Michael Podell, MSc, DVM
Posted on 07/13/2004 3:37:35 PM PDT by yankeedame
OutFront
Beware Of People
Heidi Brown,
07.26.04
Animal-rights activists are getting more violent.
Late on the night of May 30 an off-duty police officer was guarding the Monrovia, Calif. house of Mitchell Lardner....
The guard was there because Lardner, his wife and two small children have been under siege for weeks by animal-rights activists. They had spray-painted his home with words like "Puppy Killer" and "You Can't Hide" and paraded by in frightening masks and black robes, announcing with bullhorns "Mitchell Lardner kills 500 puppies a day!"
Animal-rights activists are no longer content to set up picket lines. Groups such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac) and an even more radical group called Animal Liberation Front see themselves as soldiers in the war against vivisection, the use of live animals in scientific research. "Shac is absolutely violent," says LaRae Quy, an FBI special agent in San Francisco.
And they're cutting a wider swath.
Lardner has never worked for or with any animal labs. He's a director at Presidio Venture Partners, the high-tech investment subsidiary of Japan's Sumitomo Corp.
He's a target, say the protest groups, because a completely unrelated chemicals division of Sumitomo has one business with Life Sciences Research. This firm, formerly known as Huntingdon Life Sciences, does animal tests for drug companies....
Animal-rights groups are becoming better funded, better organized and more radical, according to ActivistCash.com,ActivistCash a Web site that tracks not-for-profit funding.
Last summer bombs went off at the Emeryville, Calif. headquarters of Chiron, a biotech firm, and the Pleasanton, Calif. offices of Shaklee, a direct marketer of health products. Shac denies any role in the blasts but dutifully reported both events on its Web site. Police have not charged anyone.
Such depredations could have a far-reaching impact in slowing drug research.
"People [in the research community] should probably be getting prepared. This is not a theoretical problem," says John Gallagher, a Chiron spokesman.
Michael Podell, MSc, DVM
Two years ago Ohio State University veterinarian and researcher Michael Podell walked away from a $1.7 million grant from the NIH and his career as a research scientist. Someone had sent him a photo of a British scientist's car that had been firebombed; strangers had accosted his kids at school.
So how are we going to cure cancer without lab animals? More moderate activists say labs should use more human tissue and computer modeling. Animal tests, though, are mandated by the Food & Drug Administration.
David Jacobson-Kram, an associate director in the FDA's office of New Drugs, says that the tendency of a drug to cause birth defects, cancer or toxicity cannot be discovered through computer modeling.
Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic form of estrogen prescribed between 1940 and 1971, wasn't tested on animals and turned out to cause a rare vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who took it.
Says Jacobson-Kram: "Animal-rights activists see no difference between the value of an animal's life and a human life. We do."
Shac and its ilk have shrewdly focused their efforts.
No other firm that runs animal labs or sells animals--such as Covance of Princeton, N.J. and Charles River Laboratories in Wilmington, Mass.--has attracted the vitriol aimed at the former Huntingdon. "If you have a wall you want to knock down, you don't hit it in 25 different places," says Shac spokeswoman Emily Greene.
...Shac was founded in 1999 to force Huntingdon's demise by intimidating any business associated with it.
Activists threatened its employees, a broker of its shares (Schwab Europe) and its banker (the Royal Bank of Scotland). Its chief executive was assaulted outside his home in 2001. The Bank of England became HLS' banker, since no other bank would work with it.
When the company fled the U.K. and changed its name, Shac followed, setting off a new wave of animal rights protests directed at Life Sciences.
Its American business partners started defecting with frightening speed.
Jefferies & Co. stopped making a market in its stock, ...Auditor Deloitte & Touche withdrew late last year after getting threats at offices worldwide. The current auditor, Hugh Scott, has refused to reveal its headquarters' location.
One rare soul willing to stand up to the animal-rights terrorists is Stephan (Skip) Boruchin, the head trader at Legacy Trading in Edmond, Okla., the only consistent marketmaker in Life Science Research's stock.
He withstood two years of intimidation, including seeing his and his wife's Social Security numbers posted on the Web. Someone severed his phone and electric lines, too. ... Says he: "No individual or organization has a right to tell someone what they can or can't do because of political beliefs."
So far no one has died in an animal-rights bombing. Of course, there's no way of counting the people who may die of cancer someday because of the violence.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Fow what it's worth, Podell's research, involving cats, was on AIDS-Associated Dementia. Dr. Michael Podell, bio
We should make them a deal. Each member of the group can substitute themselves for any lab animal.
SHAQ is violent? He also can't sink free throws and plays defense like a drunken circus bear.
I agree that animals should not used for testing human medicines, etc. What we should use in place of lab rats are child killers, sexual predators, murderers, and librals.
What really sad is that this guy would probably get in trouble if he took out a few of these creeps with a shotgun next time they came to his house. The time has come where the police just aren't sufficient anymore.
Not a bad idea!
In my neighborhood, it's the triple S system for animal 'rights' activists:
Shoot
Shovel
Shutup
I'll kill anyone - man or beast - who messes with my horses.
I sure never hear of any arrests. Protected by dems in power, no doubt. This agenda fits the dem agenda of 'leveling the playing field' by letting foreigners overtake us in research.
The amazing thing about these people is that they are typically adamant in their pro-abortion stand!
I wonder if they're going to apply RICO to these people like they did to pro-lifers.
A bullet between some "activist's" eyes would help put a stop to it. I know I certainly would not stand by and be threatened and attacked.
Kill five or six of these F*****s and that will be the time some house gets spray painted and someone stalked! There is NO difference between Domestic Terrorists and Foreign Terrorists and we had better learn that lesson fast!
Kill five or six of these F*****s and that will be the last time some house gets spray painted and someone stalked! There is NO difference between Domestic Terrorists and Foreign Terrorists and we had better learn that lesson fast!
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