Month: April 2002

Pakistani Women Sentenced to Stoning for Adultery Conviction

The BBC reports that a woman, Zafran Bibi, has been sentenced to be stoned to death after being convicted of adultery in Pakistan.

Pakistan introduced the Islamic Sharia law in 1980. Several women have been sentenced to death for committing adultery in that time, but none of those sentences were ever carried out.

Bibi had filed a rape charge against her brother-in-law, but later reportedly confessed to having an affair with him. She was sentenced to death based on that confession.

Source:

Stoning sentence for Pakistan woman. Susannah Price, The BBC, April 19, 2002.

Should Animal Rights Advocates Start Promoting Beef?

Earlier this week I mentioned that I though the veggie burger being offered by Burger King was doomed to failure — despite claims by some overenthusiastic vegans and vegetarians, there is no great movement among the general population to foreswear meat. This is confirmed, ironically, by statistics from animal rights activists themselves.

Alex Hershaft, who had posted to an animal rights e-mail list about the importance of Burger King veggie burger, also recently posted statistics to the same e-mail list demonstrating why the veggie burger will fail.

In 1980, per capita consumption of meat in the United Stats was 196 pounds. By 1990, that had risen to 201 pounds, and in 2001 hit 209 pounds, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.

Consumption in beef and pork products are expected to decline somewhat over the next 10 years, but largely because people are expected to eat more chicken and turkey.

Hershaft tries to spin the change as also being due to increased vegetarian/vegan options,

Consumption is now leveling off, reflecting market saturation and increase consumer interest in meat alternatives like veggie burgers, soy dogs, and soy lunch ‘meats.’

The reality is, however, that after 20 years of trying to convince Americans to adopt vegetarian lifestyles, the animal rights movement hasn’t even made a small dent in meat consumption, with the biggest consumer change being eating more chicken and turkey rather than beef and pork.

Ironically, the switch to chicken and turkey will mean a massive increase in the total number of animals killed. Assuming the USDA is correct in its estimates here is how the numbers would change over the next ten years (these are very rough estimates intended only to show the magnitude of change):

Cows killed: -4.2 million
Pigs killed: -4.7 million
Chickens killed: +639 million
Turkeys killed: +31 million
Net: +661.1 million animals

If the animal rights movement really wants to minimize the total number of animals killed for meat, it should start with a campaign addressed to American consumers to the effect that if they are going to eat meat, the most humane option is beef. Just don’t hold your breath waiting.

Source:

2002 Death Statistics (PDF). Farm USA, Winter/Spring 2002.

More than 10 billion animals killed for food in the U.S. Alex Hershaft e-mail, accessed April 24, 2002.

US animal flesh consumption at 209 lbs. Alex Hershaft, e-mail, Accessed April 24, 2002.

U.S. Researchers Clone Calf From Cells of Dead Cow

Researchers at the University of Georgia announced this week that they had successfully cloned a calf from the cells of a cow that had been dead for 48 hours before her genetic material was extracted.

This is the first time a cow has been cloned from cells of a dead animals. European researchers last year announced they had cloned a sheep from cells taken from an animal that had been dead 18 to 24 hours.

The researchers claim that this will allow cattle producers to select the best beef stock from their herds to clone (since it is impossible to judge how suitable a given cow is for meat until after it has been killed).

Further down the road, this technique could allow for the cloning of cows from meat that is tested for low susceptibility to diseases such as Mad Cow.

Source:

Scientists Clone Calf from Dead Cow. Erin McClam, Associated Press, April 25, 2002.

First Instance of Gene Therapy Causing Cancer Spotted in Mice

Researchers in Germany recently reported in Science that while conducting research on mice designed to look at possible ill effects of gene therapy errors, they observed mice who developed leukemia after a gene therapy treatment.

The researchers were using a retrovirus designed to introduce altered genes into the bone marrow. The virus ended up inserting the altered gene into a known cancer causing gene, however. This particular gene serves an important role in initial development of organs, but is not supposed to be active in cells that develop bone marrow. The altered virus ended up switching the gene on, causing the mice to develop leukemia.

A known risk of gene therapy is the possibility that the altered genetic information might end up in the incorrect place, but this is the first time ever that animals have contracted cancer and died as a result of a faulty application of gene therapy.

This is actually very good news. On the one hand, while the risk of this sort of effect is real, it is extremely low. Ten mice dead of cancer out of hundreds of thousands of animals who have been treated with this sort of retrovirus amounts to a pretty good track record.

On the other hand, this is precisely why researchers use animal models. It is much better to find out in animals the circumstances which cause retroviruses to target the wrong chromosome, so that they can minimize this possibility before widely deploying such treatments in human beings.

Animal rights activists keep saying that all of this sort of research can be accomplished without animals, but I’d like to see their plan for duplicating this line of research without animals.

So far, very few human beings have been treated with retroviruses. The only current therapeutic use of retroviruses in humans involves treating infants born with severe combined immunodeficiency.

Source:

Gene therapy causes cancer in mice. Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, April 18, 2002.