Month: February 2005

Man Arrested In Connection With McDonald’s Arson in 2003

New Jersey resident Chris McIntosh, 22, was arrested this month and charged with setting a fire Jan. 20, 2003 that caused about $5,000 in damage to a Seattle-area McDonald’s.

Shortly after the McDonald’s arson, someone called a crime tip line claiming the arson in the name of the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. The caller said,

There was an E-L-F-A-L-F hit at McDonald’s across from the Space Needle. There will be more. The fire was set on the ‘M.’ Four gallons of gas. There was a broken lock, not cut. Broken. There will be more. As long as Mother Earth is pillaged, raped, destroyed. As long as McDonald’s keeps hurting our furry brothers, there will be more.

Prosecutors say that fingerprints and DNA evidence found on a can of spray paint and sunglasses left at the scene of the crime match McIntosh’s. McIntosh had been arrested numerous times before in several states including Oregon, California, Wisconsin and Illinois, and his name turned up quickly after the FBI ran his prints through their criminal database.

McIntosh’s former girlfriend, Maria Gardner, told police that McIntosh set that fire and that she acted as a lookout during the fire. Another woman he dated, but who is unnamed in the affidavit against him, told the FBI that McIntosh bragged about the McDonald’s fire to her in February 2005.

Additionally, McIntosh apparently used his brother David’s name as an alias, and a Seattle-area youth centers’ records show a “David McIntosh” stayed at the center in January 2003, including the period during which the fire was set (McIntosh, in fact, was using “David McIntosh” as an alias when he was arrested).

McIntosh was arrested in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after police there received a tip that he may have been in the area. He will be brought to Seattle by federal authorities, and if he is ultimately convicted, he could face up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

The full text of the affidavit filed against McIntosh can be read here.

Sources:

McDonald’s blaze suspect held. Christine Frey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 17, 2005.

New Jersey Man Arrested In 2003 Arson At Seattle Mcdonald’s Restaurant. Press Release, United States Attorney’s Office Western District of Washington, February 16, 2005.

Man charged with arson in 2003 fire. Danielle Camilli, Burlington County Times, February 18, 2005

Perhaps David Cross Should Take His Own Advice and Shut Up

David Cross, one of the actors on the hilarious Fox comedy Arrested Development, is the latest Hollywood type to go naked as part of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ anti-fur campaign.

In the ad, Cross appears naked accompanied by the cut line, “Wear your own fur. Let the animals keep theirs.”

Except, between this ad, the bizarre Dennis Rodman ad (those were vegan tattoos, right Dennis?), and the pictures of Lisa Franzetta going naked, frankly I’m beginning to understand why humans have been using furs to cover their bodies for millenia.

A press release announcing Cross’ ad included a passage so bizarre I still don’t know what PETA is referring to. According to PETA,

Although he drew the line at being genitally electrocuted [damn — now that I would pay to see!] like animals on fur farms are, dedicated David did try to better understand the pain of these animals by using double-sided tape to cover his naughty bits when he worked the runway for our cameras. Youch! (Sorry ladies, the discarded tape was promptly sold on eBay).

I think I’d much prefer a fur-fringed coat over tape with David Cross’ body hair stuck to it, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, since Cross is apparently not a vegetarian, much less a vegan, he doesn’t appear to have any problem with killing animals for any number of other purposes, so perhaps it would be best for Cross to take his own advice, and shut up, you fucking baby.

Sources:

Wear your own fur. Press Release, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Undated.

British Police Reach £30,000 Settlement with Anti-Hunt Protesters

The Wiltshire police department recently reached a £30,000 settlement with 10 animal rights activists who were arrested in October 2001 while protesting a pheasant hunt.

Gun-handling safety guidelines require a shooter to use a breaking type shotgun and to break the shotgun if approached by a member of the public. Animal rights activists developed a tactic whereby they would approach and stand directly next to shooters, forcing them to halt and break their guns.

At an October 2001 pheasant hunt, activists used this tactic. Police, however, over-reacted and arrested the activists on charges of physically assaulting the shooters. They were detained at a police station, interrogated, and then released on bail. All charges were eventually dropped.

Police wouldn’t discuss details of the settlement, except to confirm the £30,000 amount and that the settlement was reached without any admission of liability or wrongdoing on the part of the police department.

Sources:

Protesters get £30k compensation. The BBC, February 15, 2005.

£30,000 police payout for animal rights protesters. The Daily Mail, February 15, 2005.

Gene Therapy Used to Prevent Parkinson’s Disease in Primates

In February, the The Journal of Neuroscience published the results of efforts to use gene therapy to boost levels of a protein that is believed to preserve brain cells and may someday form the basis of a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease.

The protein is glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). It has been tested in human beings but so far with mixed results. A trial of GDNF therapy in human beings had to be stopped in October 2004 due to safety concerns. In that trial, GDNF was introduced directly into the brain of 34 patients. Four of the patients developed antibodies against GDNF within six months of the trial. In conjunction with research on primates that found the brain cells of the animals began to break down after the GDNF treatment, the human trial was stopped.

An earlier smaller-scale trial of GDNF in the UK showed improvement in Parkinson’s patients given GDNF, and there’s debate over whether the difference in the two studies is related to the effect of GDNF or possible differences in the protocols of the two studies.

A couple teams of international researchers, however, recently published their results of another method of delivering GDNF — using gene therapy to force the bodies of affected animals to produce GDNF. There are likely to be a number of advantages to this over the current practice of simply introducing it directly into the brain, including producing GDNF at levels that are likely to be safer for the patient.

In research sponsored by Lund University in Lund, Sweden; the University of Cambridge; and the McKnight Brain Institute and the Genetics Institute of the University of Florida, researchers used gene therapy to insert copies of a gene responsible for creating GDNF in the front part of the brain into monkeys. Researchers then induced an animal model of Parkinson’s in the monkeys by exposing them to a drug that destroys dopamine producing cells.

After 17 weeks, monkeys that had received the gene therapy not only had a significantly higher ability to perform tasks than a control group that did not receive the gene therapy, but analysis of brain tissue showed the GDNF had a protective affect on the dopamine producing cells in the experimental group of monkeys.

Dr. Nicholas Mzyczka, of the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, said in a press release announcing the results,

The simplest question we’re asking is, “Does any particular combination of proteins prevent or accelerate degeneration of the neurons?” For some time Dr. [Ron] Mandel has been working on the idea of introducing a vector into the brain that would express GDNF. What they’ve found is that if you get low-level expression, you can prevent cell death in a part of the brain called the substantial nigra. That’s been shown before in rodent models, but it’s encouraging to see data that it works in higher animals like monkeys.

In the same press release, Mandel said of the current status of GDNF as a possible treatment for Parkinson’s,

Our strategy is a neuroprotective concept and would only be amenable for early stage patients to keep a good quality of life. It would be a huge change in the way treatment is done. We know the GDNF protects the neurons in primates from the model that we use, so that’s good. We know we can use very low doses that are still effective, so that’s good. But we need a safety net. Once we turn it on, it’s on for life. So we have to control it, and we’re working on this as we speak. But it’s not ready for clinical trials.

Source:

Gene therapy for Parkinson’s Disease moves forward in animals. Press Release, University of Florida Health Science Center, February 10, 2005.

Parkinson’s trial halted. Helen Pearson, Nature, October 5, 2004.

The British Government Is Hopeless

In February, a group calling itself The Electronic Civil Disobedience against the Fur and the Vivisection Industry vowed to launch denial of service attacks against the websites of fur companies Peek & Clopenburg; Legacy Trading; The German Fur Institute; Fur Commission USA; Fur & Fashion GmbH; Maison de Bonneterie; and the MIFUR.

A denial of service attack is normally an attempt to flood a web server with bogus requests with the hope that at some point the bogus traffic will overwhelm the web server and cause it to crash. In this case, however, the protesters apparently focused on flooding the e-mail servers of the targeted organizations.

Here’s the bizarre part — if they’re carried out in the UK, denial of service attacks are not illegal. The government has been investigating explicitly outlawing DOS attacks for the past couple years, but still hasn’t followed through.

It’s bizarre that the UK can, on the one hand, consider extreme measures such as preventative house arrest against animal rights activists, but can’t even pass an obvious and straightforward remedy such as outlawing DOS attacks

The UK is just hopeless at coming up with legal responses to extremist activities. When the animal rights activists succeed in driving pharmaceutical research out of the country, it will be because the British government continues to do little more than alternate between throwing up a white flag on the one hand and overreaching on the other.

Source:

Fur protesters launch Web attacks. Dan Ilett, ZDNet UK, February 14, 2005.

Karen Davis on Bird Brains

The Washington Post recently published a summary of new research on avian brains that suggests they are more complex than previously believed which, in part, has implications for how birds evolved. Specifically, the researchers found that avian brains are more mammalian than previously believed and call for changing the nomenclature that scientists use to describe the avian brain to reflect this finding.

This, of course, was an open invitation for United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis to chime in with her twist on the new findings about avian brains. In a letter published in the Washington Post on February 12, Davis wrote,

Rick Weiss’s Feb. 1 news story, “Bird Brains Get Some New Names, And New Respect,” was deeply gratifying to those of us who spend our days with birds. We have been waiting to see scientific language and understanding catch up with the reality of bird intelligence. I spend my days with domestic chickens and turkeys, birds that have long been denigrated as stupid, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Just watch a hen calculate how to speed to her perch at night to avoid a certain attentive rooster in the way, and you know that a smart chick is looking out for her own interests.

The day may come when to be called a “chicken” or a “turkey” will be rightly regarded as a salute to a person’s intelligence.

I think there’s some opening for common ground here between activists and opponents. I think we can all agree that the chickens and turkeys Davis spends her days with are at least as intelligent as she is. See, we really can all get along.

And I can’t leave this without pointing out that when UPC posted a copy of Davis’ letter to AR-NEWS, they also urged people wanting more information about this research to visit AvianBrain.Org. I promptly followed their suggestion, but was horrified to see what are clearly the results of animal research all over the site, including illustrated cross-sections of the avian brain.

What about the animals who died for just to satisfy the curiosity of these mad scientists? I thought research like this was done just to make researchers rich?

Source:

Letter to the editor. Karen Davis, Washington Post, February 12, 2005.