Negotiation Is Over!

Lawmakers, researchers, and peaceful activists all say they deplore violence committed in the name of animal rights. But laws that may label some protesters as “domestic terrorists” are upsetting activists.

by Sue Russell (Miller-mcCune)

This is the third of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community, which insists animal research is essential to medical progresss, and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. Earlier pieces included the effort to shift the debate from sidewalks to courtrooms, and efforts to establish the “personhood” of species like apes and whales.

Daniel Andreas San Diego joined Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” watch list in 2009. Bin Laden is gone, but San Diego remains. Listed as “armed and dangerous,” with a $250,000 price on his head, the Berkeley, California, native is only the second U.S. citizen to make this particular FBI list. He is 34, a vegan, and a skilled sailor. His tattoos depict burning, collapsing buildings. On his chest is a burning hillside coupled with the words, “It only takes a spark.”

San Diego is an animal rights zealot. He is under federal indictment for allegedly igniting explosive devices outside two Northern California firms – biotechnology giant Chiron and homecare-product manufacturer Shaklee — in 2003. The FBI says a potentially deadly second explosive at Shaklee, strapped with nails and likely targeted at first responders, was defused.

Frankie Trull, founder and president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, calls these “inexplicable, unforgiveable kinds of actions.”

FBI assistant director Mike Heimbach calls them acts of terror, possibly meant to take lives, destroy property, and damage companies. The FBI has noted an uptick in violent rhetoric by animal activists and a shifting away from the code of nonviolence toward blatant threats and intimidation. Its website asserts that between 1979 and 2008, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front, and other extremist groups have committed more than 2,000 criminal acts and caused $110 million in damages.

In a February 2011 Nature magazine poll, nearly a quarter of the animal research scientists who responded reported being affected by or knowing someone affected by animal rights activists. A little more than 15 percent had changed practices or direction as a result. Whether driven by fear or conscience, some large institutions are responding to calls for animal rights — this week, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inked a deal with cosmetic maker L’Oreal that they hope brings them closer to one day using a computerized system to forecast a chemical’s safety instead of using live animals.

Ultimately, as long as biomedical researchers continue experiments using animals, they’re likely to have their own image problems in the war for hearts and minds.

In January, protesters waved signs asking the government to remove Harvard’s animal-testing license for violations in Harvard-affiliated labs and to suspend animal testing there. Then, on March 1, the director of Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center stepped down after the death of a fourth monkey in 21 months attributable to “human error.”

In June 2010, a dead animal was found after being left in a cage being sanitized with water reaching 180 degrees Fahrenheit. The facility said it died before entering the washer. Research is currently suspended at the center, which has more than 1,700 monkeys and has received 19 citations from the USDA for Animal Welfare Act violations in three years.

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Daniel Andreas San Diego’s gripe with Chiron and Shaklee, authorities believe, was that both companies apparently did business with Huntingdon Life Sciences, one of the world’s largest contract research organizations, with operations in the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan. It provides animal-testing facilities and services to clients in such industries as pharmaceuticals, food, and chemicals.

Huntingdon has long aroused the ire of moderates as well as extremists. Since 1989, disturbing undercover footage — from showing a beagle pup being punched in the face to a live monkey being dissected apparently while conscious — has emerged from various undercover investigations. In 2001, a Huntingdon executive in the U.K. was severely beaten by three masked extremists bearing bats.

The FBI believes San Diego has ties to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and ALF — two groups blamed for some of the most dangerous criminal acts in the name of animal liberation. ALF is an amorphous organization with autonomous underground cells of outliers. San Diego has been described as a “lone wolf,” Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and the ALF as “leaderless resistance.”

ALF’s website says it “has historically been opposed to violence against any living being, though other groups and activists do not observe this limitation.” Defending illegal actions like property destruction, it says: “Members of the ALF and other underground organizations feel that in order to truly liberate animals, the unjust laws that allow their exploitation must be broken.”

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by Sue Russell (Miller-McCune)

Gavels and courtrooms are replacing placards and bullhorns, says the biomedical research community, as determined legal eagles work to increase animals’ rights and possibly even grant them “personhood.”

One morning in late 2010, a few of the 32,000 registered attendees for the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting gathered in a room of the San Diego Convention Center for a panel whose name exemplified their fears: Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the Crosshairs.

Outside the building, a cluster of protesters, some wearing lab coats spattered with fake blood, stood alongside Lawrence Hansen, a University of California, San Diego, professor of neuroscience and pathology affiliated with the Experimental Neuropathology Laboratory. In his clean white coat, Hansen joined them in condemning the use of animals in medical research. Clutching a blown-up image of a monkey with a probe in its skull, he extolled the digital imaging techniques he believes soon will provide all the answers without drilling holes into animals’ heads.

“I’m willing to wait a few years until techniques are perfected,” he told SignOnSanDiego.com.

Inside the main hall, neurological researcher John Morrison of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine voiced the Society for Neuroscience’s dominant view that animals are still essential for much research, including that related to brain disorders like Alzheimer’s. “We still have a long way to go,” he said.

Once, unsuspecting human guinea pigs were used for medical experimentation, as in 1932’s notorious Tuskegee untreated syphilis study. Sometimes, new drugs — or new formulations of old ones — weren’t tested at all, as in 1937’s sulfanilamide drug disaster, which led to 100 deaths. Responses to such scandals include the 1938 U.S. Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and then 1974’s National Research Act and the 1979 Belmont report, which laid out the principles of ethical research on human beings making animal experimentation a research centerpiece.

With animal testing for toxicity a mandatory step preceding human clinical trials on any drug, it would take an update of federal rules to reflect advances in animal alternatives before animals — other than perhaps primates — have a real chance of exiting into a new era.

Thursday, the National Institutes of Health cited better alternatives as it drastically cut back future biomedical research using federally owned chimpanzees.

And while not all research chimps in the United States are federally owned, the government’s decision likely will cast a long shadow. Some 84 percent of scientists polled by Pew in 2009 listed a government entity as their most important funding source. The NIH provides 85 percent of federal funding, spending approximately $30.3 billion annually on medical research grants and supporting some 325,000 research personnel at more than 3,000 institutions here and overseas.

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Richard W. Bianco
University of Minnesota
Department of Surgery Experimental Surgical Services
420 Delaware Street SE Mayo
Mail Code 220
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Phone: 612-625-5914
Fax: 612-626-6949
Email: [email protected]

by Camille Marino

According to an article published on Wednesday, November 4, in the Star Tribune, a decline in public support for sadistic animal experimentation has prompted an aggressive $1 million propaganda campaign by the Foundation for Biomedical Research.

Sinking equally as low as UCLA Pro-Test did with their full-page advertisement in the L.A. Times, 15 billboards in the Twin Cities employ empty  rhetoric bereft of any scientific merit in an attempt to mislead the public:

“Ever had leprosy? Thanks to animal research, you won’t.“

The North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) recently addressed this nonsensical claim:

“In still a further sign of desperation, vivisectionists have also erected billboards claiming the Los Angeles populace is free of, get this, leprosy, because of animal experimentation. There were 91 cases of leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, in the entire United States in 2000; treatment has been effective since at least the 1940’s, with new drug regimens in place to counter resistance to the causative bacterium since the 1980’s. Implying that the continued killing of animals in the 21st century is a “necessary evil” to prevent leprosy is just another attempt to keep UCLA rolling in research grant money, most of it taxpayer funds wasted on addicting non-human primates to methamphetamines and other utterly ridiculous, useless and cruel experiments.”

Dick Bianco, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School, is part of the campaign.   Unconcerned with science or facts, he is focused on manipulating public perception by any means necessary:    “If we could get a celebrity, that would change everything.”

We cannot be complacent.  Abusers across the country are standing up and actively advocating violence against animals.  The capitalists are using their money and power, targeted propaganda campaigns, and, with a little help from Dick,  they will soon be enlisting celebrities.   Paris Hilton, perhaps?  What about Bart Simpson?  It remains to be seen how low these parasites will stoop.

THIS IS URGENT:  Animal Rights Activists Need to Use Every Tool Available

Nonhuman animals are being targeted by Pharma, their lobbyists, and the professional sadists in white lab coats.  We don’t have the money to counter this unprecedented wave of  “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISM”, but we have many options.  My activism is wholly above-ground.   But, clearly, the time for civil dialogue is over.  Debates and open discussions have been replaced with aggressive one-sided fallacious  propaganda campaigns.

I am aware that staying silent is the safest course… inaction.  Just as Salman Rushdie was threatened with death for publishing his words in Iran in 1989, words that articulate unpopular concepts are subject to penalties in the equally-repressive United (police) States.   I observe a changing climate in the anti-vivisection arena.  But it’s come to my attention that by discussing what I perceive, I’ve put myself under a microscope as well.

When all avenues of communication are closed off and those who profit from animal mutilation actively advocate atrocities, they are cultivating an atmosphere and inspiring their adversaries.  We should not be surprised when the unconscionable violence inflicted upon animals is justifiably visited upon their tormentors.   Sadists will never be persuaded to be decent human beings.  These abusers will eventually understand that their unethical behaviors entail tangible consequences.  It is conceivable that one day soon, vivisectors may look back on the good old days when direct action meant ALF property damage.

Animal liberationists have many resources available and they need to be used to our greatest advantage.

1)  INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND:  As long as the animal terrorists continue to step into the mainstream forum, their readily-available public-domain information will continue to be published on Negotiation Is Over.   We need to contact them and keep them on the radar.  While all communication should be respectful and non-threatening, animal rights activists have a responsibility to engage this element — by written word or in person — and be uncompromising in our position.  Until the animals can live in peace, no one deserves to live in peace — certainly not their tormentors.

2)  INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND:  An effective method of  countering a capitalist-funded propaganda campaign in to coordinate a media campaign of our own.  I suggest that one day a week, Mondays, be set aside to blog about nothing other than “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS” and their misinformation campaigns.  Every single person reading this article can register at blogspot.com and proceed to publish the names and contact information of those advocating violence. (Or, forward it to me and I will publish the information.)  In addition, we need to advance real science:  the lies being generated  by terrorist organizations such as Pro-Test for Science (formerly UCLA Pro-Test) and the BRF needs to be assessed and deconstructed.  I personally know of several active scientists and anti-vivisectionists in the NIO community who’s expertise I  hope to draw on.

This is simple.  We can set aside one day a week to address the “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS” and link our blogs in a network of comprehensive coverage — the sadists, the lies, the misinformation.  I am appealing to everyone:  contact me at [email protected] and take a stand with NIO.

3)  INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND:  Irrespective of the tactics each of us employs — and make no mistake, the spectrum of available tools needs to be employed — solid information is essential.  I invite everyone to weigh in with comments, suggestions and creative strategies to counter the “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS”.  They have the money and power.  We have the passion and drive.

The information on this site is for educational and entertainment purposes only. There is no intent, express or implied, to promote illegal activities. We assume no liability for the potential actions of any third party. All data compiled here has been gathered from, and is available through, independent public sources.

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