Animal Activist Denies Charges
David Barbarash, spokesman for Animal Liberation Front, says officials trying to discredit him

By Tom Waller

George Kalmon, president of the Wisconsin Mink Association, says attacks by animal rights groups are becoming more violent and dangerous.

A release of 2,000 animals at a Plymouth-area mink ranch and burning of a nearby mink feed plant in Sheboygan County in August are not among the most violent examples.

After those incidents, nine miles apart and within an hour of each other, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) took credit.

Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA, goes a step further than Kalmon. She says threats and attacks against ranchers and researchers who work with animals are acts of terrorism.

And what does the ALF have to say?

"I reject the label of terrorist," said David Barbarash, 35, the public voice of the underground ALF. "That is not within the realm of tactics in the ALF. Our activists are very committed to saving lives. It just happens the lives they are saving are animal lives."

Barbarash, who works as a mail and package courier in Vancouver, British Columbia, became the public spokesman for the ALF July 4, replacing Katie Fedor. He said he is too well known by law enforcement officials to be involved in direct action, and that Fedor wanted to put her energies into fighting a grand jury in Minnesota.

Activist Darren Thurston and Barbarash have been accused of waging a campaign of terror. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police believe they are responsible for sending razor blades and possibly explosives through the mail.

In March of last year, after a three-year investigation, the RCMP arrested Barbarash and Thurston and charged them on 27 counts of mailing items with intent to do bodily harm. Five of the mailings were addressed to news media.

Five counts have been dropped, and Barbarash and Thurston are out on bail. A trial is set for next July.

"I had nothing to do with those crimes," said Barbarash, in a cell phone conversation he said would surely be monitored by Canadian security intelligence. "I'm not arguing that these things didn't happen or that they aren't violent, but they are not being done by the ALF. They are being done by other activists.

"There is not one shred of physical evidence against me," he continued.

"Police can easily discredit someone by laying a charge of gross violence. I believe the RCMP is doing that. They don't have anything else to fight with, so they are fighting a media war."

Barbarash became an activist 20 years ago in the anti-nuclear peace movement and subsequently developed strong feelings about injustice to animals and the degradation of the environment.

"It was the defenselessness of animals that really stuck with me," he said.

"We have a choice to stand up and say 'no.' Animals do not have a choice."

Barbarash said fur farming has been the ALF's focus recently, but other industries also have received attention.

"Fur, leather, wool, meat, chicken, dairy - animals do not exist for us to use just because we have a taste for their flesh or their milk," he said.

"There is even abuse in the dairy industry. To have a cow constantly impregnated or milked is not natural."

Barbarash said the release of 100 fox at Gunnink Fur Farm in Chandler, Minn., Sept. 12 was the 62nd release by the ALF in the past five years.

Other recent actions, he said, include freeing 46 dogs from a Biodevices laboratory where pacemaker experiments are performed, as well as a pet store monkey in Long Island.

Barbarash, in his job to win hearts and minds and influence public opinion, uses an analogy from WWII.

"Certainly resistance fighters against the Nazis were not considered terrorists although they were destroying property and in some cases killing and injuring," he said. "Their cause was the cause of justice. They were seen as freedom fighters. The ALF does not view it much differently.

"In our society, humans don't place the value on animals at the same level as humans. Even though that is the prevailing attitude, it does not mean it is the correct one. I don't ever see the two sides seeing eye to eye on this."

The RCMP isn't buying Barbarash's rhetoric. It has called him an "animal rights extremist and anti-fascist" because of groups with which he has been linked.

The groups include: Anti-Racist Action, the Anti-Fascist Militia, the Militant Direct Action Task Force, ALF's Justice Department, and the tree-spiking Earth First.

More tentatively, Barbarash has also been linked with the David Organization, which is the source of death threats to a chief justice in British Columbia.

The RCMP suspects Barbarash of using a Student Activist Network to promote resistance to "militarism" and "imperialism" by asking activists to "expose and oppose" the Aerospace North America Trade Show in Vancouver "where merchants of death and war mongers get business done."

His criminal record started in 1982 when he was convicted of possession of narcotics. In 1987 he was one of the "Kentucky Fried (Chicken) Five" in Toronto who pleaded guilty to mischief resulting in willful damage, possession of burglary tools, and possession of stolen property.

The original charges against Barbarash in 1987 also accused him of possessing explosives, carrying weapons and vandalizing the University of Toronto dentistry school. They were dropped in plea bargaining.

In 1992 Barbarash and Thurston released animals from a University of Alberta laboratory and caused $50,000 in damage. Thurston went to jail, but Barbarash fled. He was arrested in California and extradited to Canada for trial.

A judge called the zealousness of Barbarash's beliefs "frightening," said he posed a "danger to the public," and sentenced him to jail.

In 1995 the RCMP alleged Barbarash and Thurston sent two dangerous mailings to Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel - an envelope rigged with a razor blade attached to a mouse trap, and a pipe bomb packed with nails.

Pipe bombs also were sent to Aryan Nations leader Charles Scott, to Dr. Ted Mitenko of the cattle biotechnology firm Alta Genetics, and to John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, an anti-terrorist think tank.

Barbarash denies it all. And, he adds, he has been on the receiving end of terroristic threats.

"A number of them have been quite violent," he said. "I've received death threats by e-mail. One of them came from a radio station in Southwest Minnesota yesterday."

See also:

David Barbarash : Profile of ALF's New Spokesman FCUSA report, Oct. 13, 1999; also available in PDF format.

For further information contact: Teresa Platt, Executive Director, Fur Commission USA, PMB 506, 826 Orange Avenue, Coronado, CA 92118-2698 USA, (619) 575-0139, (619) 575-5578/fax, furfarmers@aol.com, www.furcommission.com.

Home

© 1998-2008 Fur Commission USA