Tag: California

California Activists Receive Jail Sentences; Anti-Stephens Protesters Receive Fines

In October, Peter Schnell, 21, and Matthew Whyte, 18, pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges. The two animal rights activists were caught in possession of 11 gallons of gasoline, matches and other paraphernalia which they planned to use to firebomb several dairy trucks in Capitola, California.

The two were sentenced in January with Schnell receiving a two-year sentence and Whyte a 14 month prison term. This was the minimum possible sentence U.S. Circuit Court Judge James Ware could have given the pair. Ware apparently thought the statements of regret that both defendants offered in court were sincere.

Meanwhile, an Arkansas court is beginning to dispose of the charges against anti-Huntingdon Life Sciences protesters who were involved in a riot-like protests against Stephens back in October organized by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. All of the arrested protesters were from outside of Arkansas.

Alicia Skeats, 20, of Coffeyville, Texas, and Michael Durschmind, 41, of Chicago, were convicted of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and were fined $100 and ordered to pay $100 in court costs. The fines will be deducted from a $300 cash bond each of them posted. Both Skeats and Durschmind plan to appeal their conviction.

Josh Harper plead guilty to violating a city public assembly ordinance and was fined $100 and $100 in court costs, though the fines were suspended on the recommendation of the prosecutor.

Source:

Animal rights activists get prison time. San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 2002.

Two activists fined $100 for disorderly conduct. The Associated Press, January 26, 2002.

ALF Claims Credit for Lab Break-In

The Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility yesterday for a break-in at a Sierra Biomedical Facility in San Diego, California.

In a press release, the ALF claimed it entered the building and spent “several hours” smashing equipment and destroying files. According to the communique,

No high-price contract is worth murder nor is it worth what the ALF will do to stop these murders. We were thorough and determined, they will not soon recover from our visit.

Source:

ALF Destroys equipment at San Diego Lab. Frontline Information Service, November 12, 2001.

Two Activists Plead Guilty to Federal Weapons Charges

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that animal rights activists, Peter Schnell, 23, of Ocean, New Jersey, and Matthew Whyte, 18, of Orange, California, plead guilty to possessing explosive devices. Sentencing is scheduled for January 2002, with each activist facing up to three years in jail.

Schnell and Whyte were arrested at about 1 a.m. on January 23, 2001 outside the Capitola City Hall. Police found 11 one-gallon containers, along with more than 11 gallons of gasoline, matches and candles.

According to prosecutors, Schnell and Whyte agreed to a plea bargain and told prosecutors they had intended to make explosive devices as part of an Animal Liberation Front attack.

Source:

Animal rights activists enter guilty pleas. San Francisco Chronicle, October 17, 2001.

More Hypocrisy from In Defense of Animals

Primate researcher Stuart Zola was recently hired as the new director for the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University. Zola has long been a target of animal rights activists because of his research efforts: has been at the forefront of studying the structures in the brain which account for memory. As he notes on his University of California-San Diego faculty web site,

During the course of our work, we have successfully established a model of human amnesia in the monkey, and we have been able to identify a neural system of memory in the temporal lobe that includes the hippocampal region (i.e., dentate gyrus, the hippocampus proper, and subicular complex) and adjacent cortical regions, i.e., entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices.

Shortly after he was named the new director at Yerkes, In Defense of Animals decided to kick their ongoing campaign against the primate facility into high gear by making an appearance near Zola’s new home. They distributed a flier showing a monkey held in restraints and said that since 1992 Zola had received almost $2 million in federal grants “to cut up the brains of monkeys.”

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution interviewed IDA’s Jean Barnes who had her ignorance and hypocrisy in fine form.

For example, the paper reports that Barnes objected to Zola’s research noting that despite all of his research, “we’ve still got cancer.” I’m not quite clear on how Barnes thinks research into the memory structures in the brain is supposed to lead to a cancer cure. And, of course, Barnes conveniently forgets that while cancer has not been eliminated, thanks to animal research there are now more effective treatments for many specific forms of cancer as well as much better early detection methods.

But it’s Barnes’ blatant hypocrisy about targeting Zola at his home that really jumps off the pages of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. IDA plans not only to continue harassing Zola in his neighborhood, but also plans to distribute fliers to employees of Coca Cola claiming their company is supporting the “atrocities” at Yerkes. Coca Cola has nothing at all to do with the primate facility, but it is a large donor to Emory University.

For someone so willing to harass other people, however, Barnes jealously guards her own privacy,

Jean Barnes keeps some details to herself, too. In particular, she doesn’t want to reveal where she works, fearing that Emory would pressure her employer to muzzle her, or worse.

Barnes helps IDA posts the names, photos, home addresses, and telephone numbers of Yerkes researchers, but then cowardly hides behind her own veil of secrecy.

Sources:

Yerkes foes get up close and personal. Alan Judd, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, August 3, 2001.

Stuart Zola faculty web page. Stuart Zola, University of California-San Diego.

The Horrors of those "Happy Cow" Commercials

The California Milk Advisory Board has been running ads featuring cows in fields with tag lines like, “Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California.” Last Chance for Animals filed a complaint against the ads a few months ago, claiming that the ads “deliberately mislead the public, as they do not reflect the horrendous conditions in which California’s dairy cows actually live.”

The animal rights group sent undercover footage of a couple dairies to the California Attorney Generals’s Office that the group claims prove that “the cows … are anything but ‘happy.'”

In a press release announcing the complaint, Last Chance for Animals urged activists to “please ask the Attorney General’s Office to issue an injunction against the CMAB, disseminate a retraction, and enforce a criminal penalty against the company.”

Source:

California “Happy Cow” Ads. Last Chance for Animals, Press release, 2001.

Activists Angry Over Children Watching Cow Slaughtered

About 85 students at Carbon Canyon Christian School in Brea, California, watched as a butcher immobilized and then slaughtered a 2-year-old 1,000 pound steer named T-Bone. The steer had been raised at the school, and was part of a project to teach children where meat comes from. Of course, animal rights activists were less than thrilled.

Despite the fact that the school obtained parental permission for all children who watched the slaughter, animal rights activists were aghast that children would be exposed to seeing how cows are slaughtered from meat. Of course it wasn’t so long ago that many young children would have been actively participating in the killing of animals on the farm.

About a dozen teenaged animal right activists from other schools in the area unsuccessfully tried to stop the slaughter, and Lacey Levitt of Last Chance for Animals from chiming in that, “Studies have shown that when children view violence against animals, it desensitizes them to animal cruelty and makes them more aggressive.”

After slaughtering the animal, the butcher gave the children a close-up look at the heart, tendons and other internal organs of the cow.

Although the activists were troubled by the slaughter, the kids seemed to handle it okay. The Associated Press reported that a few got queasy but that others found it an educational experience. Suzanne Daigle, 14, told The Orange County Register that, “I want to be a surgical nurse and that proved to me that I could handle watching it. The butcher was very skilled. It wasn’t violent.”

Sources:

Cow’s Slaughter Causes Uproar. KCBS Channel 2000, May 19, 2001.

Class gets a graphic lesson on meat. Chelsea J. Carter, The Associated Press, May 19, 2001.