Please STOP funding these TERRORIST ACTIVITIES!

During the past two decades, radical environmental and animal rights groups have claimed responsibility for hundreds of crimes and acts of terrorism, including arson, bombings, vandalism and harassment, causing more than $100 million in damage. The Prominent Groups are: Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Earth Liberation Front (ELF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Humane Society US (HSUS).

PETA claims to be dedicated to saving animals. Did you know that, according to PETA's own records PETA spends less than 1% of its $13 million budget on actual care, housing, feeding, and home-finding for animals? In fact, PETA literally puts animals to death via lethal injection, which they claim is 'more humane', and then leaves the dead animals in garbage dumpsters! PETA directly provides funds and support to two groups, ALF and ELF. The FBI estimates that the ALF/ELF have committed more than 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 43 million dollars."

HSUS - The undercover slaughterhouse video released on January 30 by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS): If HSUS knew in October 2007 that potentially unsafe meat was entering the U.S. food chain (including the federal school lunch program), why did the animal rights group sit on its footage for more than three months? Because of HSUS%u2019s preference for sensationalism over protecting the public%u2019s health, millions of Americans (including countless children) may have been exposed to meat that wasn%u2019t fit for human consumption. HSUS clearly shares responsibility for this whole sorry episode.

Hunters/Outdoorsmen/women have done more for the environment and conservation than any of these terrorist groups. In 1937, hunters lobbied Congress to pass the Pittman-Robinson Act, an 11 percent tax on hunting equipment which, combined with license fees, now provides $700 million a year for protection of wildlife habitat on public lands. And Ducks Unlimited alone has conserved an estimated 7.2 million acres of waterfowl habitat. So next time you want to make a donation, how about make it to a real organization that actually cares about the environment, wildlife and conservation.

WHY ANIMALS HAVE NO RIGHTS

"A right, properly understood, is a claim, or potential claim, that one party may exercise against another. The target against whom such a claim may be registered can be a single person, a group, a community, or (perhaps) all humankind. The content of rights claims also varies greatly: repayment of loans, nondiscrimination by employers, noninterference by the state, and so on.

To comprehend any genuine right fully, therefore, we must know who holds the right, against whom it is held, and to what it is a right.

The differing targets, contents, and sources of rights, and their inevitable conflict, together weave a tangled web. Notwithstanding all such complications, this much is clear about rights in general: they are in every case claims, or potential claims, within a community of moral agents.

Rights arise, and can be intelligibly defended, only among beings who actually do, or can, make moral claims against one another. Whatever else rights may be, therefore, they are necessarily human; their possessors are persons, human beings.

Animals (that is, nonhuman animals, the ordinary sense of that word) lack this capacity for free moral judgment. They are not beings of a kind capable of exercising or responding to moral claims. Animals therefore have no rights, and they can have none. This is the core of the argument about the alleged rights of animals. The holders of rights must have the capacity to comprehend rules of duty, governing all including themselves. In applying such rules, the holders of rights must recognize possible conflicts between what is in their own interest and what is just. Only in a community of beings capable of self-restricting moral judgments can the concept of a right be correctly invoked.

Humans have such moral capabilities. They are in this sense self-legislative, are members of communities governed by moral rules, and do possess rights. Animals do not have such moral capacities. They are not morally self-legislative, cannot possibly be members of a truly moral community, and therefore cannot possess rights. In conducting research on animal subjects, therefore, we do not violate their rights, because they have none to violate.

Genuinely moral acts have an internal as well as an external dimension. Thus, in law, an act can be criminal only when the guilty deed, the actus reus, is done with a guilty mind, mens rea. No animal can ever commit a crime; bringing animals to criminal trial is the mark of primitive ignorance. The claims of moral right are similarly inapplicable to them. Does a lion have a right to eat a baby zebra? Does a baby zebra have a right not to be eaten? Such questions, mistakenly invoking the concept of right where it does not belong, do not make good sense. Those who condemn biomedical research because it violates "animal rights" commit the same blunder.

If you want to make a difference and help animals, avoid PETA, HSUS, ELF, ALF, and SHAC and everything they stand for. Volunteer or make donations to your LOCAL Humane Society or animal shelter. Participate in a beach or park cleanup. Patronize your local zoo. Adopt a pet that needs a home. Above all, don't fall for these Animal Rights Activists lies.