As for you being a “clinician” I pity any who may seek your care, for they will be doomed to die because you have no idea about cures or procedures found using animal testing. Here is a short list of those in case you forgot. Kidney transplants,Polio vaccine,Replacement heart valves,Hip replacement surgery,Drugs for high blood pressure ,Heart bypass operations,Drugs to treat mental illness,Rubella vaccine ,Chemotherapy for leukemia,Drugs to treat stomach ulcers,Inhaled asthma medication ,Drugs to control transplant rejection,Life support systems for premature babies,Hepatitis vaccines,Treatment for river blindness,Meningitis vaccine,Combined drug therapies for AIDS and Drugs for breast and prostate cancer.Any of these look familiar Jerry or did you miss that day at medical school?

Humans have been regulating animal species long before the firearm was invented. To answer your question Jerry nobody regulated species before man evolved, they were for better or worse self regulating. In recent years it has become necessary because of mans encroachment into wildlife habitat. That statement may sound like I support your cause..I don’t. I don’t belive we (man) should develop more wild lands but I don’t believe in arson either. I use my job to find reasons to stop a development legally and have done so on many occasions. What have you done to save a habitat from development?

As a clinician, I can assure Joe that wasting money killing animals in laboratories will not lead to cures for his beloved race…er, species. I do have one question for the “biologist”; who regulated all these animal populations in the billion (at least) years before his almighty species came along with their firearms and leghold traps? Or did the world begin 10,000 years ago with Adam and Eve?

As a wildlife Biologist I have protected lands from development, caught polluters, protected endangered species. I also support regulated hunting and set seasons and bag limits based on data collected during the year. I also have been a victim of animal rights terrorist who have threatened to kill me and my children because I support hunting.

No oppressor ever relinquishes their power voluntarily; every successful liberation struggle has required the use or threat of force to effect change. I wish it were different, but the struggle to save our ecosystems and halt animal exploitation is a comparable struggle to others for liberation, both historical and concurrent.

I’m not sure what Joe does for the environment, but as long as he isn’t exploiting that or the animals for personal gain or pleasure (such as do vivisectors, hunters, fur farmers, foresters, etc.) then more power to him.

“If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justifiable solution.”
— Jerry Vlasak on “Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!” (Showtime cable network), Apr 2004

“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.”
— Jerry Vlasak at the “Animal Rights 2003″ convention, advocating the murder of doctors whose life-saving biomedical experiments require the use of animals,

“If someone is killing, on a regular basis, thousands of animals, and if that person can only be stopped in one way by the use of violence, then it is certainly a morally justifiable solution.”
— “Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!” (Showtime cable network), Apr 2004

“I don’t have any doubt in my mind that there will come a time when we will see violence against animal rights abusers.”
— Jerry Vlasak on “Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!” (Showtime cable network), Apr 2004

Or he could have just kept his fucking mouth shut altogether. What a concept! Enough of the apologist attitude for those who have betrayed others; if you’ve ever sat through a trial, its apparent how the evidence given by snitch after snitch, even if repetitive, adds up to either a guilty plea or a conviction against those warriors brave enough to keep silent.

Virtually 100% of convictions, imprisonment and executions come about either because: (1) the action is committed by someone with direct ties to the crime, such as violence by family members or acquaintances against their own (2) diarrhea of the mouth, in which one brags about ones deeds or is snitched on by a former comrade (the current case) or (3) getting caught in the act (extremely rare). Leaving behind large amounts of forensic evidence would probably fall into this category as well.

Conviction rates that do not involve one of the 3 situations above, even for major crimes such as murder, are less than 25%, and much lower for lesser crimes. Of literally thousands of animal and earth liberation illegal direct actions committed over the last 2-3 decades, only a handful of people have ever been imprisoned for any serious length of time.

An excellent read on this is “Beat the Heat”, available from almost any online bookstore, or through the Animal Liberation Press Office.

After the information provided by Ferguson and Meyerhoff, pretty much the one thing the FBI knew for sure were the names of the individuals. There may have been a lot of details about various actions that investigators were unclear on, but who participated in which action was pretty much firmly established by the time Meyerehoff had finished talking. Keeping silent on names is noble, to be sure, but in this instance it was probably of only limited use.

By comparison, Thurston chose to name names in his co-operation agreement, and has received a lot of vilification for it. Perhaps Thuston gets singled out more than the others (at least it seems that way) because of his long history in direct action — he’d already done time for a live liberation action and was the vicitim of attempted entrapment and all sorts of police malfeasance in Canada prior to his 2005 arrest. Thurston, of all the green scare defendants (with the possible exception of Jonathan Paul), had the most experience with arrest and detention. So, why did he choose to give names?

Obviously, not being Darren Thurston, I can’t say for sure, but i do know this. At the time Thurston accepted his plea (he was the last of the naming defendants to do so), the names of all involved in everything were out on the table. Spilling that information was certainly not going to make anything worse for anyone involved. Thurston, did, however, strike a plea agreement that allowed him to hold back other, potentially more important information. As part of his agreement, Thurston was not obliged to divulge any information on any activity that happened in Canada. I suspect that if he had reversed his priorities — not named names but divulged information on his actions north of the border — he would be lauded as a hero, but a lot of people in Canada might be in jeapordy as investigations up there got re-opened on the merit of Thurston’s self-implicating information.

In more general terms on the subject at hand, those who will oppress women, those of a different race or ethnic background, what-have-you, are of the same mindset that allows the oppression, exploitation, and murder of non-human animals. Racism, sexism, and speciesism are all related, and all of us opposed to oppression should stand together to fight those who would deprive others of their rights to live free.