Animal Rights Cambridge
In the News
Here are some recent news articles concerning animal rights in cambridgeshire and further! The first articles are taken from Cambridge Evening News.
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Animals feel too
From
TIPU Aziz is mistaken in believing that British society has a humanoid perception of animals.
Any discerning person knows that animals feel pain, fear and pleasure and have varying degrees of intelligence and awareness.
Tipu Aziz has a Home Office licence to inflict severe pain and suffering on Felix, a young rhesus macaque monkey.
We believe that animals have moral value and as all religions claim to be opposed to cruelty we would expect them to be opposed to vivisection.
03 May 2007
Ruffling feathersFrom Pat Griffin
RE: "'Regret' over cage protest of Joan, 88" (News, April 27):
In his continued attempt to justify his cruel and unreliable research he seeks to undermine all legitimate protests by peaceful moral campaigners.
His recent support for cosmetic testing on animals and urging the renewed use of great apes, both of which have been outlawed for many years in this country on moral grounds, is an indication of his arrogance and insensitivity to public concern, but above all to the suffering of animals in his charge.
He says that if beautifying oneself through animal tests is proven to reduce human suffering then it is not wrong to use animals.
He insists Felix will not feel any pain because surgery is done under full anaesthetic. When animals recover from this very invasive brain surgery they will undoubtedly suffer extreme pain and distress.
I challenge Tipu Aziz to contrast any alleged violence to living beings by animal rights campaigners with that going on inside British laboratories every day. In over 100 years of peaceful campaigning against what Gandhi called "the blackest of all crimes" I think history will show campaigners have been very restrained and far less extreme than those engaged in animal research.
03 May 2007
Brave work
From
IT IS a sad reflection on our society that cruelty and abuse of animals (and often to human beings too) only comes to the attention of the public by the brave work of undercover investigators, who endure great emotional trauma as they record the suffering so callously inflicted on sentient beings - in factory farming and vivisection laboratories (High Court to Scrutinise Animal Laws, March 14) and everywhere where animals are incarcerated.
But invoking the law is a real victory. The law usually only protects those in power.
26 March 2007
Harsh justice
From Amanda James
I WAS shocked and angered by the sentencing of Mark and Susane Taylor to 30 months and four years respectively and of Theresa Portwine to 15 months, for "conspiracy to interfere with contractual relationships so as to harm an animal research organisation".
These very severe sentences were handed down in the same week that a St Ives grandfather was sentenced to just 14 months for possession of 7,790 images of child pornography!
Under our current government, any animal rights-related action is potentially being criminalised, public money is being wasted on police time and lengthy court cases and ultimately, whenever possible, incredibly harsh custodial sentences appear to be being handed down.
20 March 2007
Cruel to poultry
From
FACTORY farming involves treating sentient beings, chickens, turkeys, ducks etc as if they are incapable of feeling pain.
They are crammed in their thousands into dimly lit, windowless sheds, totally deprived of fresh air and sunlight, forced to live on a build-up of their own excrement, which means they are vulnerable to infectious diseases, even if they are pumped full of antibiotics.
Once they are slaughtered, their manure which includes, quite often, pieces of their poor bodies, are distributed on farmland.
If the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus is present - and we know it can survive for weeks in bird faeces - it will be accessible to rats, foxes, wild birds, and humans.
Industrial cruelty to farm animals is on a mass scale, and awful. We should not live in ignorance of the intense suffering being perpetuated in secrecy in the countryside, not least in
24 February 2007
No balance
From Pat Griffin
I SUSPECT the programme Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing on BBC2 set out to discredit those opposed to the building of a new
The phlegmatic and egotistical attitude of Prof Tipu Aziz, Laurie Pycroft and Carolyn Lacey to the torment and suffering deliberately inflicted on unconsenting creatures I found quite chilling.
The 16-year-old pro-vivisection activist, Laurie Pycroft, euphorically dissects a lamb's heart, pickles it and displays it on his mantelpiece like a memorial to Frankenstein. I have to wonder what his future contribution will be to a caring and civilised society.
The brain researcher Prof Aziz surely alienated many of his peers as he puffed away on his cancer-causing weed whilst demanding that we accept his altruistic concern for human health. And Carolyn Lacey, experimenting with rats, who was about to slice into Philip's brain, illustrated how possible it is to become desensitised.
If animal experiments have been instrumental in saving some human lives, it has also been instrumental in destroying thousands of human lives and this is not good science.
This would have become apparent if the programme had been balanced and included contributions from some of the many anti-vivisection scientists like geneticist Kathy Archibald, Dr Gerard Bailey or Dr Andre Manache.
Instead we had the usual spurious accusations from Tipu Aziz and Colin Blakemore about animal rights "terrorists" in order to cloud their inability to debate reasonably and accurately.
J F Kennedy said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." But, unlike the violence and intimidation meted out to unconsenting living creatures inside laboratories every day, I am sure the SPEAK campaign will continue to protest peacefully and respect all life.
02 December 2006
I'm no criminal
From
I HAVE no objection to being classed as an animal rights extremist or terrorist ("A chilling history of threats and violence", News, October 10), since the term "terrorist" is used so indiscriminately it ceases to have meaning.
One might indeed regard it as an accolade since it was once used to describe Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and many other campaigners for justice.
But may I put the record straight? I have not yet chained myself to the animal research laboratory in
I staged two hunger strikes in
We will continue to oppose all forms of animal abuse disguised as "legitimate business'".
■ Editor's note: The News regrets the inclusion of
12 October 2006
HLS in monkey farm row
MONKEYS used by Huntingdon Life Sciences for research are being factory farmed in "appalling conditions" according to an animal rights group.
The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection claims a 12-month undercover operation found the world's largest monkey breeding farm in Long Thanh,
BUAV says the farm, owned by Vietnamese/
Alistair Currie, BUAV's campaigns director, said:
"Life on the breeding farm is just the start of a lifetime of fear, pain and suffering for these intelligent and sensitive animals."
Andrew Gay, a spokesman for Huntington Life Sciences, refused to name any suppliers because of the potential for those companies to be targeted by animal rights activists. He said all suppliers were approved by the Home Office and Huntingdon Life Sciences visited firms to make sure they met the standards.
He said: "I would imagine we would be visiting them a few times a year at least."
A spokeswoman for the Home Office said: "We would be keen to obtain any evidence or information that animal breeding centres are no longer keeping to these strict guidelines."
04 October 2006
bravenet.com