Animal liberation raid turns into real-life horror story

[moroni]

Associated Press
Posted October 3 2003, 8:13 AM EDT

SULTAN, Wash. -- An animal rights group's plan to free 10,000 mink from a farm turned deadly after many of the emancipated mustelids became cannibals while others went on a carnivorous feeding frenzy.

About 9,000 of the freed mink have been returned to Roesler Brothers Fur Farm since the Aug. 25 break-in, but keeping them alive has been a challenge.

Normally, only siblings are caged together, but workers cannot readily determine which of the recaptured mink are related, said Kate Roesler.

``The mink are fine when they're litter mates together, but when they're not they're quite vicious and they're cannibals,'' Roesler said. ``They do eat each other, and that's what we're battling.''

Days after the break-in, starving mink attacked a menagerie of exotic birds, a flock of chickens and even a Labrador retriever.

A few mink have been seen recently eating fish along local rivers and one turned up last week at a fruit stand on the edge of this town about 40 miles northeast of Seattle.

About 1,000 are still missing.

<snip>
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/custom/fringe/sfl-103animallover,0,5943469.story?coll=sfla-news-fringe

[mkregel]

1. Shame on me for laughing...

and please forgive me.

But damn I find irony funny...

[ott]

2. Wouldn't be a problem...

If gluttonous assholes didn't condone killing for clothing in the first place.

[mkregel]

4. Please allow me to clarify

Yes...I don't support killing for fur. However, I think the animal liberation types are committing vandalism. What they do reflects poorly on other liberals and on the animal liberation cause as a whole.

What they are doing above is ill-thought out, stupid and destructive.

What's worse is that the cause is hurting itself at a time of victory - fur demand has gone down steadily every year. People want less and less fur coats and are happy to get imitation fur. But the above animal liberation groups don't see that and are shooting themselves in the foot.

You don't win a war like this by vandalizing private property - it only builds resentment against your cause. The way you win this war is to run ads like the one in the previous post staring Persia White. Ads like the above one will win support, and make those considering buying fur think twice.

So when the minks (which are one of the more vicious mammals on this planet) were turned loose they did what they naturally did, they hunted prey, causing fear and shock to the idiotic 'animal liberators' and hopefully teaching them a lesson. At least I hope they got it through their thick, self-righteous skulls that damaging private property is no way to win public opinion.

And the irony here has to be perfectly clear...to not see it is to be absolutely humorless.

[demsrule4life]

6. I wonder how much animal testing was done

for all that makeup she is wearing.

[damnraddem]

8. Hopefully, it has done some good toward making sure ...

that the makeup is not harmful to her.

I refuse to buy products that should be tested on animals but are not -- e.g., laundry detergents.

[curse10]

18. probably none

reputable cosmetic companies no longer test on animals.

[damnraddem]

7. I'll think about that while I put on my leather belt ...

preparing to go out for a nice veal dinner.

If we're not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?

PETA = scum

[mkregel]

9. I wouldnt mind PETA

If they just stuck to running ads and stayed away from the publicity stunts.

Their ads are thought-provoking and send their message very clearly. Their publicity stunts, well, make me want to skin them and turn them into coats quite frankly...

[Maine-i-acs]

13. That wasn't PETA this time -

- it was ALF. Who IMO are a bit more loopy than PETA. PETA's thrown some blood at people and staged some protests but ALF takes this a little further.

[Rainbowreflect]

10. Hey damnraddem

If we're not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?
Just remember you are too. ;-)

[DCDemo]

12. Yep, we are made of meat too, you are correct.

I guess that will be the next PETA "shock plan" - eat people, or trick restaurants into serving human meat to make a point.

Fucking grow up and do something productive instead of destroying private property. You have no right to do that, no matter how much you disagre with someone as long as they are operating legally.

PETA and the ALF have some good goals, but a very infantile approach.

I am an animal-loving, peaceful guy, but if some activist were to in any way harrass my mother when she wears her coat (one or twice a year for special occasions), I'd clean the floor with him/her.

Although I am not personally a fan of fur, and have talked with her about it, and why she shouldn't buy more, she also wanted a coat like that for all of her life, and when she got to a point in her life where she could realize that dream, she did.

I'm not going to take that away from her...and she's not going to buy any more fur.

[RebelOne]

17. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. n/t

[DBoon]

11. Medical testing

Think of the diabetic humans who depend on insulin. Discovery of insulin involved animal experiments that ended up sacrificing the dogs. How many human lives were saved by this discovery alone.

[bahrbearian]

15. You should go to dinner with Hannibal Lector !

[curse10]

19. Do you think your "clever" comments actually make a point?

And, this article is not about PETA. ALF and PETA are not related.

[Maine-i-acs]

3. Oh, the irony. Ecological disaster ...

... spread by those that think they're doing something good for the planet and the animals. They've introduced an upper-end predator into the ecosystem. Mink eat bird eggs right? Perhaps they'll prey on some spotted owl chicks too.

[damnraddem]

5. A further illustration of how scummy so-called animal liberation is.

They know nothing about preserving species, about environmental needs, about the needs of the animals concerned. They are only focused on their idiotic ideology of individual rights for all animals. In this case, they are responsible for environmental damage as well as mistreatment of the animals they claimed to 'liberate.' They should be caught and harshly prosecuted for their crimes.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. While I'm all for kindness to animals and that

the "animal rights activists" at the ALF level are bourgeois brats. That's the label that one of my radical friends applied to students who went off the deep end back in the late 1960s/early 1970s and started pulling dumb stunts like planting bombs and robbing banks. It was more a matter of casting themselves as the outlaw heroes in their own imagined film script than of actually doing something constructive.

Anybody who released thousands of caged minks all at once obviously didn't bother to learn anything about minks before doing so.

(My father grew up in an area of Minnesota that has a lot of mink ranches, and while his family never raised minks, a lot of his neighbors did, so I heard plenty about what the little critters are capable of.)

I should think that part of loving animals would be to learn something about their habits, not just using them as props in your own action-adventure film.

[Loyal]

16. Shit

:(