I don't see how releasing thousands of minks to overheat, starve or become roadkill helps the cause of animal rights.
Last week, subversives claiming affiliation to the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) destroyed breeding records, opened the cages of 6,000 domesticated minks and sent them scurrying into the fields and neighborhoods of Kaysville. About 500 were recaptured in the first day; the same number died of heat exhaustion. After a similar release at a farm in South Jordan a month ago, many of the 300 freed minks died from stress or were hit by cars.
I don't get it. And I'm sympathetic. I don't feel particularly sorry for the plight of women whose fur coats get splashed with red paint. I think protesters should be able to stand outside certain animal researchers' homes - the ones who don't attempt to alleviate pain in their work - with posters for an hour or two. That's free speech. Legislators and farmers and city council members call them terrorists; I wouldn't go that far.
But Front members lose me when they glue the locks and salt the lawns of the same researchers. Or when they bomb feed plants. Or when the animals they liberate end up dead anyway.
Loosely linked ALF members and supporters insist their tactics work.
Jerry Vlasak, a spokesman for North American Animal Liberation Press Office, disputes law enforcement and industry reports that most of the animals are recaptured or die in the wild. Farmed minks, he says, are not so domesticated that they can't go back to their wild ways.
"They don't forget how to swim. They don't forget how to hunt. They revert to their innate ability to survive," says Vlasak, a physician who serves as a press officer for ALF members, but who says he does not know about specific plans.
"The fact is, 100 percent of mink will die - through electrocution, clubbing or gassing - as soon as they're big enough to provide an economic profit for the farmer, if no action is taken," Vlasak adds.
True enough. But I wonder if by resorting to breaking and entering, they lose law-abiding sympathizers in the process. "Establishment" advocates like Humane Society of Utah Director Gene Baierschmidt say any tactic that breaks a law only undermines the larger effort to make people care about the inhumane treatment of animals.
"Things like this don't advance the cause," Baierschmidt says. "Lawlessness can't be tolerated in a civilized society. If everyone used these tactics to fight things they disagreed with, people could start burning buildings."
Loosely linked ALF members and supporters insist economic sabotage works.
Ann Berlin, a webmaster for the Utah ALF Web site, says mink releases in England 20 years ago led to changes in English laws that ended up putting mink farms out of business. Despite negative publicity for the liberators, "The public learned about the cruelty. Fewer people bought furs. For the rest of eternity, fewer mink are being tortured," Berlin says.
"Perhaps the mink who died on the roads in England could be seen as Northern U.S. soldiers who fought the Civil War so that others could be free."
Whether this works in Utah remains to be seen. The state produces many of the country's pelts for fur coats. In 2007, Utah's 65 farms and 599,000 animals generated more than $30 million in sales for the Utah Fur Breeders Cooperative - second only to Wisconsin. Still, that's down one farm from two years ago.
Utah Department of Agriculture spokesman Larry Lewis says there's a better way.
"When you cross the line, you do more harm to your cause than good. Is it a publicity stunt or are they trying to help the animals?" Lewis asks. "Other organizations have made more progress by talking rather than acting."
It's hard to know what to credit for the decline in mink farms: ALF's radical intervention or the growing unpopularity of fur or both. But Vlasak says ALF's "illegal direct action" works in tandem with the softer animal rights campaigns of groups like PETA.
"It has to be more than just a single-pronged strategy," he says. "The struggle is far from over."
walsh@sltrib.com
