Feature Archives

On July 17, 2009, People for Animal Liberation demonstrated in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Healdsburg, California. Demonstrators held signs and banners with a variety of slogans. Street theater included one activist climbing into a guinea pig cage, from which they were pulled out of the cage and murdered.

From Death Row at San Quentin, Donald Ray Young writes: "We had strange fruit for breakfast today...a death row prisoner committed suicide at San Quentin, in East Block. But, I can’t worry about that guy....Wait; how can I not think of the suicide in this very building - - his family...loved ones? What if he was innocent? Do I know him? How many other people on death row have contemplated killing themselves to escape this madness? I believe that when one dies - - a part of all of us all dies...."

On February 13th, about 75 people gathered in Santa Rosa's Courthouse Square to demand that the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department end their use of Tasers, a deadly device which has led to five deaths of unarmed civilians in our community over the last two years. The October 22nd Coalition Against Police Brutality organized the protest as part of a new campaign demanding the end of Taser use in Sonoma County.

Mark Hawthorne writes: One of the most exciting results of Proposition 2 — California’s successful campaign to ban battery cages for hens, gestation crates pigs and veal crates for calves — is that it energized activists across the United States, introducing a new generation of animal advocates to the horrors of factory farming. Many of these people had known little, if anything, about agribusiness practices. But they literally took up the Prop 2 banner, getting involved in the fight to end the use of intensive-confinement devices in California.

Copwatcher and member of the Free Mind Media Center (a Santa Rosa based radical infoshop and bookstore) Ben Saari, was arrested on May Day while doing Copwatch and has charges pending against him.

On May 31st, nearly a thousand protesters marched across the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the proposed spraying of the Bay Area for light brown apple moths. Groups gathered on both sides of the bridge and marched to the middle carrying signs protesting the proposed aerial spraying of a moth pheromone as part of a statewide campaign to wipe out the moth.

On January 24th, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Chuck Conner announced the availability of $74.5 million in emergency funding to combat the light brown apple moth (LBAM) "infestation" in California. President Bush's recent budget proposal sent to Congress sets aside $330 Million to eradicate plant pests, like the LBAM. It is unprecedented to design a long term plan to spray chemicals on people, which are untested for safety.