By JAMES C. LOUGHRIE
Valley Press Staff Writer
In the one-page letter to Los Angeles County's top prosecutor, Daniel Paden, a cruelty caseworker with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asked Cooley that all of the 21 men cited be tried for maximum sentences. Paden wrote suggesting that any convicted person associated with the cockfight Feb. 13 near 185th Street East and Avenue H-6, be banned from animal contact for life and "required to undergo thorough psychological evaluations followed by mandatory counseling."
The cockfight led to 21 citations issued, as well as sheriff's deputies and the county department of animal control confiscating 93 roosters set to be euthanized.
Though the case is still under investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the letter came after several county residents contacted PETA asking for help, said Martin Mersereau , the organization's casework manager.
"I've got 100 e-mails from people I still have to reply to," Mersereau said.
"It's hard for most people with a heart and soul to understand that there's a thriving subculture that enjoys seeing animals tear each other apart."
The organization is also pitching a public service announcement to run the in the Antelope Valley that features Dennis Franz, from the television show "NYPD Blue."
The seizure of roosters Feb. 13 was the third since November in the Valley.
Kaye Michelson, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Control, said the department picked up two birds from an east Palmdale cockfight in early February.
In November, 26 dead roosters and five survivors were seized from a Littlerock fight.
Mersereau said that the number of cockfights busted in the county isn't unusual.
"In an area as large as Los Angeles County, that's sort of what we see along these lines on a daily basis," he said.
Source: http://avpress.com/n/thsty8.hts
Courtesy: Gerry C.
Work experience
2003-present. Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine (PCRM), Washington D.C., USA.
Consultancy-based researcher for this high-profile charitable organization,
which promotes alternatives to animal use in scientific research. Current
project entails the research and compilation of a position paper critiquing
the use of animals in the identification of human teratogens, with the
objective of publication in international scientific journals to help shift
current practice in favor of humane alternatives. Duties also include
reviewing and co-authoring concurrent projects of
colleagues.
Source: http://www.animalconsultants.com/consultants/bailey_jarrod.htm
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Feb 24 2005 | |
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By Paul James, The Journal | |
A Newcastle scientist is spearheading a campaign to end medical research on animals.
But Dr Jarrod Bailey is no animal rights activist and his argument is founded entirely on the belief that it simply does not work.
As scientific director of Europeans for Medical Progress, Dr Bailey, 34, said "archaic" animal methods have either harmed humans or set research back by decades.
The group say scientists are not making best use of new technology that would allow the same experiments to take place using human tissue rather than mice or apes.
Following last week's defence of animal testing at Newcastle's Centre for Life by Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, he said academics are stifling progress as much as the major drugs companies.
Dr Bailey, who lives in Corbridge, Northumberland, and is project development coordinator for the University of Newcastle's School of Population and Health Sciences, was appointed to the group in December.
He said: "We want an end to vivisection because of its lack of relevance to human medicine. There are historic examples, like penicillin, the introduction of which was delayed by 10 years because it was given to a rabbit and didn't work. Even after thalidomide had harmed about 15,000 people, they still struggled to show similar birth defects in animals."
He says research into the likes of cancer, brain diseases and hormone replacement therapy has been held back by a reliance on animal methods. He is now preparing for a series of head-to-head debates with those who defend animal testing, including one later this year with Professor Blakemore.
He said relating results of animal testing to how drugs will affect humans can be as unreliable as guessing the result of a coin toss. "The ethical side is a big dilemma, but that is removed when you present people with the information that animal methods are not useful," he said. "They haven't got us very far at all.
"Colin Blakemore uses examples like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to defend the animal model but never substantiates his claims with any hard science. What we have learned about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's has all been from studying human beings."
After commissioning an independent study that found 82pc of GPs thought animal data can be misleading when applied to humans, Europeans for Medical Progress is now trying to persuade the Government to launch an independent study of how effective animal research has been.
* Anyone who would like to find out more can contact www.curedisease.net
As he urged closer ties with Europe Monday, President Bush played down the current political disputes. "No power on earth will ever divide us," he said.
That may be true when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. But his remark ironically hints at a transatlantic chasm over US and European values, and the role each side assigns to a fundamental facet of human life: religious faith.
Two events last year neatly frame the challenge: In the United States, a California man tried to remove "One Nation, Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Americans cried foul — roughly 90% wanted to keep the phrase — and on June 15, the Supreme Court halted the bid on procedural grounds.
Three days later, in Brussels, officials agreed on the final text of the European Union's new Constitution. The charter made no mention of God, despite calls that it recognize Europe's Christian roots.
Indeed, its secularism has led to jokes that Europe is one big "blue" state. But Europeans aren't laughing. Buffeted by the crosscurrents of secularism, Christianity, and Islam — and mindful of a history of religious violence — they are wrestling with their values and identity as never before.
"The clash between those who believe and those who don't believe will be a dominant aspect of relations between the US and Europe in the coming years," says Jacques Delors, a former president of the European Commission. "This question of a values gap is being posed more sharply now than at any time in the history of European-US relations since 1945."
Religion's role in public life, and its influence on politics, have been center-stage questions worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001. But the debate in Europe has been complicated by the continent's difficulty in integrating its fast-growing Muslim immigrant minority. It has been sharpened by tragedies such as the bombing of a Madrid train station last March, and the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist last fall.
Those incidents "will reinforce secularism" in Europe, predicts Patrick Weil, a sociologist of religion at the Sorbonne in Paris. "The tendency now in Europe is to say we have to be clear on the limits to religious intervention" in public life. "We are not going to sacrifice women's equality, democracy, and individual freedoms on the altar of a new religion."
Secularists who think like that are swimming in friendly waters in Europe, where religious convictions and practice have dropped sharply in recent decades, and where mainstream churches — especially the Catholic Church — continue to lose members and influence.
Today, just 21% of Europeans say religion is "very important" to them, according to the most recent European Values Study, which tracks attitudes in 32 European countries. A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly three times as many Americans, 59%, called their faith "very important."
Although a Gallup poll found last year that 44% of Americans say they attend a place of worship once a week, the average figure in Europe is only 15%, although the picture varies widely across the Continent. (See map.)
Godless secularism?
For some Europeans, that slump marks a defeat for moral values at the hands of godless secularism.
"The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion," complains Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian politician whose ambition to become the European commissioner for justice was thwarted last year by the European Parliament, which objected to his description of homosexuality as a sin.
"It is an atheist, nihilistic religion — but it is a religion that is obligatory for all," Mr. Buttiglione adds.
Luis Lopez Guerra, the Spanish government's point man in its campaign to wrest from Catholic influence social legislation on questions such as abortion, divorce, and gay marriage, sees things differently.
He wonders why, in a country where less than half the population ever goes to church, he should have found a Bible and a crucifix on his desk, along with the Constitution, when he was sworn in as undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice a year ago.
The Spanish government's plans to legalize gay marriage this spring, to liberalize divorce and abortion laws, and to permit stem-cell research, do not represent an attempt to impose an atheist state religion, he insists. Rather, he says, they "extend civil rights and make the law independent of Catholic dogma.
He adds, "The government has a responsibility to represent the majority of the people. Our policy has to depend on the people's will, not on the preferences of the Catholic church."
Spain is currently the front line in the Vatican's rear-guard battle to retain church influence over public policy in Europe. But with public opinion ranged firmly on the government's side, there seems little it can do but make its displeasure known.
Pope John Paul II lashed out at Madrid recently, accusing authorities of "restriction of religious freedom" and "relegating faith to the private sphere and opposing its public expression."
The changes in Spain, Catholic church leaders worry, are part of a broader trend. Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, recently attacked "a new holy inquisition ... motivated predominantly by prejudice toward all that is Christian."
Other traditional churches have felt the same cold winds. The president of the French Protestant Federation, Jean-Arnold de Clermont, warned Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin last December of a climate of "secularist zeal" that was undermining all faiths.
Such zeal has known peaks and troughs over the centuries, but it is not new to Europe, where political leaders and ordinary citizens experienced religion and felt its weight in ways quite unknown to Americans.
The differences are rooted in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment, the philosophical revolution that laid the foundations of the modern Western world, was interpreted quite differently by Americans and Europeans in one crucial respect.
Enlightenment divergence
In Europe, says Grace Davie, an expert on religion at Exeter University in England, "the Enlightenment was seen as freedom from religion ... getting away from dogma, whereas in the [US] it meant freedom to believe."
In America, a country founded in part by religious dissidents fleeing an oppressive government, "religious groups are seen as protecting individuals against the interference of the state," says Mr. Weil.
In Europe, on the other hand, the post-Enlightenment state "is seen as protecting individuals from the intrusion of religious groups," Weil argues, after centuries during which the official church, be it Catholic or Protestant, had always been closely identified with temporal powers.
While religion and democracy have always been intertwined in America, where churches were at the forefront of battles against slavery and in favor of civil rights, this has by no means been the case in Europe. There, estab-lished churches in countries such as Spain and France long opposed political reform.
European mistrust of public religion is heightened even further, however, when it is mixed with patriotism in the kind of rhetoric that President Bush often uses.
"God and patriotism are an explosive mixture," cautions Nicolas Sartorius, an éminence grise of the Spanish left who spent many years in jail during Gen. Francisco Franco's dictatorship. The dictator's guiding ideology, he recalls pointedly, was known as "Catholic nationalism."
After a tortured, centuries-long history of wars fought over religion, in whose name millions died, Europeans are deeply skeptical today of patriotic exhortations infused with religious meaning, says Karsten Voigt, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's adviser on relations with Washington.
And nowhere is this truer than in Germany, he adds. "The mixture of patriotism and religion is anathema and heresy in German religious life because it was misused and went too far in the past," Mr. Voigt explains. "Remember, German soldiers in World War I wore belt buckles reading 'Gott Mitt Uns' [God With Us]."
Dominique Moisi, one of France's most respected political analysts, agrees. Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, "the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening," he says. "We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare."
How values affect policy
EU members have gone further than any other group of nations in pooling their national sovereignty in the interests of collective security. It's a concept completely foreign to the US, where Bush has repeatedly insisted that he will do whatever he sees fit to protect Americans.
That divergence "is a matter of principle, a matter of values," says Martin Ortega, an analyst at the EU's Institute for Security Studies in Paris. "Europe's history has led Europeans to a more cosmopolitan worldview, which tries to understand 'the other,' " he suggests.
One of the implications of this approach, Mr. Ortega argues, is that a ban on the use of force except in extreme circumstances has become a European value, just like its corollary: reliance on international law.
That, too, sets Europe apart from America in a fundamental way when it comes to coping with world crises.
The differences were stark over the war in Iraq. They persist with regard to Iran, where Europe's three largest nations are pursuing diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from enriching uranium — efforts the US has refused to join.
The values gap is evident in Washington's wariness of multilateral approaches to world affairs: The US has rejected the Kyoto treaty, designed to slow global warming, which came into force last week, while the EU embraced it. And Europe supports the International Criminal Court, which the US opposes.
Some European leaders, eager to mend diplomatic fences with the US, fear that such different perspectives could tempt Washington to dismiss Europe as an unreliable ally.
"In some segments of conservative US opinion, anti-European feeling is on the rise," worries Mr. Voigt. "They see us as soft on terrorism, or as simply immoral."
On the contrary, retorts Ortega, who describes himself as a Catholic believer, "I interpret my religion in a more modern, humane, and universal manner. I find the American manner quite antiquated. For example, I'm sure that when President Bush applied the death penalty in Texas, or decided to use force in Iraq, he felt it compatible with his religious beliefs."
In fact, the fundamental values that Europe and the US proclaim are almost identical.
Few Americans would quibble over the proposed EU Constitution's declaration that "the Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights." It goes on to promote "tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men."
Philosophical differences
These shared sentiments, however, flow from different metaphysical head waters. In his inaugural address last month, Bush founded his commitment to human rights on the belief "that every man and woman on this earth ... bear[s] the image of the Maker of Heaven and Earth."
That thinking does not sit well in Europe, where human rights are rooted in a tradition of secular humanism, which holds that mankind is capable of ethical conduct and self-fulfillment without recourse to the supernatural.
In Europe, secularism is not understood as necessarily hostile to religion. In France, the term denotes a level playing field, on which the state allows all religions to operate freely, but stands aside. Elsewhere, it means an indifference to faith. More generally, secularism refers to an approach to life grounded not in religious morality but in human reason and universal ethics.
At the same time, European governments have chosen to adopt a broader set of moral values in setting their foreign policy than they see apparent in US policy, which to them often seems wholly focused on "the war on terror."
That leads them to attach more importance to issues such as the en-vironment and poverty, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac stressed in speeches to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this month.
Though the broad moral values at the foundations of public policy in Europe draw clearly on Christian inspiration, the established churches are equally clearly losing their grip on social attitudes to personal moral questions.
A look at the dramatic fall in birthrates all over Europe reveals how faithfully couples are following Catholic teaching on contraception. And as religion's importance fades in people's lives, their permissiveness increases, the European Values Study found.
For example, of the 10 countries where religion is most important to people's lives, eight are among the 10 least tolerant of euthanasia. An increasing number of European governments are following Britain's lead in legalizing stem-cell research, with public support, despite opposition from Catholic leaders.
But even if churches are emptying across Europe, and citizens are reluctant to imbue policy with religious significance, that hardly makes the Continent atheist, pollsters and religious leaders say.
Rather, suggests Archbishop John Foley, the US head of the Vatican's Council for Social Communications, "many people in Europe consider it poor taste to mention your beliefs. It is perceived as rendering other people uncomfortable."
While only 41% of Europeans say they believe in a personal God, another 33% believe in a spirit, or life force.
It is on that reservoir of spirituality that religious leaders of several faiths hope to draw, in order to bring religion back from the margins of public life in Europe. And they are finding encouragement from some unlikely sources.
In France, perhaps the most militantly secular society in Europe, and which this year celebrates the 100th anniversary of a law separating church and state, one of the men most likely to succeed Jacques Chirac as president broke a strict political taboo late last year.
In a book-length series of interviews entitled "The Republic and Religion: Hope," Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of the ruling conservative Union for a Popular Movement, broached controversial subjects such as state funding for religious institutions.
He was motivated by a feeling that would be banal in the US, but which for a French political leader is almost revolutionary: "That the religious phenomenon is more important than people think, that it can contribute to peace, to balance, to integration, to unity and dialogue," he wrote. "The Republic should debate this, and reflect on it."
Contributors: Sophie Arie in Rome and Mark Rice-Oxley in London
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-02-21-god-europe_x.htm?csp=34
In his 1995 book, "The Mind Hunter," FBI criminal profiler John Douglas states that a "new type of violent criminal has surfaced -- the serial offender, who learns by experience and tends to get better and better at what he does." Douglas notes that the these criminals' earliest act of violence is often the torture and/or killing of pets or wildlife, graduating to brutalizing younger siblings before taking intensified perversities into the streets or engaging in domestic violence.
Unimpeded acts of violence beget acts of increased violence. To the depraved person who feels powerful and in control only while inflicting pain or death, that "high" must continually be sustained by more heinous or morbid acts.
Until recently, law enforcement rarely related serial sniper shootings or the bludgeoning, rape and murder of multiple women as the latest in a chain of escalating crimes by someone who practiced on animals first. Today, arrests for prior acts of animal cruelty are regularly used to corroborate patterns of violent behavior.
It is also recognized by criminal psychologists that participating in or willingly viewing acts of repeated animal cruelty desensitizes the perpetrator or spectator.
The sordid and barbaric world of dog fighting and cockfighting is so abhorrent to the average person that it is routinely discounted as something that happens only in "other" neighborhoods or as a "cultural tradition." In fact, national experts estimate that within two miles of everyone living in any metropolitan area is someone who is actively involved in illegal animal fighting, either owning, breeding or training the animals themselves or attending or betting on bloody bouts where animals are forced to fight to death.
Recently a condominium owner reported leasing out two high-rent units in an upper-class building. When the second month's rent was overdue, the landlord came to the building to discover that the carpets were soaked with blood and the walls covered with bloody paw prints of dogs trying to escape. Pit bulls -- the dog of choice of both professional and amateur fighters -- can be conditioned to fight and suffer so silently that even adjacent neighbors are not aware a match is taking place.
Ignorance of the pervasiveness of animal fighting by legislators -- and even some animal-protection advocates -- has allowed it to burgeon unabated in L.A.'s gang-infested areas, where owning the "baddest" dog generates gambling income and fear in the community. Merritt Clifton, editor of the worldwide publication Animal People recently wrote, "Many activists don't have a clue how much harm the pit bull proliferation is doing to minority communities."
Dog fighting and cockfighting affect us all. They bring a ruthless criminal element into unsuspecting neighborhoods where innocent children are at risk. Beloved pets are stolen from yards and cars for "blood bait" to train fighting dogs and to rev up lust for the main event at staged fights. Absentee owners of rental property being used to raise and train fighting animals or conduct fights may have unexpected liability. Animal-fighting operations anywhere diminish surrounding property values.
Young boys are frequently present at animal fights to gather bets from spectators, creating a generation of youths in our city who believe maiming and killing is the mark of a man. It is an easy step from executing an animal to shooting a rival gang member -- or anyone else.
L.A.'s anti-cruelty task force can be successful only if everyone who suspects animal fighting or abuse immediately reports it for investigation. When you read about a sadistic crime against an animal, remember that the perpetrator is just warming up. The next victim could be someone you know and love.
Phyllis M. Daugherty is director of the Los Angeles-based Animal Issues Movement
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~24781~2728458,00.html
| PETA DEMANDS JAIL TIME IF ALLEGED CALIFORNIA COCKFIGHTERS ARE CONVICTED |
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Community Should Fear for Public Safety, Say
Experts For Immediate Release: Contact: Lancaster, Calif. ---This morning, PETA sent an urgent
plea to Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, urging him to
vigorously prosecute 21 men who face charges stemming from their alleged
February 13 attendance at a cockfighting event. Authorities reportedly
raided the event as two birds were beginning to fight, seizing 93
"fighting" roosters and up to $800 in betting money. "Cockfighting is the sport of cowards," says PETA Casework Division
Manager Martin Mersereau. "Birds have razor-sharp blades strapped to their
legs and commonly suffer broken wings, pierced eyes, and punctured lungs.
The losing birds are typically thrown together in a pile and left to die
slowly. People who demonstrate such disregard for suffering can pose a
risk to the community at large." Mersereau also points out that animal
fighting is almost invariably associated with drugs, weapons, and illegal
gambling. |
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked that the men, if convicted, be ordered to undergo counseling, be banned for life from contact with animals and to have any animals in their possession taken away.
"Repeat crimes are the rule rather than the exception among animal abusers, and this is especially true of animal fighters," Daniel Paden, a PETA staffer, wrote in a letter to Cooley.
Ninety-three roosters were confiscated Feb. 13 after deputies acting on a tip found a cockfighting arena near an abandoned house in a sparsely populated area about 15 miles east of Lancaster.
The arena was made of garage doors supported by sawed-off telephone poles and four-by-fours implanted in the ground, with two fighting pits inside.
Scattering, dozens of men ran into the desert or sped off in vehicles as deputies arrived, but 21 were caught. The men who were caught were from San Fernando, Los Angeles, Van Nuys, Newhall and other areas, as well as the Antelope Valley, deputies said.
None of those caught admitted to owning the roosters, so all were cited for the misdemeanor offense of being present at a cockfight, deputies said.
"We are prosecuting them," Deputy District Attorney Robert Foltz said Wednesday.
He said prosecutors are awaiting for a final report from the Sheriff's Department before filing charges.
The birds were taken away by county animal-control officers. Animal-control officials said they were not disclosing where the birds were taken for fear that people would try to steal them.
Charles F. Bostwick, (661) 267-5742 chuck.bostwick@dailynews.com
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20943~2728496,00.html