Koko is one of the world’s most renowned gorillas – reared from birth, she learned her first sign within two weeks, and after 25 years can now use 1,000 different signs in American Sign Language.

By Ari Solomon

10/28/09

In a recent interview with Larry King, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain quipped that it was OK for humans to kill and eat animals because we’ve been designed to chase down “smaller and stupider creatures.” Never mind that cows and pigs, two animals that are slaughtered by the millions for food, are most certainly bigger than we are. It was the “stupider” remark that caught my attention, and not just for Bourdain’s obvious grammatical shortcomings.

I think many of us feel that animals are dumb; that animals lack the intelligence we humans seem to have so abundantly. I believe this looking down on animals plays a big part in what allows us to treat them in the most heinous ways — from factory farms to fur farms to laboratories to circuses. We believe that because animals can’t write a book, compose a symphony, or do algebra that we’re so much better than them.

What a load of bullshit.

Did you know, for example, that pigeons can fly thousands of miles to find the same roosting spot with no navigational difficulties? Some species of birds, like the Arctic Tern, make a 25,000-mile round-trip journey every year. Many species use built-in ferromagnets to detect their orientation with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. Can you do that?

Dolphins have a very distinct language that scientists now refer to as “dolphinese” which humans can’t decipher. For all our human knowledge, we have no idea how to understand what should be, according to Bourdain, a “stupider” means of communication.

Salmon are born in rivers, but swim thousands of miles to the ocean only to return to the exact same spot upstream to die.

Elephants communicate with each other subsonically, using low rumbles that can travel for miles underground. They also mourn their dead and have been seen cradling the bones of family members that have passed on.

Butterflies are now thought to have the equivalent of a GPS system in their antennae.

Pigs have the mental capacity of a four year-old human child and have beat humans in memory games.

So, perhaps animals are not stupid. Perhaps it’s we who are stupid for not recognizing the amazing things animals can do, many of which we can’t do ourselves. Perhaps it’s we who are dumb for not being able to circumnavigate the globe without instruments as albatross do, or find our way home across thousands of miles of ocean as Blue Whales do.

Maybe humans can actually learn a thing or two from these “stupid” animals. How about we start with this: animals don’t create trash. Animals don’t build nuclear weapons to annihilate each other. Animals don’t conjure up religions and then kill each other in the name of their Gods. Animals with white fur don’t discriminate against animals with fur of a different hue or color. Animals only take what they need. Animals are self-cleaning and don’t waste water — my cat has NEVER had a bath yet he’d smell better than any human who didn’t shower. Animals don’t gay bash homosexual animals. Animals don’t screw over other animals for financial gain a la Bernie Madoff. Animals don’t breed other animals to be prettier, fatter, or tastier. Animals don’t systematically torture and abuse and kill billions of other animals (or each other) the way humans do. Animals don’t commit Holocausts, they don’t factory farm, and they don’t ethnically cleanse each other. Animals don’t cheat. Animals don’t front. Animals are their authentic selves.

Yes, humans can do some amazing things: we can cure diseases, we can build skyscrapers, we can figure out how to travel into space. But only human arrogance would suggest that we’re better or smarter than animals. The animals of the world evolved to be just as they are. They exist for their own reasons. Only an idiot would call them stupid.

Ari Solomon is the president and co-creator of the celebrated candle line A Scent of Scandal

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Koko is one of the world’s most renowned gorillas – reared from birth, she learned her first sign within two weeks, and after 25 years can now use 1,000 different signs in American Sign Language.

By Ari Solomon

10/28/09

In a recent interview with Larry King, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain quipped that it was OK for humans to kill and eat animals because we’ve been designed to chase down “smaller and stupider creatures.” Never mind that cows and pigs, two animals that are slaughtered by the millions for food, are most certainly bigger than we are. It was the “stupider” remark that caught my attention, and not just for Bourdain’s obvious grammatical shortcomings.

I think many of us feel that animals are dumb; that animals lack the intelligence we humans seem to have so abundantly. I believe this looking down on animals plays a big part in what allows us to treat them in the most heinous ways — from factory farms to fur farms to laboratories to circuses. We believe that because animals can’t write a book, compose a symphony, or do algebra that we’re so much better than them.

What a load of bullshit.

Did you know, for example, that pigeons can fly thousands of miles to find the same roosting spot with no navigational difficulties? Some species of birds, like the Arctic Tern, make a 25,000-mile round-trip journey every year. Many species use built-in ferromagnets to detect their orientation with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. Can you do that?

Dolphins have a very distinct language that scientists now refer to as “dolphinese” which humans can’t decipher. For all our human knowledge, we have no idea how to understand what should be, according to Bourdain, a “stupider” means of communication.

Salmon are born in rivers, but swim thousands of miles to the ocean only to return to the exact same spot upstream to die.

Elephants communicate with each other subsonically, using low rumbles that can travel for miles underground. They also mourn their dead and have been seen cradling the bones of family members that have passed on.

Butterflies are now thought to have the equivalent of a GPS system in their antennae.

Pigs have the mental capacity of a four year-old human child and have beat humans in memory games.

So, perhaps animals are not stupid. Perhaps it’s we who are stupid for not recognizing the amazing things animals can do, many of which we can’t do ourselves. Perhaps it’s we who are dumb for not being able to circumnavigate the globe without instruments as albatross do, or find our way home across thousands of miles of ocean as Blue Whales do.

Maybe humans can actually learn a thing or two from these “stupid” animals. How about we start with this: animals don’t create trash. Animals don’t build nuclear weapons to annihilate each other. Animals don’t conjure up religions and then kill each other in the name of their Gods. Animals with white fur don’t discriminate against animals with fur of a different hue or color. Animals only take what they need. Animals are self-cleaning and don’t waste water — my cat has NEVER had a bath yet he’d smell better than any human who didn’t shower. Animals don’t gay bash homosexual animals. Animals don’t screw over other animals for financial gain a la Bernie Madoff. Animals don’t breed other animals to be prettier, fatter, or tastier. Animals don’t systematically torture and abuse and kill billions of other animals (or each other) the way humans do. Animals don’t commit Holocausts, they don’t factory farm, and they don’t ethnically cleanse each other. Animals don’t cheat. Animals don’t front. Animals are their authentic selves.

Yes, humans can do some amazing things: we can cure diseases, we can build skyscrapers, we can figure out how to travel into space. But only human arrogance would suggest that we’re better or smarter than animals. The animals of the world evolved to be just as they are. They exist for their own reasons. Only an idiot would call them stupid.

Ari Solomon is the president and co-creator of the celebrated candle line A Scent of Scandal

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

The Mayor of Grand Haven might choose to fight fire with fire. We prefer to fight fire with water.

Another great satirical video from our allies in Grand Haven, MI, Defenders of Urban Wildlife!

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/ and email us at willpowerful@hotmail.com.

By Anthony Marr

11/27/09

Calcutta sounds like a fable in a song, but in reality, it is where John, my colleague and successor, was murdered. He was on the job for only three days when he got his throat slashed. As an undercover investigator targeting the illegal wildlife trade, especially in tiger parts, his real name was unknown, even to me, nor mine to him. We were just John and James to each other. All I know is that he was Chinese American, while his predecessor James – real name Anthony Marr – is Chinese Canadian, and how sincere he was in helping to save the Bengal tiger from being poached out of existence, while its habitat continues to dwindle due to human pressure.

It would have been me who got killed had I not been called to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh – the “Tiger State” – to investigate a dreadful wave of poaching which wiped out10 of their 40 tigers in 12 months. What John and I were after was the identities of the trading party/ies, the location/s of the loot, and the routes and means by which it was transported to its destination, usually China. Once these were uncovered, we would inform police, who would then go and make arrests and seizures. How we did it is confidential. Suffice to say that we were both posing as Chinese buyers. During my stint into enclaves where lone policemen dared not tread, accompanied by middlemen who would sell their mothers for a rhino horn, I’ve been shown sacks of tiger bone and rolls of tiger skin, just as I did in the villages surrounding the tiger reserves. I would then agonize on just how much more pressure the remaining tigers – less than 2000 in India – could take.

Since I cannot get into details in these operations, let me tell you a story which illustrates something different altogether – cast discrimination. The safe-house I was given to stay at for the two-week operation was on the 4th floor of a wood-frame building. My room was in the center of the building and windowless. There was a front room inhabited by my “servants”, a middle-aged couple of the Untouchable cast, which opened out to the street, where the temperature, even in March, was a humid 115F+. I was already sweating profusely when I was being led up the 4 flights of rickety stairs by the “woman servant”. But when I was led into the front room, I was staggered. It was like a hotter oven inside an already sizzling one, easily 125F, no less. “How the hell am I gonna stand 2 weeks of this?!” But as soon as I entered my room, aaaaahhhh, a cool little oasis, 70F, no more. And then, I saw the air-condtioner mounted in the wall between the two rooms, cool air into mine, hot air into theirs. I invited them to come into my room to cool off, but they humbly declined. Apparently, mine was not a realm permitted to Untouchables. I tried in the first night to keep my door open so that some cool air to reach them, but they quietly closed it for my privacy. Good people in a rotten system.

Good people in a rotten system. I’m sure we all can relate to it.

Anthony Marr, TPC’s Senior Editor of Ecological Crisis and Wildlife Defense, has a degree in physics, and has worked as a field geophysicist and an environmental technologist; was born in China, lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and travels world-wide 6 months every year; has been to Africa to observe the wildlife situation first hand (~1980): has performed undercover operations and media campaigns in all the major Chinatowns of North America, to rid them of endangered species products (1995 onward); led the “highest profile Canadian wildlife campaign in 1996″ regarding trophy hunting of Grizzly bears in British Columbia; has led three deep-rural-India expeditions to help save the subcontinent’s wildlife habitat and ecosystems, resulting in being honored as the “Champion of the Bengal Tiger” in the award-winning TV documentary series Champions of the Wild aired in 20 countries worldwide (1997-1999); has conducted two overt/covert missions in Japan against whaling and the dolphin capture and slaughter (2004 & 2005); has since 2003 completed 6 Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE tours) throughout the United States and Canada, the first of which (CARE-1) covering 40 states and 4 provinces in 7.5 months (2003-2009); has been a speaker at the National Animal Rights Conference since 2004 (see www.ARConference.org), giving up to a dozen different speeches per year-conference (2004-2009); has appeared on television, radio, newspapers and magazines hundreds of times (1995 – 2009); is the founder of Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE – 1999); is the author of the book OMNI-SCIENCE and the Human Destiny (2003); and is the author of the book Homo Sapiens! SAVE YOUR EARTH. For all the above and more, see www.HOPE-CARE.org.

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

A new PETA undercover investigation inside a Land O’Lakes supplier facility in Pennsylvania has revealed routine neglect and cruelty to cows who are milked for the Fortune 250 company’s products. Over the course of several months, the investigation documented deplorable, filthy conditions for cows on the farm, such as pens that were filled with deep excrement (see video and photos), and cows who suffered from ailments and conditions so severe that they collapsed and became “downers” but were not put out of their misery or given veterinary care in a timely manner, if at all.

Land O’Lakes “inspected” the farm as recently as June 2009 and even noted that there were areas in need of cleaning (including the milking parlor walls!) but approved the facility nonetheless.

Cows on dairy factory farms are not given much more than the numbered tag that is punched through their ears to identify them. Read more about what happened to a few of the cows who lived and died miserably at one such farm.

The farm’s owner and one of his sons were caught on video electro-shocking cows who were in too much pain to stand up. One of the farmer’s sons kicked a cow and jabbed her with the blade of a pocket knife.Both the father and son have now been charged with cruelty to animals.

The dairy industry’s standard forms of cruelty also led to suffering for these cows. In order to make milking easier, cows’ tails were amputated by tightly binding them with elastic bands, causing the skin and tissue to slowly die and slough off and leaving the animals unable to swat away flies, which, in addition to tormenting the cows, also led to the spread of disease. Tail-docking is unnecessary and cruel, which is why it has been condemned by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Dairy farmers don’t allow cows―whose pregnancies last for nine months, just like human pregnancies―to spend any significant time with their calves, who are taken from their mothers shortly after birth. Cows are intelligent animals who can remember things for a long time, and they have the capacity to worry about the future.

PETA’s investigation also reveals cows and calves who were kept in pens and barns whose floors were covered with deep excrement, which caused foot and hoof problems and fostered the spread of disease. Calves rescued from the farm had pneumonia, “manure scald,” ringworm, pinkeye, and parasites. Some cows suffered respiratory distress and had pus-filled nasal discharge streaming down their faces. Abscesses were common on the farm—some of them burst and oozed pus, even as cows were being milked, as can be seen in our video.

World-renowned meat and dairy industry expert Dr. Temple Grandin, after reviewing the footage, said, “The conditions are absolutely atrocious. … It was obvious that the place was seldom cleaned and … that many sick animals were not receiving veterinary treatment. … The dairy manager totally NEGLECTED his animals. … Many animals suffer greatly.”

PETA is calling on Land O’Lakes to implement and enforce a 12-point animal welfare plan to govern all cooperative members’ dairy-farming operations, which will eliminate some of the worst abuses to cows raised for their milk. Write to Land O’Lakes President Christopher Policinski now and urge him to implement the plan today. Of course, the best way for you to help prevent cows from suffering these abuses is to go vegan and stop consuming dairy products. Explore our “Vegetarian Starter Kit” for recipes and tips to get started today.

source: https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2515

Video by ALLdeersgo2heaven

11/23/09

Imagine if one of those “axes” hits a child, a dog or any non-killing public? They are doing a fine job of killing each other all the time….. http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/accident-center.html….

They’ve already blown out the brains of 313 defenseless deer with high-powered rifles in Death Park, but the “good” people in Johnson County and at the Kansas Department of Wildlife haven’t satiated their lust for blood yet. They want to slaughter MORE semi-tame bucks, does and fawns in our suburban family park, formerly known as Shawnee Mission Park!

Call and/or email the people below to demand that they stop the incredibly cruel bow hunt they have planned for early December. Tell them to manage the relatively few deer who remain in Death Park with Anthony Marr’s comprehensive, viable, and cost effective nonlethal deer management plan! Tell them it’s not too late to do the right thing!

Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson http://governor.ks.gov/comment
785-296-6240

Kansas Dept of Wildlife Big Game Coordinator Lloyd Fox lloydf@wp.state.ks.us
620-672-5911 or 785-296-2281

Johnson County Parks Director Michael Meadors and PR Director Randy Knight
Michael.Meadors@jocogov.org and Randy.Knight@jocogov.org
913-438-7275

Johnson County Board of County Commissioners:
BOCC-Commissioners@jocogov.org

Who are:

Annabeth Surbaugh 913-715-5000 annabeth.surbaugh@jocogov.org
Jim Allen 913-715-0432 jim.allen@jocogov.org
C. Edward Peterson 913-715-0431 ed.peterson@jocogov.org
David Lindstrom 913-715-0433 david.lindstrom@jocogov.org
Ed Eilert 913-715-0434 ed.eilert@jocogov.org
Doug Wood 913-715-0435 doug.wood@jocogov.org
Calvin Hayden 913-715-0436 calvin.hayden@jocogov.org

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/ and email us at willpowerful@hotmail.com.

TORTURED BY FRIENDS OF DARIO RINGACH/UCLA PRO-TORTURE (image furnished by animal mutilator ringach)

Posted by Jason Miller

11/22/09

Camille Marino’s deconstruction of a UCLA vivisector’s article describing “responsible research with monkeys” (click on the link below) serves nicely to address The University of Kansas Medical Center’s concerns that “materials publicly distributed in the Kansas City area by protestors contained gross inaccuracies.” Meanwhile, we patiently await access to the laboratories at KU Med Center so that we can observe and video their “ethical” enslavement and torture of sentient, intelligent, and social beings. (See Ricky Setticase’s email exchange with KUMC below).

Excerpted from DARIO RINGACH POSTS AN UNBELIEVABLE BLOG ON SPEAKING OF RESEARCH by Camille Marino:

Dario Ringach posted an essay on Speaking of Research, A look at responsible research with monkeys, in which he states that the images of injured animals activists publicize are either decades old or from other countries. Yet, the “humane” footage he provides is from a foreign country — the UCLA dungeon is off-limits . He will not acknowledge that every single time an activist gains access to a lab, new horrors are continually exposed — EVERY SINGLE TIME. But I now realize that Ringach is incapable of recognizing sadism. He truly is a sociopath and he, as well as the rest of his murderous community, will never stop their sadistic reign of their own accord.

And here is the email exchange between activist, Ricky Setticase, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs, Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD:

Subject: Gross Inconsistencies
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 22:59:51
From: Ricky Setticase
To: mnielsen@kumc.edu
CC: batkinson@kumc.edu
03 November 2009

Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD, MPH
(913) 588-5240

Good day KU Medical.

Bite Club of KC protested Paul Cheney of KU Medical during National Primate Liberation Week October 17-24 2009 for his enslavement and torture of monkeys in a brain mapping study. The information promoted by Bite Club was provided by Michael Budkie and his group Stop Animal Exploitation Now (www.saenonline.org )

KU Medical spokes person stated that Bite Club’s information was full of “gross inconsistencies.” So I am asking you, Marcia, what are those inconsistencies?

I am also asking that you “open the doors” to Paul Cheney’s “research” and allow the public to witness the vivisection. Would KU Medical be willing to co-produce a video with Bite Club showing the “research” of Paul Cheney highlighting the enslavement of sentient monkeys while Paul has his way the restrained animal?

I believe my tax dollars are funding Paul Cheney’s “torture porn” research. I should therefore be allowed to see how my money is being spent!

I look forward to hearing back from you or one of your staff. At the least I hope you will outline those “gross inconsistencies” you provided in such general terms.

Ricky Setticase.
http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/
Get your free vegetarian starter kit at www.vegetarianstarterkit.com
Start saving the lives of animals today.

From: Marcia Nielsen
To: Ricky Setticase
Cc: Jessica Taveau ; Stephanie Sharp
Sent: Mon, November 16, 2009 4:01:22 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Gross Inconsistencies

Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD, MPH
Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs
Office of External Affairs
The University of Kansas Medical Center
3901 Rainbow Blvd.
Kansas City, KS 66160
voice 913.588.5240
mnielsen@kumc.edu
Executive Assistant Theresa Woolley
voice 913.588.5258/fax 913.588.1481
twoolley@kumc.edu

Dear Mr. Setticase:

Thank you for contacting us.

Materials publicly distributed in the Kansas City area by protestors contained gross “inaccuracies” — the word I used and that media reported; not “inconsistencies.” They promoted false, misleading and inflammatory statements. They impugned the integrity of our researchers, whom we know to be trained professionals committed to finding cures and discovering medical treatments that relieve suffering.

We provided corrections to media and others, including the following:

Animal research plays a vital role in medical advances for humans and animals. Practically every present-day prevention treatment, cure and control of disease, pain and suffering is based on knowledge attained through research with animals. This includes Insulin for diabetics, blood transfusions, vaccinations, chemotherapy, antibiotics, joint replacement and dialysis.

Primates do receive anesthesia during research procedures; they are treated and monitored by qualified veterinarians to prevent injury or disease.

The research is performed under strict protocols set by national regulatory bodies and is done for the purpose of developing cures and treatments for victims of stroke and other neurological afflictions.

Researchers at the KU Medical Center and around the world engage in this ethical research to learn more about motor function loss, long-term cognitive impairments, to repair brain injuries and to devise techniques to help stroke victims rehabilitate.

Results of the neurological procedures under attack by activists have provided invaluable insight into the treatment and management of neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injury, in addition to stroke.

We work hard to maintain a clean, comfortable and respectful environment for the animals in our research facilities. The facilities are overseen and reviewed by professional and federal animal care regulatory agencies.

Sincerely,

Marci Nielsen

From: Ricky Setticase
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 6:03 PM
To: Marcia Nielsen; twoolley@kumc.edu
Cc: Jessica Taveau; Stephanie Sharp; Jason Miller
Subject: Re: Gross Inconsistencies (KU Medical vivisection)

Thanks for the reply, Marcia. Sorry for inaccurately quoting the news article and thank you for the correction.

So are me and my Bite Club colleagues invited to video tape this “clean, comfortable and respectful environment for the animals?” Can Bite Club, on behalf of the animals, witness this “valuable” research in action? Will KU Medical open its doors to dispell the so called myths promoted by animal activists?

I know research facilities are “overseen and reviewed by professional and federal animal care regulatory agencies” but so are meat processing plants and we have all seen the video footage from animal activists showing regulatory agencies turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to animal abuse.

I hope you will extend an open hand to Bite Club and I look forward to your invitation.

Ricky Setticase.

!!!Help Animals Now!!!

Free vegetarian starter kit www.vegetarianstarterkit.com
End puppy mills http://www.idausa.org/campaigns/puppymills/index.html
Bite Back Animal Liberation http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/ and email us at willpowerful@hotmail.com.

TORTURED BY FRIENDS OF DARIO RINGACH/UCLA PRO-TORTURE (image furnished by animal mutilator ringach)

Posted by Jason Miller

11/22/09

Camille Marino’s deconstruction of a UCLA vivisector’s article describing “responsible research with monkeys” (click on the link below) serves nicely to address The University of Kansas Medical Center’s concerns that “materials publicly distributed in the Kansas City area by protestors contained gross inaccuracies.” Meanwhile, we patiently await access to the laboratories at KU Med Center so that we can observe and video their “ethical” enslavement and torture of sentient, intelligent, and social beings. (See Ricky Setticase’s email exchange with KUMC below).

Excerpted from DARIO RINGACH POSTS AN UNBELIEVABLE BLOG ON SPEAKING OF RESEARCH by Camille Marino:

Dario Ringach posted an essay on Speaking of Research, A look at responsible research with monkeys, in which he states that the images of injured animals activists publicize are either decades old or from other countries. Yet, the “humane” footage he provides is from a foreign country — the UCLA dungeon is off-limits . He will not acknowledge that every single time an activist gains access to a lab, new horrors are continually exposed — EVERY SINGLE TIME. But I now realize that Ringach is incapable of recognizing sadism. He truly is a sociopath and he, as well as the rest of his murderous community, will never stop their sadistic reign of their own accord.

And here is the email exchange between activist, Ricky Setticase, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs, Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD:

Subject: Gross Inconsistencies
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 22:59:51
From: Ricky Setticase
To: mnielsen@kumc.edu
CC: batkinson@kumc.edu
03 November 2009

Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD, MPH
(913) 588-5240

Good day KU Medical.

Bite Club of KC protested Paul Cheney of KU Medical during National Primate Liberation Week October 17-24 2009 for his enslavement and torture of monkeys in a brain mapping study. The information promoted by Bite Club was provided by Michael Budkie and his group Stop Animal Exploitation Now (www.saenonline.org )

KU Medical spokes person stated that Bite Club’s information was full of “gross inconsistencies.” So I am asking you, Marcia, what are those inconsistencies?

I am also asking that you “open the doors” to Paul Cheney’s “research” and allow the public to witness the vivisection. Would KU Medical be willing to co-produce a video with Bite Club showing the “research” of Paul Cheney highlighting the enslavement of sentient monkeys while Paul has his way the restrained animal?

I believe my tax dollars are funding Paul Cheney’s “torture porn” research. I should therefore be allowed to see how my money is being spent!

I look forward to hearing back from you or one of your staff. At the least I hope you will outline those “gross inconsistencies” you provided in such general terms.

Ricky Setticase.
http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/
Get your free vegetarian starter kit at www.vegetarianstarterkit.com
Start saving the lives of animals today.

From: Marcia Nielsen
To: Ricky Setticase
Cc: Jessica Taveau ; Stephanie Sharp
Sent: Mon, November 16, 2009 4:01:22 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Gross Inconsistencies

Marcia J. Nielsen, PhD, MPH
Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs
Office of External Affairs
The University of Kansas Medical Center
3901 Rainbow Blvd.
Kansas City, KS 66160
voice 913.588.5240
mnielsen@kumc.edu
Executive Assistant Theresa Woolley
voice 913.588.5258/fax 913.588.1481
twoolley@kumc.edu

Dear Mr. Setticase:

Thank you for contacting us.

Materials publicly distributed in the Kansas City area by protestors contained gross “inaccuracies” — the word I used and that media reported; not “inconsistencies.” They promoted false, misleading and inflammatory statements. They impugned the integrity of our researchers, whom we know to be trained professionals committed to finding cures and discovering medical treatments that relieve suffering.

We provided corrections to media and others, including the following:

Animal research plays a vital role in medical advances for humans and animals. Practically every present-day prevention treatment, cure and control of disease, pain and suffering is based on knowledge attained through research with animals. This includes Insulin for diabetics, blood transfusions, vaccinations, chemotherapy, antibiotics, joint replacement and dialysis.

Primates do receive anesthesia during research procedures; they are treated and monitored by qualified veterinarians to prevent injury or disease.

The research is performed under strict protocols set by national regulatory bodies and is done for the purpose of developing cures and treatments for victims of stroke and other neurological afflictions.

Researchers at the KU Medical Center and around the world engage in this ethical research to learn more about motor function loss, long-term cognitive impairments, to repair brain injuries and to devise techniques to help stroke victims rehabilitate.

Results of the neurological procedures under attack by activists have provided invaluable insight into the treatment and management of neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and traumatic brain injury, in addition to stroke.

We work hard to maintain a clean, comfortable and respectful environment for the animals in our research facilities. The facilities are overseen and reviewed by professional and federal animal care regulatory agencies.

Sincerely,

Marci Nielsen

From: Ricky Setticase
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 6:03 PM
To: Marcia Nielsen; twoolley@kumc.edu
Cc: Jessica Taveau; Stephanie Sharp; Jason Miller
Subject: Re: Gross Inconsistencies (KU Medical vivisection)

Thanks for the reply, Marcia. Sorry for inaccurately quoting the news article and thank you for the correction.

So are me and my Bite Club colleagues invited to video tape this “clean, comfortable and respectful environment for the animals?” Can Bite Club, on behalf of the animals, witness this “valuable” research in action? Will KU Medical open its doors to dispell the so called myths promoted by animal activists?

I know research facilities are “overseen and reviewed by professional and federal animal care regulatory agencies” but so are meat processing plants and we have all seen the video footage from animal activists showing regulatory agencies turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to animal abuse.

I hope you will extend an open hand to Bite Club and I look forward to your invitation.

Ricky Setticase.

!!!Help Animals Now!!!

Free vegetarian starter kit www.vegetarianstarterkit.com
End puppy mills http://www.idausa.org/campaigns/puppymills/index.html
Bite Back Animal Liberation http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/ and email us at willpowerful@hotmail.com.

Problem of biodiversity loss has been ‘eased off centre stage’ by focus on climate change, according to Prof Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as ‘Darwin’s natural heir’

Extinct Tasmanian Wolf on Display in Sydney, Australia Photograph: Frans Lanting/Corbis

The diversity of life on Earth is undergoing an “immense and hidden” tragedy that requires the scale of global response now being deployed to tackle climate change, according to one of the world’s most eminent biologists.

Prof Edward Wilson, an ecologist who has been described as “Darwin’s natural heir” and hailed by novelist Ian McEwan as an “intellectual hero” and “inspirational” writer, told the Guardian that the threat was so grave he is pushing for the creation of an international body of experts modelled on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, which is credited with convincing world leaders that the threat from climate change is real, includes about 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries and was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2007 along with Al Gore. Wilson’s proposed organisation – which he names the Barometer of Life – would report to governments on the threats posed to species around the world.

Wilson said the problem of biodiversity loss had been “eased off centre stage” because of the focus on climate change.

“We don’t hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn’t get anything like the attention the physical environment has,” he said.

Since the beginning of the last century, 183 species are known to have become extinct, including the Tasmanian tiger, the Caribbean monk seal and the toolache wallaby. But this number is a gross underestimate of the true number of extinctions, according to the International Union forConservation of Nature species programme.

Wilson was speaking ahead of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on Tuesday. The 80-year-old scientist will deliver a lecture via video link to an audience at London’s Royal Institution on Darwin’s legacy and “the future of biology”.

The extent of scientific ignorance about the diversity of life on Earth is vast. Scientists have catalogued about 1.9 m species, but estimate there are about 20m-30m in total (excluding microbes).

Wilson said the scale of the mass extinction now under way was even harder to comprehend.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000. Wilson’s proposed international initiative, which he has developed with Simon Stuart, the chairman of the Species Survival Commission, would document this species loss and work out how to tackle it.

“Darwin would be simply appalled by what humanity had done to the richness and diversity of natural life,” said Randal Keynes, one of Darwin’s great-great-grandsons, who is helping to coordinate the 150th anniversary with the British Council. “He would be in the lead of campaigning on the preservation of biodiversity.”

Some of the species that played a central role in the formulation of Darwin’s theoryof evolution by natural selection are now either extinct or severely threatened. The Floreana mockingbird, that lives on the island of the same name in the Galapagos, was one of a handful of related species that first gave Darwin the idea that species could change (it is a myth that finches were the crucial group).

Reflecting on the similarities and differences between mockingbirds on different islands and on the mainland, Darwin gave the first vague hint of his later theory in his notes on the Beagle voyage that “such facts would undermine the stability of species”.

Today, the Floreana mockingbird is classed as “critically endangered” and exists in two populations numbering 200 and 49. The giant tortoise that Darwin encountered on the same island – Geochelone elephantopus – was driven extinct by hungry whalers who enjoyed eating its meat in soup.

Wilson said conservation efforts around the world were far from adequate. “Right now we are just piddling around with efforts here and there, some of them strong and dedicated, the aggregate of which is not even close to what we need.”"The benefits for humanity [of a concerted international effort on biodiversity] would be enormous … the discovery of the rest of life on Earth and fuller evaluation of it is going to result in all sorts of very valuable knowledge,” said Wilson, pointing at new crops, products and biotechnology advances.

A year of celebration of Darwin’s achievements (and his 200th birthday) is drawing to a close and will segue neatly into the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

“The public recognition of the importance of biodiversity as an issue is very poor, very low,” said Kenyes, “I think Darwin would want everyone to pick up that agenda and give it all the support they can.”

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/biodiversity-loss-darwin-edward-wilson

Submitted by Kyle Kelleman

11/18/09

I am working major on this and need all the help I can get. Please read the article at the link below:

http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009911100364

If we all act now we can stop this “urban deer hunt”

Act now….

CALL the powers that be-Say something like:

You’re in the area, you don’t support it, and there are many nonlethal alternatives. I have sent them all emails regarding this matter. You can refer them to my email (sent by ‘Kyle on 11/17/2009′). I talked to a few of them and left voice mails for others.

We NEED them getting a TON of calls.

When calling you can call it ‘The Controlled deer hunt in Springfield’ by bow,or better yet bill #2009-288

Nick Ibarra; Office: 417.864.5007

Cindy Rushefsky; Office: 417.862.9614

Doug Burlison; Office: 417.865.7175

Collin Quigley; Office: 417.864.1001

John Rush; Office line:417.864.1651; Cell phone: 417-818-8429

Mark Creed, Conservation Agent; Office Phone: 417-582-1907

Tim Russell
Day phone: 417-895-6881,ext-274
Fax: 417-895-6910
Email is: Tim.Russell@mdc.mo.gov
(regional supervisor of the conservation department)

If we get people behind this-We can stop it!-Pass this along to as many people as you can!

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog. Emile-Edouard Mouchy, oil painting, 1832.

“APS exposes the powerful economic interests driving the vivisection complex and its clunky 17th century research paradigm during a 21st century era of genetic science, advanced nutritional knowledge, and hundreds of sophisticated technological alternatives to vivisection.”

November 20, 2009

Soldiers of Misfortune

In January 2006, 16-year-old student Laurie Pycroft formed the “Pro-Test” group in the UK to rally public support for vivisection in the face of vocal animal rights opposition. The group’s spokesperson, Tom Holder, came to the US in March 2008, funded by a vivisection industry front group, to start Speaking of Research, a “grassroots” organization dedicated to mobilizing support for “research,” the universal euphemism for vivisection.[1] In March 2009, Dr. David Jentsch, Professor of Psychology, founded a Pro-Test chapter at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).[2]

With these events, a novel movement of vivisector-activists was born, and the research community opened a new propaganda front, as the failures and obsolescence of the vivisection industry become ever more obvious.[3] Tired of animal rights “terrorists” kicking sand in their faces, vowing no longer to live in fear of attack, vivisectors have taken to playing offense, not merely defense. The transatlantic Pro-Test – more accurately characterized as Pro-Torture — network seeks to generate mainstream support for vivisection, to create a culture of solidarity among rattled “researchers,” and to perpetuate shopworn apologetics for vivisection as both legitimate and necessary.

Despite Labor Party promises to reduce the use of nonhuman animals in vivisection, the UK death toll has steadily risen, with the year 2008 showing the greatest increase since 1986.[4] While the body count has grown in the US as well, the American vivisection industry fears it is losing the battle for hearts and minds to the animal rights opposition.[5] One study claims that support for vivisection among US citizens dropped steeply from 70 percent to 54 percent during the 2000-2008 period, prompting industry front groups like the Foundation for Biomedical Research to invest millions of dollars in “Research Saves” propaganda[6] and Pro-Torture forces to place ads in newspapers and on billboards.[7]

Disinformation Inc.

In essence, the vivisection industry’s propaganda strategy is to sanctify themselves and demonize animal rights. Vivisection apologists tirelessly repeat the ludicrous claim that all advances in modern medicine resulted from nonhuman animal experimentation.[8] This conveniently overlooks the pivotal role played by improved sanitation, lifestyle changes, epidemiological studies, clinical observation, in vitro research, autopsy studies, computer and mathematical modeling, and molecular biology and genetics. Just a few of many medical advances that did not involve experimenting on other animals include the discovery of: how blood circulates throughout the heart, lungs, and arteries; the germ theory of disease; the mechanism of AIDS transmission; the human blood groups; the relationship between chemical exposure and birth defects; the anti-malarial drug quinine; the nutritional and environmental causes of stroke, cancer, vascular disease, and birth defects; and the link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

The Big Lie of vivisection also overlooks the astonishing number, perhaps vast majority, of cases, where vivisection fails dramatically – leading to serious side-effects, disease, and death – and doesn’t even meet minimum standards of predictive accuracy to be called science rather than pseudo-science or guesswork. Vivisectors try to minimize the huge problem posed by the differences between human and nonhuman animal metabolism, reaction to drugs, and so on, but it is their Achilles heel, and the never-ending slew of drugs that “tested safely on animals” yet had disastrous results when given to humans testifies not to a glitch in the system, but rather to a fundamental error and faulty foundations.

Combining fabrication and historical revision with manufactured fear, vivisectors’ second tactic of disinformation relies on the invalid deduction that since animal rights activists oppose vivisection, they necessarily reject medical progress. Should the sentimental views of misanthropic misfits prevail, vivisectors warn, the consequences for humankind would be catastrophic.

But this imposes a blatant false choice (vivisection or no research at all) and the realities are otherwise. History shows that, on the whole, vivisection has impeded knowledge, delayed discovery, and thwarted progress. Despite ubiquitous claims that the polio vaccine came from experiments on other animals, for example, such studies in fact misled scientists about where the virus enters the body and delayed finding an effective vaccine throughout the first half of the twentieth century Clinical trials of the drug digitalis, used to treat heart disorders, were delayed when it caused high blood pressure in nonhuman animals. Furosemide (Lasix), a diuretic used to treat high blood pressure and heart disease, was almost lost to the public because it was found to cause liver damage in mice, rats and hamsters. Fluoride, which provides protection against cavities, was initially withheld from dental use because it causes cancer in rats.

Animal rights advocates champion a better or valid science as opposed to an inferior or pseudo-science. Paying lip-service to noble ideals such as curing disease and advancing medical progress and the public good, vivisectors march millions of innocents to be tortured and slaughtered on the alter of selfish interest and material gain. Enslaved to erroneous and obsolete paradigms, addicted to the endless flow of grant money, and often contracted to corporations, vivisectors have strong vested interests in perpetuating the ancient regime rather than using sound alternative methods and blazing new trails. And so, while the snake-oil trade continues, millions of nonhuman animals die[9], human animals die from FDA-approved drugs “tested safe on animals,” and cures for cancer and other diseases remain as elusive as ever. According to Richard Klausner, former head of the National Cancer Institute, “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in humans.”[10]

Dogs are however extremely resistant to the cancer causing effects of cigarette smoke(Right). The tobacco companies were able to hide behind science’s inability to reproduce the obvious in dogs for many, many years and used such research to “prove” that smoking was not unhealthy.

While the vivisection industry brands animal rights activists as “terrorists,” their crimes against humanity are less publicized than their sadism against nonhuman animals. Time after time, vivisectors and pharmaceutical companies have intentionally deceived people about the dangers of marketed drugs. Experiments on nonhuman animals from the 1950s and 1960s failed to establish a link between cigarette smoking and cancer,[11] providing an avenue to mislead smokers decades later. Having proved in clinical trials that cigarettes kill humans, in 1988 vivisection became a vehicle to intentionally deceive the public[12] and, while humans continued to die of cancer, vivisectors and the tobacco industry worked in tandem throughout the 1990s.[13] Just one of countless examples, the vivisection industry, the state, and corporations routinely conspire to suppress critical reports on drug trials, to publish junk science in leading medical journals, and to fast-track dangerous drugs for mass marketing, thereby knowingly sickening and killing people for the reward of lucrative profits.

The Farce of Animal “Welfare”

Vivisectors pledge strict fidelity to laws and regulations mandating care for the “welfare” of the other animals they exploit. Yet every time activists penetrate the thick walls shielding vivisectors from accountability and scrutiny, the same habitual practices of neglect and cruelty are revealed, refuting the lies and obfuscating rhetoric of “welfare” and the myth that government, oversight committees, and the Animal Welfare Act ensure that vivisectors provide “care” for their coerced captives.[14] Countless cases of cruelty and sadism documented by whistleblowers[15] and undercover activists refute the lies of compassion, concern, and professionalism vivisectors spread in their lip-service to “animal welfare.”

Contrary to claims of government-enforced regulation, Dr. Isis Johnson Brown, a former United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector, resigned in frustration after her supervisors prevented her from enforcing minimal welfare standards. At a press conference in 2000, she revealed that she was the only inspector in Oregon and was, therefore, the sole person responsible for overseeing 120 facilities throughout the state. While she expected that vivisectors would not welcome her inspections, the systematic corruption at the USDA was an insurmountable issue: “What was surprising to me was my own supervisors were disappointed and unsupportive of my efforts to simply enforce the bare minimum standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. The USDA has a good ol’ boy relationship with the research industry and the laws are nothing more than smoke and mirrors. More than once, I was instructed by a supervisor to make a personal list of violations of the law, cut that list in half, and then cut that list in half again before writing up my inspection reports. My willingness to uphold the law during my site visits at the Primate Center led to me being `retrained’ several times by higher-ups in the USDA.”[16]

The Animal Welfare Act regulates details such as cage size and feeding, without interfering in the design of experiments themselves. The state, therefore, condones the most heinous forms of torture and cruelty that university-trained vivisectors can devise.[17] Moreover, the Animal Welfare Act does not apply to over 95 percent of nonhuman animals suffering and dying in vivisection laboratories, through a convenient definition that excludes birds, rats, and mice from the category of “animal.”[18]

The Animal Welfare Act is at best a worthless bureaucratic code; by duping much of the public into thinking nonhuman animals are protected in laboratories, the law works more to promote the “welfare” of vivisectors and drug companies than their captive victims. Similar to the ideological effects of the US “Humane Slaughter Act,” the advertising of “welfare” regulations lures the public into a complacent sleep and reinforces the demented assumption that any level of captivity, torture, and killing of sentient beings is somehow compatible with “humane” treatment.

Corporate and university laboratories are unmarked, hidden, and guarded for good reason (the University of Iowa is building a new $11.2 million vivisection facility underground!). Just as if slaughterhouses had glass walls vegetarian populations would swell, so translucent laboratories that revealed the truth of “welfare,” government “regulation,” and pseudo-scientific fraud would provoke outraged citizens to demand an end to the cruelty and charades their tax dollars underwrite.

First Responders

Whereas in the 1980s the animal rights movement thought it had shut down the fur industry, only to witness its vigorous resurgence a decade later, anti-vivisectionists must not make the same mistake and need to attack every new vivisection campaign and tactic. Amidst a glaring neglect of critical attention to the Pro-Torture offensive, in October 2009 two leading total liberation blogs — Thomas Paine’s Corner (TPC)[19] and Negotiation is Over (NIO)[20] — joined forces with Dr. Steven Best and the North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO)[21] to create the Alliance for Progressive Science (APS).

The critical analyses of NIO and TPC reached a worldwide audience and did not fail to capture the attention of the new vivisection lobby. One week after the joint campaign began, on Sunday, October 18, Pro-Torture purchased a full-page ad in The LA Times and began posting their propaganda on billboards. At the same time, UCLA vivisectors David Jentsch and Dario Ringach, Associate Professor of Neurobiology at UCLA,[22] once again refused to debate Dr. Jerry Vlasak and Dr. Ray Greek in a neutral and mainstream forum — CNN — that could have provided them with the vast audience they desperately seek.

Just as they run from “transparency” and accountability, Jentsch and Ringach flee from debate. Their excuse is that they don’t debate “extremists” and “terrorists,” but this is an ad hominem canard. Beneath their puffed-up bravado, Jentsch and Ringach clearly fear a real debate, such as a trauma surgeon and former vivisector (Vlasak) and a physician and prolific anti-vivisection author (Greek) would serve. Far from the security of their scripted sound bites and Internet forums, Jentsch and Ringach fear their feeble arguments and pathetic rationalizations might not win the day, and they would be exposed to the world as the charlatans and sadists they are.[23]

Thus far, TPC and NIO have worked to exploit all available angles. In May 2009, Pro-Torture sought to mobilize public support by way of an online petition which publically posted the names of dozens of vivisectors who otherwise hide in anonymity. Since the petition in effect “outed” a gang of exploiter who now had names, TPC and NIO published it not as a record of protest but rather as a directory of abusers and legally sanctioned killers. In response to the predictable accusation of “terrorism” leveled by Speaking of Research, we published our basic position:

Tom Holder and those abusers he speaks for fail to grasp an essential truth that lies at the core of this statement: If the Pro-Test Community of “researchers” were not committing atrocities that demand retribution, then they would have nothing to fear. VIVISECTORS FEAR EXPOSURE – which [we] are eager to provide. Speaking of Research references a “climate of fear” and yet their community refuses to acknowledge that this is the “climate” that they have cultivated. Vivisectors imprison animals in perpetual horror and carve up their bodies for fun and profit. Yet, rather than accept responsibility for the terroristic atmosphere they wallow in, those who openly advocate violence want to blame animal rights activists for the” fear” they experience when their atrocities are thrust into the spotlight. These people must not be allowed the luxury of anonymity. Those who victimize the helpless — human or nonhuman — demand attention. And we are watching you. We will not go away.”

Moreover, since the Pro-Torture community denies being funded by, or working for, the pharmaceutical industry, TPC and NIO raised the issue with Tom Holder who, as their spokesperson, has a natural facility for lying. In response to our query, Holder wrote: “I have never been paid by anyone in the pharmaceutical industry.” Upon receipt of his categorical denial, we sent Holder a SourceWatch page which identified Americans for Medical Progress, an industry front group, as the corporate entity that bankrolled his move to the US in March 2008 to create a pro-vivisection “grassroots” group, “Speaking of Research.”[24] Sitting on the Board of Directors of Americans for Medical Progress is a veritable “who’s who” of nonhuman animal torturers that would have every interest in spreading disinformation on college campuses and neutralizing potentially critical minds;[25] and what better way to legitimate a corrupt and violent industry than through the illusion of grassroots support and enthusiastic young adults?

The Alliance for Progressive Science

In October 2009, we (the undersigned) formed the Alliance for Progressive Science (APS) to attack Pro-Torture on both scientific and ethical grounds. APS exposes the powerful economic interests driving the vivisection complex and its clunky 17th century research paradigm during a 21st century era of genetic science, advanced nutritional knowledge, and hundreds of sophisticated technological alternatives to vivisection.

Combating the stereotype of animal rights as “anti-scientific” and “anti-progress,” APS champions a research paradigm that is “progressive” in its embrace of animal rights and development of new technologies that promise qualitative leaps in science and medicine. APS emphasizes that it is the vivisection industry, not the animal rights community, which is anti-science, anti-progress, and misanthropic. Apologists of vivisection refuse to acknowledge the physiological differences between human and nonhuman animals and the artificial setting and simulated conditions of research that yield false and misleading data. Fearing change and loss of funding, they perpetuate outmoded research methods and fail to exploit the full potential of science and technology. Amidst the corporatization of universities and commodification of knowledge, they prostitute science to the profit interests of pharmaceutical corporations.

From the breeders to the white-coat sadists, vivisection is a blood-money capitalist enterprise. Even with an 18 percent decrease in profits from last year, lab victim breeders, Charles River, earned $37.3 million for the three-month period ending September 30, 2009.[26] The Department of Health & Human Services reports that vivisector David Jentsch received a $176,731 grant in 2008.[27] Also in 2008, out of a total of 940 NIH grants received by UCLA vivisectors, Dario Ringach received two in the amounts of $301,840 and $361,263; Jentsch deposited two checks in the amounts of $427,148 and $69,559; and Edythe London was rewarded for torturing the innocent in the amounts of $100,291 and $120,508.[28] Jentsch, naturally, downplays the co-optation of science by capital and trivializes the money he takes from pharma.[29]

Vivisectors have successfully framed animal rights activists as extremists, terrorists, misanthropes, and atavistic enemies of science. In fact, following the same position pushed by advocates for nonhuman animals since the beginnings of the anti-vivisection movement in the mid-19th century, we are not opposed to science. We only reject bad science, pseudo-science, and corporate science that is antiquated, obsolete, flawed in essence, and perpetuated more for corporate profits than ailing people.[30]

Vivisection, not animal rights, is the real obstacle to medical progress; vivisectors, not animal rights activists, are the real terrorists. Vivisectors steal, capture, or breed their drug and data slaves; they inflict fear, suffering, violence, and death on innocents, slaughtering up to 100 million intelligent, sensitive, and complex beings every year worldwide. It is the height of absurdity and the gravest offense to language and logic for those whose occupation is to torture and kill without remorse to vilify as “terrorists” those whose humanity compels them to defend the defenseless. And the property damage a few saboteurs inflict on vivisection laboratories can never compare to the horrendous violence white-coat terrorists inflict on the sentient beings held captive in their chambers of horror.

The global vivisection industry is not about science but money, playing a massive shell game in which the farce of experiments on other animals legitimates the research and marketing of products and drugs.

Like the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is understaffed, inept, and corrupt. The appalling lack of control in slaughterhouses and vivisection labs, and the revolving door between government and industry, is repeated in the failures of the FDA to regulate the research and marketing of drugs.[31] With the assistance of a corrupt FDA, drug companies have fast-tracked drugs into the market while suppressing risks and dangers. Corporations not only buy products and nonhuman animals and labor, and influence or control entire departments and universities in general, they also buy and control government.

Seen in its proper light, vivisectors, universities, pharmaceutical industries, and others are the real misanthropes and anti-science forces, as they perpetuate a flawed, obsolete, and barbaric research model because it is lucrative business. These servants of humanity not only massacre other animals, they kill humans too and often knowingly market unsafe drugs. Greed and lust for profit fuels the global vivisection industry.

Through the concept of “progress,” APS emphasizes both the moral bankruptcy of vivisection and its antiquated, obsolete, and unscientific nature. Progressive science champions “alternative” methods of research and testing and rejects speciesism to include all animals – human and nonhuman – equally in its sphere of moral concern; it thereby rejects the troubling utilitarian logic that sanctifies scarifying the interests of one group to those of another group if it brings about alleged benefits or “the greater good.”

A Growing Consensus: The Age of Vivisection is Over

Pro-Torture brown-shirt forces are a vivid reminder of how interests tethered to obsolete paradigms will cling with all their might before yielding to progressive change. Just as the Catholic Church attacked science and the monarchies and aristocracies resisted democracy, so the global vivisection complex rails against the moral and technological advances attached to the animal rights movement.

But as ever more critics from the opposition and from within expose the fallacies and failures of vivisection, the case for its obsolescence and retirement to museum of horrors grows increasingly strong.

In 2006, Health & Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt observed that “Currently, nine out of ten experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because we cannot accurately predict how they will behave in people based on laboratory and animal studies.”[32]

And other scientists point to the fallacious claims advanced by vivisectors. Yale University’s Dr. David Katz writes, “Extrapolation from rodent research to outcomes in people is notoriously uncertain and fraught with danger. Basic science studies and animal experiments have resulted over the years in headlines about cures for cancer, a definitive obesity gene and effective AIDS vaccines, to name a few. None of these has yet to materialize, and early hyperbole in each case gave way to disappointment.”[33]

In addition to embracing antiquated techniques over cheaper and more accurate alternatives, vivisectors promote discrimination of our fellow species and deny that nonhuman animals have complex emotional, intellectual and social lives. A particular species is frequently chosen for “research” not because it provides a “good model,” but because it represents a cheap, easily transportable, convenient resource.

We vehemently oppose a pseudo-science rooted in irrational ideologies, obsolete methodologies, and blatant lust for profit and that promotes oppression, violence, terrorism, and murder. Any field of science that defends speciesism employs the same logical defect that has hampered progress throughout history. There is no moral justification for the subjugation, imprisonment, and torture of other animals.

Oppressors don’t give up their power voluntarily, and virtually all profound social change in the modern world has been made through coercive tactics that force oppressors to relinquish power and privilege in favor of more democratic and inclusive arrangements In the nineteenth century, a good number of leading scientific voices were using “science” to justify racism and a wide array of prejudices against those deemed inferior or unfit, thereby propagating pernicious ideologies that helped to bring about Nazism. Today, many scientists pride themselves on the claim that they are beyond such crude and vile distortions and are “enlightened.” In fact, they are laboring with the oldest prejudice on earth – speciesism – and are enablers or direct participants in the holocaust it perpetuates.

In laboring with antiquated models of nonhuman animals, oblivious to the recent scientific revolution of cognitive ethology,[34] and in legitimating practices that torture and kill up to 100 million innocent victims every year, these “enlightened” speciesists are no different than racists. In fact, they are worse, for the costs of their ignorance, prejudice, and self-serving, soul-assuaging mythologies take an incredible toll on human and nonhuman animals alike.

Racism allowed an oppressive white culture to enslave, exploit, and torture African-Americans. It was only through a bloody and violent revolution that the disenfranchised slaves won their freedom. Vivisectors are driven by the same supremacist mentality as any slave owner. And they are equally resistant to freeing their slaves. Future generations shall cast harsh judgment on them, as critical scientists of the current day are opprobrious of their benighted predecessors in the 19th century.

A Call to Arms

We need to unite our community to address the imminent threat that the new vivisection activists present. Left unchecked, this movement can lobby for laws that further marginalize and penalize activists.

We must be confident, but never complacent. While Pro-Torture forces are small, weak, and amateurish, they must not be underestimated. This can be either a minor resistance that we can beat back or the beginning of a surge that – backed by powerful industries and patrons — can sway public opinion and lawmakers alike, leading to a major setback for our movement that in recent years has seen the death toll of innocents rise in countries such as the UK.

Animal rights activists now have an obligation to acknowledge and counter the new breed of vivisection champions. Their reaction to our alliance indicates that relentless exposure, interspersed with targeted aggressive campaigns against individuals, has put them in a defensive, reactionary mode and exposed their weaknesses. While they pander to the media spotlight, they fear critical publicity. We must provide it. And we can amplify our message if we make a concerted effort within the animal rights community.

As long as vivisection is alive and practiced somewhere, we will relentlessly pursue those who violate the rights of other animals and who retard the movement of moral and scientific progress. We urge all animal rights activists to help APS stop the Pro-Torture movement dead in its tracks. In an effort to maintain a laser-beam focus on the vivisection industry, NIO is establishing a network of bloggers committed to publishing weekly articles. We ask fellow activists to follow us in monitoring the insidious moves of the vivisection industry; to read the essays featured on the NIO, TPC, and NAALPO sites; and to contribute writings of their own for mass dissemination. As often as we can, our websites will broadcast Pro-Torture plans so that our community can disrupt them.

In beating back these new waves of industry encroachment by aggressive Pro-Torture forces, APS does not compete with, but rather compliments, existing anti-vivisection activism. APS seeks to put down the new tactical fronts and propaganda efforts designed to erase two centuries of anti-vivisection activism and to expand vivisection’s trail of torture and death to unprecedented levels for the profits of Big Pharma.

Working together, we can stop Pro-Torture, advance medicine and science, and abolish vivisection altogether. The changes that bring about nonhuman animal liberation will result when society learns the fate of human and nonhuman animals are intertwined; that vivisection kills nonhuman and human animals alike; and that the only promising pathway of change is through preventative medicine and proper diet, epidemiology and human-based research methods, and aggressive development of alternative technologies.

Dr. Steven Best, Philosopher
Dr. Jerry Vlasak, Co-Founder of NAALPO
Jason Miller, Thomas Paine’s Corner
Camille Marino, Negotiation Is Over

——————————————————————————–
[1] On the origins of the Pro-Test groups in the UK and US, see www.pro-test.org.uk, http://www.speakingofresearch.org/, and http://www.pro-test-for-science.org/.

[2] The group was founded as “UCLA Pro-Test” and in late 2009 changed its name to “Pro-Test for Science.” See Jentsch’s website at: http://faculty.bri.ucla.edu/institution/personnel?personnel_id=45365.. For Jentsch’s research profile, heavily focused on addicting nonhuman animals to amphetamines, see: http://www.biomedexperts.com/Profile.bme/638932/J_David_Jentsch.

[3] It is somewhat improbable that the visionaries, founders, and driving forces of Pro-Test were not veteran vivisectors like Jentsch, but rather two teenagers. More likely, cunning scientists and industry bosses manufactured their teen-age superheroes to generate media interest and create the illusion of popular support. Given that Pycroft was a high-school drop-out and disorganized “bedroom blogger,” there is some mystery about what — or how much money — sparked his sudden interest in promoting vivisection. See “Laurie Pycroft: The Making of a Teenage Protestor” (http://www.teachers.tv/video/30453), and “Bedroom Blogger, 16, takes on animal rights activists” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/feb/25/news.animalrights).

[4] “The Long Fight Against Animal Testing,” Guardian.co.uk, July 23, 2009 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/23/animal-research-rate-rising).

[5] The USDA reports that over one million “animals” (in their arbitrary legal definition that includes nonhuman animals such as dogs, cats, non-human primates, guinea pigs, hamsters, and rabbits) are experimented on in US laboratories each year. On a more accurate scale of measure, however, namely one that includes the 93 percent of sentient beings used in vivisection (namely: birds, rats, mice, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) the US government excludes from its count (and any legal protection) because it does not define them as “animals” (!), the number would rise from one million to 34 million (for a critique of governments’ manipulation of definitions and statistics, and an alternative scale of measure, see Dr. Hadwen Trust, “New research reveals 115 million animals used in experiments worldwide,” August 13, 2008 (http://www.drhadwentrust.org/news/new-research-reveals-115-million-animals-used-in-experiments-worldwide).

[6] “Science takes case for animal research to the people,”StarTribune.com, November 4, 2009 (http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/pets/68093422.html).

[7] See the NAALPO press release, “LA Times Advertisement, Billboard Confirm UCLA Desperation Animal Abusers Refuse to Debate Issues, Spend Big to Counter Exposure of Their Atrocities,” October 18, 2009 (http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/press_releases/2009/pr_09_10-18_ucladesperation.htm).

[8] In an April 10, 2000 paradigmatic statement, for instance, the American Medical Association stated three major industry lies in as many sentences: “Every medical breakthrough of the last century has involved research with animals. The reason is that we have no other choice. There are no alternatives to animal research.” Similarly, in a recent discussion before a CNN audience, Tom Holder shamelessly lied: “Every single advance in human history has come about because of research using animals…. Should we just stop all types of testing?” CNN Blogger Bunch, “Is animal testing necessary?” November 11, 2009 (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/11/11/dcl.bloggers.animal.testing.cnn).

[9] In April 1998, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study which showed that more than 2 million Americans become seriously ill every year because of toxic reactions to correctly prescribed medicine and 106,000 die from those reactions, making drug side effects the sixth most common cause of death in this country. Legal drugs kill more people per year than all illegal drugs combined. In recent years, considerable media attention was given to the failure of widely used and mass marketed painkillers, Vioxx and Celebrex. One might be tempted to applaud the government for protecting consumers and taking swift, just, and decisive measures, but the Food and Drug Association (FDA) had knowledge of the dangers of Vioxx years before taking it off the market. As evidence became to mount that Vioxx doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke, and was implicated in tens of thousands of deaths, Congress and the FDA had to take the rare act of protecting consumers over corporations. See “Pass Legislation to force disclosure of drug info” (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/mission/viewpoint/passlegislationtoforcedisclosureofdruginfo305/).

[10] Safer Medicines Campaign (http://www.safermedicines.org/faqs/faq10.shtml).

[11] Jonathan Balcombe, “Beyond Animal Research,” (http://www.pcrm.org/resch/anexp/beyond/smoke_0409.html).

[12] SourceWatch, “The Whitecoat Project” (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Whitecoat_Project).

[13] Advancement of Sound Science Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advancement_of_Sound_Science_Center).

[14] On November 11, 2009, the chamber of horrors at the University of Utah became the latest fraud of vivisection. Business as usual, the atrocities included “mice dead from neglect, dying mice bloated with ulcerated tumors, rabbits and cats with surgically implanted devices on their heads and spines.” Vivisectors were also recorded entertaining themselves with the some of the most horrifically injured victims. The Salt Lake Star Tribune, “PETA spy infiltrates U. animal research labs, documents alleged suffering” (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13758496).

[15] “OHSU [Oregon Health and Science University] Whistleblower: Interview with Matt Rossell, former lab technician at OHSU’s primate center,” White Coat Welfare, June 4, 2009 (http://whitecoatwelfare.org/rossell.shtml).

[16] “Matt Rossell’s Letter to the Editor of The Scientist” (http://www.vivisectioninfo.org/campaigns/mattrossell/index.html). Most revealingly, Rossell reported on the discrepancy between what vivisectors do amongst themselves, when they laugh at the farce of their “data” and acknowledge the cruelty of their experiments and handling of nonhuman animals, and when speaking to animal rights protestors or the outside world generally, they lie about the value and ethics of their experiments: “One day technicians would be joking about this research and how much of a joke it was. People would actually be laughing about Dr. Cameron’s latest study – that it even got past the animal care committee. The technician who sat in on the animal care committee would come out of the meeting laughing about how ridiculous the study was and how unbelievable it was that it was going through. On another day, we would talk about how harsh the `roundup’ was where we took the baby monkeys away from their mothers to sell for experiments. Whatever the case was, someone would either be laughing or complaining. And then on the day the protesters were outside, everyone would rally together like, `we’re doing the right thing here and you’re the ones who are wrong.’ So people were willing to discuss amongst themselves all the problems, but when they felt challenged by the outside world, by protesters, all of a sudden everyone would get really defensive and rally together and laugh at the protesters and their silly signs. It’s really weird. One could do a whole psychological study on researchers who work in that environment. It’s really dysfunctional, that is, too focused on intellectual curiosity and not enough on humanity” (our emphasis).

[17] The Animal Welfare Act stipulates “minimal” standards of treatment for laboratory animals; however, the phrase “unless necessary” effectively negates these requirements, allowing for repeated major surgeries, the infliction of pain and distress, withholding of food and/or water if such condition is deemed necessary; the AWA expressly prohibits nothing. See the “Animal Welfare Act” (http://www.animallaw.info/statutes/stusawa.htm).

[18] See David Favre, “The Story of Rats, Mice, and Birds,” Section B of “Overview of the U.S. Animal Welfare Act,” Michigan State University College of Law, May 2002 (http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ovusawa.htm).

[19] http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/

[20] http://www.negotiationisover.com/.

[21] http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/.

[22] See Ringach’s website at: http://web.mac.com/darioringach/lab/Welcome.html. Ringach claims pressure from animal rights activists forced him out of nonhuman primate vivisection; see “Throwing in the Towel,” Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2006 (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/22/animal).

[23] Rather than a debate, a moderated discussion transpired on November 11, 2009, on CNN’s Blogger Bunch. Interestingly, neither Jentsch nor Ringach participated, continuing to resist the open dialogue they fear will expose their atrocities. Rather Tom Holder was enlisted for panel joined by OSHU Vivisector Michael Conn, who, rather than respond to questions, chose to propagandize his misinformation for the mainstream audience. Dr. Ray Greek challenged Conn to defend his statements in a public debate. Unable to accept, Conn ignored the offer and began regurgitating more irrelevant drivel. See “The CNN.com “Blogger Bunch” Discussion: Animal Liberation v. Vivisection,” Negotiation is Over, November 12, 2009 (http://negotiationisover.com/?p=3698). In a statement to Ringach and Jentsch, Dr. Greek deconstructed Pro-Torture’s misinformation campaign and AGAIN challenged the “researchers” to a public debate – the second offer to debate any of the nonhuman animal mutilators in a 24-hour period. Explaining why vivisectors vilify their opposition, Greek writes, “Sometimes researchers present a sweat-drenched fear of public debate because of threats to their life. The fact is, I have probably had as many if not more threats to my life as any of them have. (A little publicized fact.) What they really fear is public exposure to the facts.” See Dr. Ray Greek, “Spin is not the same as a debate,” Negotiation is Over, November 10, 2009 (http://negotiationisover.com/?p=3675).

[24] “Tom Holder (Speaking of Research): Paid to Advance Pharma’s Capitalist Agenda,” Negotiation is Over, October 24, 2009 (http://negotiationisover.com/?p=3201). While technically a “charitable organization,” the AMP finances industry advocacy movements through Hayre Fellowships. In 2008, Holder became a Hayre Fellow, financing the expansion of Pro-Torture into the US, and establishing the Speaking of Research community as “unofficial” paid advocates of the vivisection industry. See “Americans for Medical Progress,” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Medical_Progress).

[25] SourceWatch, “Americans for Medical Progress” (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Medical_Progress).

[26] “Charles River’s Lab Q3 net falls 18%” (http://www.massdevice.com/news/charles-river-labs-q3-net-falls-18-percent).

[27] U.S. Department of Health & Human Services: Expenditures & Results – Project Number: 5P20DA022539-03 Sub-Project ID: 0003 (http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter_SearchResults.cfm).

[28] NIH Animal Research Awards to UCLA 2008 (report.nih.gov/award/trends/InstInfoExcel.cfm?OrgID=577505&Year=2008 – 101k).

[29] “The total amount of funding I have received from pharmaceutical companies in all my years at UCLA (a total of 8 years) is less than the budget I obtain in a single year on my RO1 grant. It is not an immense amount, and it certainly is not the kind of funding that I would need to sustain my research program” “Interview with Professor David Jentsch about not taking drug company money” (http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/10/21/interview-with-professor-david-jentsch-about-not-taking-drug-company-money).

[30] For detailed analysis of the flaws in modern science and postmodern paradigm shifts, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (1997, Guilford Press) and The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (2001, Guilford Press).

[31] There are many excellent critical analyses of illicit relations between vivisection and pharmaceutical industries and the US government, such as Fran Hawthorne, Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat (Wiley Publishers, 2005).

[32] “Neurology Today: FDA Approves Earlier Clinical Trials for Experimental Drugs,” (http://journals.lww.com/neurotodayonline/Fulltext/2006/03070/News___Views.12.aspx).

[33] Preventative Medicine Column (http://www.davidkatzmd.com/admin/archives/wonder%20drugs.Times.8-3-08.doc)

[34] See Steven Best, “Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 2009 (http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol5/vol5_no2_best_minding_animals.htm).

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Submitted by Devin Listrom

11/20/09

This Saturday, November 21st, is the Candle Light Turkey Vigil from 5pm to 6pm at the Horse Fountain on the Plaza off of 47th Street and Broadway.

This vigil for the turkeys is a way of speaking out against the slaughter of these awesome creatures for this bloody holiday called Thanksgiving. I do have a turkey outfit for whomever wants to wear it, and we will be handing out flyers and holding candles. If you have candles, please bring them.

Millions of turkeys are killed every year for Thanksgiving, but we can have a cruelty free holiday — it can be done. Meanwhile, turkeys go through a very painful experience of having their toes and beaks cut off with no pain killers, and are stunned so they can’t move. Then their heads are cut off by a spinning blade while they are totally awake.

There is time to still sponsor a turkey at www.adoptaturkey.org, a program through farm sanctuary.

Hope you all can make to the vigil. It’s only for an hour. I thought maybe we all could go to Eden Alley or the Seed Cafe after the vigil.

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

From Defenders of Urban Wildlife, our allies in Grand Haven, MI:

This may be the easiest way of dealing with the deer population, but it’s not the RIGHT way. With no interest in alternative solutions, the Grand Haven City Council chooses to simply kill any deer that get in our way…

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

On the second Saturday of November each year  they  beat a bull in Medina, a town of Soria (Castilla y Leon).

For about 23 hours, a group of village youths grabbed a bull in the name of tradition and with a rope twisted his neck to get secured on a wooden pole.

That was just the beginning of a long night for the animal. Then, as every year made use of a dubious value and exploit the animal can not move to approach him and placed two balls on the horns. The unfortunate turn bull, as every year, tried in vain to resist. Still no idea what would happen, but I expected the worst.

Just then, as every year, set fire to the balls and set fires around the animal. Just then released the Toro Jubilo on behalf of national celebration and writhing animal responded with eyes frightened and burned by  the flames and embers pieces that jump from the particular crown of thorns that the locals gave him .

The fire that broke out of his horns and face lit fires of hundreds of spectators, who burst of enthusiasm along with municipal officials, who are the politicians that give part of the municipal budget to pay that public torture an animal.

This happened again, as every year, despite the 7,000 signatures that the Party Animal Abuse Against Bullfighting (Pacman) presented Saturday at the records of the Junta de Castilla y León. These signatures come from citizens of 90 countries, disgusted by the celebration of joy in Medinaceli bull, the bull of fire that only survives in Castile and Leon.

The signatures that were collected in just three weeks, were delivered to the regional government territorial delegation in Soria, supported by 150 protesters who had come to the capital Castile and from Bilbao, Logroño, Madrid and Valladolid.

Exhibicionist Protesters at the gates of the regional headquarters several banners with slogans against animal abuse, including “Stop Bullfighting” and “Bullfight, national shame.“

In the manifesto, PACMA struck how in the XXI century in Medinaceli burn an animal alive “like a heretic”.

please,sign the petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/firebull—stop-the-burning-of-live-bulls

source: http://www.publico.es/espana/269699/hoy/tortura/toro/medinaceli#comentarios

“…So what exactly was this superlative achievement of evolution? What was it that finally separated us from the animals and made us who we are — ducks?

Wings are not unique to us, of course, and have even evolved several times, although primitive versions of real wings – the ones that would ultimately culminate in duck wings – seem to have emerged in the early Oligocene.  But the important anatomical features that set us apart from mere animals – the qualities that make us so special – apparently didn’t evolve until much more recently. Our elegant webbed feet, for instance, are key to our dominance of the water’s surface, and our aquiline beaks enabled us to spend less time underwater looking for food, giving us the leisure to develop philosophy and mathematics. The latest DNA analysis suggests that these features are quite recent and true ducks actually split off only a few million years ago from our primitive canard cousins. This discovery is somewhat humbling, and provides yet another nail in the coffin for the unscientific but still widely held belief that we were created uniquely by Daffy, in His image, and given dominion over the fishes of the sea. This is no longer a tenable hypothesis and most educated ducks today recognize that we did in fact evolve from more primitive animals and have achieved our position at the very top of the evolutionary tree only comparatively recently in geological terms.

We ducks are beautifully adapted to our world. Other species sometimes have some interesting adaptations too, of course: snakes have lost their limbs and so can perform a rudimentary swimming motion, while certain primates have even lost their feathers (in mammals these are known as “hair” and lack significant waterproofing qualities) and hence had to evolve unnaturally bloated brains in order that they can keep themselves warm by seeking shelter. Nevertheless, nothing could be prized more highly than our beautiful voices, which are, without question, unique across the animal kingdom. Canardologists have been able to show that certain other, closely related species to ourselves, are capable of superficially similar utterances, but it is very clear that these are not true quacks. To the untrained ear they resemble quacking but they clearly lack genuine syntax and scientists regard them as at best a kind of squawk. Quacking is not possible without our highly evolved beaks, and some theorists even hold that our ability to quack is a consequence of strange quantum-mechanical interactions within the pecten on the edges of our beaks, which could not be replicated, either in nature or in misguided attempts to create Artificial Quacking, known as AQ [see Vaucanson, 1738].

The many races of ducks on our waters today are, of course, one species,  and we must celebrate our differences whilst recognizing our common heritage. To our shame it was not until 1967 that Mandarins were legally recognized as ducks at all by Mallard society, but the time has come to put aside these superficial differences. Coots and Moorhens are merely primitive cousins but the presence of our elegant beaks and our stunning voices should be enough to qualify the rest of us as equal members of Anatidae. Today our attention must be focused on more pressing issues: our profligate over-fishing in particular threatens the food chain and hence the entire planet. We need to become better stewards, or else our lakes and streams may one day become dry, worthless land and we will have to return full-time to the air, like our primitive ancestors.”

We eat them,we wear them,we use them,we don’t care about them,we forget them,we ignore them,we …don’t understand them.

So why don’t we leave them alone?animals don’t need us!we humans are killing,exploiting,closing them in cages for life,using for fun our brothers without even having the courage to declair war to them!shame!

Every day we are killing the nature,piece by piece!the human population reached 6,700,000 beings and every day thousand of species of animals are extincting.and extinction is forever!!!

Mother nature will take her revenge!and we can’t stop her!

VEGAN is not just not eating meat,milk and eggs,not wearing fur or leather.vegan is FULL COUNCIOUSNESS,respect  and love for the planet and for all the living forms.you are not a vegan if you thrue plastic bags on the street,if you don’t care that the paper is coming from the trees,if you mind take a walk  and do not use the car  when you go to buy the newspaper.

help mother nature to fight back!

By Dr. Steven Best

11/13/09

I.

The nonhuman animal advocacy movement is at a crucial crossroads where truly it is now do or die. In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement glowed bright with potential; in just a few years, however, the light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy snuffed out the promise of genuine change. As they evolved, it became increasingly obvious that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other groups emulated the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to become corporate behemoths and mainstream machines. Increasingly co-opted and compromised, animal rights groups frequently worked with, rather than against, the exploitation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.

In the last decade, for instance, PETA pressured McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC to increase cage size and adopt “less cruel and more profitable” slaughter methods,[1] while HSUS aggressively campaigned for “humane meat” and “cage-free eggs.” These groups ultimately serve corporate exploiters’ interests and champion capitalist principles generally. But whereas PETA began as a grassroots organization in 1980, and continues to defend the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and to promote veganism, HSUS has been a bureaucratic welfare group since its inception in 1954, it consistently denounces the ALF, and has always capitulated to carnivorous culture as it barely gives support even for vegetarianism.

Lest anyone in either the industry or advocacy camps had any doubts, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle put them to rest in a sycophantic July 2009 interview on Agritalk radio. Pacelle virtually apologized for being vegan in his private life and assured the flesh, vivisection, hunting, zoo, and circus industries that they had nothing to fear from HSUS, as his goal is to promote “decency and mercy toward animals” and not to close their operations.[2]

II.

In direct response to the wretched reformism and opportunism of bureaucratic “welfarism,” a new movement emerged to reconstruct nonhuman animal advocacy unequivocally as a struggle for animal rights, not “welfare”; for the total abolition of nonhuman animal slavery rather than its regulation; and for veganism, not “humane” animal-derived products of any kind. To a significant degree, the new vegan abolitionist movement has been shaped and defined by the work of Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Francione exposed the duplicity of “new welfarists” who use the term “animal rights” but pursue “welfarist” policies. These policies, Francione argues, are incoherent and dilute the meaning of rights; “welfarism” in any form, he insists, works to the benefit of industries and thus increases, rather than decreases, the demand for animal-derived products; it only aggravates, rather than alleviates, speciesism and the plight of nonhuman animals in horrific systems of exploitation.

Francione tapped and mobilized growing dissatisfaction with corporate reformism and sparked a growing vegan abolitionist movement. More accurately, he revived a vegan movement first created by Donald Watson in 1944, and was sustained by vegan societies such as in the UK and US. These societies maintained Watson’s broad and political vision of veganism not merely as a diet but rather as an ethical and political commitment to the abolition of nonhuman animal exploitation and, indeed, to all systems of oppression.[3] Francione wedded the pacifist ideals of ancient Jainism, Watson’s vegan viewpoint, and the philosophy of animal rights first systematically developed in 1983 by Tom Regan, merging these influences in a new matrix of pacifist vegan abolitionism.

Francione typically speaks as if he invented veganism, and sycophantic followers such as Roger Yates claim that a bona fide “animal rights movement” only began in 2006 with the ascendant influence of Francione’s work.[4] But Francione mostly returned to Watson’s original teachings, albeit often in diluted form that retains the ethical vision linking food choices to moral commitments to oppressed nonhuman animals, but without a consistent political commitment to working against all forms of oppression and exploitation. Abolitionist approaches toward speciesism began within the nineteenth century feminist-antivivisectionists, were deepened in Watson and emerging vegan societies, informed the hunt saboteur movements in the UK from the 1960s to the present, and were advanced in historically momentous ways in 1976 when Ronnie Lee founded the Animal Liberation Front.

While Francione advanced a forceful critique of “welfarism” and took animal rights philosophy to a new level, he has nonetheless proved to be bereft of political vision and incapable of forging a genuine resistance movement that can evolve beyond the marginalized position currently embraced by less than one percent of the human population. In Francione’s religious, tepid, and apolitical rendering, vegan abolitionism remains an elitist, white, Eurocentric consumerist lifestyle easily co-opted by capitalism and dominant ideologies. Moreover, Francione has spawned a cult-like following – “Franciombes” – who parrot his fundamentalist, rigid, bellicose, and Manichean positions; with slavish devotion to their Master and his hostile manner, Franciombes defame his critics in a style more suited to Machiavelli than Jains.

III.

The Guru and his disciples come together in a dance of doctrine and dogma. Like Christian fundamentalists, Francione and his followers believe they possess the Truth while all others struggle in error. As Francione argues there is literally “no alternative,” only chaos and ruin, except for their approach based on obedience to law, peaceful education, and focus on individuals and consumption habits over institutions and productive imperatives stemming from global capitalism. For them, the world is black and white, answers are cut and dry, and complexity is reduced to the Procrustean bed of either/or, rather than enlivened through the dialectical logic of both/and.

According to the pacifist party line, militant direct action (MDA) tactics such as economic sabotage are ALWAYS wrong and NEVER effective. Excusing themselves from the work of analyzing the complexities and unique specific situations, Franciombes fashion a handy a priori “truth” and apply it mechanically to every action that has happened or will happen. Their ignorance of history is matched only by their mental rigidity. For over three decades, in dozens of countries throughout the world, in countless thousands of actions, liberators and saboteurs have freed hundreds of thousands of captive nonhuman animals; permanently shut down numerous breeders, “fur farmers,” and vivisectors; and convinced countless numbers of individuals to find gainful employment in careers other than nonhuman animal exploitation, while inspiring people worldwide to join the animal liberation movement.

In all this, Franciombes see no value or gain and, despite operations closed forever, they can only repeat the baseless claim that all damaged property is rebuilt and all liberated nonhuman animals are “replaced.” This may happen in some cases, but in light of the many operations shut down for good, this clearly is a false claim; even when animals are replaced and property rebuilt and restored, rising insurance costs are enough to weaken and jeopardize the viability of small and moderate operations at least. Whereas dogmatic pacifists hide under the cover of ignorance and denial, corporate exploiters themselves have testified to the effectiveness of ALF actions.[5]

By vilifying sabotage tactics as “violent,” and by conflating attacks on property with assaults on people, Franciombes adopt the reactionary discourse and position of the FBI and the corporate-state-media complex. They needlessly and divisively pit education in opposition to illegal tactics (even open rescues), as if the two tactics were irreconcilably opposed rather than complimentary aspects of a revolutionary process.

Despite some talk of capitalism, commonalities of oppression, and alliance politics, Francione ultimately pushes a simplistic, single-issue “go vegan” approach pitched to a white, affluent, privileged, Western audience, with no intent to engage people of color, working class families, the poor, or China and India – the world’s most populous nations now in rapid transition from maintaining traditional plant-based diets to embracing Western diets rooted in consuming “animal products” including flesh, milk, and eggs.

Francione thereby reinforces the dismal elitist, classist, and racist stigmas attached to activists for nonhuman animals since the beginning of “animal protectionism” in the early nineteenth century, and he further isolates veganism and animal rights from progressive movements and the social mainstream. Unable to articulate a structural theory of oppression, exploitation, and ideological hegemony, and mired in Western dualisms and the construction of false oppositions such as between production/consumption, individual/social, and psychological/institutional, Francione exculpates the logic and global machinery of capitalism to lay the entire burden of blame and responsibility on individual consumers.

Certainly, humans do have agency and need to take responsibility for transforming their personal lives, such as by engaging the ecological and ethical imperative to go vegan. But politically and pedagogically it is also crucial for citizens to recognize the formidable power of the structural forces in their lives and the ways in which sedimented economic and political institutions pose profound obstacles to teaching, learning, and progressive ethical and social change. Psychological and ethical change is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the large-scale social transformations needed for creating viable democratic and ecological cultures.

Internalizing the capitalist ideology of liberal individualism, this pseudo-abolitionist offers nothing but the most banal and tepid reformism which is no more effective in changing the overall social relations of domination than “welfarism” is in breaking the chains of speciesist oppression. Rather than advancing on Watson’s formulation, Francione offers a regressive and hollow version of a rich ethical political ideal opposed to all forms of exploitation and hierarchy.

IV.

Franciombes eliminate complexity and ambiguity from the social-political picture, and reek of arrogance, dogma, and condescension. They cling to the religious conviction that any approach to veganism, animal rights, or abolitionism other than what Francione has set in stone is false, reactionary, and “welfarist.” They promiscuously deploy the phrase “new welfarist” to discredit others in the movement, much as McCarthyites hurled the epithet of “communist” and post-9/11 patriots terrorize with the discourse of “terrorism” to discredit their opponents as irrational extremists.

Indeed, in McCarthyist fashion, upon receiving alleged death threats from supporters of confrontational or illegal direct action, Francione made reckless accusations and named names of anyone (including avowed pacifists) remotely connected to such a devious terrorist plot. Moreover, Francione routinely brands his opponents as “mad” or “insane,” as if disagreement with his divine teachings were evidence of psychological impairment and oblivious to the normalizing and ableist implications of crude dichotomies of sane/insane and rational/irrational.

Unable to grasp the root causes of hierarchical domination and ecological crisis, blaming individuals over institutions, Francione is hardly positioned to grasp the nature of the problems afflicting other animals and the planet let alone to offer potential solutions and viable tactics. And thus we get nothing beyond the hopelessly vague, liberal pseudo-panacea of “vegan education.” Apparently limited to blogging and podcasting to the choir, Francione & followers are bereft of politics, and, in fact, they lack even the most rudimentary elements of a theory and practice of education – more than a small problem for an approach seeking change through vegan education. Their outlook is utterly delusional in the conviction that veganism is the main vehicle and catalyst for individual enlightenment and, thereby, for social change. These pugilistic pacifists cling to a Christian-like faith that somehow, someday their insular polemics and feeble “education” efforts will transform the heart and soul of humanity and, thereby, change society as a whole. Oblivious to the threshold we are about to cross, they promote slow, incremental change amidst rapid, systemic ecological breakdown.

Incredibly, as global ecological and social crises rapidly mount, Francione ignores the most crucial events of the day – human overpopulation, species extinction crisis, deforestation, global climate change, and the destructive growth imperatives inherent in the capitalist economy. The chaos theory model Franciombes use to buttress their collective hallucination of a “vegan revolution” is far more applicable to the exponential growth of flesh consumption in China and India. For every person who becomes vegan, a thousand flesh-eaters arise in these rapidly industrializing societies and elsewhere such as Brazil and South Africa. The Franciombe concern over “replacement” of liberated nonhuman animals seems to elude them as it applies to their own single-issue approach, which fails to realize that for every vegan convert they celebrate, armies of necrovores are continuously born and raised.

Francione’s approach is complacent, detached from reality, and irrelevant to the massive and complex struggle necessary to forestall biological meltdown and ecological catastrophe. Pacifist lifestyle veganism is another dead-end and groundless hope, totally inadequate to the unprecedented challenge of a planet in crisis. If once progressive, Francione’s approach is now clearly reactionary. It is a pseudo-abolitionist movement, bourgeois lifestyle veganism; it is a one-dimensional, single-issue, Eurocentric, white, elitist, consumerist, capitalist construct that vegans and abolitionists need to shed quickly.

Where Franciombes seek to trademark abolition and revile as mere “welfarism” any vision not their own, this group aims to blow the doors off their cultish theology in order to reinvigorate thinking, restore common sense, situate veganism in its broadest political context, and revitalize possibilities for revolutionary change. Our options are not confined to either the “welfarism” of HSUS or the pseudo-abolitionism and lifestyle veganism of Francione. There are other ways, such as history reveals and the future requires.

V.

We need a far richer and more radical concept of abolitionism that draws from and revitalizes the strength and power of the nineteenth century anti-human slavery movement that erupted in the US (and of course earlier in the UK). Unlike the pale imitation and caricature espoused by Franciombes, the version of abolitionism we champion is far more in tune with the radicalism, pluralism, and alliance politics (imperfect and impermanent as it was) of nineteenth-century abolitionism. But eschewing nostalgia and outmoded political models, this approach also draws from numerous other contemporary theories and political movements. We recognize the need for radical social change and we understand that the fight against speciesism, capitalism, the state, and hierarchy in all forms will be waged on many different fronts simultaneously. We seek to reinvigorate a movement sold-out by corporate opportunists and paralyzed by pacifists who sympathize with the latent “humanity” of oppressors and demonize the militant wing of animal liberation, a perverse inversion of loyalties and misguided sentiments manifested in the Stockholm Syndrome mindset evident in the mindset of fundamentalist pacifists who enjoin activists to respect the humanity of murderous oppressors as they demonize and vilify militant liberationists[6]

We cannot stop the speciesist and corporate war on nonhuman animals and the planet with blogging, leafleting, tabling, and recipe books alone. Capitalism is inherently destructive, and change will never come solely through education and persuasion, nor without a movement more powerful than the agents and institutions of omnicidal destruction. As radical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire himself insisted – education can only be part of a much broader and multi-pronged movement of resistance, struggle, and change. Thus, like all priorl revolutions, human and nonhuman animals will not win liberation because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.

It is not only the content of Francione’s positions we challenge, but also the very form and method of his approach. We cannot progress in the struggle for liberation or hope to be politically relevant unless we abandon Francione’s dualistic, either/or logic for a dialectical both/and logic, one that abandons all bogus dichotomies and false separations. Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage, and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening speciesist capitalism.

We need more, not less, vegan education, of a kind that shatters the enclaves of white privilege in which Franciombes entomb abolitionism and reaches out to the poor, working classes, inner cities, less-industrialized nations, and, crucially, the emerging crisis flashpoints in the burgeoning population giants of China and India. And, despite one of his most persistent and vapid imposed false options, those who work underground to liberate nonhuman animals through raids can and do rescue other animals from “shelters.”

While we support the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, and defend the importance of economic sabotage, we also recognize that property destruction is only a rear-guard and minor means of resistance that has to yield to a broad social movement. Still, it remains an important – sometimes seemingly the only – means of resistance against the capitalist property system, and merits support as we simultaneously work toward building political alliances on a global scale and in an unprecedentedly broad and inclusive way.

The pluralist and contextualist approach central to our position absorbs the partial value and validity of vegan abolitionism, but without the debilitating dogmatism and disabling rejection of effective tactics simply because they do not conform to an ancient code or utopian ideal that only serves to strengthen oppression and to reassure oppressors they have nothing to fear from an “opposition” movement.[7] It abandons single-issue fetishism and the complacency of class and racial privilege in favor of diversity, solidarity, and bridge-building with those most economically disadvantaged and politically marginalized. Only in this way, can the profound importance of veganism and animal rights be recognized and respected by a social majority; only in alliance with other struggles can its revolutionary potential be realized.

In the consumerist and privatized lifestyle form promoted by Franciombes, however, veganism is the opiate of the people, and Murray Bookchin’s polemic against apolitical “lifestyle anarchism” can be fruitfully applied to the vaporous lifestyle veganism championed by Franciombes and others.[8]

We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.[9]

VI.

We form this new group out of the need for a radical social approach to veganism and animal rights that transcends bourgeois liberalism; the need for a global Left that renounces speciesism and all other ancient and lingering prejudices and forms of oppression; the need for post-hierarchical worldviews and democratic and ecological societies; and the need for total liberation and revolutionary transformation.

Forget Francione …

We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination. Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between “revolution or barbarism,” but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction.

We have two goals. First, we aim to expose the fatal flaws in Francione’s approach, and provide a positive alternative to his apolitical, one-dimensional, and single issue form of abolitionism. This approach provides a greater openness, diversity, and flexibility of tactics in contrast to the dogmatic and artificially constrained options Francione leaves open for his extreme pacifist approach. Since this alternative model is richer, multidimensional, and far more political, it opens to an alliance politics with other progressive and radical causes and groups.

And as we promote alliance politics, it is crucial to find ways of building bridges and forming commonalities. And thus our second and quite modest goal is simply to open a space for new forms of thought and struggle that revolve around the ideal of total liberation and a new ethics and politics that transcend humanism – however broadly defined – and encompasses all sentient beings and the natural world. We must first and foremost forge channels of communication to link vegan and nonhuman animal liberation communities with human animal liberation and environmental communities, representing a politics for the 21st century. In this endeavor, we hope to make this site and possible others a rich storehouse of information and a valuable medium for discussion and debate.

We reach out to any and all people from any of these communities to contribute to this crucial endeavor. Clearly, this broad spectrum of thought and politics will not agree on all points, but it is more important to focus on similarities and shared concerns, such as arise from the devastating impact of capitalism on social, sentient, and natural worlds with mutual concerns of peace, justice, equality, democracy, rights, autonomy, and ecology.

To Join Our Extended Facebook Network:

-Do a group search on Facebook for “Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation by Any Means Necessary” and submit a request to join, or

-Email camille@negotiationisover.com with the subject “Faceboook Radical Abolition Group”

Notes:

——————————————————————————–
[1] For PETA’s approach, see “The Case for Controlled-Atmosphere Killing” ( www.peta.org/cak/).

[2] For a transcript of the interview, see: http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Content.asp?contentid=327066 .

[3] For Watson’s seminal 1944 essay arguing for a broad ethical and political concept of veganism, see: http://www.ukveggie.com/vegan_news/vegan_news_1.pdf .

[4] Roger Yates, “Three Years Young” (http://human-nonhuman.blogspot.com/2008/12/three-years-young.html).

[5] Susan Paris, president of vivisection-industry front group Americans for Medical Progress, for example, admits the ALF has had a large impact on vivisectionists, writing, “Because of terrorist acts by animal activists like Coronado, crucial research projects have been delayed or scrapped. More and more of the scarce dollars available to research are spent on heightened security and higher insurance rates. Promising young scientists are rejecting careers in research. Top-notch researchers are getting out of the field.” Moreover, the August 1993 Report to Congress on Animal Enterprise Terrorism describes the effectiveness of ALF tactics:, “Where the direct, collateral, and indirect effects of incidents such as this are factored together, ALFs professed tactic of economic sabotage can be considered successful, and its objectives, at least towards the victimized facility, fulfilled.” Both quotations cited at: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/ALFPrime.htm.

[6] For a vivid and grotesque example of the Stockholm Syndrome and the internalization of the capitalist superego, see Lee Hall’s scurrilous attack on MDA in her self-published screed, Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (2006). For critical dissection of the multitude of fallacies, errors, and abysmal scholarship informing this pacifist propaganda tract (which one could easily mistake for a political attack from a vivisection industry front group or the FBI), see the essays by Best and Miller listed in note 7. Also see the devastating critiques from UK activists deeply involved in the campaigns Hall distorted and denounced: Steven Best, Jason Miller, Joan Court, Janet Tomlinson, and Lynn Sawyer, “Presence of Malice: UK Activists Vs. Lee Hall” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/presence-of-malice-uk-activists-v-lee-hall/),Alison Banville, “Lee Hall: Unplugged and Unmasked” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/lee-hall-unplugged-and-unmasked/); and Lynn Sawyer, “On the Practice of Pluralism: A Response to Lee Hall and the London Vegan Festival Controversy.”

[7] On the importance of a pluralist and contextualist method, see Steven Best and Jason Miller, “Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More? A Critique of Lee Hall, Friends of Animals, and the Franciombe Effect in the New Abolitionist Movement” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/pacifism-or-animals-which-do-you-love-more/), and “Averting the China Syndrome: Response to Our Critics and the Devotees of Fundamentalist Pacifism” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/averting-the-china-syndrome-response-to-our-critics-and-the-devotees-of-fundamentalist-pacifism/).

[8] See Murray Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm” (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/bookchin/soclife.html).

[9] On alliance politics in a total revolution framework, see the Introduction to Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006, AK Press).

Dr. Steve Best is TPC’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation. Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Steven Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Watch this video to “take the time to educate yourself on who we [White Buffalo] are and what we do…”

Anthony DeNicola, the deer mass murderer who orchestrated and led the slaughter of 313 deer (the “official” count) in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park) over the course of three nights last week, sent me this missive via email:

From: WBUFFALOINC
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 1:41 PM
To: Jason Miller
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments

Jason,

If I understand correctly you are a self-proclaimed autodidact. If so, please take the time to educate yourself on who we are and what we do, and not follow the misinformation and ignorance that you are regurgitating. We euthanized 312 deer in 3 nights while training law enforcement personnel to be able to continue management in the future in the most humane way possible. There were no crippled deer and all were shot in the brain. The meat processor and State biologist can verify this because they saw every carcass, and they have no reason to lie about their observations. In fact, the State would prefer hunting, so if we had conducted ourselves improperly they would have called us to task to have hunting be the only permitted management option.

Also, please realize that my organization was instrumental in the research that allowed for the registration of GonaCon, the vaccine that was part of your proposed solution. I am conducting 100 surgical sterilization next month in Missouri as part of a suburban deer management program. This is an initiative to come up with an alternative non-lethal solution that can be practical and cost effective in developed environments.

And remember millions of “semi-tame” cats and dogs are euthanized every year.

Tony DeNicola, Ph.D.
www.whitebuffaloinc.org

Probable victim of the Death Park Deer Massacre….

My reply:

From: Jason Miller
Date: Nov 12, 2009 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments
To: WBUFFALOINC

Tony,

I will admit that I’m no expert on you, your company, or your “services,” but I’ve done enough homework to know that while you are not the cause, you are an abhorrent symptom of the dominant culture and its obsessions with death, killing, dominating, profiting, “wise use” (my favorite euphemism for abusing nature and nonhuman animals), and satiating human desires at the expense of other sentient beings and the Earth.

In an anarcho-vegan world (which we probably won’t see in our lifetime, but if Homo sapiens are to remain extant, humanity will probably be forced to reorganize and evolve into such a sociocultural and economic construct—since we’re destroying the planet), you would be tried and severely punished (perhaps executed) for premeditated mass murder of sentient beings.

I have watched the video that Steve Hindi captured of that horribly botched “sharp-shooting” you orchestrated that devolved into chaos, mayhem, and the shooters resorting to suffocating deer with plastic bags over their heads. God only knows what Hindi had captured on the confiscated cameras which you or the rangers wiped clean. And God only knows what happened out there in Death Park. It took the FBI, the JOCO Sheriff Department, city police, the park police, and a ridiculous restraining order, but they managed to keep me out of the areas where you were baiting and preparing for the democide. Otherwise, you can bet I would’ve had you on “candid camera.” One day someone will capture you on film and shut you down.

I saw the photos, have spoken to activists and have read accounts of the helicopter massacre of Axis deer you perpetrated at Pt. Reyes.

And gunning down 313 deer in 3 nights at Death Park? That’s a bloodbath. What’d you use? Uzi’s?

I’ve read of your butchery you call sterilization (saw a photo of you with a scalpel in one hand and a deer ovary in the other), which by the way is NOT a nonlethal means of deer overpopulation control I support. Your sterilization and IC projects are merely vehicles for you to maintain your tax-exempt status. You aren’t pulling the wool over my eyes.

GonaCon is NOT the IC that we proposed in our nonlethal plan. We suggested the use of PZP, which Jay Kirkpatrick has been studying for years—and as he states, “It works. It works WELL.” We ultimately began demanding (we learned early on there was no point in “asking”) that JCPRD/KDWP use GonaCon since it had recently been approved for use by the EPA, though even without that approval they could have gotten a permit to use either drug for research purposes—an ideal scenario for our suburban family park had they used Anthony Marr’s DAA to “remove” the “excess” deer instead of paying you to shoot them in the face and splatter their brains on the ground.

GonaCon would have been developed and approved with or without your organization. Besides, I see the world in shades of gray. Polemics and hyperbole aside, I recognize that you are not “all bad” and that you have made some contributions to wildlife. But make no mistake about the fact that I also realize that your ruthless barbarism cloaked by your intellect and professionalism far outweigh any good you’ve done for nonhuman animals.

And to call shooting another living, sentient being in the head “euthanasia” is a criminal abuse of language. At the end of your missive to me, you reference the millions of domestic companion animals whom are euthanized each year (a practice which I utterly abhor—I have several rescue animals in my family and make regular donations to no-kill shelters). As malevolent a practice as that is (Nathan Winograd has crafted a brilliant plan to implement nationwide no-kill shelters), even animal shelters generally euthanize with drugs. But then again, I suppose bullets are cheaper.

I recognize that state conservation agencies like the KDWP are all about killing too, though for slightly different reasons than you. I’m all too familiar with the complex social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics that enable the 15 million or so US hunters and “conservationists” like Lloyd Fox to maintain their self-appointed place as “guardians of over-populated species” and of “biodiversity.”

As with most forms of nonhuman animal exploitation and slaughter, it comes down to human monetary gain, “tradition,” comfort, pleasure or convenience—with an utter disregard for sentience and for the growing body of cognitive ethology studies showing that the individuals that people like you and hunters wantonly massacre lead relatively rich intellectual, emotional, and social lives. It takes a souless person, Tony, to reify or objectify thinking, feeling individuals to the extent that you can eradicate them like a flea infestation, murdering them, tearing apart families, and leaving fawns motherless before they’re self-sufficient.

And for you to present yourself as the only alternative to their blood-sport is both mendacious and representative of a false dichotomy. Like you, Tony, I’m a smart, educated man. So don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that it isn’t possible to utilize a variety of nonlethal means to manage human-caused over-populations of wildlife. In this specific instance, we had Anthony Marr, In Defense of Animals, and thousands of grass roots activists around the world poised to pour their time, money, brainpower, and labor into creatively implementing a comprehensive nonlethal deer management plan in Death Park. JCPRD and KDWP let the deer overpopulation problem spiral out of control for several years and then simply marched in lock-step with the prevailing culture of death, anthropocentrism, and speciesism by paying you handsomely to slaughter our precious deer and by authorizing a bow hunt, which won’t happen if my group has anything to say about it. You and your butchers have already plowed enough deer six feet under.

You, sir, are an abomination from a moral standpoint. And practically speaking, your’re a dinosaur—-a vestigial remnant of a culture of death that’s gasping its last, choking on the noxious fumes of its own excrement. We’ve fouled our own nest to the extent that we, as a collective species, are drowning in our own effluent.

Meanwhile, empathy deficient bullies like you surf the wave of humanity’s peak as “lords and masters” of the Earth. Be careful, Tony.

When Mother Nature reaches out and bitch slaps us (Homo rapiens), that wave will hurl you face-first into the craggy rocks hugging the shore-line and you and your pitiless cohorts are going to find yourselves mangled beyond recognition.

Regards,

Jason Miller
Senior Editor and Founder of Thomas Paine’s Corner
Press Officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office
Founder of Bite Club of KC

More on Anthony DeNicola aka Dr. Death:

http://www.sharkonline.org/?P=0000000431

http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/cc2007-w-what.html

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Watch this video to “take the time to educate yourself on who we [White Buffalo] are and what we do…”

Anthony DeNicola, the deer mass murderer who orchestrated and led the slaughter of 313 deer (the “official” count) in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park) over the course of three nights last week, sent me this missive via email:

From: WBUFFALOINC
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 1:41 PM
To: Jason Miller
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments

Jason,

If I understand correctly you are a self-proclaimed autodidact. If so, please take the time to educate yourself on who we are and what we do, and not follow the misinformation and ignorance that you are regurgitating. We euthanized 312 deer in 3 nights while training law enforcement personnel to be able to continue management in the future in the most humane way possible. There were no crippled deer and all were shot in the brain. The meat processor and State biologist can verify this because they saw every carcass, and they have no reason to lie about their observations. In fact, the State would prefer hunting, so if we had conducted ourselves improperly they would have called us to task to have hunting be the only permitted management option.

Also, please realize that my organization was instrumental in the research that allowed for the registration of GonaCon, the vaccine that was part of your proposed solution. I am conducting 100 surgical sterilization next month in Missouri as part of a suburban deer management program. This is an initiative to come up with an alternative non-lethal solution that can be practical and cost effective in developed environments.

And remember millions of “semi-tame” cats and dogs are euthanized every year.

Tony DeNicola, Ph.D.
www.whitebuffaloinc.org

Probable victim of the Death Park Deer Massacre….

My reply:

From: Jason Miller
Date: Nov 12, 2009 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments
To: WBUFFALOINC

Tony,

I will admit that I’m no expert on you, your company, or your “services,” but I’ve done enough homework to know that while you are not the cause, you are an abhorrent symptom of the dominant culture and its obsessions with death, killing, dominating, profiting, “wise use” (my favorite euphemism for abusing nature and nonhuman animals), and satiating human desires at the expense of other sentient beings and the Earth.

In an anarcho-vegan world (which we probably won’t see in our lifetime, but if Homo sapiens are to remain extant, humanity will probably be forced to reorganize and evolve into such a sociocultural and economic construct—since we’re destroying the planet), you would be tried and severely punished (perhaps executed) for premeditated mass murder of sentient beings.

I have watched the video that Steve Hindi captured of that horribly botched “sharp-shooting” you orchestrated that devolved into chaos, mayhem, and the shooters resorting to suffocating deer with plastic bags over their heads. God only knows what Hindi had captured on the confiscated cameras which you or the rangers wiped clean. And God only knows what happened out there in Death Park. It took the FBI, the JOCO Sheriff Department, city police, the park police, and a ridiculous restraining order, but they managed to keep me out of the areas where you were baiting and preparing for the democide. Otherwise, you can bet I would’ve had you on “candid camera.” One day someone will capture you on film and shut you down.

I saw the photos, have spoken to activists and have read accounts of the helicopter massacre of Axis deer you perpetrated at Pt. Reyes.

And gunning down 313 deer in 3 nights at Death Park? That’s a bloodbath. What’d you use? Uzi’s?

I’ve read of your butchery you call sterilization (saw a photo of you with a scalpel in one hand and a deer ovary in the other), which by the way is NOT a nonlethal means of deer overpopulation control I support. Your sterilization and IC projects are merely vehicles for you to maintain your tax-exempt status. You aren’t pulling the wool over my eyes.

GonaCon is NOT the IC that we proposed in our nonlethal plan. We suggested the use of PZP, which Jay Kirkpatrick has been studying for years—and as he states, “It works. It works WELL.” We ultimately began demanding (we learned early on there was no point in “asking”) that JCPRD/KDWP use GonaCon since it had recently been approved for use by the EPA, though even without that approval they could have gotten a permit to use either drug for research purposes—an ideal scenario for our suburban family park had they used Anthony Marr’s DAA to “remove” the “excess” deer instead of paying you to shoot them in the face and splatter their brains on the ground.

GonaCon would have been developed and approved with or without your organization. Besides, I see the world in shades of gray. Polemics and hyperbole aside, I recognize that you are not “all bad” and that you have made some contributions to wildlife. But make no mistake about the fact that I also realize that your ruthless barbarism cloaked by your intellect and professionalism far outweigh any good you’ve done for nonhuman animals.

And to call shooting another living, sentient being in the head “euthanasia” is a criminal abuse of language. At the end of your missive to me, you reference the millions of domestic companion animals whom are euthanized each year (a practice which I utterly abhor—I have several rescue animals in my family and make regular donations to no-kill shelters). As malevolent a practice as that is (Nathan Winograd has crafted a brilliant plan to implement nationwide no-kill shelters), even animal shelters generally euthanize with drugs. But then again, I suppose bullets are cheaper.

I recognize that state conservation agencies like the KDWP are all about killing too, though for slightly different reasons than you. I’m all too familiar with the complex social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics that enable the 15 million or so US hunters and “conservationists” like Lloyd Fox to maintain their self-appointed place as “guardians of over-populated species” and of “biodiversity.”

As with most forms of nonhuman animal exploitation and slaughter, it comes down to human monetary gain, “tradition,” comfort, pleasure or convenience—with an utter disregard for sentience and for the growing body of cognitive ethology studies showing that the individuals that people like you and hunters wantonly massacre lead relatively rich intellectual, emotional, and social lives. It takes a souless person, Tony, to reify or objectify thinking, feeling individuals to the extent that you can eradicate them like a flea infestation, murdering them, tearing apart families, and leaving fawns motherless before they’re self-sufficient.

And for you to present yourself as the only alternative to their blood-sport is both mendacious and representative of a false dichotomy. Like you, Tony, I’m a smart, educated man. So don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that it isn’t possible to utilize a variety of nonlethal means to manage human-caused over-populations of wildlife. In this specific instance, we had Anthony Marr, In Defense of Animals, and thousands of grass roots activists around the world poised to pour their time, money, brainpower, and labor into creatively implementing a comprehensive nonlethal deer management plan in Death Park. JCPRD and KDWP let the deer overpopulation problem spiral out of control for several years and then simply marched in lock-step with the prevailing culture of death, anthropocentrism, and speciesism by paying you handsomely to slaughter our precious deer and by authorizing a bow hunt, which won’t happen if my group has anything to say about it. You and your butchers have already plowed enough deer six feet under.

You, sir, are an abomination from a moral standpoint. And practically speaking, your’re a dinosaur—-a vestigial remnant of a culture of death that’s gasping its last, choking on the noxious fumes of its own excrement. We’ve fouled our own nest to the extent that we, as a collective species, are drowning in our own effluent.

Meanwhile, empathy deficient bullies like you surf the wave of humanity’s peak as “lords and masters” of the Earth. Be careful, Tony.

When Mother Nature reaches out and bitch slaps us (Homo rapiens), that wave will hurl you face-first into the craggy rocks hugging the shore-line and you and your pitiless cohorts are going to find yourselves mangled beyond recognition.

Regards,

Jason Miller
Senior Editor and Founder of Thomas Paine’s Corner
Press Officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office
Founder of Bite Club of KC

More on Anthony DeNicola aka Dr. Death:

http://www.sharkonline.org/?P=0000000431

http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/cc2007-w-what.html

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

“Man’s treatment of his fellow-men, and especially his conduct toward the forms of life differing anatomically from him, are such as to stamp him as being anything but an ideal animal—anywhere outside the psychologies of brigands, at any rate.”

The New Ethics

By J. Howard Moore

London, 1907

The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings below, above, and around him. The Great Law—ACT TOWARD OTHERS AS YOU WOULD ACT TOWARD A PART OF YOUR OWN SELF—is a law not applicable to Aryans only, but to all men; and not to men only, but to all beings. There is the same obligation to act toward a German, a Japanese, or a Filipino, as one acts toward a part of his own organism, as there is to act in this way toward Americans or Englishmen; and, furthermore, there is the same reason for acting in this manner toward horses, cats, dogs, birds, fishes, as there is in acting so toward men. Restricting the application of this all-inclusive injunction to the human species is a practice dictated solely by human selfishness and provincialism. The restriction is made, not because we are logical, but because we are diminutive.

How would it be for some other distinct group of the inhabitants of a world, to cut themselves off ethically from the rest, observing in their conduct toward each other THE GREAT LAW of social propriety, but ignoring this law in their conduct toward others, and acting toward all others, although these others were like them in every essential respect, as if they were without any of the ordinary rights and sensibilities of a common consciousness? Is it probable that men would have any difficulty in seeing clearly the untenableness of such an attitude? And yet it would be just as logical for any other group of animals to do this as it is for men to do it. The philosophies of this world have all been framed by, and from the standpoint of, a single species, and they are still managed and maintained in the interests of this species. What insects! The breadth of human sympathy and understanding is the catholicity of katydids who never see beyond the hedgerows that bound the little meadow in which they sing their lives away.

Moral practice and understanding are everywhere tribal and antagonistic. They have been inherited, not reasoned out. They have been handed along to us, not generated by us. They have come about as a result of the militant condition of things in the midst of which and in conformity with which life has been developed on the earth.

The ideal conception of social obligation is bigger than family and friends, bigger than the city and state in which one happens to be born and raised, bigger than species, bigger even than the particular world of which one is a tenant. There are no aliens anywhere, not even in hell, to the being who is as big morally as he ought to be—only brothers. The universal heart goes out in tenderness beyond all boundaries of form and color and architecture and accident of birth—into every place where quivers a living soul. The Great Law is for the healing and consolation of all. Moral obligation is as extensive as the power to feel. […]

Man has defined himself as the “paragon of creation.”

This is an overestimate. Man is no more a model animal than the universe is a model universe. They are both of them very immodel, as every one must know who has powers of understanding exceeding those of the infant.

Man is a bigot, and in his conception of himself and in his estimate of the relative importance of himself and others, he is true to the weaknesses of his kind. But, omitting altogether the question of whether man is the masterpiece of the universe or not, we may affirm with perfect confidence, and without fear of contradiction, that if man is the paragon of the universe, the universe has no cause for dry eyes.

Man’s treatment of his fellow-men, and especially his conduct toward the forms of life differing anatomically from him, are such as to stamp him as being anything but an ideal animal—anywhere outside the psychologies of brigands, at any rate.

Human beings have been sufficiently enterprising and sufficiently devoted to each other to evolve into the master of the earth; but instead of recognizing their responsibilities and converting themselves into preceptors for the vanquished races, as an ideal race would have done, they have become the butchers of the universe. Instead of becoming the models and schoolmasters of the world in which they have outstripped, and striving to improve the faulty natures, and guide the wayward feet of those by means of whom they have been hoisted into distinction, they have become colossal pedants, proclaiming themselves the pets and specials of creation, and teaching each other that other races are mere things to furnish pasture and pastime for them. They preach that it is the ideal relation of associated beings for each to act toward the others in the way in which he himself would like to have others act toward him. This ideal of social rectitude was discovered two or three thousand years ago, and has been taught by the sages of the species ever since. But in the application of this rule human beings restrict it hypocritically to the members of their own species. No nonhuman is innocent enough, or is sufficiently sensitive, intelligent, or beautiful, to be exempt from the most frightful wrongs, if by these wrongs human comfort, curiosity, or pastime are in any way whatever catered to. Our own happiness, and that of our species, are assumed to be so pre-eminent that we sacrifice without hesitancy the most sacred interests of others, in order that our own may be carefully provided for. Even for a tooth or a feather to wear on human vanity, forests are silenced and communities littered with the dead and dying. Beautiful beings that fill the groves with song and juvenility are compelled to sprawl lifeless and disheveled on the heads of unconscionable sillies. […]

Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.

Oh this killing, killing, killing—this awful, never-stopping, never-ending, worldwide butchery! What a world! “Ideal”?—and “perfect”?—and “all-wise”? Certainly—to tigers, and highwaymen, and people who are sound asleep; but to everybody else it is simply monstrous.

We are nothing but a lot of ferocious humbugs—that is the long and the short of it—leading lives all the way from a tenth to two-thirds decent in our conduct towards our fellow men, but almost absolutely savage in our treatment of not-men. A being who can look without weeping on the heart-rending facts that fill the cities of our so-called civilization has a psychology granitic enough to gaze unmoved on a hellful of roasting souls.

The Chicago stockyards alone grind up annually 4,500,000 sheep, 5,500,000 cattle, 450,000 calves, and 10,000,000 hogs-20,500,000 living beings a year, or an average of over 100 a minute during every ten-hour working day!

What a mill! Just think of it! You who find it hard to realize vividly, and who stand blank and unconcerned in the presence of horrors that ought to make your very viscera crawl, and the very stones at your feet rise up, just remember, as you go about your daily duties, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, that every time the clock strikes, 6,500 innocent, intelligent, and highly sensitive beings have had their heads smashed with an axe, and their throats lunged through, and have struggled, and shuddered, and seen the world vanish from their eyes, here in these godless charnels. And remember, too, that this appalling carnage goes on, and on, and on, day after day, month after month, year after year.

“What for”? Why, bless your life! In order that men and women may pray for mercy, and preach the Golden Rule, and deplore injustice, with their bellies full of blood!

I would like to retain respect for the religion of my boyhood, but when I see that religion look with indifference, and even levity, upon a hemorrhage wide as the continents, and horrible even to “heathens”—not only wink at it, but apologize for it, and even belittle those few emancipated souls who are trying to stop it—I can but feel that such a faith has no just claims on the allegiance of thinking men. “Does it not shame you,” cried “pagan” Plutarch away in the dawning, “to mingle blood and murder with Nature’s beneficent fruits? Other carnivora you call savage and ferocious—lions, tigers, and serpents—yet you yourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.” Men and women who hold shares in the responsibility for the common crimes of our civilization would do better to stop giving money for missionaries and begin on themselves; for they commit every day of their lives greater crimes and more of them than the so-called heathens they are trying to “convert” ever dream of. The gods pity this world if we have got to go on for ever as we have in the past—a globeful of lip-virtuous felons!

It has been claimed that man cannot be a consistent humanitarian, because it is necessary for him to exploit others in various ways in order to provide for his own needs and desires.

This is the most common objection. … It is the most common because it is the most selfish. So prominent is egoism in human psychology, and in the philosophies that have sprung from that psychology, that the most natural and convincing objections to any proposition are those prompted by and appealing to the selfish instincts. The question that arises in the mind of the ordinary man when a change in the arrangements of the world is suggested to him is not what will be the effect of the change on the universe, but what will be its effect on him—on that remarkable atom of the universe so zealously partitioned off from the rest of his own skin. Man has been so long accustomed to the undisputed privilege of spoliation, and has so long and so brilliantly imagined himself to be all there is in the world, that a proposition denying this privilege, however fair the proposition may be from an impartial point of view, is promptly classified as the allegation of a zany, and is supposed to be conclusively disposed of when it is shown to be capable of interfering with human convenience or pleasure.

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Tyke, who broke down and went on a rampage at a 1993 Shrine Circus in Altoona, PA, infamously retaliated again in Honolulu, HI on August 20, 1994, killing her trainer and charging through city streets. Tyke was shot 87 times and took over 2 hours to die.

Submitted by Greg Scott

This Thursday, November 12th at 6:30, a protest will be held to show opposition to the Ararat Shrine Circus taking place at Municipal Auditorium. We will meet at the main entrance at 6:30, an hour before the show is scheduled to start. Shrine Circuses have been notorious for their unmerciful cruelty to elephants, lions, and other forced circus performers. Not only are the circus animals at constant risk of injury and death, but so are those attending the show. Remember, elephants and tigers are wild animals, who have been stolen from their natural environment and placed into a very scary situation. Please show your opposition to such horrid cruelty and exploitation by attending the protest. Feel free to make signs! Hope to see everyone out there.

Let’s show Ararat Shrine Circuses that they are not welcome in this city, and that their cruelty to animals must end!

Thursday, November 12th, 6:30
Municipal Auditorium (main entrance)
301 W. 13th St.
Kansas City, MO 64110

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

By Ricky Setticase for Bite Club KC

10 November 2009

A puppy mill is a mass breeding facility for dogs. Female dogs are breed over and over again to produce puppies for the pet store industry. Limited care is provided to the female dogs. Their sole purpose is to produce puppies. Over time the female dogs become spent and are then killed, as they no longer serve their purpose. One of their female offspring takes their place and the cycle of abuse continues.

Those who operate a puppy mill are doing so for the profit. That irresistible puppy at the pet store, that you have to own, which is sold for the low price of 1200 dollars, is what drives this cruelty. Puppies are harvested from their mothers around 8 weeks after birth and cleaned up. A human has never handled them until this point in their lives. They are bathed and sprayed with fragrance to make them more irresistible.

The next step in the process for the puppy is to be inspected by a broker. The broker is the middle person between the puppy mill and the pet store. One of the largest brokers in the United States is Hunte Corporation in Springfield, Missouri. (http://www.thehuntecorporation.com/default.html) So from the mill the puppies are packaged into a shipping container and sent to the broker. This transit will kill some; others will be rejected by the broker thus resulting in their death or being sold to a research facility where they will endure continued suffering; and the ones that pass the test go on to the pet store.

Petland is a pet store franchise that obtains their puppies from Hunte and thus puppy mills. They sell the potential customer on a pure breed puppy from good breeding stock. There is no reference to the puppy mill other than that the breeder is licensed by the USDA. USDA licensed puppy mills are still puppy mills. The USDA does not prioritize the inspection of puppy mills to compliance of the Animal Welfare Act…the only law that protects companion animals. The puppy will have “papers” so they can be registered with the American Kennel Club. These “papers” mean nothing outside of the AKC but that does not stop people from sending in their membership fees. The customer does not have to know anything about dogs to adopt from the pet store. They just have to pay the bill and they can take the puppy home. And home can mean anything.

Man’s Best Friend

The dog, known for loyalty, willingness to please, and unconditional love, has been standing by mans side since being domesticated. But mans treatment of dog has been the opposite. An estimated 4 million dogs are euthanized in America annually, yet over 5,000 breeders registered with USDA are churning out puppies. Each female can have 2 litters per year, between 6 to 10 puppies per litter. Theoretically, if each of the 5,000 breeders has 50 females the total number of puppies is 3 to 5 million annually.

Is it ethical for man to continue breeding dog while there remains euthanasia?

Breeders say they love the breed. If it were for love of breed then they would assist animal shelters with adoptions, as 25% of shelter dogs are pure bred. Breed registries, like American Kennel Club (AKC), make money from fees owners pay to say their dog has “papers.” These “papers” however mean nothing outside the inner circles of the registries.

The Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) November 2008 undercover investigation found Petland, America’s largest retailer of pure bred puppies, obtained them from puppy mills. Puppy mills, as seen on Oprah April 2008, are mass breeding facilities churning out millions of puppies annually where dog’s care is second to breeder’s profits. The United States Department of Agriculture, the government body responsible for inspection of puppy mills under the Animal Welfare Act, are negligent in their duties. The inspection process is under funded because the economic hand of the breeding lobby is powerful.

Therefore, animal shelters, breed rescue groups, and other compassionate people who truly love dog provide the love and care absent in the breeding industry. These non-profits seek to rescue those dogs deemed unprofitable by breeders. Several high profile rescues from puppy mills have made national news.

As I see it, until we eliminate euthanasia of dogs, there needs to be an all out ban of dog breeding. The issue is not preservation of breed but ethical treatment of species domesticated by man. And when euthanasia is eliminated and breeding is again allowed, there should be no monetary profit in breeding dog. But for now taxpayers, in the form of animal control, and compassionate citizens, in the form of non-profits, will pay the bill for the lack of ethics demonstrated in the dog breeding industry.

By today’s end nearly 11,000 dogs will be euthanized.

Organizations Biting Back at Puppy Mills

National:

In Defense of Animals
http://www.idausa.org/campaigns/puppymills/index.html
Humane Society of USA
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/stop_puppy_mills/
Companion Animal Protection Society
http://www.caps-web.org/

Local:

KC Citizens for Canine Causes
http://www.puppymillprisoners.org/
Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation
http://www.maal.org/Puppy-Mills.asp

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Som transkille är jag glad, men som djurrättsaktivist är jag bekymrad.

Forskare i USA har lyckats komma på hur man rekonstruerar kukar med potens. De skar bort penisen på hankaniner, för att sedan testa att odla fram fungerande organ, med svällkroppar som gör det möjligt att få erektion. Försöket lyckades. Kaninerna fick snoppar som gick att använda till att para sig, vilket de också gjorde och fick ungar som resultat. Hur många försök innan dess som misslyckades, och hur kaninerna mådde av miljön och behandlingen och vad som hände med dem sedan, framgår inte. Man kan ju gissa.

Jag vill verkligen verkligen verkligen ha kuk. Mitt penisavund och mitt kukkomplex råder det liksom inget tvivel om, och lika lite hur skeptisk jag är till att låta mig opereras med dagens metoder. Jag vill bara inte att forskare skär snoppen av kaniner för min skull. Så visst är tanken oerhört lockande och fascinerande, men jag känner med de kaniner som fått offra sitt könsorgan och förmodligen sitt liv för forskningen.

Att det är möjligt att göra det på kaniner säger ju dessutom inte att det är lika “lätt” att göra det på människor. En kaninkuk är inte längre än en centimeter ens med stånd; tillochmed jag har längre kuk än så. Fyra månader på testosteron har tagit ut sin rätt, även om det inte är något som kan mäta sig med en medfödd kuk på något sätt.

Jag känner med de kaniner som har plågats och dödats, men samtidigt är jag glad över de framsteg som har gjorts; jag önskar bara att de hade skett på ett mindre blodigt sätt. Min känsla är lika mycket grundad på moralisk medvetenhet som på min egen kastrationsångest – för jag är i första hand kanin, i andra hand transkille.

Cred till Amanda Brihed. Läs även andra bloggares intressanta åsikter om kukar, könsorgan, kaniner, djurförsök, forskning, djur, djurrätt, operationer, organodling, medicin, metaoidioplastik, falloplastik, transsexualism, HBTQ, vård, könskorrigering, moral, etik, djurplågeri, kastrering

Our latest billboard opposing the Death Park Deer slaughter is positioned on I-670, just outside of downtown Kansas City, MO and receives over 50,000 views per day….

Journal Entry by Jason Miller

11/9/09

The slaughterers have annihilated 313 deer at Death Park, but the rest of the herd still needs us. JOCO and the Kansas Department of Wildlife intend to massacre even more innocent, semi-tame, sentient deer by unleashing empathy deficient bow hunters on the remainder of the herd. This despite the fact that they’ve already massacred so many deer that the biodiversity of the park will be restored. And Randy Knight once told me in a telephone conversation that biodiversity was the only true concern driving this slaughter.

We will be protesting at the entrance of Death Park this Saturday at 2PM. And again on Sunday. And there will be much more activism to follow to oppose the impending bow hunt……It’s never too late to do the right thing and implement Anthony Marr’s nonlethal deer management plan!

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.