After the Animal Liberation Press Office press release this week publicizing the ALF action against notorious primate importer Mathew Block and his wife Brooke, the New Times in Broward/Palm Beach wrote an article reminding their readers of Block’s previous criminal conviction, 13-month sentence and $30,000 fine for smugglingorangutans from Indonesia. Read the article here. The ALF communique is here.
Block, of course, trots out the same tired old excuses, going so far as to claim he doesn’t torture and kill the animals himself in a laboratory, and therefore he is not a bad guy. One commenter to the story online said it best: “Block imports animals for research but doesn’t do any research himself? So what? The people who captured slaves and brought them to this country did the same thing. They imported slaves and didn’t utilize the slaves themselves to pick cotton. What a bunch of specious reasoning.”
Block goes on to say liberators who freed 33 crab-eating macaques from his gulag in 1994 condemned them to “sit in the wild and starve to death.” Like his plans for them were so much better. And oh yeah, no wild animal loses its survival instincts after only a generation or two in captivity, but he conveniently ignores this fact and spouts his lies to assuage his own conscience.
Block further claims the ALF vandalized his mother’s car instead of his, even though the story details that “his wife Brooke and mother Gertie are listed officers on the paperwork” as agents for Worldwide Primates Inc. Activists know, of course, that family members of those committing atrocities against innocent non-human animals are effective targets; recall the owner of Newchurch Guinea Pig Farm halting his slaughter of thousands of creatures after his mother’s grave was vandalized.
Another writer on the New Times’ site sums it all up: “what this man is doing is abominable. humans do not have the right to steal, breed, enslave, sell, confine, torture, kill non-humans.”