In a ruling against the Sea Shepherds last week, Kozinski called out the group’s tactics—ramming ships, hurling acid, and similarly violent stunts —for what they are: Piracy on the high seas. He wrote, on behalf of a unanimous panel:

You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.

So, while Judge Kozinski’s ruling may make life and fundraising a bit more difficult for Watson and his acolytes, what does it mean for those who have helped him out in the past? Their number include Wayne Pacelle, boss of the Humane Society of the United States (not to be confused with your local animal shelter), who helped the Sea Shepherds raise money when he worked for the Fund for Animals some years back.

The answer? Probably not much, unfortunately. Consider Neal Barnard, head of the 90 percent doctor-free Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. A decade ago, he co-signed a letter with a representative of the violent animal liberation group SHAC who was later sentenced to six years in federal prison for animal enterprise terrorism. Barnard is now hawking his latest vegan-shilling diet book and cutting PSAs for PBS. The no-animals diet plan now purports to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease. (Nobody tell him about the proven brain benefits of omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids found in fish—that would be inconvenient.) Next week veganism will cure cancer, improve your vision, and tie your shoes for you, but we digress.

The Discovery Channel recently saw the ugly side of a nutjob with a wacky environmentalist agenda, so it’s bizarre that the station continues to make money off of eco-pirates. Hopefully the execs there will wise up to the not-so-controversial idea that cozying up with Pirate Paul or his crew can backfire in one way or another. As for Barnard and Pacelle, we’ll keep making sure people know that these two smooth-talkers aren’t who they seem.

Oregon scientist Michael Conn and ethicist James Parker write that the federal fugitive, named Daniel Andreas San Diego, epitomizes the radical view that animals’ lives are more important than those of people. And, they add, al Qaeda has some competition in the bomb-making department:

Like al Qaeda, such extremism is committed to changing public policy by violence and terror. University researchers in California have had their children followed, their cars fire-bombed and their homes vandalized. Researchers in Oregon have had their cars and homes damaged and their families harassed by bullhorn-wielding extremists. And graduate students nationwide were recently threatened by several extremist groups who promised to "target" their attacks at the next generation of scientists.

Unlike al Qaeda, however, animal rights extremists enjoy worrisome public support for their cause. Polls by the Foundation for Biomedical Research show that only about half of Americans support the use of animals in health-related research, down from near-universal support 40 years ago. This decrease has followed massive campaigns by organizations such as PETA and the Humane Society of the United States (which spends only a tiny fraction of its huge budget on animal shelters, with most going to "educational endeavors," according to IRS forms reviewed by the watchdog group HumaneWatch). These campaigns claim that animal research is without value, cruel and unregulated.

Opponents of animal research distribute images that are altered or outdated, even 50 years old in some cases. And they never mention that animal research is regulated and inspected by the federal government. Anyone who hasn't visited a research laboratory is left to assume the worst.

(Click here to read the full essay.)

What makes this op-ed important is not that the authors name-check our HumaneWatch project. It’s not their (correct) observation that very few of the millions of dollars Americans donate to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) directly benefit pet shelters. It’s the recognition that campaigning for equality between people and animals tends to devolve into something culturally extreme, and sometimes explosive.

The concept of animal “rights” affects more than just your freedom to scramble together a sausage and cheese omelet and wash it down with milk. The issue also threatens mankind’s ability to fight dreaded human diseases, improve quality of life for the chronically infirm, and replace despair with modern miracles. When an entire movement says a lab rat’s considerations must be on a par with a sick child's, activism has become extremism.

“[S]omeone who would halt medical advances through bombings,” Conn and Parker conclude, “certainly belongs on our list of public enemies.” They’re right, of course, but halting medical advances through lobbying and propagandizing is just as detestable.

If PETA and HSUS disagree, 11 million U.S. cancer patients and 33 million HIV-positive people worldwide would all like a word with them.

That’s good news for UK scientists. But the bad news is that Jerry Vlasak is still here in America—and he’s still defending the use of murder as an animal-rights campaign tactic.

Last night in Los Angeles, KABC-TV aired a story about acts of violence perpetrated by anti-science animal rights protesters. The news story included photography of one research scientist’s car, fully engulfed in flames, after animal activists firebombed it. Another researcher showed KABC reporter David Ono an envelope he received in the mail, containing a razor blade along with “threats to cut my throat."

To a terrorist sympathizer like Jerry Vlasak, who serves as the national spokesperson for the FBI-designated “terrorist” Animal Liberation Front, killing humans to save lab animals is A-OK. In his mind, aspiring arsonists and murderers are modern-day Black Panthers in a new kind of civil rights movement:

"All of these successful liberation struggles have always involved violence or the threat of violence. I would hope that hurting, killing or assassinating would not be necessary. I would say it would be morally justified if all other methods failed."

Is openly advertising a death-wish for your enemies where terrorism begins? Vlasak doesn’t think so:

"I’m not a terrorist. I don’t think I’ve inflicted terror on anybody who didn’t deserve to have terror inflicted on them."

Glad we straightened that out. Not only does Vlasak believe that assassination—literally—is morally justifiable, but he’s also pretty sure any future victims have it coming to them.

We’ve reported before that the California Medical Board is (inexplicably) unwilling to review or revoke Vlasak’s medical license. He could be treating patients—and making life-or-death decisions of a completely different kind—at this very moment.

What would happen if a medical researcher with a lab full of mice were in an accident and landed on Vlasak’s operating table? If the good doctor is a ticking time bomb that goes off tomorrow, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Greenpeace is the best-known anti-biotech group that scares British politicians silly. Members of Parliament say there’s no appeasing the international environmental activist group, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that proves the safety of agricultural biotechnology.

Former British MP and government minister Lord Taverne told London’s Daily Mail yesterday that environmental groups’ opposition to biotech crops is “not rational,” and that they have made it more difficult for some nations to achieve agricultural sustainability and eliminate hunger:

They keep on saying that we must prove the technology is safe. There have been any number of reports.

Every single national academy of scientists in the world—the Mexican, the Indian, the Chinese, the American, the Brazilian, the Royal Society, the European Society have all examined this time after time after time and their conclusion is absolutely clear.

So far there is no evidence, despite 12 years of their growth and consumption, of harm to human health or harm to the environment.

Sadly, it’s quite possible that no level of scientific certainty will ever change the Greenpeace mindset. Patrick Moore, an early Greenpeace leader with an ecology Ph.D., tells the Vancouver Sun that his former group has “a policy of ‘zero-tolerance’ for GM crops.” (Moore left Greenpeace and later described the group as “a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics.”)

Greenpeace’s refusal to even acknowledge the promise that biotechnology holds for helping impoverished nations feed themselves speaks volumes: The same activists who will risk their lives scaling skyscrapers and harassing fishermen, just to make the evening news, remain unconcerned about saving human beings from starvation.

The early Greenpeacers, like Patrick Moore, meant well when they founded an organization with a “vision of a green and peaceful future.” It’s sad that this future doesn’t seem to have a place for roughly 1 billion people in the Third World.

Unfortunately, the Medical Board didn’t see things our way. Here’s the meat of how the body replied to us this week (you can view the full letter here):

It is the conclusion of our legal counsel that we lack sufficient evidence to establish a violation of the Medical Practice Act. The First Amendment’s protection of speech permits commentary that can be perceived as offensive. In the case of a physician, comments that may be perceived as objectionable must be linked to the physician’s ability to practice medicine with safety to the public in order to be actionable.

For a little background, here’s the “free speech” that Vlasak said to the Animal Rights 2003 convention about doctors who use animals in research (at the time he was a spokesman for the so-called “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine):

“I don’t think you’d have to kill — assassinate — too many … I think for 5 lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.”

On a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller’s show “Bullsh*t,” Vlasak stated his belief that “I think that violence and nonviolence are not moral principles, they’re tactics.” And in 2005 Vlasak again endorsed the murder of medical scientists, this time in front of the U.S. Senate.

This guy takes professional disagreement to a new level. And he apparently believes it’s better to see people in Somalia starve than see mosquitoes killed.

Falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater isn’t protected speech. Neither is advocating imminent violence or making direct threats. We wonder if recommending the mass murder of physicians is really protected. In some ways, it’s similar to preaching violence. If a medical researcher who uses animals is ever blown up by a bomb, can Vlasak be held responsible?

“They would have us believe it’s either the mosquitoes or us. That’s just not the case. For one thing, there are way too many people on the planet,” Vlasak said. Vlasak said more attention should be focused on the problems of overpopulation instead. “One of the problems is, they send 1 million pounds of food to Somalia and all they do is reproduce and pretty soon there’s going to be more people suffering there. China is sort of an example where they were able to stabilize the population with governmental standards,” Vlasak said.

Get that? Instead of swatting or spraying an annoying insect, we should let poor Somalians starve, since giving them food to live will just result in them having kids. Or maybe Chinese-style population control could work.

Right.

This is nothing new from Vlasak. At the “Animal Rights 2003” conference, Vlasak (as a representative of PCRM) endorsed the murder of physicians whose medical research work requires the use of lab rats. (PCRM has denied that Vlasak was speaking on its behalf, but the event’s program described him as “Jerry Vlasak, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.”)

Vlasak stated:

I don’t think you’d have to kill — assassinate — too many vivisectors before you would see a marked decrease in the amount of vivisection going on. And I think for 5 lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million non-human lives.

Unfortunately, Vlasak is not alone in his bizarre, anti-human thinking. Accompanied by violence or not, the idea that there’s nothing special about people is increasingly common in the animal rights movement. It seems that when people are the problem, no “solution” is ever enough.

Here are a few snippets from “the demands and sayings of Lee”:

All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed …

For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human's lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease! …

Saving the environment and the remaning [sic] species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.

Sound familiar? It sounds like a ham-fisted version of the "hell is other people" philosophy written by animal rights attorney and population control promoter Carter Dillard. He’s “Of Counsel” to the “Humane Society” of the United States (HSUS). Dillard has written extensively about how having kids isn’t an unlimited “right,” but one that should be limited by the “public good”—which he defines as being balanced against “other rights”—including those of the wilderness and “non-human species.”

HSUS has more ties to the zero-population-growth world than you might think. The group’s current CEO, Wayne Pacelle, has said in the past that “I certainly don't plan to have children. I take it as a very serious personal responsibility not to put another consumer on this planet.” And in the 1990s HSUS wrote a check to an organization called—you guessed it—“Zero Population Growth.”

Why does an animal group care about the population of people? Pacelle put it best himself: “It's a simple equation that more consumers translates into more animals raised for food.” That could also explain why HSUS Senior Vice President Heidi Prescott had herself sterilized at a very young age.

“Sea Shepherd” pseudo-pirate Paul Watson also legitimizes the anti-human rants of unbalanced activists like James Lee. Watson thinks it’s reasonable to break laws whenever the ends can be twisted to justify the means. He told the Animal Rights 2002 convention: “We should never feel like we’re going too far in breaking the law, because whatever laws you break to liberate animals or to protect the environment are very insignificant.”

Attacking ships (manned by people) on the high seas to protect whales only makes sense if you subscribe to the people-are-parasites religion. (Coincidentally, the “Whale Wars” show featuring Watson is shown on Animal Planet, which is owned by the Discovery Channel’s parent company.)

Simply, most eco-warriors and much of the animal-liberation movement sees people as the problem. Humans must do penance.

Let’s be clear that environmental and animal rights groups aren’t directly responsible for Lee’s hostage-taking actions any more than Al Gore is. Lee made his warped choices all alone. But promoting poisonous philosophies that put “Gaia” and her furry children first—and humans last— corrupts and perverts the minds of too many like him.

The modern environmental and animal rights movements have become moral enablers of anti-human terrorism. James Lee’s philosophy seems ripped from the pages of the Unabomber’s screeds. And PETA’s. And HSUS’s. Yesterday’s horror reminds us that in moments of moral outrage, it’s okay to take sides. In fact, it’s healthy.

[Medical research labs], loggers, factory farmers and members of our own government are terrorizing the Earth and its nonhuman animal inhabitants. If these people did a better job of safeguarding our world, groups like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front would be less inclined to take the law into their own hands.

Get that? It’s not terrorists’ fault for engaging in terrorism. Scientists, loggers and farmers made them do it. “I suspect that groups like ALF and ELF would love nothing more than to refrain from engaging in illegal activity,” Stormont writes. Right.
After law school, Stormont was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 2005 and worked as a PETA legal counsel. Eventually, she moved to HSUS’s immense legal staff; she led a 2008 lawsuit against an egg producers’ trade association, and currently identifies herself as an HSUS attorney. (We placed a call today to HSUS’s legal department and confirmed her status.)
HSUS sure knows how to pick ‘em.
Stormont isn’t even the first full-blown radical to wind up on HSUS’s senior payroll. HSUS still employs former ALF spokesman John “J.P.” Goodwin, who has described his goal as “the abolition of all animal agriculture,” racking up a hefty arrest record along the way.
HSUS responds to our criticism by claiming that Goodwin has “renounced” the activity of his “youth.” (Interestingly, the fur industry has documented Goodwin’s employment history, establishing that HSUS hired him long before he stopped making statements on the ALF’s behalf.) Regardless, a Paul of Tarsus-like conversion story makes for a convenient argument—likely one that parole boards hear from convicts every day. We wonder if HSUS will whistle the same happy tune about Stormont.
We should underline here that having ties with someone claiming ties with ALF doesn’t make Stormont guilty of any crime. And she hasn’t been charged with anything. (Yet.) But her conversation with the grand jury should be telling, assuming she testifies.
One man has already been indicted under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act in connection with the University of Iowa attack, another woman is in jail for refusing to testify, and (according to the indictment) additional suspects may still be indentified.
We’ll be tracking these developments closely. But in the mean-time, enterprising young attorneys who are considering hopping aboard the HSUS train may want to think twice. You can never be too careful.

When someone actually coaches or conducts criminal behavior to impose a political agenda on each and every other citizen of Canada, that does seem to me to meet the test of a terrorist organization. I am calling on the Government of Canada to actually investigate whether or not this organization, PETA, is acting as a terrorist organization under the test that exists under Canadian law.

Our friends up north can find a precedent from our own government. As we’ve pointed out, this “Facility Security Profile” questionnaire from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service describes PETA as a “Terrorist Threat,” listing it alongside notorious domestic terrorist groups like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. (See Page 4. While the USDA removed the form from its website after we started spreading the word, you can find a PDF copy preserved here.)
We revealed back in 2002 that PETA gave $1,500 to the Earth Liberation Front. PETA, naturally, had a wide range of shifting explanations for this “grant.” And that’s not even getting into the group’s $70,000+ gift to convicted arsonist Rodney Coronado, along with other eyebrow-raising “donations.”
Yes, yes. We know it was “just” a tofu dessert (if there really is such a thing). But the fact that a PETA wingnut can get close enough to a Canadian cabinet official to assault her (and the PETA activist was charged with assault) should give the Mounties some serious pause.
A 2003 New Yorker  profile notes that “officially, PETA does not engage in violence, but its leaders wholeheartedly defend and encourage guerrilla groups like the Animal Liberation Front.” The sooner governments start recognizing this reality, the faster the projectiles stop flying toward government officials.