Month: May 2005

Yes, Virginia, There Really Was a Deep Throat

I was one of those who believed there was no Deep Throat — that Woodward and Bernstein simply made Deep Throat up out of a composite. But it turns out W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat.

The weird thing is that Felt apparently kept his secret because he believed that Deep Throat was perceived as a criminal, telling his son, that being Deep Throat “was [not] anything to be proud of. … You (should) not leak information to anyone.”

Well, yeah, you should if doing so exposes the sort of criminal conspiracy that the Nixon administration created. Felt is certainly an American hero for helping the Washington Post expose corruption at the highest levels of the government.

Give the man a medal. And, in related news, just where are these intrepid investigative journalists working today? 60 Minutes II perhaps?

Source:

Washington Post Confirms ‘Deep Throat’ ID. Greg Sandoval, Associated Press, March 31, 2005.

Dog Genome Expected to Enhance Cancer Research

In December, the BBC published an interesting article on the role that the decoded dog genome may play in helping to understand and treat cancers in human beings.

Initial work on sequencing the dog genome was finished in the summer of 2004. Human beings and dogs share many of the same cancers, including bone cancer, skin cancer and lymphoma.

Ironically, thousands of years of human-influenced breeding of dogs means it will be relatively easy to discover which genes contribute to cancer in dogs. Because of the way dogs have been breed, there is little genetic variation within purebred dogs and many breeds of dogs began with a very small number of dogs, so they had little genetic variation to begin with.

As geneticist Matthew Breen told the BBC, this means that cancers in dogs are likely “being switched on by very few genes — maybe even just one — which exert a very large effect.”

This provides an excellent example of why animal models are often superior to using human models of a disease. As the BBC notes,

In order to figure out where a cancer-causing gene is located in an animal’s genome, scientists use genetic “markers,” which are sequences that differ slightly between different dogs and have a known location on a chromosome.

When disease-affected animals consistently have a certain marker, and healthy animals do not have it, then there is a good chance that a disease gene is located very close to that marker.

These analyses are difficult to do in humans, because geneticists need to look at DNA samples from many people in an affected family in order to pin down the gene’s location.

Most human families are too small – and have too few generations alive at the same time – for a sufficient number of samples. Dog families, on the other hand, have short generations and many offspring.

Such a technique was used to locate a gene in German shepherds that is responsible for kidney cancer, which also turned out to be a recently identified suspect in kidney cancers in human beings.

Source:

Dog genome boosts cancer research. BBC, December 29, 2004.

PCRM Sues OSU — Wants Photographs and/or Videotapes of Spinal Cord Injury Course

In April, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against Ohio State University’s board of trustees seeking photographs and/or videotapes of OSU’s three-week long Spinal Cord Injury Research Techniques Course.

The course teaches students methods of injuring the spinal cords of laboratory animals so they can be used in animal models of such injuries. According to The Columbus Dispatch, 189 rats and 60 mice are injured as part of the course.

PCRM requested information from OSU about the course, and OSU turned over some written records about the course. But PCRM’s suit argues that it needs access to the photographs and/or videotapes in order to evaluate whether or not animals are being treated properly.

In its lawsuit, PCRM claims,

It is of significant societal importance that all U.S. and Ohio taxpayer-funded medical research performed by a noncommercial scientist at, through, and in conjunction with a public university is subject to public accountability and scrutiny.

By withholding the requested information, OSU is preventing the public from meaningfully and thoroughly understanding the process by which taxpayer-funded animal research, which purports to help humans, is conducted.

In its original communication to PCRM refusing to release any photographs or videotapes, OSU said that such records were OSU’s intellectual property, which is one of the exemptions to OSU’s public records law.

Source:

Doctors sue OSU for videos of spinal research on rats. Darrel Rowland, The Columbus Dispatch, April 12, 2005.

Joan Dunayer Withdraws from Friends of Animals Conference Because Opponent of Animal Rights/Eco-Terrorism Invited As Well

In April, Joan Dunayer announced she was withdrawing from the Friends of Animals’ July 9-10 conference because organizers dared to invite Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center as its keynote speaker.

In a letter to other activist, Dunayer writes,

I’ve withdrawn, in protest, from participation in Friends of Animals’ July 9-10, 2005 conference, at which I was scheduled to speak. I refuse to participate because the conference will feature Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as keynote speaker. Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project and editor of the SPLC’s quarterly Intelligence Report (IR), Potok is a virulent speciesist and opponent of nonhuman rights.

As described by the SPLC’s website, the Intelligence Project “monitors hate groups and tracks extremist activity throughout the U.S.,” providing “comprehensive updates to law enforcement, the media and the public.”[1] The Project uses “high-tech online tracking as well as solid fundamental investigative techniques.”[2] For some time now, the SPLC has been casting animal rights activists as terrorists and hate-mongers and monitoring their activities.

Potok’s IR portrays animal rights advocacy in an entirely negative light. A synopsis of the 2002 anonymous IR article “From Push to Shove” reads, “Environmental radicals and animal rights activists say it’s ‘ludicrous’ for the FBI to call them the No. 1 domestic terror threat. But their rhetoric and increasingly extreme criminal actions are making the ‘eco-terror’ label stick.”[3] The article has sensationalistic headings such as “A Growing Radicalism,” “At the Hilton, Violence is Cheered,” and “Targeting Scientists, and Others.” The text abounds with pejoratives applied to animal rights advocacy. For example, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty employs “escalating violence,” uses “terroristic tactics,” and “sets a new standard for eco-terrorism.” Even lawsuits filed against factory “farmers” are “attacks.” The article refers to Chris DeRose as the “boss,” not president, of Last Chance for Animals and to Peter Singer as a “long-time darling of many eco-radicals.” According to the article, the Farm Animal Reform Movement holds its annual animal-advocacy conferences in “surprisingly highbrow” settings. “But the discussions are down and dirty.”[4] (By Potok’s own admission, the SPLC gathered information on activists at Animal Rights 2001.)[5] A 2003 SPLC article on PETA’s “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign is titled “Hate in the News: PETA Turns Holocaust into Pig Pen,” as if drawing connections between racist and speciesist atrocities–and deploring both–constitutes hate.[6]

IR articles express no objection to the ongoing violence that humans perpetrate against countless nonhumans and no concern whatsoever for those victims. In the language of IR, vivisection labs against which activists campaign are only “perceived as abusing animals” (emphasis added).[4] All of IR’s expressed sympathy is for those who abuse nonhumans or profit from such abuse–from vivisectors, mink killers, and pig enslavers to hunting guides and pelt dealers. IR portrays nonhumans’ abusers as the innocent victims of animal rights “terrorism.” Vivisectors are “scientists.”[4] Huntingdon Life Sciences “tests drugs.”[4] (IR omits the information that HLS also uses nonhuman animals to “test” everything from industrial chemicals to mascara.) Animal rights activism caused cat vivisector Michael Podell to abandon what IR terms his “AIDS studies.” In the manner typical of pro-vivisection propaganda, IR states, “Scientists say that some research, like Podell’s, cannot be done with computer modeling or with human subjects.”[4] Podell’s cat victims did not, of course, have AIDS; they suffered from artificially induced Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, a very different disease. IR favorably describes and quotes the vivisection-promotion group Foundation for Biomedical Research.[4]

Mark Potok clearly is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, the cruelty and injustice of vivisection, the pelt industry, food-industry enslavement and slaughter, and other forms of speciesist abuse. He’s an active foe of animal rights and animal rights advocacy. It’s an understatement to say that Potok has no genuine understanding of animal rights and is not an appropriate keynote speaker for an animal rights conference.

Friends of Animals does a disservice to nonhuman animals and their advocates in hosting Potok, giving him positive publicity, and presenting him as a credible spokesperson with regard to animal rights. I no longer will participate in the FoA conference because I no longer believe that participation is in the best interests of nonhuman animals. Further, I advise animal advocates to be wary of Potok and the SPLC.

Its interesting that Friends of Animals is willing to host a speaker who is opposed to a segment of the animal rights movement, while Dunayer can’t apparently stomach even the hint of a dissenting view.

Source:

Joan Dunayer Withdraws, in Protest, from Friends of Animals Conference. Joan Dunayer, Letter, April 14, 2005.

Bash the Toxic Toads?

Cane toads are poisonous, ugly-looking large toads that are a major problem in parts of Australia. Brought in early in the 20th century in an effort to control crop-destroying can beetle populations, the population of cane toads soon exploded and became a major pest itself. According to the BBC, there are as many as 100 million cane toads in Australia today.

Since animals such as fresh water crocodiles, dingoes and kangaroos can die from eating the toxic toads, reducing and/or eradicating them is a high priority.

Nonetheless, not everyone appreciated Liberal MP David Tollner’s suggestion for dealing with the toads — people should take bats to the toads as Tollner and others did when he was a child.

Tollner said,

We hit them with cricket bats, golf clubs and the like. Things were a bit different, most kids had a slug gun or an air rifle and we would get stuck into them with that sort of thing as well. If people could be encouraged to do it rather than discouraged the better the chance will be of stopping the cane toads arriving in Darwin and other parts of northern Australia.

Australia’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s immediately condemned the suggestion and said anyone who bashed cane toads with bats would be fined and/or jailed for animal cruelty. According to The Associated Press, animal welfare groups in Australia would prefer that the toads be killed by freezing them (now there’s an efficient way to deal with 100 million cane toads).

Tollner’s solution was endorsed, however, by Environment Minister Ian Campbell who told reporters,

I would encourage anything that has a practical effect on stopping cane toad numbers. I remember as a child growing up in Brisbane I used to shoot them with my air rifle. That was relatively ineffective, I can report.

The reader must, at this point, be wondering how Tollner and Campbell avoided becoming serial killers given the animal rights can that cruelty to animals is an accurate predictor of violence against people.

Sources:

Toxic Toad Problem? Join The Club. Associated Press, April 14, 2005.

Australia MP targets toxic toads. Phil Mercer, BBC News, April 11, 2005.

Why PETA Stopped Its “Holocaust On Your Plate” Campaign

In April, Brownsville, Texas, KFC manager John Olivo greeted three protester from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals by turning on his sprinklers as the three approached his restaurant.

Olivo told the Brownsville Herald,

They [the protesters] already hit me in McAllen. I was already waiting for them here in Brownsville.

The PETA protesters also faced one especially active counter-protester, David Ingersoll, who had his children passing out anti-PETA pamphlets, and high school students yelling insults from the windows of their bus.

PETA’s Chris Link told The Brownsville Herald,

It hasn’t been quite like this in other parts of the state. It’s a rarity that we get this.

The odd thing is that, of course, PETA has compared the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust, but what is its current proposal for improving chicken welfare — gassing chickens to death in large chambers.

According to the Brownsville Herald,

“We’re out of here today to raise awareness about the chickens,” said link, a Baltimore native. “All we want them (slaughter houses) to do is gas the chickens instead of killing them.” [Apparently Link is a bit confused about a lot of things].

PETA suggests a “controlled-atmosphere” killing, using gases such as nitrogen and argon to kill the chickens.

The gas chambers would ensure a painless death for the birds, PETA reported in its web site. Slaughter houses currently use an electrical stun method or cut off the birds’ heads.

So that’s why the group backed off its Holocaust claims. It’d be a bit difficult to wander the country claiming meat eating is just like the Holocaust while simultaneously arguing in favor of gas chambers for chickens.

Finally, Link told one of the most bald-faced lies I’ve seen even for a PETA member. Link actually told the Brownsville Herald that,

Almost all (PETA’s) money goes directly to fund animals. Every dime goes directly to helping animals whether it’s through demonstrations (or) to raise awareness.

Uh, Chris, have you read PETA’s tax returns lately?

Source:

PETA gets rude welcome in Brownsville. Gilberto Salinas, The Brownsville Herald, April 14, 2005.