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Joshua Schwartz of Chicago, Ill., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion, criminal harassment and two counts of conspiracy.
• Jennifer Greenberg, 17, of Wheeling, Ill., indicted on one count each of attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion.

Additionally, two unnamed women and one unnamed man were indicted. Police have photographs of the unnamed individuals and are seeking to identify them.

Attempted extortion is the most serious crime that the individuals were charged with, and in Massachusetts carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in jail and up to a $5,000 fine.

Kurt Schwarz, of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, told the Boston Herald that, “These 12 people in the name of protest engaged in conduct that went far beyond the bounds of protected speech.”

Referring to Ryan Smith, Schwarz told the Lowell Sun,

He, like the 11 others were all participants in multiple protests in Boston and the protest he participated in, we allege, were designed to not only criminally harass the targets but were designed to compel the target’s company [Marsh] to withdraw its business relationship with the English company [Huntingdon Life Sciences].

Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General Philip J. McGovern of the Corruption, Fraud and Computer Crime Division has been assigned to prosecute the cases against the indicted individuals.

Sources:

Billerica teen accused in animal rights terror case. Jennifer Fenn, Lowell Sun, October 28, 2002.

US animal rights activists indicted for stalking. Reuters, October 28, 2002.

Activists indicted for harassing Hub man. Michael Lasalandra, The Boston Herald, October 26, 2002.

AG Reilly Announces 43 Indictments Against 12 People In Connection With International Animal Rights Extremist Group. Office of Attorney General Tom Reilly, Press Release, October 25, 2002.

Earlier this year the Virginia legislature authorized a large number of various specialty license plates, including one that is to bear the slogan “Fox Hunting.” As soon as the Virginia Office of Motor Vehicles has enough requests for the specialty plate, it will begin producing them.

The Fund for Animals is urging people to write state legislators and register their disapproval for the fox hunting plate. According to the Fund for Animals,

The state of Virginia is beginning to sell a fox hunting license plate. The cruel practice of fox hunting releases baying hounds onto terrified wildlife for recreation. This special license plate was overwhelmingly authorized by the state legislature in 2002 in House Bill 680. Now the Department of Motor Vehicles is trying to sell enough of the special plate to justify beginning production. While it is too late to stop this horrific license plate, your legislators need to hear from you that you do not approve of their support for the vicious and indefensible practice of foxhunting.

Source:

Tally-No, Virginia!. The Fund for Animals, October 2002.

I’ve seen a lot of questions recently about Americans for Medical Advancement’s Ray Greek. Nothing better captures Greek’s particular brand of animal rights idiocy than a review of Sacred Cows and Golden Geese by Michael F.W. Festing,

There are many biographies of Pasteur which describe exactly how he did this by using intra-cerebral inoculations of infected neural tissue to induce rabies in dogs and rabbits, with homogenates of dried spinal cords of rabbits as a vaccine. . . . It took Pasteur five years to develop the vaccine, at which point he had about 50 dogs that were immune to rabies.

. . .[After immunizing dogs, a mother brought a child bit by a rabid dog to Pasteur.] Pasteur and his colleagues examined the child and decided that they dare not refuse to treat him. [The child, Joseph] Meister did not develop the disease, and by 1 March 1886, of 350 patients treated, only one had developed rabies, and she had not been treated until 37 days after she had been bitten. It has been estimated that 40-80% of people bitten by rabid dogs developed rabies, so there is not the slightest doubt that Pasteur had in fact developed a highly effective vaccine, which has since saved many thousands of human lives. The vaccine continued to be used for many years, until replaced by a vaccine prepared in cell cultures.

On page 33 of this book [Ray and Jean Greek's Sacred Cows and Golden Geese], it states that “. . . Pasteur used animals as pseudo-humans as he attempted to craft a rabies vaccine. He took spinal column tissue of infected dogs and made what he thought was a vaccine. Unfortunately, the vaccine did not work seamlessly and actually resulted in deaths. Yet, this gross failure did somehow did not detract from the reverence for the animal-lab process.” This account is simply not true. The vaccine did not cause any deaths, it failed to cure one person out of the first 350, for a very good reason, and it was highly successful. The book does not even acknowledge that Pasteur did in fact produce a rabies vaccine.

One of the perplexing things about such animal rights distortions is why people like the Greeks try to get away with such obvious falsehoods. Perhaps they believe that more than a century later the average reader of their book is likely unfamiliar with how the rabies vaccine was created, but surely they must be aware that debunking the false history they put forth is trivially easy. As Festing puts it,

Unfortunately, the book [Sacred Cows and Golden Geese] “. . . is a feat of omission and distortion,” to use the words that it uses to describe somebody else’s work. it cannot be described as a serious attempt to show the limitations of animal research, because any facts that conflict with the beliefs of the authors have simply been ignored, or history has conveniently been rewritten. As a way of reducing the use of animals in medical research, I think this book will be counter-productive, because even if the authors do have a few good points to make, its numerous inaccuracies and distortions make it impossible to trust anything that they have written.

Source:

Sacred Cows and Golden Geese (Book Review). Michael F.W. Festing, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals 29, pp.617-620, 2001.

It has become almost a mantra within both animal rights circles and the larger mainstream media that children who harm animals are on the path to harming human beings. But is this claim true?

Manchester Metropolitan University researchers Heather Piper and Steve Myers looked at such claims and found a surprising lack of any actual valid evidence for it. They write,

A few years ago, the notion that abused children were likely to become abusers was common. This is no longer accepted as true. In this case the dominant view is that harming animals is directly linked to, or can be treated as part of a cycle leading to, violence towards people. It is suggested that the relationship is clear cut, consistent and predictable. This argument suggests that harming animals can be a predictive variable in indicating future harm to people. There are serious flaws in this argument. Although there may be some disturbed individuals who are cruel towards both animals and people, extreme cases do not provide the basis for generalized conclusions.

Piper and Myers identify two major problems with the alleged link between harming animals and harming people. First, the studies that claim to find such a link rarely define animal abuse in a methodologically sound way,

Few studies define what is animal abuse or violence or harm. Does cruelty include pulling the legs off spiders, or only those of vertebrates? Does it matter that one society eats dogs and another keeps them as pets? Richer children may legally kill animals through fox hunting, whereas poorer ones are prosecuted for similar behavior towards a cat or a dog.

Second, such studies have a deeper methodological flaw in who they choose to study,

Research supporting the supposed links is based mainly on extreme and non-representative samples. Accounts suggesting links between those who have harmed animals and later violence toward humans often rely on the same small sample of extreme criminals in the US. Researching a limited population to produce a broadly applicable generalization is problematic. Any number of life experiences could also be shown to correlate with the behavior.

A further problem is that much of the research tends to suffer from fallacies of logic. Just because some serial killers have harmed animals, this does not mean that all or even the majority of those who harm animals will become serial killers. Yet this stance is taken in much of the literature.

Piper and Myers conclude that “Social workers should not uncritically accept the arguments that have been put forward about linking animal and human violence.”

Source:

Missing Link. Heather Piper and Steve Myers, Community Care, October 3, 2002, p.38.

Faced by enormous financial problems, the Coulston Foundation shut down in September. The 266 primates under the foundation’s care will be transferred to the Florida-based non-profit Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care.

At its height in the 1990s, the Coulston Foundation had over 600 primates and more than 100 employees engaged in various research projects.

The Coulston Foundation had faced protests, opposition and acts of terrorism from animal rights activists over the years. It also had a spotty record for ensuring the welfare of its animals, being formally charged four times by the USDA for violating the Animal Welfare Act. The Coulston Foundation’s fate was sealed when the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the US Department of Agriculture all withdrew their financial support .

The Foundation then fell behind on its debt payments and the First National Bank of Alamogordo filed foreclosure papers on the Foundation in December 2001. Foundation CEO Fred Coulston tried but failed to find a buyer for the laboratory and agreed to transfer the primates to the CCCC, which received a $3.7 million grant from the Arcus Foundation to purchase the Coulston Foundation’s buildings and equipment.

Sources:

More than 300 research chimps and monkeys retired, turned over to preserve. Richard Benke, Associated Press, September 18, 2002.

Coulston lab shuttered; monkeys get new caretakers. New Mexico Business Weekly, September 18, 2002.