The Home Farm

             So I would like to change things up a bit from the last several blogs I have done. The past blogs focused on different types of animal rights activist groups that try everything they can to save animals from murder and abuse. I obviously feel different about this as explained before but I still have some beliefs that coincide with their feelings. I feel that commercial farming is mostly the reason for animal rights groups to grow into organizations that mass to fight for animal rights. The commercial farming industry is one where the groups get their firepower to support their cause.

            The reason that I say this is because most of the horrific pictures and videos that you see up on PETA’s website  are ones from commercial farming operations in which sick and dying animals are videotaped to show the worst of the worst conditions at the farm. I know that there are some farms that do not take care of their animals because they just seem not to care but in reality most family farms actually do take care of the animals because they want to produce the most amount of meat, milk, or eggs as possible for the lowest cost. That is the reason I would be more likely to say no to a commercial farming business coming into my town. I am for the local family farm operations where the business owners have more of a deeply vested interest in their animals then some big CEO that doesn’t know squat about what is happening or care what is happening within his business.

            I have grown up where my sister was in Future Farmers of America or FFA for three years of high school and my girlfriend was in 4H for 10 years of her life. I have been around and helped raise pigs, sheep, goats, cows, and chickens both for show and the home freezer. If you are wondering yes I did help slaughter and butcher the meat. I saw the whole stage from small piglets and chicks to sausage and chicken on the dinner table. I have to say a home grown animal tastes so much better then store bought meat. There are many reasons why, one is every day I get to see what I am feeding the animals and I get to raise them the way I feel will produce the best meat to eat. I never have a middle person that raises the animals and pumps them full of antibiotics that may be necessary only for farms with a lot of animals to help stop the spread of diseases throughout the heard. I also never used genetic modifying try and alter the weight of the animal to make the most money possible out of the weight of the meat. I do however feed the animals food that would enhance their meat for taste and sometimes would have to slim them down so that they fit the right criteria for the best fat content in the meat. So you can basically think of it like a normal human diet. If you want to lose weight then you can work out and change your diet to get the results that you want. This is the same for meat producing animals. So I am against genetically modifying animals for profit gain.. That is a very lame and cruel practice that big corporate owned companies make money off of pumping their animals full of fluids so that they can make more profit on essentially salt water. This is done most notably in chickens and turkeys.

            I do have to say that my preferred practice of raising my own animals is still against the animal rights activists since I am killing the animal  but people have been eating meat for so many centuries that there is no way they can possibly stop people from consuming meat. I have eaten meat all my life and even though there are multiple statistics out there to show that meats can possibly be more harmful then good for your longevity I will still not stop because I love the taste of a juicy barbeque tri-tip way too much and I would rather cut some years off my life instead of becoming a vegetarian. I do have several personal experiences with some friends and family members being vegetarian but I will give you the worst one so far. The personal experience that I want to share is one of my cousins who is an animal rights extremist that decided to be a vegan which means he did consume any animal based products at all.  He lost weight and a lot of it. He looked like a twig with skin wrapped around it and he started having health problems because his body was not getting the right nutrients needed to function properly. He ended up going to the doctor and the doctor prescribed eating eggs and other sources of protein rich meat such as chicken to help him get back the nutrients lost. So much for being a vegan, he is now just a vegetarian but still looks unhealthy and has not put on much weight since. With that example I am not saying that being a vegan to try and save animals is a bad thing or cannot be done, I am stating that to do it because you want to feel included in some protest that you sort of believe in is not the right thing to do. There are other ways you can help save animals like joining a humane society to find animals new homes or get a job at a SPCA or Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. SPCA’s go after people that are cruel to animals and LEGALLY find them to arrest or cite them through legal processes not through some crazy persons idea to try and destroy a company by committing illegal acts that will get you put in jail instead of the person actually committing the so called crime.  

            The moral to this blog is that even though animal rights activists groups are necessary to uncover some wrong doing in different companies that abuse their animals, the tactics that they deploy to try and bring attention to their cause and harm to the industry is just morally wrong. Committing illegal acts should never be supported in any circumstance. They are criminals and should be punished for what they do to these companies. If it is PETA throwing red paint on someone’s fur coat,  Captain Paul Watson ordering someone to throw stink bombs onto another ship’s deck, or an ALF member torching a delivery truck just to make a statement of stop killing animals; these people need to be taught the lesson of the law and be harshly punished for what they do. If they spend enough time in prison they will stop. I have no problem with people that want to support animal rights but please do it in a legal fashion because if I had my way the people committing these crimes for animals they would be sent to prison for a long time.

What is The ALF Good For?

          Today I would like to talk about the very controversial animal rights activist group the Animal Liberation Front or ALF. This group has been responsible for a number of acts against meat packing plants, animal production and research facilities. These terrorist cells use a direct action approach to handling any mistreatment they see. They are a known terrorist organization that is destroying people’s lives for animals and here are some facts about them.

            A brief history on the ALF from their website begins with the groups beginnings in England in the 1970’s with it being officially named Animal Liberation Front in 1976 after Ronnie Lee originally from the Band of Mercy was released from prison for the first time. “Taking shape in the mid-1990s, the numerous anti-vivisection struggles provoking controversy in England can be seen as a second wave of direct action, following the first wave that began in the 1960s with the actions of hunt saboteur groups. The new struggles often overlap with the ALF, but they are also independent of it. Whereas the ALF is an underground movement pursuing illegal tactics such as property destruction” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). The group migrated to the US in the 1980’s where it has taken hold of twenty countries worldwide. This group has been a part of terrorizing the economic stability of a country by any way possible which includes arson and explosives. “Thus, contemporary direct action movements for animal liberation are diverse, powerful, and effective, and they are growing in sophistication and strength. In Britain, animal liberation movements now threaten the viability of the multi-billion dollar vivisection and pharmaceutical industry and therefore pose a serious economic threat.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History).

           They seem to encourage the US and British Government to try and shut them down just like the US tried so hard to stop Al Qaeda. They state “Whatever actions animal exploitation industries and governments take against the animal liberation movement, they will no more stop it than US soldiers were able to quell North Vietnamese armies or the resistance movement spreading throughout Iraq, or the Israelis can stop the Palestinians in their efforts to achieve their goals.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). The ALF are antagonizing the governments just as Al Qaeda did after September 11, 2001. They also like to boast their so called achievements of effectively being able to cost American tax payers money which in essence could be going to help rebuild the economy. “According to FBI testimony to Congress in Feb 2002, since 1996 the ALF and ELF have committed over 600 "criminal acts" that caused $43 million in damage to animal industries.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History).. They are in full support of causing as much destruction and damage as possible to any company having animals for their business. “The Animal Liberation Movement is a loosely-associated collection of cells of people who intentionally violate the law in order to free animals from captivity and the horrors of exploitation. As activists in one cell do not know activists in another cell, their non-hierarchical structure and anonymity prevents legal authorities from breaking up the organization. Animal Liberation activists break into any building or compound - be it a fur farm or university laboratory - in order to release and/or rescue animals. They also destroy property in order to prevent further harm done to animals and to weaken exploitation industries economically” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). They have been effective in their philosophy to a point; the FBI instated Operation Backfire to help capture a set of eco-terrorists as the FBI calls them. Since the operation has been set into effect they have been successful in solving “…more than 40 criminal acts ranging from vandalism to arson have been solved. Seventeen individuals have been indicted, and 15 of them pled guilty and were sentenced in 2007 to jail time ranging from 37 months to 188 months” (Investigation, 2008). After reading the some of the attacks that the FBI reported on their website I was sick to my stomach. On January 3, 2000 “At approximately 1:00 a.m., on January 3, 2000, unknown suspects set three separate fires on the grounds of the Rancho Veal Corporation in Petaluma, California. Subsequent investigation determined that an accelerant, believed to be diesel fuel, was used in the attack. The fires damaged office space, two trucks, and an equipment storage facility, resulting in an estimated $150,000 in damages. On March 16, 2000, the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office released a communiqué stating that a cell of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a terrorist animal rights movement, claimed responsibility for the fires. A similar act of attempted arson had been claimed by the ALF against the Rancho Veal Corporation in February 1997” (Investigation, Reports and Publications, 2001). I found this really upsetting because it is close to where I grew up as a child for so many years. I also found that another attack happened on January 15, 2000 at the Petaluma Farms processing plant. It was disturbing to think that an industry that is local company that supports our local economy in a relatively small community was targeted by this terrorist group so close to my home. I buy eggs from Petaluma farms regularly when at my parent’s house and  I never imagined a terrorist group trying to destroy such a local business where family friends work for their company and could have had their jobs affected by these absurd actions. Instead of helping animals they are just being trying to cause damage and be reckless to those in any animal business. Their focus is to “save animals from cruel situations” but how is burning a truck saving anything but the satisfaction of the rush of adrenaline they get by committing a crime. They did say that destroying property was to weaken the company economically expect they must not realize that burning some trucks really only is a nescience to the company because it only slows down transportation not production. So really the ALF members that did these acts are just idiots that just want to have fun destroying property. They seem to almost need a reason to do it and they found one through the ALF.

               We have seen these sorts of actions before as I explained in past blogs Paul Watson of SSCS fabricates his own reality so he can sleep at night when he commits illegal acts. This group I feel does mostly the same thing by not only committing crimes but they also think they are helping the animals and the world by doing this. They also have five ways that animal liberation helps human rights on their website to try and lure people into their cause. These five ways are “Less abuse and less exploitation of vulnerable human beings, less world hunger and starvation, a healthier population, less destruction of the planet, and fewer dangerous drugs being tested on humans.” (Front, How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights). These are explained further with little to no facts backing them up. They seem just to make statements that sound good to an average person that has no knowledge of the topic. One of their claims are “A driving force behind the destruction of the tropical rainforests: American meat habit” (Front, How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights) this has no references to back up they simply just put this so called fact on their website without supporting it with any data. This tells me that the ALF has zero conception of reality because they slap so called facts up there hoping people will believe them. They may have had their claims be supported in the past but they certainly don’t have them all supported now. This terrorist group has shown that they just allege statements that they think will bring in another person willing to commit illegal acts to support their cause, even if that is destroying property instead of saving animals from murder and abuse. ALF is a terrorist organization that is working in the US and affecting local economies near you and needs to be stopped  so someone doesn’t end up losing their life because of their acts.

References

Front, A. L. (n.d.). Animal Liberation Front History. Retrieved may 2011, from Animal Liberation Front: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/Premise_History/ALF_History.htm

Front, A. L. (n.d.). How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights. Retrieved May 2011, from Animal Liberation Front: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Health/ALbenefitsHR.htm

Investigation, F. B. (2001). Reports and Publications. Retrieved May 2011, from Federal Bureau of Investigations: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terror/terrorism-2000-2001/?searchterm=ALF

Investigation, F. B. (2008, November 19). Stories. Retrieved May 2011, from Federal Bureau of Investigation: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/november/backfire_11908