Month: January 2002

Huntingdon Life Sciences Leaves the London Stock Exchange

Last week, Huntingdon Life Sciences left the London Stock Exchange as it prepares to move its stock listing to the U.S. NASDAQ where its shareholders will be afforded more protection from the animal rights terrorists who have plagued the company for the past few years. The move brought reactions from all of the different players in the HLS saga.

Not surprisingly, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty spokesman Joseph Dawson told Reuters that, “We will not stop until we have driven this disgusting firm out of business.” Of course given SHAC’s recent fortunes he might have wanted to add to that “or until we’re all in prison.”

Great Britain’s Home Office spoke out promising that it would not allow another testing firm to be hounded out of the country as HLS was. “We will not hesitate to take any further action to make sure that legitimate businesses are free to operate without fear of intimidation,” a spokeswoman for the Home Office said. Words are cheap, though. We’ll see how Great Britain reacts when the SHAC protesters inevitably turn their hostilities toward other companies.

Paul Drayson, chairman of the BioIndustry Association, said that the industry needs to deal with the anti-HLS thugs head on. “They’re bullies and . . . there’s only one way to deal with bullies,” Drayson said. “You stand up to them together.”

Drayson urged Great Britain to adopt U.S.-style disclosure rules where shareholders with less than a 5 percent stake in a company can remain anonymous. In Great Britain, the threshold is only three percent.

HLS managing director Brian Cass debunked a piece of nonsense that SHAC had been floating in the United States. SHAC has been sending out press releases claiming HLS’ listing on the NASDAQ over-the-counter bulletin board as Life Sciences is in danger because the company has been unable to find a market maker for the listing.

Cass described this as nonsense saying, “We needed a market maker to sponsor the submission of our listing request. But that has happened.” The companied does not need a market maker for NASDAQ’s over-the-counter bulletin board trading.

Sources:

Call to shelter shareholders from extremists. Geoff Dyer, Patrick Jenkins, and Robert Shrimsley, The Financial Times (London), January 25, 2002.

UK says will defend firms as Huntingdon quits LSE. Mark Potter, Reuters, January 24, 2002.

Stand up to bullies says biotech chief. Rosie Murray-West, The Daily Telegraph (London), January 25, 2002.

Did Washington's Ban on Trapping Create a Mountain out of a Molehill

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that a ban on fur traps approved by Washington state voters in 2000 has backfired on some residents by making it illegal to use common traps designed to kill moles.

The initiative, approved by 55 percent of voters, banned the use of “body-gripping traps . . . [on] nonhuman vertebrates.” The bill, which was engineered by the Humane Society of the United States, included exceptions for rats and mice, but not for moles. And Washington’s Fish and Wildlife Department claims that the plain language of the bill makes it illegal to use traps to kill moles.

The Journal reports that a similar problem occurred in Massachusetts where the HSUS pushed a similar ban on traps. As a result the beaver population in Massachusetts almost tripled in the five years after voters approved the initiative in 1996. In 1999, the Massachusetts initiative was amended to allow for some trapping of beavers.

The Washington state legislature has attempted to amend its anti-trapping initiative but has been blocked by Republicans in the legislature who claim that amending the bill to exclude moles would create a double standard that, as the Wall Street Journal describes it, “would allow wealthy suburbanites to trap moles but prevent ranchers from trapping coyotes preying on livestock.”

Meanwhile, Washington residents are using a number of ingenious (and often questionable) methods to kill moles, including gasoline, explosives, and flooding mole tunnels with garden hoses.

Source:

After Washington Forbids Animal Traps, Mountains of Molehills Make It Reconsider. Robert Gavin, The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2002.

Animal Rights Activists vs. the Heifer Project

In September 2001 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called for an end to U.S. government contributions to Heifer International. Now that the events of September 11 are fading, PETA and other animal rights activists are returning to that campaign against one of the most innovative international charity’s around.

Activists are angry because Heifer International is planning to send chickens to and other farm animals to poor families in Afghanistan. The charity specializes in using donor money to buy people in developing world animals from cows to camels and everything in between. Currently, Heifer International is working in Afghani refugee camps in Pakistan. The charity is giving families chickens, goats and cattle and training the families to care for the animals.

The idea behind Heifer International is to use aid money to make families self-sufficient rather than dependent on aid agencies.

Of course this is anathema to animal rights activists. As animal rights activist Barbara Biel put it in the subject of an e-mail protesting Oxygen’s support such efforts, “‘Send a Chick to Afghanistan’ is CRUEL!” The sample letter Biel and other activists are circulating is hilarious.

For example,

The HPI gift catalog shows numerous smiling adults and children hugging or cuddling goats, rabbits, pigs, sheep, llama, chickens, cows, water buffalo . . . Not surprising, there are no pictures showing the animals being killed for consumption. The catalog does mention protein, meat, selling offspring, but pictures of slaughter would make this catalog messy and off-putting to the folks they want to sucker in with cutesy writing such as:

“Your granddaughter is celebrating her very first Christmas. What better way to share the joy you see in the eyes of such happy, healthy little girl than to give her a trio of bunny rabbits to a struggling family in her name.”

. . .

How happy and joyous will this child be when she’s old enough to know that violence was done in her name? How happy and joyous would a child be witnessing the killing of rabbits?

And so on. But it gets better. The letter continues,

According to the catalog, HPI provides “free Sunday school lessons and faith-based materials similar to ‘A hero’s Story’ that teach children ages 5-12 about the problems of hunger and poverty.” No doubt, these materials fail to mention that HPI teaches exploitation and lack of compassion for other living beings. HPI fails to mention that it teaches killing. HPI doesn’t tell young people that it is invested in spreading animal agriculture, rather than plant-based sustainable agriculture [one would think the presence of animals might tip them off, but maybe Biel’s a bit too slow to notice that]. There is no education about the politics of hunger and food distribution, and the dire health and environmental costs of animal agribusiness.

. . .

Contrary to HPI’s belief, animals are not renewable resources but individuals capable of experiencing not only crude emotions like fear, but far more subtle and complex emotions such as love, grief, pride, shame, joy, and loneliness.

Huh? Has anyone ever seen a rabbit act ashamed?

The letter ends by calling Heifer International “insidious and dangerous because it promotes violence and labels it ‘doing good.'” Apparently opposed to animal rights activist who promote lies and label it as “the truth.”

PETA, meanwhile, is upset that about $13 million in international aid from the United States has been distributed through Heifer International. It wants people to write the U.S. Agency for International Development and “ask that it immediately stop exporting animal cruelty.”

Source:

Stop the Use of Tax Dollars to Promote Animal Cruelty in Developing Countries. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, September 20, 2001.

Oxygen.com thinks HPI is doing good work–Pls send letter. Barbara Biel, E-mail communication, Accessed: January 24, 2002.

The Tactics and Effects of Animal Rights Terrorism from a British Women Who Experienced it First Hand

The Times (London) ran a horrifying op-ed by Sally Staples about her experience after being targeted by animal rights terrorists in Great Britain who want to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Staples has no connection at all with HLS. Her crime was that she sat on a residents committee. On that committee with her was a man who worked for a bank that in turn had helped to finance HLS. This sort of association with HLS was enough to cause Staples to be inundated with threats, pornographic magazines, obscene phone calls, and a variety of other harassment techniques.

Staples writes,

For the past two months I have been bombarded with obscene phone calls, threatening and abusive mail and rape threats. Pornography, fetish magazines and even a Haitian voodoo curse have come rattling through my letterbox.

Yes, you read that correctly, a voodoo curse. Staples writes that the curse came on a photocopied piece of paper saying, “Whilst in Haiti a voodoo spell was cast upon you. You will soon feel the effects of it. The spell will be lifted when your involvement in HLS ceases. Do not underestimate this warning.”

Staples reports that many of the people who served with her on the residents committee received letters claiming their spouses were having affairs. One received “a stack of paedophile literature sent to his address” (exactly what are activists doing when they’re not worrying about the suffering of animals?)

Staples urges readers not to donate to the terrorist behind such acts,

Next time you are out shopping in your high street and see one of those trestle tables covered in gut-wrenching pictures of suffering animals, look closely at the people seeking your support. They may seem well-intentioned and caring, they may be eloquent in their arguments . . . But before you open your wallet, remember that money donated to this cause is often spent on promoting terrorism against people like me . . .

Animal rights activists keep claiming that their terrorism efforts are in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Funny, I don’t remember King or Gandhi urging followers to send pornographic magazines and paedophile literature to his opponents.

Source:

Terror behind the trestle tables. Sally Staples, The Times (London), January 24, 2002.

The United States Should Withhold Family Planning Money Over China

Columnist Chris Weinkopf recently surveyed the controversy over the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund and makes a compelling case that the U.S. President George W. Bush should withhold all $34 million allocated for that purpose by Congress.

Normally the authorization for the UNFPA funding includes a provision that deducts from the total however much the UNFPA uses in China. So if Congress approves $30 million and the UNFPA spends $2 million in China, the amount the United States gives the UNFPA would be $28 million.

When the Congress passed funding for then UNFPA in December 2001, however, it removed that automatic provision and instead left it to the president’s discretion to decide how much of the $34 million actually makes its way to the UNFPA.

At a minimum, Bush should withhold an amount equal to what the UNFPA plans to spend in China. The United States should not subsidize China’s hideous one-child policy.

Source:

Where “Choice” and “Life” Should Agree, but Don’t. Chris Weinkopf, FrontPageMagazine.Com, January 30, 2002.

Virginia Law Would Close FOIA 'Loophole'

Republican Harry Purkey is sponsoring a bill that in the Virginia General Assembly which would allow public institutions to deny Freedom of INformation Acts requests if a judge deems the request an effort to harass. The bill is aimed squarely at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and could come up for a vote this week.

The text of the bill reads:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

1. That the Code of Virginia is amended by adding in Chapter 37 of Subtitle 2 of Title 2.2 a section numbered 2.2-3715 as follows:

§ 2.2-3715. Protective orders.

Any public body subject to the provisions of this chapter may petition the circuit court in the city or county in which the public body is located for a protective order relieving the public body in whole or in part from its obligation to produce or provide access to public records sought by a particular requester. The court shall grant the petition and enter such an order if the court finds that the request for access to public records is unreasonable, not made in good faith, or motivated primarily by an intent to abuse, harass, or intimidate the public body. In entering the order, the court may require the requester to pay the reasonable attorney’s fees incurred by the public body in obtaining the order.

Purkey introduced the bill after the Virginia Marine Science Museum received an FOIA request from PETA that included a large volume of documents. Purkey introduced the bill after hearing how the museum foundation was overwhelmed by FOIA requests from PETA in 2001.

The law would allow cities and counties to ask a judge to look at the FOIA requests. If the judge finds that requests are “unreasonable, not made in good faith, or motivated primarily by an intent to abuse, harass or intimidate the public body,” the requests could be denied and the person or group making the FOIA requests could be forced to pay the government’s court costs.

Source:

Bill would outlaw some requests for information. Robert McCabe, the Virginian-Pilot, January 29, 2002.