Pacheco is a veteran of animal rights terrorism, getting his start aboard the Sea Shepherd, famous for ramming whaling vessels on the high seas. Pacheco improved his skills and moved on to the Hunt Saboteurs Association where he specialized in vandalizing hunters' vehicles, slashing tires and smashing windshields. Incidentally, the use of violence to promote the animal- rights agenda was on the schedule for the event.

People love animals. Animals help with our labors, comfort us, entertain us, clothe us, feed us, and provide valuable medical research information to help cure killer diseases.

Animal-rights activists use our concern for animal welfare as a propaganda tool to promote their anti-human agenda. "Rights" are a human concept. Rights are the rules that protect us against aggression by those who reject the codes of civilized society.

Animal-rights activists prey on our fondness of animals. They use graphic descriptions of the meat industry to make us squirm. They depict hunters as murderers. They perform acts of violence against restaurants and fur solons to intimidate people from using those establishments. A major target of animal-rights activists are research laboratories that utilize animals-most specially bred white mice--to find cures for diseases that disable and kill humans.

Most Americans would be surprised to find that no animal-rights organization runs shelters or animal rescue services. The animal rights movement is not interested in protecting animals or preserving species. They hold the human race in utter contempt.

They make no distinction between a rat and a human. Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) said, "I don't believe human beings have the 'right to life.' That's a supremacist perversion. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."

PeTA believes that pet ownership is the moral equivalent of slavery. Elliot Katz, President of In Defense of Animals, said, "It is time we demand an end to the misguided and abusive concept of animal ownership. The first step in this long, but just, road, would be ending the concept of pet ownership."

Animal-rights propaganda opposes all traditional relationships with animals, from eating meat and wearing leather and wool, to biomedical research, hunting, trapping, ranching, fishing, zoos, circuses, and species breeding. Animal-rights advocates work for the day when there will be no interaction with animals. Tom Regan, an animal rights leader said, "we don't want cleaner cages, we want empty cages."

Paul Watson, director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a founder of Greenpeace said, "I reject the idea that humans are superior to other life forms. Man is just an ape with an overly developed sense of superiority." Sydney Singer, director of an animal rights group called the Good Shepherd Foundation, has established a new religion--the All Beings Are Created Equal (ABACE) Church. He writes, "Human reproduction is like evil perpetuating evil, sickness breeding sickness."

Animal-rights philosopher Peter Singer asserts "it can no longer be maintained by anyone but a religious fanatic that man is the special darling of the whole universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have a divine authority over them and divine permission to kill them." In the 1990's, Singer published a book entitled "A Declaration of War: Killing People To Save Animals and the Environment," in which the author, using the pseudonym "Screaming Wolf," urges activists to "hunt hunters, trap trappers, butchers," and so on.

Animals-rights activists are well known for their attacks on research laboratories where animals are freed in the dead of night. In such cases million of dollars of medical research has been lost. Laboratories are burned. Researchers are threatened. Violence replaces public debate. How far are these terrorists prepared to go?

Following the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in England, PeTA's Ingrid Newkirk let it be known she hoped the disease would sweep the U.S. as well. Her justification was that destruction of US livestock would "wake up" consumers and only bring economic harm to "those who raised animals in farm-style concentration camps." Newkirk reportedly told the Environmental News Network that FMD would be "good for animals, good for human health, and good for the environment."

The list of companies and other enterprises targeted for animal-rights violence literally encompasses whole industries that include international restaurant chains, pharmaceuticals, the fur industry, ranching, farming and many more as animal rights and environmental terrorism is on the rise.

Congressman George Nethercutt (R-Wash.) has introduced the Agro-terrorism Prevention Act, aimed at "environmental extremists who use violence, often against agricultural research centers, to gain publicity for their 'hands-off-nature; point of view.'"

Nethercutt said, "I serve as co-chairman of the House Diabetes Caucus and have a daughter with the disease. I hope someday soon that the 16 million Americans who suffer from diabetes will be cured, but I know that if our scientific community is frightened away from promising research by threats of vandalism and bombing, that day will be more distant."

Nethercutt's bill would add agro-terrorism crimes to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Law (RICO). That law is widely credited with giving the FBI the teeth it had needed for decades to bring organized crime to its knees. Now, perhaps it will work as well against the formerly untouchable eco-terrorists.

The animal-rights movement is not about saving furry little animals in the wild or rescuing abused pets in captivity. It's not even about so-called animal "rights." It is an attack on humanity, the ultimate target of the entire environmental/animal rights movement. It is "the human cancer" they want to eliminate in order to "save the earth."

Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report, a monthly newsletter, and is president of the American Policy Center, an activist think tank. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org.

Published by permission.