Month: July 2001

PETA's Anti-Fishing Campaign (and the Hypocrisy of Some Anti-Animal Rights Folks)

When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched it’s anti-fishing billboards and radio ads in June, it provoked a lot of interesting commentary, with much of it directed at ridiculing PETA. But even in some of the otherwise excellent anti-PETA articles there was a lot of fuzzy thinking about animals, humans and nature that is the source of what little strength the animal rights movement possesses.

The actual ads PETA tried to take out were amusing. To coincide with Wal-Mart’s BFL Tournament, PETA produced a radio ad featuring “reformed fisher” Jay Kelly. Here’s how PETA described Kelly’s view in a press release,

As a child, Kelly fished with his family. He now realizes that fish have feelings, too. “Fishing is just as cruel as beating a puppy,” says Kelly. “When those fish on your hook move their lips, they aren’t just whistling Dixie, they’re trying desperately to keep on breathing. They know they are suffocating to death.” Kelly hopes that fishers will toss their tackle, pitch their poles for good, and take up harmless outdoor activities like hiking, badminton, and lawn-bowling.

The claim that a fish’s efforts to continue breathing is proof that a fish is self-aware is a genuine surprise, since that standard would imply that creatures that have even extremely primitive nervous systems have rights. Usually when anti-animal rights activists ask if animal rights activists want to protect insect rights or worm rights as well, they are accused of creating a straw man, but Kelly’s standard means almost all living organisms would be accorded rights which is so absurd that most animal rights activists won’t even go there.

PETA claims that fish feel pain, and in a letter to The Washington Times, PETA staffer Paula Moore offered the organization’s incredibly weak argument in favor of that position which backs up Kelly’s claim. Essentially, PETA is claiming that since fish exhibit many of the same responses that mammals exhibit when in pain, “including rapid startle reactions and simple nonspecific flight,” this must mean that they are really experiencing pain. But one of the problems with this is that fish lack a neocortex, which is widely regarded as being the source of higher order responses to pain.

And again, if PETA is serious, then almost every complex organism will have rights, and we are back to debating whether or not cockroaches have rights.

Some of the anti-PETA opinions, however, were almost more annoying than PETA’s own anti-fishing claims. Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly wrote a hilarious column about PETA with lines like,

“Why do we throw a Frisbee to some animals and a barbed hook to others?” PETA asks on its web site.

And, of course, the answer is: Because fish really suck at catching Frisbees.

The weird thing, though, is that in the middle of his anti-PETA rant, Reilly takes time out to elaborate on his anti-hunting views. According to Reilly,

…sitting in the back of a pickup, taking a rifle with an infrared scope and killing a deer from 1,000 yards away is not early the same thing as standing up to your spleen in icy rushing river water, trying to cast the perfectly tied fly into the perfect eddy to catch a rainbow trout. … Tell you what: I will get behind hunting when hunters come up with a shoot-and release program.

Unless Reilly is a vegetarian, which seems extraordinarily unlikely, this is an extremely myopic and hypocritical claim. As someone who has never hunted, I don’t see how anyone could consistently say that it is wrong to shot a deer from 1,000 feet a way with a scoped rifle, but it is okay to buy meat that comes out of slaughterhouses.

Similarly, Richard Louv of The Denver Post wrote a wishy washy sort of anti-PETA article in which Louv apparently couldn’t help but say that although he disagrees with PETA, the animal rights movement “is not entirely without merit.” Again, presumably like many who have come under attack from the animal rights community, Louv is certain that when he kills a fish that is perfectly fine, but he’s not so sure about what happens when a researcher performs a medical experiment or a circus trains elephants.

The animal rights activists aren’t the only ones with clouded thinking about animals and ethics.

Source:

PETA’s Anti-Fishing Radio Ad Targets Animal Tournament. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, June 12, 2001.

Fish may not be cute, but they feel pain. Paula Moore, The Washington Times, June 12, 2001.

Scales of injustice. Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated, June 26, 2001.

The Angler’s Manifesto: PETA’s anti-fishing campaign all wet. Richard Louv, The Denver Post, June 3, 2001.

Success in Applying Nanotechnology in Mice

For years now, people on the speculative fringe of respectable science have been claiming that nanotechnology was right around the corner and would revolutionize medical treatment. We’re still a long way from that rosy future, but a study published in Nature represents the first successful use of nanotechnology to treat a disease.

Researchers at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, created a ‘nanochemical’ — essentially an extremely small antibiotic — which seeks out dangerous bacteria and kills it by puncturing the cell wall of the invader.

Their research took off from earlier research in polypetides. Polypetides could be used to target bacteria in the same way except for two problems: they tend to break down quickly once introduced into the body and they have a habit of targeting non-bacterial cells which is obviously a definite problem.

Working at the nano scale, the researchers were able to construct synthetic peptide rings which turned out to be me more stable and easier to produce than polypetides. Through trial and error, the researchers produced peptide rings that would attack only bacterial membranes.

Putting their methods to the test, the researchers infected mice with an antibiotic-resistant strain of staph infection, and then injected the peptide rings into the mice. The nanochemicals did their job, completely ridding the mice of a disease that would otherwise be fatal.

Reza Ghadiri, one of the principal researchers involved in the study, noted that one advantage of the nanochemical is that it should be harder for bacteria to develop resistance to it. Antibiotic work by targeting a specific molecule, and over time very subtle changes in that molecule allow bacteria to develop resistance.

But in order to become resistant to the peptide rings, the bacteria would have to alter numerous molecules. Not outside the realm of possibility, but likely a task that is several magnitudes of order more difficult than altering a single molecule.

These peptides are obviously a long way from human testing, with research on the safety of these drugs in animals still in its infancy, but some of those wild-eyed futurists are probably going to feel vindicated by this fascinating breakthrough.

Source:

Antibiotic prototype punctures bugs. Tom Clarke, Nature, July 26, 2001.

Internet Advertising, AT&T, and Innovation

TechTV producer David Roos was recently complaining that it was my fault that CNET had to lay off many of its staff members. See, I’m one of the people Roos complained about who don’t click on any of CNET’s ads.

Frankly, like Jim Roepcke, I simply don’t visit CNET much anymore because, to put it bluntly, the site really sucks. It used to be on my list of sites I had to visit every morning to keep up with the cutting edge of tech happenings, but now it consists largely of rewritten press releases and comments on earnings and pricing of high tech stocks. Boring.

But even if I were visiting the site more often, I still wouldn’t click on the ads because advertising doesn’t work, and Internet advertising is the worst of the worst.

Joseph Sobran has an insightful article on the downfall of advertising. He’s concerned with radio advertising, but all of the problems he cites are even more prominent with web advertising.

Rather than tell me something interesting about a product, I see banner ads that leave me completely clueless. Either that or the ads are completely irrelevant. Why would I want to download a white paper from IBM, as a recent CNET ad urged me to do? As Sobran writes,

What makes commercials especially annoying is that most of them are so badly done. They don’t interest you in the product or give you any useful information about it. And they certainly aren’t entertaining. The harder they try to be funny, the worse they are.

I see the ads that people pay to place on my AnimalRights.Net and Overpopulation.Com web sites and most of the time I have to shake my head and wonder what the hell these people were thinking.

So what’s a wannabe profitable corporation to do when their lousy products marketed with lousy ad campaigns fail to interest anyone? Why blame it on the Internet infrastructure, of course?

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a much maligned article describing corporations who want to turn the Internet into a toll both in an effort to make money.

The worst offender in the story has to be Thomas Nolle, identified as a “New Jersey telecommunications consultant” who says,

The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn’t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network.

This may sound absurd (and it is, of course), but it is also conventional wisdom within the academic communications community. Most college-level communications textbooks, for example, defend cable monopolies as necessary to avoid market failure, and before the 1980s many of these same books and authors defended AT&T’s monopoly as necessary to avoid market failure. Is it any surprise at all that these nitwits are now turning their attention to the Internet and arguing that monopoly-style regulatory schemes are the only solution to avoid market failure?

It is worth remembering how AT&T secured its long-standing monopoly — it convinced the U.S. government to semi-nationalize the phone system during World War I on the grounds that having a stable, widely available phone system was in the interests of national security. Combined with long-distance rate regulation, the government did what AT&T had been unable to do after its patent on telephones expired: kill off the companies competitors.

The one thing I don’t understand, however, is why people get upset when sevice providers such as Excite@Home announces deals to place some third party content on internal servers to provide very high speed access to multimedia content.

Some people strongly object to this as “walling off the Internet,” but how is it any different than my cable system setting up a proxy server to speed delivery of third party content that is accessed frequently? Or downloading a multimedia file and placing it on my home file server for that matter?

As far as I’m concerned that’s the right way to create private Internets along side the more public Internet. Trying to build tollbooths in to the infrastructure of the public Internet, however, is the wrong way to do this.

Karen Davis, Songwriter

Back in April, as it has for the last four years, United Poultry Concerns promised to protest at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. The event was marred by rain, but that wasn’t about deter UPC. In a report for their Summer 2001 Poultry Press, UPC claimed that the “Big Chicken in the Sky Rains out Egg Roll, Not UPC.”

Apparently UPC handed out a pamphlet to kids and parents containing song lyrics written by Karen Davis meant to be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Somehow I don’t think this is destined to become a children’s classic, but you can judge from the lyrics,

Chicken, chicken, why aren't you
With your mother hen so true?
Pecking, playing, running around
Taking sunbaths on the ground.
Chicken, chicken, why aren't you
With your mother hen so true?


Chicken, chicken, why aren't you?
With your sisters and brothers, too?
Scratching, running, having fun,
Taking dustbaths in the sun.
Chicken, chicken, why aren't you
With your sisters and brothers, too?


Chicken, chicken, baby bird
May your cheeping cries be heard,
Hushed and soothed by those who see
We are all one family.
Chicken, chicken, why aren't you
With your mother hen so true?

I suspect those lyrics made even the “Big Chicken in the Sky” cringe.

Source:

Big Chicken in the Sky Rains out Egg Roll, Not UPC. United Poultry Concerns, Summer 2001.

Hare Krishna's Object to McDonald's Restaurant

I’ve heard of churches objecting to bars being built nearby, but members of a Hare Krishna temple in east Dallas are complaining that a proposed McDonald’s restraunt would offend their religious practice of vegetarianism.

“We just really feel offended that McDonald’s is planning to come here,” temple member Mike Meyer told The Dallas Morning News. “A big part of our religion is vegetarianism; it’s one of our main beliefs. It’s like an in-your-face type of thing.”

Of course the Hare Krishna objection to a McDonald’s in the neighborhood couldn’t havev anything to do with not wanting competition for the vegetarian restaurant run by the temple.

Source:

Hare Krishnas fight McDonald’s plan. The Associated Press, July 6, 2001.

The Horrors of those "Happy Cow" Commercials

The California Milk Advisory Board has been running ads featuring cows in fields with tag lines like, “Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California.” Last Chance for Animals filed a complaint against the ads a few months ago, claiming that the ads “deliberately mislead the public, as they do not reflect the horrendous conditions in which California’s dairy cows actually live.”

The animal rights group sent undercover footage of a couple dairies to the California Attorney Generals’s Office that the group claims prove that “the cows … are anything but ‘happy.'”

In a press release announcing the complaint, Last Chance for Animals urged activists to “please ask the Attorney General’s Office to issue an injunction against the CMAB, disseminate a retraction, and enforce a criminal penalty against the company.”

Source:

California “Happy Cow” Ads. Last Chance for Animals, Press release, 2001.