Tag: Teresa Platt

Peter Young Arrested After Seven Years on the Run

Animal rights extremist Peter Young, 27, was arrested on March 21 after seven years on the run. Young was indicted in 1998 in a number of break-ins at fur farms in Wisconsin.

The government alleges that Young and Justin Samuel broke in to a number of fur farms and released the animals there. In 1999, Samuels was extradited from Belgium and plead guilty to two misdemeanors arising from the fur farm break-ins. As part of a plea deal, Samuel agreed to provide law enforcement with testimony against his co-conspirators, including Young, which made Samuels persona non grata among activists.

Young was arrested at a Starbucks in San Jose, California, after he attempted to shoplift several CDs. Fortunately, an on-duty, uniformed police officer was also in the Starbucks (these activists are brilliant, eh?) and arrested Young.

Young was being held in isolation after his arrest because he refused to have a tuberculosis test because it was not vegan. He was also whining that Santa Clara County corrections wouldn’t provide him with vegan food (though they did offer him vegetarian fare).

An obvious question is where Young has been for seven years and whether or not other activists have helped him hid. As Fur Commission USA’s Teresa Platt told the Mercury News,

I’d like to know who introduce him to this, and who indoctrinated him. And who’s been hiding him? You can’t tell me that nobody knew where he was for seven years.

Samuel served two years in prison for his part in the break-ins, and is reportedly living in San Diego, California.

Young could potentially serve life in prison if he is convicted an all charges.

Sources:

Activist eluded capture for years. Dana Hull, Mercury News, March 29, 2005.

Wanted animal rights activist arrested after 7 years on the run. Associated Press, March 29, 2005.

Fur Commission, USA On Survey of Animal Rights 2003 Participants

Fur Commission, USA’s Teresa Platt has a fascinating article about Animal Rights 2003 East, held earlier this summer. Platt discusses a conference workshop called “What Price Animal Liberation” where activists in attendance were given a survey to gauge their attitudes about the morality and effectiveness of various illegal tactics. Platt presents the results of the survey, which I’ve reproduced in the table below:

Moral
(%)

Effective
(%)
1.
Civil Disobedience

100

100
2.
Unmasked Animal Liberation (ex. open animal rescues)

95.7

87
3.
Masked Animal Liberation

91.3

82.6
4.
Unmasked Property Destruction of Equipment

82.6

73.9
5.
Masked Property Destruction of Equipment

69.9

56.5
6.
Property Destruction as Economic Sabotage

52.2

34.8
7.
Threats against People as Destructive Sabotage

52.2

30.4
8.
Threats against People as Intimidation (death threats)

26.1

26.1
9.
Physical Assault

26.1

21.7
10.
Political Assassination

21.7

17.4

Unfortunately, Platt doesn’t say how many people attended this session, so we don’t know exactly how big of sample this is. And, of course, it is clearly not a random, scientific sample of activists in general. Still, as Platt notes it is disturbing to see such extremely high support for property destruction, and significant support for threats and violence against people.

Source:

AR2003: Been There, Done That, Bought the T-Shirt. Teresa Platt, Fur Commission USA, August 12, 2003.

Excellent Teresa Platt Article on PETA, Animal Rights

Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission, USA, a fur industry group, recently wrote an excellent article defending animal agriculture from the claims made by animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Platt dug up some succinct quotes about the importance of animals as a food source from Oklahoma State University’s Department of Animal Science:

Only about one-third of the land area of the world is classified as agricultural. Thus, roughly two-thirds of the land area of the world is not suited for any sort of agricultural use because it is covered by cities, mountains, deserts, swamps, snow, etc. Of the 35 percent that can be devoted to agriculture, less than one-third can be cultivated and produce plant products that the human can digest. The remaining two-thirds of the world’s agricultural land is covered by grass, shrubs or other plants that only ruminant animals can digest. Thus, the inefficiency of animals is not a major concern since they represent the only way these plants can be converted to human food. As the human population of the world increases, it is likely that we will be forced to depend more and more on ruminant animals to meet the increased demands for food.

As Platt notes near the end of her article, if PETA and other animal rights groups are serious about obtaining all human-edible food from plants, they should acknowledge that the environmental changes such a transformation would entail would likely rival the changes that took place with the massive worldwide clearing of forests and other ecosystems for farmland in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Of course one way to get around that would be to use genetic engineering, but the activists are opposed to that, too).

Source:

Let Them Eat Cake!
PeTA Sees Foot-and-Mouth Disease as the Final Solution. Teresa Platt, Fur Commission USA, April 24, 2001.

Breeds of Livestock. Department of Animal Science, Oklahoma State University, Factsheet, undated.

More Details on Jacques Ferber Inc.'s RICO Lawsuit Against Animal Rights Organization

Fur Commission USA, which represents over 400 fur farms, recently issued a press release on the Jacques Ferber Inc. lawsuit against the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, the Animal Defense League, and Vegan Resistance for Liberation. Under the civil provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), Ferber alleges that these three groups as well as four named individuals engaged in a series of acts that amounted to a criminal conspiracy to interfere with a legitimate business enterprise.

As I’ve mentioned before, RICO was originally meant to help prosecutors go after legitimate businesses that were used as fronts by organized crime, but it is the civil provision of the act that has gained the most notoriety. Pro-choice groups recently won big victories in two separate civil cases against pro-life groups and individuals that advocated or approved of illegal acts against abortion clinics, but did not actually participate in such illegal acts. Juries in those cases agreed with the plaintiffs that even though the defendants did not commit illegal acts, by their advocacy of illegal acts they were part of a conspiracy that did commit such acts and as such could be held liable for the illegal acts.

The Fur Commission USA release noted that since 1995 Ferber was subjected to almost weekly protests by animal rights groups and on April 24, 1999, “vandals wearing hoods smashed the store window.” Ferber argues that the three animal rights groups and the four individuals named in the suit engaged in a pattern of harassment intended to intimidate the company and ultimately force it out of business. The Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that juries should be allowed to decide whether or not this sort of activity constitutes extortion.

Ferber might have an even stronger case than did the pro-choice groups if Fur Commission USA’s information is accurate. It quotes one of the activists named in the suit, Brett Wyker, but in a footnote at the end of its release claimed:

In January [1999], Wyker e-mailed FCUSA’s Terry Platt: “hey, what did oyu [sic] think of the Fur Farmers convention in WI? FUR IS DEAD AND YOU’LL BE SOON!”

The convention in question was the International Mink Show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where several masked animal rights activists tried to gain entrance to the show. According to Fur Commission USA, among those activists was Gary Yourofsky, an activist recently jailed in Michigan for releasing mink from a farm there, and CAFT’s John Paul Goodwin.

These sort of links between those who commit illegal acts and nominally nonviolent groups and individuals is exactly the sort of evidence that led to the pro-choice plaintiffs to win their cases. Lawyers in those cases produced evidence showing all sorts of connections between the allegedly nonviolent activists pro-life activists who did commit crimes and told the jury that it was absurd to claim that the two were not part of an organized, illegal attempt to shut down a legitimate business.

Ferber’s lawsuit is apparently at a standstill while lawyers try to find and serve the four individuals named in the lawsuit, but once that is taken care of this will be an interesting test case of the RICO statute. If it can prevail it could be the beginning of the end of common practices used by groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and others (in much the same way that pro-life groups have had to radically alter their tactics in the last decade). On the other hand, since animal rights issues have a far lower profile than abortion issues, this case might not receive nearly the same treatment as the case against the pro-life groups did, and could potentially lead to another round of judicial review of the RICO statute.