Author: Brian Carnell

UN Warns Officials: No Extravagant Feasts at Environmental Summit

After being burned by reports of the large banquets served to those who attended the World Food Summit, the United Nations has issued a memo to staff members urging them not to repeat such ostentatious displays at the upcoming environmental summit in South Africa.

About 65,000 people, including 100 heads of state, are scheduled to attend the summit. In a memo sent to UN staff, an assistant to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that,

We must keep in mind that this conference is taking place in the midst of a major food crisis in southern Africa, affecting 13 million people. . . . It would be wise to refrain from excessive levels of hospitality, and any event sponsored by the United Nations should be of modest, even frugal dimensions.

The World Food Summit, held in Italy, was widely criticized for the sumptuous dinners and banquets enjoyed by those who attended the event, as well as the shopping sprees reportedly taken by delegates from developing countries.

Source:

UN ban on feasts during famine. The BBC, August 6, 2002.

Alberta Premier Outlines the Horrors of Canned Hunts

After a meeting of a government caucus to consider the issue, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein announced that deer and elk game farms in Alberta would not be allowed to offer hunters the opportunity to shoot the game. Deer and elk game farms are struggling financially, and had hoped opening up their facilities to hunters might make them profitable.

Like all arguments against canned hunts, Klein fell back on some vague metaphysical view of hunting that requires some poorly defined amount of fairness in order to be legitimate. According to Klein,

To go to a hunt farm and shoot a penned-up animal, an animal that doesn’t have a chance, I think it’s abhorrent. . . . I think it’s abhorrent to take wild animals and have them penned up and available to hunters who don’t want to take the time to go out into the wild.

Good for Klein. If he allows canned hunts, what’s next? Someone will come along with the audacity to suggest outright domestication of animals and all of a sudden Alberta would be burdened by the horrors of settled animal agriculture. Chickens, cows and other animals would be held by farmers and just marched off to slaughterhouses without even a chance at escape. How sporting would that be?

If Klein is a vegan and plans next to dismantle all animal agriculture in Alberta, then he is wrongheaded but at least principled. More likely, however, Klein is here engaging in a common hypocrisy that places the hunting of deer and elk in enclosed environments on a different moral plane than raising cattle destined for the slaughterhouse. There is no justification at all for this sort of silly distinction.

Source:

Alberta rejects hunting deer and elk on game farms. Canoe.Ca, August 8, 2002.

Game farms ‘abhorrent.’ Michelle Mark, Calgary Sun, August 8, 2002.

Scottish Judge Upholds Ban on Fox Hunting with Dogs

A Scottish Judge this month upheld the Protection of Wild Mammals Act which makes it illegal to hunt foxes with dogs. The new law went into effect August 1.

Hunters had challenged the new law on the grounds that parliament had overstepped its bounds. But Lord Nimmo Smith at the Court of Session issued a 122-page decision in which he held that banning foxhunting with dogs was well within the power of the legislative body.

Smith wrote in his decision,

To regulate the way in which animals may be hunted and killed appears to me to be far more within the constitutional responsibility of the parliament as the elected legislature than within the constitutional responsibility of the courts.

In that the parliament took it upon itself to form judgments as to whether mounted foxhunting with dogs is a sport, whether it can be described as cruel, whether it can be distinguished from other methods of controlling fox numbers in terms of efficiency, the relative suffering of the fox and so on, all appear to me to fall within the discretionary area of judgment to which the court should defer.

Proponents of foxhunting plan to appeal the decision to a three-judge panel at the Court of Session, and could ultimately take their case to European Union courts.

Hunting foxes with dogs will continue, but under the new law the foxes must be killed with guns rather than by the hounds.

Opponents of fox hunting, such as the League Against Cruel Sports, hoped the judge’s decision would spur England to ban foxhunting with dogs as well. Mike Hobday of the LACS said, “This decision will add further pressure on the Government to bring forward legislation that will clearly bring an end to the gratuitous cruelty of hunting with dogs in England and Wales.”

Sources:

Hunting lobby to challenge ruling. Bruce Mckain and Frances Horsbrugh, The Herald (Glasgow), August 1, 2002.

Court upholds fox-hunting ban. Hamish Macdonell and John Robertson, The Scotsman, August 1, 2002.

Scottish Court case decision. League Against Cruel Sports, Press Release, July 31, 2002.

Appeals Court Finds for PETA in Reversing Lower Court Decision

A lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2001 against Taylorsville, Utah, police is headed back to the U.S. District Court in Utah after an appeals court reversed a district court verdict against the animal rights groups.

The lawsuit stems from a Jan. 20, 1999 protest that PETA organized at Eisenhower Junior High School in Taylorsville, Utah (but remember, PETA doesn’t target children according to Ingrid Newkirk).

Taylorsville police had arrested two PETA protestors on Jan. 6 for attempting to remove a McDonald’s banner that was flying on the school flagpole. At the Jan. 20 protest, police told protestors they had two choices — either disburse or face arrest.

PETA filed suit a week later, and in June 2001 the U.S. District Court agreed with police and the school that PETA’s protestors violated a state law making it illegal to disrupt school.

In reversing that decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law applied only to colleges, not to junior high schools. PETA will be allowed to ask for damages, but will be barred from challenging the law itself since the appellate court ruled “there is no credible threat of prosecution under the statute for any future protests at Eisenhower.”

The appellate court disagreed with PETA’s contention that since its protest was timed to coincide with the end of the school day that its activity was not disruptive, but it agreed with PETA that the school and police had failed to provide any evidence that the protest disrupted the school’s activities, noting that the heavy presence of several police squad cars and a helicopter was at least as distracting as the PETA protest.

Source:

Appeals court backs animal activists in protest. Matt Canham, The Salt Lake Tribune, August 8, 2002.

Animal Rights Activists Steal Aged Galah from Australian Pet Store

A couple weeks ago, two animal rights activists swiped a 32-year-old galah parrot from an Australian pet store. The activists, identified as two women in their 50s by a witness, left pamphlets at the scene that advocated freeing birds from their cages. The pamphlets were printed by the World League for the Protection of Animals, which denied it had any involvement in the theft of the animal.

The thieves sent a letter to The Daily Telegraph in Sydney claiming they had liberated the bird from its “prison-like existence” at the pet store, and was now free to live out his life in a larger aviary.

World League for the Protection of Animals Joan Papayanni told The Daily Telegraph that, “It [liberating a 32-year-old bird] would be the last things from our minds. This bird wouldn’t survive [in the wild]. We don’t like the idea of birds in cages, but only a fool would say a bird in a cage for 30 years should be let out.”

The bird has becoming something of a celebrity, with anonymous individuals posting a reward of AUS $7,000 for the return of the animal.

Sources:

Hector thieves make contact. Stavro Sofios, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), August 7, 2002.

Hunt for misguided animal lovers. Stavro Sofios, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), August 7, 2002.

Huntingdon Life Sciences Once Again Profitable

At the end of July, Huntingdon Life Sciences (now Life Sciences Research) announced its first profitable quarter in years. The company reported net income of $2.9 million for the quarter ending June 30, 2002, compared to a net loss of $1.7 million during the same period in 2001.

For the first six months of 2002, HLS sustained a loss of $400,000 compared to a loss of $6 million in the first six months of 2001.

Total revenues at the drug testing company were up 19% in the second quarter over a year ago and the company reported it currently has a backlog of testing.

This after Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has spent the last 12 months claiming the company was on the verge of imploding.

Cass believes that SHAC’s campaign is beginning to lose steam as it fails to achieve its goal and is widely perceived as endorsing terrorism in its campaign against HLS. Citing a rally in Cambridge where SHAC talked of as many as 1,000 protesters but where only 200 or so people showed up,

The demonstration at the weekend shows that support is waning, and the rank and file [animal rights activists] are beginning to stand up and say that this is not what peaceful protest is about. The campaign leadership is losing credibility.

Cass also had some unkind — but accurate — words for the numerous banks, market makers and brokers who abandoned the firm due to pressure from SHAC,

We were very disappointed that there are people in the City who should give in to terrorism, on a relatively minor scale, so easily. They seemed to think: ‘Here’s a small company, let’s just dump them and have the problem go away.’

In fact, the problem has not gone away and the movement has got more aggressive as they realized the effective, intimidatory power they had. Perhaps if the financial community had stood more firm all the other individual investors and shareholders and members of staff would not have suffered as much harassment as they have done.

Assuming that HLS is able to maintain its profitability over the rest of the year, Cass is right that interest in the campaign is likely to wane, but it is also likely to become more militant as the hardcore activists see illegal actions as their only effective avenue. Expect more actions like the smoke grenade bombings at those Seattle office towers.

Sources:

Huntingdon about to step back from brink. Alex Jackson-Proes. The Daily Telegraph (London), July 29, 2002.

How Cass brought Huntingdon back to life. Lauren Mills, Sunday Telegraph (London), July 28, 2002.

LSR Announces Second Quarter Results. Life Sciences Research, Press Release, July 31, 2002.