Andrew Stepanian was interviewed by Amy Goodman this morning on Democracy Now! as he heads for jail today in a case that put the First Amendment (and the Internet) on trial. Interesting, Andy was not even a member of SHAC, a group opposed to vivisection (see below) He was a member of the Animal Defense League of Long Island and attended a SHAC demo and his sentence was upped a year because some activists held a protest the night of his going away party. If you watched Democracy Now! at 7am on TV (HMS), Amy warned there would be graphic footage that some might find disturbing. She was referring to under cover footage taken in the Huntington Life Science labs, the object of SHAC’s campaign, where you see beagles being punched in the mouth and shaken by lab assistants annoyed and cursing because they can’t find a vein in a 4 month old puppy.

You can view this footage on the SHAC 7 website: http://www.shac7.com/hls.htm

You can read a HLS whistleblower report on the SHAC-UK website: http://www.shac.net/MISC/Inside_HLS.html

HLS does product testing on animals for everything from shampoos & detergents to toxic chemicals, where they force pipes with these solutions down the throats of animals, mostly beagles, because they are so docile, for weeks and months. Then, they are killed and dissected. 500 animals are disposed of daily...Over the course of a year, they test and kill over 700,000 animals.


Go Vegan Texas! discussed the SHAC 7 trial and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act which passed the Senate unanimously on Saturday, right before the recess. It is still in committee in the House where it will remain until after the elections where it will be at the mercy of a Lame Duck Congress. You can listen to our Sept 18, show: "The Green Scare: Green is the New Red" on the KPFT archive: http://archive.kpft.org

It is my hope that peace activists will take an interest in this dangerous, precedent setting case.

Janice Blue
http://ww.GoVeganTexas.org