"Truth lives a wretched life, but always survives a lie."
---Anonymous
Last night, Bite Club of KC canvassed two heavily trafficked night spots in Kansas City, educating thousands of people about the University of Kansas Medical Center's fraudulent waste of millions of our taxpayer dollars (which they attain via National Institute of Health grants) on fraudulent research AND about the abject cruelty (as evidence by the 160 violations of animal welfare laws for which the USDA cited them) that KU Med inflicts upon primates.
We distributed over 200 copies of this article (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/the-university-of-kansas-medical-center-has-become-known-for-violating-the-animal-welfare-act/ by SAEN's Michael Budkie which references publicly available summaries of animal abuse, as documented by KU Med's own employees in federally required logs about their "patients." A vast percentage of those members of the public who engaged us were outraged by the primate vivisection program at KU Med and stated they would help us shut them down any way they could.
We directed them to: Contact Barbara Atkinson, KU Med's Executive Vice Chancellor, and tell her that what KU Med is doing to primates is wrong and to stop wasting our tax money on cruelty and fraudulent science! She is at (913) 588-1440 and BATKINSON@kumc.edu.
AND
Contact Francis Collins, Director of the National Institute of Health (KU Med's source of funding) at 301-496-2433 and francis.collins@nih.govand tell him to stop providing public monies to a "research facility" that was cited for 160 violations of animal welfare laws by the USDA!
Our action last night also served to demonstrate KU Med's iron-fisted response to our campaign on behalf of the monkeys whom are suffering under their "care." Apparently the University of Kansas Medical Center and cooperating law enforcement agencies have determined that the First Amendment does not apply to Animal Rights activists. Toward that end, I proceeded with the group last night through the throngs of people in the shopping and dining districts near 39th and State Line (adjacent to KU Med) and the Plaza (just south of KU Med) hand-cuffed, gagged and blind-folded. The sign around my neck explained that the cuffs, gag and blind-fold symbolized how KU Med (and animal exploiters in general) blind the public from the truth of the atrocities they commit on the public dole, how they act to silence those who speak, write, or demonstrate the truth, and how they hand-cuff even those who act in legal ways to stop them from abusing the innocent and defenseless.
Though I admire and respect those who take underground and illegal action to free nonhuman animals and to impede their exploitation, and as a member of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office am part of an organization which receives and publishes anonymous communiquà ©s detailing underground illegal actions, I chose to go the route of relentless, creative, above-ground and legal activism as my means of fighting for Animal Rights and animal liberation.
Over the last 14 months, in addition to writing myriad essays and publishing Thomas Paine's Corner, I (with considerable help from my allies) have organized and participated in hundreds of demonstrations, pioneered tactile activism in the US (the use of the heads or the blood of the victims of nonhuman animal exploitation to create media spectacles to take the murder of animals from the abstract to the real), engaged the media hundreds of times, put up three billboards, did the first home demo in Kansas City, orchestrated and participated in an act of civil disobedience for which the police refused to arrest us (in order to undermine our message), filed an injunction against a deer cull and acted pro se on behalf of the deer, brought a noted anti-hunting activist to KC from Canada to do a funeral motorcade for the deer in Shawnee Mission Park, preached Christians messages of compassion for animals to rodeo-goers via my bullhorn, caged myself and my dog and dared KU Med to experiment on us instead of the primates, spear-headed an intense Internet/phone/fax campaign that was instrumental in stopping the passage of a state law that would have legalized horse slaughter, investigated and reported on a horse killer-buyer's operation, and engaged in numerous other actions on behalf of other sentients.
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