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The animal rights movement from the inside

by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com

august 9, 2004

Newly-published author Steven Kendall has never met NewsMax.com Left Coast Report author James Hirsen, but both men have something in common: Exposing Hollywood hypocrisy.

Hirsen’s written gems about the champers set of the silver screen have made him world famous.

Kendall, a private investigator, who went under cover in an investigation into the animal activist and environmental activist network, bagged more than one star in his butterfly net.

When David McMillan of the Florida-based Tiger Eye Productions came under the attack of People for the Ethical Treatment of animals (PETa), Kendall strategized for him to get the dispute before television’s Judge Judy. PETa activist Lisa Lange showed up in court with Bea arthur, of Maude and Golden Girls fame in tow.

The vaunted arthur did not intimidate McMillan and Kendall, like many Tinseltown Pooh-Bahs an avowed animal rights activist, and hoped Judge Judy was in the same category.

The July 1996 segment opened with McMillan labeling PETa as a "terrorist group", managing to put Lange and arthur on the defensive in his opening salvo.

PETa had alleged animal abuse by McMillan’s Tiger Eye Productions and boasted having a video proving the abuse.

Judge Judy asked for the whereabouts of the PETa "investigator" who had done the filming and was told he was on another undercover assignment.

"How can you come into my courtroom without any factual basis for harassing this man?" asked a less than impressed Judge Judy.

"You could see the embarrassment on Bea arthur’s face," Kendall wrote in his recently released book a Tiger among the Jungle: How Ringling Bros. Circus organized an undercover investigation into the animal activist and environmental activist network.

To make for a more interesting show, Judge Judy allowed the video to be entered into evidence.

The PETa video showed a lion being hit on the nose by an elderly woman with her open hand. But edited from the video was a scene where the lion had attempted to bite the woman’s hand while she fed him. This is considered the correct method in training an animal and correcting the animal’s behavior. Indeed, as the defendants pointed out, if the situation is not corrected immediately, the animal may bite off the next person’s hand when it is feeding time again.

PETa usually gets to demand the answers.

In her demands for answers, Judge Judy twice asked Lange, "When are you going to stop harassing Mr. McMillan and his people?" Lange responded, "When he gets rid of his tigers."

"PETa spokesperson Lange came across as foolish and PETa was publicly embarrassed," wrote Kendall.

PETa had spent eight months on costs putting together their case. But this was "her courtroom" and Judge Judy found the activist group guilty of harassment. With one tap of her gavel, the no-nonsense judge unceremoniously dismissed the accusers--golden or not-- from her courtroom.

Some of the anecdotes in Kendall’s a Tiger among the Jungle are humorous.

But the book, released when emboldened animal rights activists are leaving behind a wake of terror, is testimony to an author with unflagging courage.

"as the animal welfare groups have grown more militant, they have often intruded on home and family," wrote reporter Lizette alvarez in the New York Times. "Blaring alarms have been tossed into gardens, cars have been stripped of paint, voice mail services have been flooded with menacing calls and children have been followed.

"The militants’ successes have alarmed investors, scientists and drug manufacturers, who warn that Britain could face a serious drop in biomedical investment if the campaigns are not curtailed."

Kendall’s factual chronicle is based on his work over a period of 14 years investigating animal activists and environmental groups.

"animal activist terrorism among various activists groups across the United States and Canada, in particular has continued to rise at an alarming pace," he writes in the book’s introduction. "The damage caused by animal and environmental activists has run into the billions of dollars of damage at medical research facilities, universities, circuses, mink ranches, food establishments, clothing stores, and private businesses as well as people’s homes."

No one is spared in his hard-hitting book, which blames "poor communication" between the CIa and FBI of the day remaining unsolved for many crimes, of the day remaining unsolved.

Kendall’s book gives a detailed account of how activists’ groups were infiltrated and how a major corporation used this knowledge to combat the animal extremists by demonstrating how to effectively handle different situations.

Not only does Kendall expose with facts the conduct of activist groups who equate human life with that of a chicken or a rat as a philosophy; he includes in the book’s appendix PETa’s closely guarded Master List.

(Launched on Canadafreepress.com today: www.StevenKendall.com).

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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