By Professor Steve Best -
sbest1@elp.rr.com
Is it my imagination, or is all hell breaking loose?
Vegan and animal rights activists seem finally to have caught the
attention of animal exploitation industries, and the war between them
has escalated to intense battles in the streets, courtrooms, boardrooms,
and media.
Hardly a day goes by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)
and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have not freed animals from their cages
in fur farms and laboratories or destroyed the property of industries
killing animals or damaging nature. From burning biotech research labs
and destruction of ski lodges to firebombing meat companies, these
underground liberation groups have resorted to militant tactics that
have earned them the FBI label of “terrorists” as the government now
works toward criminalizing animal rights activities through legislation
such as the “Patriot Act” that allows the state full powers of
surveillance, search and seizure, and suppression of dissent.
The militancy of these liberation groups inspired the
most powerful animal rights campaign yet, that waged against Huntingdon
Life Sciences (HLS) by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). HLS is a
large and particularly heinous drug and chemical testing company with
offices in England and New Jersey. They profit from pouring industrial
chemicals into the eyes of rabbits and pesticides and herbicides down
the throats of beagle puppies. A series of five undercover videos
exposed for the world to see how vicious this company is, sadistically
beating and killing 500 cats, dogs, rabbits, and chimpanzees a day,
180,000. In one HLS lab report, some of the animals were recorded as
“rotting, but still alive.” HLS performed necropsy (dissection) on
living monkeys and numerous employees were convicted of violating animal
welfare laws by the USDA and almost shut down by the UK government. In
the late 1990s, outraged activists in England and the U.S. formed SHAC
as a militant and ultra-confrontational group. Hardly satisfied with
letter writing and petitions, SHAC activists have made their case
through property destruction, hassling of executives and employees of
HLS and their investors at their workplaces and homes, and raucous
demonstrations. Consequently, over a dozen corporations pulled out of
HLS, including Stevens Inc. a major investor that saved the company from
collapse with a $33 million bailout. Meanwhile, Cambridge University
announced they would not open a new animal laboratory for fear of animal
rights activists, as some British scientists vowed to fight back against
animal rights activists.
It seems a new animal rights movement has been born, one
that will have to deal not only with the stigma of “domestic terrorism,”
but also the spies, harassment, and persecution of the federal
government in a time of great paranoia about “homeland security.” A
prime example of the new attacks on vegetarian and animal rights groups
as fanatics and even “terrorists” arrives in the form of the newly
created Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a coalition of 30,000
restaurant and tavern operators adamantly opposed to vegetarianism,
animal rights, anti-biotechnology activists, anti-smoking lobbying,
organic foods advocates, and any “food cop” who dares to question or
regulate consumption of the goods related to their industry. No
vegetarian or animal rights individuals or groups fall outside the huge
net they cast over today’s “nanny culture” of politically correct
whiners. Besides SHAC and PETA, CCF’s favorite target is the Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an organization led by Dr.
Neil Bernard and comprised of scientists, medical doctors, researchers,
and others who advocate veganism and the abolition of animal
experimentation.
In the last year, PCRM has been featured regularly in
the mass media, debating Dr. Atkins over the validity of his
high-protein diets, and attacking the food pyramid as, in their words,
“a form of rationalized racism that overlooks minority people’s health
concerns to sell products by the meat, and dairy industries.” PCRM also
has publicly urged the government to sue meat retailers for the
devastating effects of their products on public health, much in the same
manner that tobacco industries were targeted.
The CCF rejects PCRM’s claims to scientific legitimacy
and denounces them as a “terrorist front group” for PETA and SHAC whom
they designate as “domestic terrorist groups.” They “expose” the
financial and organizational ties between PCRM and PETA and PCRM and
SHAC. In a January 2002 press release, CCF “called on PCRM to stop
portraying itself as a medical organization and come clean about its
connections to extremist animal rights organizations responsible for
acts of violence and millions of dollars in the destruction of
property.” PCRM is “no more than a puppet for PETA to use in spreading
its virulent anti-choice rhetoric.” PCRM’s superb health education
campaigns are rejected as nothing but “junk science” and efforts “to
dispense dangerous animal rights orthodoxy masquerading as nutritional
advice.” CFC conveniently fails to discuss the 16 major research studies
that link milk consumption to maladies like prostate cancer and heart
disease. In September 2001, PCRM received some much-deserved
legitimation when the USDA expert panel agreed that the claims made by
the “milk mustache” and “got milk?” advertisements made untruthful
health claims.
While crying rivers over the loss of inanimate property,
CCF shows no regard for the billions of animal lives lost every year in
slaughterhouses and laboratories. They excoriate PCRM for their “junk
science” but praise HLS – notorious for its drugged-out and drunk
employees who falsify data -- as scientifically respectable. They say
that PETA and other groups use “scare tactics [that] are designed to
intimidate people into accepting a ridiculously small set of food
choices” with no knowledge of the diversity of vegetarian options
including a remarkable soy analogue for any and every meat taste and
preference. Insipid morons who make Rush Limbaugh seem sagacious? Yes,
but they are also the blowback symptoms of the industry’s vow to
retaliate against vegetarian and animal rights campaigns.
The war for the public mind unfolds on other fronts. In
January 2002, Ringling Bros. Circus (RB) and PETA waged mighty courtroom
and media battles. The Humane Society of Santa Clara (not PETA) claimed
that animal trainer Mark Oliver Gebel bloodied an elephant with a bull
hook. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) launched a
letter-writing campaign to persuade the district attorney’s office to
prosecute Gebel, which it did. Ringling Brothers CEO Kenneth Feld argued
it was a “crime manufactured to satisfy a political agenda” and
apparently the jury agreed as they acquitted Gebel after only two hours
of deliberation. Unlike many industries under attack by animal rights
activists, RB fought back after the acquittal by taking out full-page
ads in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Feld signed an “Open
Letter to Animal Rights Activists” and singled out PETA for “targeting
responsible animal care providers [!] for political reasons.”
Feld did not discuss Ringling Bros.’ notorious record of
animal abuse. Nor of course does he mention that circus animals are
inherently exploited and caged or chained most of their miserable lives.
While RB may have won the battle, they and the circus industry have not
won the war. Interested in Feld’s missive, national media like The Today
Show carried the story, giving PETA an opportunity to make their case to
millions of viewers. On one notable occasion on January 8th edition of
The Today Show, RB failed to show for the debate, and Wayne Pacelle of
HSUS and Jane Garrison of PETA made forceful and uncontested points
against the circus, backed by compelling videotaped evidence.
Subsequently, on January 15th, PETA released a shocking undercover video
of elephant trainer Tim “Make Them Scream” Frisco of Carson and Barnes
Circus spewing profanity and hurting elephants with metal prods,
teaching assistants to inflict pain behind closed curtains and never
before the public eye. CBS news ran the story on their evening news
February 6th. Apparently the animal industry has not learned the lessons
of the Mclibel suit, when in 1990 McDonalds sued British activists for
claiming their products were unhealthy, cruel to animals, and harmful to
the environment. McDonalds won their case in court, but not without
bruising public relations damage as the activists claimed were aired and
confirmed by the British court. “From a PR standpoint,” Debbie Leahy of
PETA said, “it was probably the dumbest thing [RB] could do. We’ve been
flooded with calls from reporters wanting our response, which has given
us many new chances to explain why we think circuses inherently abuse
animals.”
In February 2002, things heated up between Showing
Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), an animal rights group devoted to
exposing and documenting the cruelty of rodeos, and the Olympic
committee, which decided to sanctify rodeo as an official Olympic
“sport.” SHARK strenuously protested this travesty, and as part of their
resistance, followed the passing of the Olympic torch around the country
with the celebrated “Tiger Truck” equipped with a massive video screen
showing images of rodeo cruelty for all to see. When Senator Paul Ray
(R-Clearfield) referred to the group on television, in writing, and on
the House of Representatives floor as “terrorists” who made “threats of
violence” to the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC), SHARK
immediately denied the charges and responded with a libel and slander
lawsuit, claiming that Ray’s remarks damaged their ability to collect
donations. As SHARK seeks a trial to sue for unspecified damages, Ray
defends the rodeo as “a very important piece of our culture here in
Utah” and remains unapologetic about lumping the entire animal rights
movement together through the T-word. Enjoying his own Mclibel effect,
Steve Hindi of SHARK has received much media coverage from his “debates”
with the rodeo industry (who somehow never manage to show up). The
Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City provided over two weeks of time
to air animal rights critiques of the rodeo to an international
audience.
These are but a few portals through which one can view
the intensifying drama surrounding the struggle between vegetarian and
animal rights activists, and the animal exploitation industries. From RB
and CCF to British vivisectionists and sportmen’s advocacy groups, the
industry is fighting back at “notorious and extreme” (CCF) organizations
they feel want to restrict peoples’ freedom to consume, wear, experiment
on, and be entertained by animals, while health and animal rights
activists continue to pose ever-greater threat to their economic
viability.
But no one has the right to exploit animals, and here
consumer “choices” and even “science” must give way to the rights of
animals, unless we are prepared to use the same flimsy rationalizations
to experiment on humans too. As evidence of increasing tensions, and
especially after the events of September 11, there has been a growing
tendency here and abroad to criminalize animal rights activities and
brand them not simply as “radical” or “extreme,” but rather as
“terrorist,” a term that should be reserved to mean inflicting pain and
violence on innocent living beings for nefarious political or economic
goals.
The ironies are all-too painful. When puppies are
crippled and punched in the face, when pigs are strapped into restraint
devices that smash their skulls, when kittens have their brains carved
up, and when monkeys are dismembered while still alive, we are asked to
believe this is science, not terrorism. When nearly 10 billion animals
each year in the U.S. alone are confined and killed in unspeakably
vicious ways by the American food industries, we are told this is
business, not terrorism. In this sick and violent society, property is
more sacred than life, and thus those only who destroy property are
branded as criminals while the real terrorists execute their banality of
evil in the daily affairs of the animal industries.
Go on to For Folks
That Are Not Doing Meatout This Year
Return to 10 March 2002 Issue
Return to Newsletters
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