Damage Some Property,
and end up on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists”.
Together with the likes of Osama Bin Laden. You didn’t kill anybody, you didn’t hurt a person, the property damage was minor, and yet – you’ll be hunted down like somebody who has murdered a number of people.
I’m talking about what happened to Daniel Andreas San Diego, an animal rights activist who was arrested on November 25 in Wales. He is charged with planting two homemade pipe bombs on August 27, 2003 at the Chiron Corporation’s headquarters in Emeryville, California. The explosions caused minor property damage but no injuries. Another bomb exploded on September 26, 2003 at the health and beauty products company Shaklee Corporation in Pleasanton, California; again, nobody was hurt.
An animal rights group calling themselves “Revolutionary Cells – Animal Liberation Brigade” (ALB) sent some emails after the bombings, claiming responsibility. There’s no proof that San Diego sent these emails, but the FBI believes he did because he had ties to the group that sent them as well as ties to another group: “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty”. These supposed ties were enough for the FBI to declare him to be the first domestic terrorist, to add him to their Most Wanted Terrorists list, and to offer an award for up to $250,000 for information that could lead to his arrest. By contrast, the FBI’s reward offered to capture the murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was – a mere $50,000. Weird, isn’t it.
Why was the FBI so hell-bent to catch somebody who caused a bit of property damage – allegedly? The answer is clear, once one learns what kind of businesses are involved.
First of all, let’s look at the Chiron Corporation, a multinational biotechnology company. They use genetic engineering to develop vaccines against Hepatitis B or influenza for example, and to develop cancer drugs. The company was bought up by Novartis AG, a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland. Chiron had contracts with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a contract research organization that uses animals for the biomedical research it conducts for its clients. And there you have it: Daniel San Diego was/is up against Big Pharma, or better: BIG Pharma. This is a powerful industry which spends millions of dollars lobbying for favorable legislation. To accuse any of these companies of animal abuse is a dangerous undertaking.
In 1997 freelance video journalist Zoe Broughton recorded an undercover investigation at one of the two HLS laboratories in England. Her film, “It’s a Dog’s Life”, was broadcast on British TV’s Channel 4 and showed how excessively cruel some lab technicians treated the dogs kept at HLS. It resulted in three of the technicians being suspended right away, and their arrest and subsequent prosecution for “cruelly terrifying dogs”. Moreover, the company’s stock value dropped by over half because some companies withdrew their contracts with HLS; the test data from HLS were deemed inaccurate. The documentary recorded one technician squirting a syringe filled with some drug into a garbage can when he couldn’t find the dog’s vein. Zoe Broughton's film won an award in Britain, and she was pleased that her documentary had some positive results as far as the poor lab animals were concerned. That’s what happened in Britain.
One year later, an investigator for PETA infiltrated the HLS laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey and recorded 50 hours of video tape, four 90-minute audio tapes, and photocopied company documents. According to PETA some of the film she shot showed a monkey being dissected while still alive and conscious. But this documentary was never shown to the public.
“HLS took PETA to court and they now have a gagging order, stopping them from publicising or even talking about any of the information that they discovered; not because it is untrue, but because American company law protects companies, not freedom of speech or exposure of the truth. Astonishingly, this gagging order also means that PETA cannot communicate with the American Department of Agriculture, which, like our Home Office, was going to investigate the evidence. Obviously if the prime witness is forbidden to speak and cannot authenticate the evidence, then nothing can be done.”1
That’s what happened in the United States.
So here you have the bottom line truth. Because of the money to be made with biotech research, and because of the money companies are allowed to pay legislators via their lobbying endeavors, the truth will be hidden. Just to be sure there’s no misunderstanding, I don’t condone violence and/or property destruction. But I’m absolutely opposed to the fact that non-human animals can be used and abused at will, without recourse to legal protection, because greedy humans want more money. I’ve written about this before: there are alternative methods to animal testing, with three main categories: in chemico which uses proteins, DNA, and the like which are removed from cells, to experiment on; in silico which refers to the use of computer or machine learning models, and in vitro, with scientists using cells, including artificially grown cultures, outside of the body.2
Even if you’re convinced that the torture and mistreatment of innocent animals was justified because it made it possible to find lifesaving cures for and vaccines against many diseases, alternative methods are possible now and should be implemented. In 2019, “Scientists in the US used approximately 12-24 million animals in research, of which only less than 1 million are not rats, mice, birds or fish.”3 Those approximately 800,000 other animals are guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, non-human primates, dogs, pigs, cats, and sheep; plus 21% of the 800,000 are various other species. The industry argues that people eat 1,800 times the number of pigs for example than the number used for research. That does make you feel better, doesn’t it.
Back to money being more powerful than the law, or better: able to shape laws so they benefit money-making. You may remember that in July of 2022 the Humane Society removed about 4,000 beagles from a mass breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia, owned by Envigo, a contract research organization which had received a lawsuit from the U.S.Department of Justice because of multiple violations of the Animal Welfare Act (I wrote about this in 2022).
“Government inspectors found that beagles there were being killed instead of receiving veterinary treatment for easily treated conditions; nursing mother beagles were denied food; the food that they did receive contained maggots, mold and feces; and over an eight-week period, 25 beagle puppies died from cold exposure.”4
And guess what. In 2015, Huntingdon Life Sciences and some other labs merged into: Envigo. And while the Cumberland, Virginia facility has been shut down, there has never been any criminal prosecution for the many animal welfare violations. Envigo is now a subsidiary of another multinational company, Inotiv, which offers tens of thousands of monkeys, rabbits, rodents, pigs, and more for research: they’re called “biological products”. Nothing prevents them from opening another facility, even in Virginia, and of course they claim that “[a]cross our entire business, we are committed to the welfare of the animals in our care and operate under strong governing principles and a universal code of conduct. We regularly review and evaluate our facilities in an effort to ensure that our operations and animal facilities meet applicable standards for quality, safety, and animal welfare” (from their website).
When you look at the website, you learn that the biological products are being kept in cages, isolated from each other, and the only contact with another living being is a plastic-covered hand that moves them from one cage to another. There is no sympathy, no affection, no love. These animals are commodities which are fed disease-inducing diets so that specific tests can be performed: rodents are fed diets to induce obesity, diabetes, and MASH (Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis), for example. All this is legal because biomedical and biotech research bring in big bucks.
So – I’m sure you understand why I don’t think that somebody like Daniel Andreas San Diego ever belonged on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. He’s currently held in London, and extradition proceedings have begun. I hope they’ll be denied, but I won’t hold my breath.
Capitalism and the flow of wealth are causing humans to lose their humanity. Were humans always this awful?
there's a better way / damage just creates conflict / in conflict people harden their feelings not open up to new ones / sorry i didn't even read your post / what's it about ??