Just another nerd.
Last week I noted that VegSource.Com was promoting its upcoming “Vegetarian Super Stars!” weekend with the claim that it would teach people how to “Make yourself heart attack proof” (see this article for more details.)
VegSource.Com has now altered the text to read as follows,
Maybe instead of banning me from his site, Jeff Nelson should hire me to find all of the errors and unjustified claims on VegSource.Com. Oops, that’s right — there are still only 24 hours in a day. Not nearly enough time.
Following on the heels of the departure of Michael Podell from Ohio State University, the New York Times featured a long article on the debate within animal research circles on how vigorously to defend animal research against animal rights protests.
This is a debate that I’ve never quite understood. It seems obvious that universities should vigorously and publicly defend animal research being conducted at their universities, especially in the case of something like Ohio State University where Podell was the researcher but the grant was actually to the university.
On the contrary, as several people cited in The Times article said, the general consensus is to say as little as possible and hope the animal rights protesters will go away. Dr. Richard Bianco, who is in charge of laboratory animal care at the University of Minnesota (which has actively defended its animal research), told The Times,
We should be proud of what we do and talk about it. We’re scared to death. That’s our problem.
In the Ohio State University case, the officials at OSU were so afraid of inciting yet more protests, that they even refused to write an opinion column for local newspapers defending their research. That’s just pathetic.
What is genuinely shocking is this view that seems to prevail both in business and academia that if you ignore them long enough or cancel one program here or divest your stock there that the animal rights movement will be appeased and just go away. That is never going to happen.
First, in case these folks haven’t noticed we are now living in an age where instant communication over the Internet is all-but ubiquitous. Fringe and special interest groups are able to quickly communicate, share information, and get their version of the story out to reporters. If an institution just responds with silence, both the activists and the general public are going to assume that it’s because the activist claims are correct. Left unchallenged, activist claims about medical research will become the dominant narrative.
Second, even minor victories energize these sorts of movements. After all, the animal rights movement isn’t exactly used to winning very often, so little victories mean a lot. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has really shown how to run an animal rights campaign, focusing on an already vulnerable target, then attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of its employees and associates. In the real world, convincing some small, marginal market maker to abandon an HLS stock listing is not a major victory, but SHAC does a good job of spinning these sort of events as major victories in the battle for the animals (although SHAC also risks a backlash with its hype that HLS is on the edge of collapse).
What after all were the lesson that activists learned from the OSU debacle? That some academic institutions will not bother to defend their own research grants, and that a professor working at such an institution can be isolated and harassed until he decides that fighting on is no longer worth it. If I were the leader of an animal rights group, I’d be scanning animal research grants at universities looking for a researcher with a family at a university that has historically not stepped up to defend its researchers. That’s always going to be a winning strategy.
Institutions doing animal research need to be proactively reaching out to their community to explain what they do and why they do it. They also need to at least discuss contingency plans on how to deal with animal rights activists. There are groups such as Americans for Medical Progress and The Foundation for Biomedical Research that are uniquely suited to help out and advise institutions under attack from animal rights activists, and such institutions should at the very least consult with them to better understand exactly what they are facing.
Universities and businesses do not have the luxury of pretending that the animal rights movement is some loose, disjointed collection of a bunch of fringe idealists. Today the animal rights movement is relatively sophisticated with the capacity to use modern technologies to leverage the actions of disparate activists across the country into a coordinated attack on a given institution. Trying to ignore the activists is easily the single worst thing any institution could do.
Source:
Debate over whether to defend animal tests. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, July 23, 2002.
In July the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an extensive story on the harassment that workers at Huntingdon Life Sciences have faced from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and its supporters. The article included quotes from SHAC’s Kevin Kjonaas highlighting his view of SHAC-inspired violence and revealing an interesting (if typical) hypocrisy.
On the issue of violence, not surprisingly Kjonaas has no problem with it. Kjonaas told the Inquirer,
If a car being blown up in a driveway or animals being liberated from a lab scares them, then I would say that fear pales by comparison to the fear that the animals have every day. The kind of true violence that these animals endure at the hands of people at Huntingdon leaves me with little sympathy.
The Inquirer even reports that Kjonaas “speaks favorably” of British animal rights activist David Blenkinsop. Blenkinsop was one of three activists imprisoned for beating HLS director Brian Cass. Blenkinsop was also charged with a series of arson attacks on cars. The Inquirer quotes Kjonaas as saying,
David is a very passionate person, and what he did was with the best intentions. I don’t feel any sympathy for people in England or America who have had their cars tipped or torched, because those cars were paid for out of blood money.
But perhaps the most revealing part of the story was Kjonaas’ explanation of why he has sometimes uses the name “Kevin Jonas.” According to the Inquirer,
He [Kjonaas] says he uses the alias to spare family members outside Minneapolis from harassing phone calls from people who oppose the tactics and aims of his group.
So the man behind a group that specializes in harassing family members of people even tangentially linked to HLS is a hypocrite who himself tries to shield his family from the ire of his opponents. Of course, you will note that there are no anti-animal rights sites that lists the phone numbers and addresses of Kjonaas or any of his family members next to slogans like “go smash them.” Apparently Kjonaas’ violent ways have also bred a bit of paranoia.
Source:
A harsh animal-rights campaign targets N.J. firm, workers. Chris Mondics, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 14, 2002.
A panel set up by the British government to study the recent foot-and-mouth outbreak in the United Kingdom released its report in July. It criticized the government for not acting more quickly to bring the outbreak under control, and recommended that in the future the government vaccinate animals on farms near any outbreak.
The British government relied exclusively on a strategy killing both diseased animals and all livestock within a 1.5 kilometer radius. More than 4 million animals were slaughtered during the 11 months that the disease spread among British livestock.
The Royal Society report recommends killing diseased animals and vaccinating nearby animals. But that strategy was rejected because of fears that it would result in a long-term ban on British meat exports. The problem with existing vaccines is that vaccinated animals can be carriers of the disease even though they do not show any symptoms.
Countries which are free of the disease, such as the United States, generally require that imported meat be certified as free of foot-and-mouth. A vaccination strategy would prolong the term that such countries would ban the import of British meat. In fact, ironically the report recommends that European Union countries strengthen their regulations on meat imports.
The Royal Society report criticized the government for not banning the movement of farm animals quickly after the epidemic started, and urged the government to create regulations that minimize the movement of farm animals in general. The report estimated that a three day delay in stopping the movement of livestock probably doubled the number of animals that had to be killed.
Source:
Foot-and-mouth’s painful lessons. Alex Kirby, The BBC, July 16, 2002.
Scientists call for vaccination strategy. The BBC, July 16, 2002.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Marilyn Gardner wrote an interesting article about ‘deadbeat’ dads that acknowledged the problem with parents failing to pay child support but balanced it with a look at the obstacles that stand in the way of noncustodial fathers and mothers.
One of the interesting statistics Gardner cites is how the likelihood of a parent failing to pay child support increases when the noncustodial parent’s ability to visit the child is cut off by the custodial parent. Gardner writes,
Some fathers want an end to what appears to be a double standard in the legal system.
“They throw fathers in jail for not paying support,” [Fathers’ Rights Foundation founder Ronald] Isaacs said. “But they don’t throw mothers in jail for denying visitation. If the courts would enforce visitation orders with the same vigor that they enforce child support, they would get a lot more money than they do by going after these few people.”
As Gardner notes, custodial parents sometimes have what they believe are very good reasons to violate court-ordered visitation. But those sorts of issues should be addressed by independent mediators and/or the courts, not the custodial parent. Courts should enforce visitation orders just as they enforce child support and other orders.
Going even further, courts should have a presumption of joint physical custody. Joint legal custody is already common, and several states have a presumption of joint legal custody. With joint physical custody, the child spends time living with both parents on an agreed upon schedule, typically with the child residing with one parent 70 percent of the time and with the other parent 30 percent of the time (50/50 arrangements are also common). This keeps both parents active in the life of the children.
Now obviously there are many circumstances in which joint physical custody is simply not possible or feasible, but courts should presume joint physical custody unless and until circumstances of the individual case suggest that a different arrangement would be better for the children involved.
Source:
Making ‘deadbeat’ parents a thing of the past. Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2002.
Women’s E-News reports that a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Ford Motor Company was dismissed by a judge after the plaintiff and plaintiff’s lawyers publicly talked about a prior sexual misconduct conviction by one of the defendants.
Justine Maldonado is suing Ford claiming that an inspector at one of its plants, Daniel P. Bennett, exposed himself to her and demanded oral sex. Several other women have filed similar lawsuits against Ford and Bennett. According to Women’s E-News, Ford maintains that it investigated the complaints and found them baseless.
Maldonado and her lawyer both gave interviews with reporters in which they discussed Bennett’s 1995 conviction for exposing himself to three women. Under the terms of that conviction, Bennett’s conviction was expunged after he met court-determined requirements.
Circuit Court Judge William J. Giovan dismissed Maldonado’s lawsuit saying that the plaintiffs efforts at publicizing the expunged conviction was little more than an attempt to prejudice any jury that might hear the case. In his decision, Giovan wrote that, “The behavior in question has been intentional, premeditated and intransigent. It was designed to reach the farthest boundaries of the public consciousness.”
According to a Detroit Free Press story, along with interviews with the press Maldonado and her lawyer also staged protests and handed out flyers detailing Bennett’s expunged conviction.
Sources:
Lawyer to file appeal in Ford case. Alejandro Bodipo-Memba, Detroit Free Press, August 27, 2002.
Judge Dismisses Sex Harassment Suit against Ford. August 31, 2002.