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.

Fight Over Distribution of $10 Million McDonald's Settlement

Back in June, McDonald’s formally settled five class action lawsuits brought on behalf of vegetarians who complained they were deceived into believing that McDonald’s french fries contained no animal products (see http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2002/000209.html). McDonald’s agreed to pay $12.5 million to vegetarian groups. Now, however, those groups are fighting amongst themselves over who will get to divided $10 million of that (the other $2.5 million, of course, goes to the lawyers).

The major instigator is once again Seattle attorney Harish Bharti, who filed the first lawsuit against McDonald’s but who has also generally alienated the attorneys involved with class-action lawsuits. Bharti, who reportedly likes to cite his training with Indian Swamis in his legal briefs, now maintains that “this whole settlement is a sham” noting that the four other attorneys are “joining hands with McDonald’s” on a settlement proposal that will be considered by a judge at the end of August.

Of course, as Los Angeles Attorney Kevin Roddy — who negotiated the settlement with McDonald’s — points out, the settlement agreement itself requires that McDonald’s and the suing parties work together to come up with a settlement proposal for the judge, which is pretty standard operating procedure when settling a class action lawsuit.

Bharti’s objections, as well as others, center around which groups will and will not receive money under the proposed settlement. Bharti is angered that groups he had been pushing, including a yoga meditation center and a cow sanctuary would not receive any money. Neither would People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or Vegan Outreach.

Chicago-based attorney James Latturner told the Seattle Times that, in fact, animal rights groups were excluded early on from the settlement because they represent only “a small subset of groups which advance vegetarianism.”

Muslim groups around the country are also petitioning to be added to the settlement.

Source:

Latest beef over fries — who gets money. Lynn Thompson, Seattle Times, August 4, 2002.

Groups ask for share of McDonald’s settlements. Associated Press, August 7, 2002.

Another Example of BigPub vs. Weblog Ethics

Here’s another example of the sort of egregious ethical standards at some weblog-oriented sites, this one courtsey of Slashdot. Posting about the recent revelations of yet more accounting problems at WorldCom, a Slashdot editor writes,

There’s also a NYT story. I love how the news outlets are saying, “error”, “irregularity”, “problem”, as if this was all some sort of tragic accident, instead of laying out the obvious truth, “criminal fraud committed with full knowledge it was a crime”.

“Criminal fraud” is not an “obvious truth,” but rather is something that has to be provn in a court of law. There are dozens of libel cases in which newspapers have paid out a lot of money for stating the sort of “obvious truths” that Slashdot claims to have access to.

Remember when it was an “obvious truth” that Richard Jewell was responsible for the Olympic Park bombing?

Slashdot might want to consider upgrading its ethical standards to somewhere north of the tabloid trash it apparently has an affinity with.

Seeing the Doctor

Today I went in and saw my doctor about the viral infection that’s been making me feel lousy most of this week.

Not very interesting, perhaps, except my doctor has a peculiar habit that I’ve never seen any other physician do and which is simultaneously scary/intriguing — when he gets to the point where he’s convinced he knows what’s wrong with you and starts to tell you what to do about it, he closes his eyes and tilts his head upward as if he’s concentrating on some universal truth.

So he’ll close his eyes and look to the ceiling while he says, “You need to take this antibiotic for the next five days.” Then he’ll open his eyes, look at you for a second, and then close his eyes again to say, “And makes sure you drink lots of fluids.”

It’s like doctoring as a performance art. Or maybe he’s got all the answers written on the back of his eyelids.