P&G HALTS NON-LEGALLY MANDATED ANIMAL TESTS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

CINCINNATI––Passing another milestone in a 15-
year drive to develop and implement alternatives to animal testing,
Procter & Gamble spokespersons Mindy Patton and Amy
Neltner announced on June 30 that the company “will end the
use of animal tests for current beauty, fabric, home care, and
paper products, except where required by law. This announcement
covers roughly 80% of P&G’s total product portfolio,”
Patton and Neltner specified. This decision is effective immediately”
in all 140 nations where P&G operates.”
Added P&G vice president of global product safety
Larry Games, “Science and technology have advanced to the
point where we can confirm the safety of these finished products
through non-animal alternatives,” chiefly developed within
P&G’s own laboratories.

Read more

Election may have brought good news for the Kiev SPA

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

KIEV, Ukraine––Kiev Society for the Protection
of Animals president Tamara Tarnawska is taking as good
news the May 28 re-election of three-year incumbent Kiev
mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko.
“Shortly after being re-elected,” Tarnawska told
ANIMAL PEOPLE on July 6, “Omelchenko called a meeting
to review the work of the Animals In The City center,”
the animal control department he formed in September 1997,
five months after closing the dog-and-cat pelting plant which
had killed strays since Czarist times, and giving the site to the
Kiev SPA for use as the first humane shelter in the Ukraine.

Read more

Where else dogs and cats are eaten

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

The ANIMAL PEOPLE files indicate
that dogs and sometimes cats are also
eaten in parts of Cambodia, China, Japan,
Laos, the Philippines, the Asian portions of
the former Soviet Union, Taiwan, Thailand,
and Vietnam––but almost exclusively by
either members of an ethnic Chinese minority,
or by remote indigenous groups.
Tibetan and Thai Buddhists especially
disapprove of dog-and-cat-eating,
because dogs and cats are believed likely to
possess reincarnated human souls. Resettled
in Tibet as part of the ongoing Beijing government
effort to subvert Buddhist influence,
ethnic Chinese immigrants are at times
accused of deliberately provoking outrage by
butchering and cooking dogs in the streets of
Lhasa. Dog-eating among refugees from
Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam likewise
exascerbates ethnic strife in northern Thailand.

Read more

Animal control, rescue, sheltering, and alternatives to population control killing

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

The fifth year of the San Francisco
Adoption Pact, completed on March 31,
dropped the combined San Francisco Department
of Animal Care and Control and San
Francisco SPCA euthanasia toll to a new low
of 3,688 dogs and cats. The SF/DACC euthanized
2,526 dogs and cats due to irrecoverable
injury, illness, or aggressive behavior, and
1,162 for other reasons, most often that they
were neonatal kittens with possible upper respiratory
disease and––though some might have
recovered with much care, a poor prognosis.
The SF/DACC returned 1,472 dogs and cats
to their owners, adopted out 1,833, and sent
2,482 to the SF/SPCA. “Of these,” said the
SF/SPCA, “1,598 had special impediments,
often requiring medical or behavioral care
prior to adoption,” as did “932 of the 2,643
dogs and cats whom the SF/SPCA accepted
directly from the public.” The SF/SPCA
returned 29 dogs and cats to their owners, and
adopted out 4,971. The San Francisco rate of
shelter killing, already the lowest of any major
U.S. city, dropped to 5.01 per 1,000 residents.

Read more

U.S. Senate votes to hammer ALF

From: Animal People July/August 1999

WASHINGTON D.C.––A joint House/Senate conference committee is considering whether two Senate amendments to reinforce the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 should be part of the reconciled version of the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act, which is to be sent to both the House and Senate for final approval later in the 106th Congress.

The amendments were added to S.254, passed by the Senate on May 20, but were not in a similar bill, HR.1501, approved by the House of Representatives on June 17.

Section 1652 of S.254 would provide the death penalty as a possible punishment for murder committed as a crime defined by the Animal Enterprise Protection Act; would multiply the minimum prison term for any violation of the act from one year to five; and would raise the maximum fine to “double the amount of damages” done by a violation.

In addition, Section 1652 would add to the Animal Enterprise Protection Act language prescribing a five-to-20-year prison term, plus a possible fine, for anyone using fire or explosive devices to harm an animal enterprise, such as a farm, fur store, or lab. Section 1653 would create “a national clearinghouse” within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, “for information on incidents of crime and terrorism” allegedly “committed against or directed at any animal enterprise,” or associated person, or “committed against or directed at any commercial activity because of the perceived impact” it might have on the environment.

Minnesota raid

Momentum favoring the S.254 amendments grew after an April 5 vandalism at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis raid was the first since the Animal Enterprise Protection Act took effect to follow a pattern characterizing many of the most publicized ALF actions during the 1980s.

Claimed by the ALF, and apparently achieved without forced entry, the raid did an estimated $2 million worth of damage at 12 laboratories housed in two different buildings. An ALF communique distributed with a 10-minute videotape of the action said 48 mice, 36 white rats, 27 white pigeons, and five salamanders were taken from the labs.

Fourteen of the pigeons, one of whom had a broken leg, were recovered on April 8 in a cornfield near Woodbury, Minnesota. Three white rats were found alive in the same cornfield, along with four white rats who had died from hypothermia, and one white rat whose remains were partially eaten.

The University of Minnesota uses about 152,000 animals per year in research.

The most serious research casualty of the raid, university spokespersons said, was the destruction of an incubator holding brain cells from human participants in an Alzheimer’s disease project headed by Walter Low, MD––who does not do animal research, he told Jim Dawson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“In the same building,” Low said, “there are animal labs. Those areas were secured, however, so they got into my lab.”

Two weeks after the raid, the Minnesota state senate unanimously endorsed an amendment to a an anti-crime bill, passed 62-2, which would impose triple damages on persons convicted of “unauthorized release of animals” and would criminalize claiming credit for illegal animal releases.

Utah ALF

The language of the S.254 federal amendments most directly responds, however, to the ALF campaign against Utah fur farmers waged during 1995-1998, eventually broken up by BATF, the FBI, and local authorities.

In a related incident, Salt Lake City residents Eben Andrew McKenzie, 25, and Dustin Chappell Black, 24, were charged on April 14 with retaliating against a witness, Clinton Colby Ellerman, 22, by allegedly chasing him and, in McKenzie’s case, allegedly threatening to kill him.

Ellerman, wrote Sheila R. McCann of the Salt Lake Tribune, was “negotiating a plea deal with federal prosecutors in the bombing of a Utah mink feed plant” in 1997. He was earlier convicted of releasing mink from a farm in South Jordan. Ellerman’s brother, Douglas Joshua Ellerman, 20, pleaded guilty to participating in the bombing, and is serving a seven-year prison term. Clinton Colby Ellerman and three other men are to go to trial for the bombing on July 6.

ELF

The S.254 amendments also bear apparent reference to a string of arsons plus an Oregon mink farm raid claimed by the Earth Liberation Front, beginning in 1996, including the October 1998 Vail ski lift arson. Some of the ELF actions have been claimed anonymously as joint acts also involving the ALF.

The most recent ELF incident was a fire on December 26, 1998 at the U.S. forest Industries headquarters in Medford, Oregon. On May 9, however, just before the S.254 amendments were approved, a fire set by persons using the same technique did $150,000 worth of damage to the Childers Meat Company, in Eugene, Oregon. That fire was reportedly claimed by the ALF 19 days later.

An ongoing ANIMAL PEOPLE investigation has found hints that the Earth Liberation Front may actually be the fictitious cover of several wise-use wiseguy agents provocateur, two of whom we have identified in proximity to the issues and locations involved in most of the alleged ELF attacks. The limited available information about the ongoing federal probe of the actions, however, indicates that the investigators have not even casually considered this possibility.

Other actions

In New Jersey, ALF statements have since March 1997 claimed credit for vandalizing two butcher shops, fur stores in five cities, as many as 125 fast food restaurants, and on March 27, 1999, firebombing three trucks belonging to the Big Apple Circus.

In Irondequoit, New York, police in February 1999 found nine fake pipe bombs, some of them planted with graffiti protesting a bait-and-shoot deer cull in Irondequoit and Durand-Eastman Park. However, one such fake bomb was found––with no note––at a primary school across town from the park. The deer killing has been unpopular with both animal lovers and hunters. About 750 deer have been killed in the park since 1993.

In Chatham, Ontario, Gary Yourofsky, 28, of Royal Oak, Michigan, on April 27 drew six months in prison for releasing 1,500 mink from a fur farm in 1997. Yourofsky was sentenced soon after Pat Dodson, 49, of Ferndale, Michigan, and Hilma Ruby, 61, of Rochester Hills, completed 90-day sentences for the same action. Yourofsky’s uncle, Alan Hoffman, and Robyn Weiner, both of Farmington Hills, received community service in exchange for testimony against Yourofsky.

In Scone, New South Wales, Australia, two men and two women who were stopped on suspicion of drunk driving were charged on May 23 with having released 4,000 pigs from the Parkville Piggery.

The Australian organization Animal Liberation invaded the Parkville Piggery in a 1995 protest against conditions there, but Animal Liberation president Mark Pearson disclaimed any association with the May 23 raid.

On June 9, two men allegedly chained Hill Grove Farm owners Christopher Brown, 60, and his wife Katherine Brown, 62, to a fence near the farm in Witney, Oxon, England. Hill Grove is the only licensed breeder of cats for biomedical research in Britain, and has reportedly been scene of frequent demonstrations for more than 15 years.

Animal groups blast both Gore and Bush

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

WASHINGTON D.C.–– Announcing
his candidacy to succeed U.S. President
Bill Clinton on June 16, Vice President
Albert Gore was expected to lead a White
House ceremony commemorating recovery of
the bald eagle and removal of the eagle from
Endangered Species Act protection on July 4.
But Gore caught heavy flak from
the animal protection community for alleged
empty posturing, including from Senator
Barbara Boxer and Representative George
Miller, both from California––and both, like
Gore, Democrats.
In a June 17 commentary published
by the Los Angeles Times, Boxer and Miller
noted the paradox that the U.S. Commerce
Department has since April 29 allowed tuna
netted “on dolphin” to be sold as “dolphin
safe,” while on May 28 it reminded the public
that people who feed, touch, or swim
with wild dolphins may be prosecuted for
harassing them.

Read more

WISE-USE WISEGUYS

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

“Powerful crime syndicates
including the Cali Cartel, the Sicilian
Mafia, and the Tijuana Cartel, have
bought up most of the tuna fleets and
canneries in Latin America in order to
smuggle cocaine and heroin by sea and
to launder billions in narco profits,”
Craig Van Note of TRAFFIC charged
in a recent address to the T u f t s
University Symposium on Global
Crime, Corruption, and Accountability.
“Tuna was an ideal product to
use as a cover for narcotics: the prime
markets for the high-priced fish are the
U.S., the European Union, and Japan,
also the wealthiest consumers of drugs.”

Read more

Dolphin freedom advocates fined $56,000

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

KEY WEST––Dolphin Project founder
and former “Flipper” trainer Ric O’Barry and
Sugarloaf Dolphin Sanctuary founder Lloyd Good
III were on June 10 ordered by U.S. Administrative
Law Judge Peter A. Fitzpatrick to pay combined
civil penalties of $59,500 for allegedly illegally
releasing the former U.S. Navy dolphins Buck and
Luther on May 23, 1996, off Key West, Florida.
Luther, apparently hurt in a fight with
other dolphins, was recaptured the next day. Buck
was caught 13 days later, 40 miles away, reportedly
emaciated, also with injuries.
O’Barry and Good deny that the dolphins
were in seriously bad shape when recaptured, and
argue that the release was not illegal because, they
contend, the Marine Mammal Protection Act did not
then specifically require a release permit. It has
since been amended to add such a requirement in
more explicit language. O’Barry and Good have
until July 10 to decide whether to appeal.

Read more

Whalers’ covert strategy confirmed

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

TOKYO, VICTORIA (B.C)– –
Whaling industry revival strategies long suspected
by ANIMAL PEOPLE and the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society were bluntly
confirmed in early June, soon after the annual
International Whaling Commission meeting
ended in Grenada without lifting the 1986
global moratorium on commercial whaling.
Citing Hideki Moronuki of the
Japanese ministry for agriculture, forests, and
fisheries as her source, Mari Yamaguchi of
Associated Press on June 3 reported from
Tokyo that “In a bid to gain support for commercial
whaling, Japan hopes to coax developing
countries to join the IWC by giving
them financial assistance. Aid will be given,”
Yamaguchi continued, “to countries that have
been reluctant to join the IWC for fear of damaging
their diplomatic and economic ties with
the West” if they favor whaling.
Moronuki argued that whales, rather
than aggressive fishing led by the Japanese
fleet, are chiefly responsible for globally
declining catches.

Read more

1 2 3 4 5