Key Link: FCUSA Press Kit Special Feature: Safe Farms Campaign.

Update: Farmers and Ranchers Win Battle for Safe Farms

Waco, TEXAS: U.S. District Judge Walter Smith dismissed an animal rights group's lawsuit that sought the release of contact information for those using legal predator control assistance from the U.S. government. The judge declared giving out such information would violate the federal Freedom of Information Act, which exempts the release of people's personal information, adding that farmers and ranchers could be at risk from attack and harassment from extremists if the information was released.(1)

The Texas Farm Bureau and the American Farm Bureau Federation battled the Animal Protection Institute (API), a Sacramento, California-based animal rights group, which filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the information in 1998. API vowed to appeal their recent loss, bemoaning the limited number of wild animals killed in the control program while, oddly enough, ignoring the far greater numbers of sheep, lambs and other domesticated animals brutally killed by the predators.

Fur Commission USA's executive director Teresa Platt gave expert testimony in the case, which pitted the public's right to know versus the security of small family farms.(2)

"Family farmers owe a big thank you to the Farm Bureau lawyers who argued this case and the judge who used common sense to rule in support of Safe Farms," stated Platt.

Hit Lists of Resource Providers and Others

The tactic of attacking resource providers and others using FOIA information is not new. Using the FOIA, a group run by a woman appropriately named Pat Wolff, New West Research (NWR), obtained the names and addresses of all New Mexicans who have asked Wildlife Services to control wildlife, both lethally and non-lethally, for whatever reason. NWR took these names and addresses, 25 pages of full contact information on anyone in New Mexico who has participated in the wildlife control program, and posted it to a website entitled "Hall of Shame." Topping the list is the quote, "The Earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses," implying that generational ranchers and sheepherders are somehow killing the Earth. More an indictment against where the "New" West is going, NWR's Hall of Shame is the world's very first hit list for shepherds.(3)

Fur farmers are familiar with this tactic. The Final Nail: Destroying the Fur Industry - A Guided Tour has been posted for years on the Internet, introduced by the same quote: "The Earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses." The Final Nail lists farm addresses for fur farmers and, since fur farms are predominantly family-owned, those addresses are the home addresses of small family farmers.(3)

The Final Nail includes chapters entitled "Maximum Destruction NOT Minimum Damage", "Smashing the Furriers" and three chapters on incendiary devices.

Extremists have used these addresses to coordinate midnight raids on farms, releasing, then abandoning, domesticated animals to become road kill. These terrorists have mailed razor blades and death threats to farms where children routinely fetch the mail. They have used the information in The Final Nail to build incendiary devices and commit arson.

Also circulating out there are the famous hit lists published by various ecoterror groups, one of which is credited for some of the Unabomber's selection of targets, three of whom died. The Unabomber's final target had retired a year earlier, but the package bomb was opened by Gilbert Murray of the California Forestry Association. Murray was killed instantly.(4)

Physicians providing abortions were targeted in 1997 when their photos and home addresses were posted on the Internet, with a graphic of dripping blood on the home page. Doctors who were injured were listed in gray text; those who died were crossed out. The site gained attention in October 1998 when a physician was slain in his New York home and his name was crossed out soon after.(5)

Most recently, a rabid animal rights group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), has published not just names and addresses of those working at the company they target for destruction. They've broadened this hit list tactic to include vendors, suppliers, bankers, insurance brokers and even janitors involved with the target company.(6)

Lack of Regulation of Conflict Industry

Over the last decade, a new industry has sprung up: the multi-billion-dollar, multinational "conflict industry". It produces no goods and provides no services. Its only product is conflict. It has no code of ethics. It has no standards. It is constantly in search of targets du jour and ever-more-extreme tactics. Wanted posters, hit lists and attacks on property and people, civil disobedience for photo ops are now the norm.

Corporations and groups that threaten the safety of the public should lose their non-profit status. Although eco-terrorists and thugs are generally considered out of the mainstream, groups operating with non-profit status are supposed to work for the public benefit, not circulate thinly veiled threats masquerading as information.(7)

Where, oh, where, is the Internal Revenue Service when you need them?

NOTES:

(1) Judge Dismisses Suit vs. Ranchers, Associated Press, Oct. 21, 2002.

(2) Farm Bureau Secures Order Against Release of Personal Data, Nov. 4, 1999; Farm Bureau Wins Bid to Protect Confidentiality, FCUSA advisory notice, Feb. 11, 2000.

(3) Good Shepherds, Sheep, Predators and Seasons of Good Will, FCUSA commentary, Nov. 23, 1999 by Teresa Platt, Executive Director, FCUSA

(4) Unabomber information at www.furcommission.com/news/newsF04a.htm

(5) For information on the Nuremburg Trial see http://www.ppcw.org/news/nuremberg.asp

(6) AG Reilly Announces 43 Indictments Against 12 People in Connection with International Animal Rights Extremist Group: Defendants Charged with Stalking, Making Threats against a Boston Insurance Employee and His Family, Office of Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, Oct. 25, 2002.

(7) See FCUSA Press Kit Special Features: Regulating the Conflict Industry and Safe Farms Campaign.

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. See also Teresa's blog and Facebook.

To take a cyber-tour of a fur farm, visit FCUSA's Fur on Film.

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