The Senate voted 29-to-17 for the measure. It now goes to the state House, which last month passed a measure that would ask voters whether they want to reduce the penalty for cockfighting.
Last November, voters approved a statewide referendum that banned cockfighting in Oklahoma and made violations felonies. The proposal got 56 percent of the vote. The author of the Senate measure, Frank Shurden of Henryetta, says he thinks the penalties for cockfighting are too severe.
Opponents of the measure say the change would punish cockfighters with the equivalent of an expensive parking ticket. They say it would render the cockfighting ban unenforceable.
Source: http://oklahoman.com/cgi-bin/show_article?ID=997340&pic=none&TP=getbrief
The Chico Enterprise-Record reports that McDonald's employees called the Sheriff's Office at 7:15 in the morning after they "found a small fire had been set in an attempt to burn down the concrete-block building."
As with last week's attack, the arsonist(s) left behind their calling card: the spray-painted letters "A-L-F" (for "Animal Liberation Front") -- the same graffiti found at the other Chico McDonald's (and carved, incidentally, into a promotional object d'art from PETA last year).
Unlike the earlier arson attempt, this one appears to have been a simple fire, set without the benefit of plastic milk jugs filled with flammable liquids (what we're now calling the "Rod Coronado design").
The Enterprise-Record adds one interesting piece of information about last week's arson, writing that the two firebombs "had been lighted but failed to ignite." It would be fair to conclude, then, that the activists responsible for that attack intended to burn their target to the ground, rather than just putting unlit incendiary devices in place for shock value.
Sheriff's Sergeant Tony Borgman told KCRC-TV News last night that it is "too early to say it is the same people, but they have the same political beliefs."
Source: http://www.consumerfreedom.com/headline_detail.cfm?HEADLINE_ID=1820
News comes from New Jersey that animal rights group Farm Sanctuary is lobbying hard for a statewide law that would outlaw the most commonly employed veal production methods. There's a chance that the measure could pass as early as this week, even though Farm Sanctuary and its leader Gene Bauston (according to senior veterinarian Dr. Anne Pierok at the New Jersey Department of Animal Health) have "admitted in testimony that they don't know of the existence of any commercial veal operations in the state."
So why would Farm Sanctuary expend political capital to ban a form of animal husbandry in a state where nobody is practicing it? For the same reason it illegally funneled over $465,000 into Florida last year to outlaw "gestation crates" used by only a few pork farmers in that state. (Farm Sanctuary paid a $50,000 fine after election day.)
As in Florida, the current New Jersey bill is just a phony "trial balloon" -- an attempt to get an animal-rights law on the books somewhere, in order to legitimize subsequent battles in states where the stakes are higher. In Florida last year, the stakes were practically nonexistent, although two farmers were forced to slaughter their animals due to the cost of complying with the new law. Now, however, the Humane Society of the United States is organizing legislation and ballot measures to outlaw pork farming in Iowa -- a state where raising pigs adds over $2 billion to the economy and employs more than 87,000 people.
In New Jersey, Dr. Pierok is concerned -- as are experts from Rutgers University and the New Jersey Department of Agriculture -- that "not only is the bill unnecessary, but some aspects of it promoted by animal rights activists would actually be harmful to the animals." Animal care experts should be concerned, especially since New Jersey governor James McGreevey recently unveiled an "animal welfare task force" packed with notorious animal rights zealots -- including representatives from the Humane Society of the United States.
Source: http://www.consumerfreedom.com/headline_detail.cfm?HEADLINE_ID=1817
Two national experts on exotic Newcastle disease, a virus affecting domestic birds, will speak and take questions tonight about the impact the disease has had in Southern Nevada.
Dr. Reginald Johnson, a veterinary epidemiologist, and Dr. Henry Loper, a veterinary medical officer, will answer questions during a Clark County-sponsored television show on Cox cable Channel 4 between 7 and 7:30 p.m. Both experts are from the U.S. Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Inspection Service.
The disease has led to the death of hundreds of birds in a quarantine area that includes California, Arizona and Clark and Nye counties in Nevada. The disease, which first appeared in September in Los Angeles, kills more than 90 percent of birds that it infects, Johnson said Monday.
He said the disease is passed by people moving from areas with infected birds to other premises with birds, almost exclusively domesticated birds. One suspected contributor to the spread of the disease is the network of cockfighting in the Southwest, Johnson said.
Cockfighting is illegal in Nevada, but still occurs, authorities believe. Johnson said moving birds between the sites of cockfights is increasingly under scrutiny as a disease vector.
"Evidence to support that is mounting," he said. "At the very least, there are going to be some connections there."
Federal and state officials slapped a local quarantine on birds Jan. 16, after the infection was discovered in chickens near Nellis Air Force Base.
The state reported no new infections after mid-February, but Johnson cautioned that the quarantine restricting the movement of any domesticated birds is still in effect.
"It is still in effect and probably will be in effect until at least June 2003, maybe even beyond that," he said.
Violating of the quarantine could result in fines up to $600 and other civil penalties of up to $25,000.
Signs that birds are infected with exotic Newcastle disease may include coughing, sneezing, loss of appetite, a red swollen head, nasal discharge and depressed behavior. However, the surest sign of the disease is sudden death with no previous indication of illness, according to experts.
Johnson, based in Fort Collins, Colo., said the disease does not
appear to pose a human health threat, although it has been linked to mild human
eye infections in some cases.
North Carolina State University poultry scientists have developed a powerful new tool to aid the understanding of how chicken embryos develop.
The research of Dr. Paul Mozdziak, assistant professor of poultry science, and Dr. James Petitte, professor of poultry science, resulted in successfully transferring a gene into a chicken and establishing a line of chickens carrying that specific marker gene.
Currently, the chick embryo is often used as a model to understand normal and abnormal embryo development. The new lines of transgenic chicken provide a new tool that can be employed in studies aimed at understanding birth defects such as limb deformities and spina bifida. The researchers say learning the mechanisms behind how cells behave during embryo development could eventually provide clues to halting developmental disabilities and may lead to other uses not yet imagined, including improvements in human and animal health.
The research appears in the March edition of Developmental Dynamics.
"Although there are people who have made transgenic chickens before, no one has produced a transgenic chicken expressing a reporter gene that can be easily tracked," Mozdziak says. "We can now take cells from our transgenic chicken and put those cells into a chick embryo or another transgenic chicken and see how the cells behave and interact with each other."
"This tool provides the impetus to go to the next level of looking at avian stem cells in embryos, putting these stem cells in different places and seeing where they end up," Petitte says.
The researchers say gene transfer is much more complicated in chickens than in, say, mice. Chicken embryos contain about 50,000 cells before the egg is laid; gene transfer in other mammals involves inserting DNA into just one cell.
Mozdziak and Petitte developed the transgenic chicken by taking a RNA virus, or retrovirus, carrying a reporter gene – the lacZ gene, which is easy to detect and which expresses a protein, beta-galactosidase – and injecting it into the blastoderm, or layer of cells on the surface of the yolk, of freshly laid chicken eggs. The eggs were allowed to hatch, and chickens were screened for the presence of the lacZ gene. Eight of 15 male chickens that lived to sexual maturity carried the lacZ gene in their semen, the researchers say.
These eight chickens were then mated with female non-transgenic chickens. Of the chicks produced, two males tested positive for the lacZ gene. These two males were mated with normal females and 50 percent of their offspring contained the lacZ gene as expected.
Further, the second-generation chickens expressed beta-galactosidase, and the lacZ gene is apparently stable from generation to generation.
Petitte says that other transgenic chickens have carried the lacZ gene, but that this is the first time that a transgenic chicken line that expresses beta-galactosidase has been developed.
"This is a really powerful research tool, and it's the first time anyone has had this tool in avian biology," he said.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news
release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to
quote any part of this story, please credit North Carolina State
University as the original source. You may also wish to include the
following link in any citation: Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030311074337.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030311074337.htm