STOP THE KILLING
Lindy Greene from Animal Defense League Interviewed

Judge Stewart Rice, in Division 71 of the Metropolitan Court on Hill Street, told Animal Defense League Los Angeles to remove the photo below from its website by August 31 because the photos of Boks and Gordon are ‘lone’ photographs! We asked Lindy Greene from ADLLA what’s going on! www.StopTheKilling.net

Abolitionist: What is Stop The Killing Campaign all about?

Lindy Greene: The Stop The Killing (STK) Campaign seeks to implement the programs, policies, procedures, and protocols of Nathan Winograd's No Kill Solutions - already monumentally successful in progressive shelters nationwide. Here in Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Ed Boks to the position of General Manager (GM) of the six municipal shelters ("Death Camps") in hopes of securing a million-dollar contribution for a future gubernatorial run from Boks' multi-billionaire friend, Gary Michelson.

What is happening with these latest pics that’s causing so much controversy in the US? You have said the judge and the prosecution are really trying their hardest to close down the STK site and ADL-LA as well. Please tell us the why, how, when and what for?

Ed Boks was fired from New York City and asked to leave Maricopa County, Arizona after city officials discovered that he took a six-figure salary only to slaughter thousands of healthy, treatable, and adoptable animals while "cooking the books" and employing other reprehensible and disingenuous practices in order to appear to reduce the kill stats. A couple of examples of the latter are allowing animals to become sick and die on their own or placing one bowl of kibble in a crowded pen and then labelling its contenders "food-aggressive" when the inevitable conflict ensues.

Activists representing several animal rights groups from Los Angeles and surrounding areas convene periodically to do "mobile demos" in the neighbourhoods of Ed Boks, other department employees, and city officials to educate the residents about what's transpiring in the shelters and paid for by their hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Just as people have the right to know if there is a sex offender living in their midst, so they should be informed of the presence of an animal abuser in the vicinity. Intentional dereliction of duty, blatant violation of public trust, and deliberate betrayal of animals should be exposed and paraded in what these criminals consider inviolable territory - their places of residence.

Of course, they are beside themselves that animal rights activists show up every couple of weeks or so to thus embarrass them. From a sheer pragmatic standpoint, we don't understand why it wouldn't be easier - logistically and emotionally - just to do one's job properly and effectively. Why not do right by the animals and avoid all the hullabaloo of demonstrations and court appearances? It must be so much more difficult to have to concoct and remember lies, to juggle and fudge statistical data, and to endure repeated militant activism than it would be just to make the attempt to find loving homes for the animals. There is no public outreach - no marketing - in behalf of the dispossessed and displaced companion animals and wildlife whose misfortune it is to fall into the clutches of the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services (LAAS). Tens of thousands of dogs, cats, puppies, kittens, rabbits, and wildlife are roped and muzzled, dragged to the kill rooms, and given lethal injections to slam shut forever the door on the opportunity to share companionship with a loving human guardian. With Ed Boks, it's a family affair. Lactating mothers and their unweaned babies all die together.

I'm no political expert, but all historical signs are there that this government is being converted into a military dictatorship. All governments are corrupt - and this one is no exception. It has engaged in atrocities from its inception. It enslaved African-Americans, denied women the vote, put Japanese in concentrations camps, and defoliated Viet Nam. What it is doing today seems unprecedented in both nature and scope: spying on its own citizens, entering into a pre-emptive war based on lies, committing genocide and fomenting civil unrest in another sovereign nation, and - in defiance of Constitutional law and our international covenants - torturing prisoners of war.

And no police state will tolerate activism. The mission to demonize and criminalize it is both a national and local obsession. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is admittedly straightforward and hardly any more draconian than laws already in existence with regard to illegal activity - it just specifically names and officially casts in its sights the underground arm of the animal rights / animal liberation movement. But one still has to be aware that its seeming "reasonable" and "innocuous" veneer may have the purpose of camouflaging more deadly legislative assaults to come. On the local front, the Mayor and his Deputies, the City Attorney and Prosecutor, the protest targets and their neighbours, and the police are not happy about the semi-monthly half-hour disruptions of the good citizens' favourite television sitcoms. So, they invent alleged violations of city ordinances in order to haul us into court, get us on probation, slap us with fines, and attempt to chill our free speech. There is an ordinance in Los Angeles which prohibits "focused picketing" within one hundred feet. While connotation ally counterintuitive to the very notion of what it means to picket, the operational effects are that demonstrators cannot stop before or unduly "focus" on targets of protest activity within that stipulated radius. The authorities send out the police to videotape our every step. If an activist should stop for a second to so much as scratch an itch - or glance cross-eyed at the target's window - we are cited and hauled into court.

Surveillance, infiltration and harassment of animal rights, environmental and anti-nuclear organisations is rampant in the US of today. How has this affected you?

Some of us (this author included) have been the objects of even more intrusive harassment. I have been "raided" twice by the FBI. The second time, I wasn't home - and they literally broke down my front door to enter the premises, ransack the apartment, and confiscate my computer and other paraphernalia showing that I am an animal rights activist. I could have saved them the time and trouble, as I most willingly and proudly admit to so being! (I am an anti-war protester, as well.) But, listen. Uncomfortable and inconvenient as it is, the animals suffer much more. If you're a committed activist, you have to accept the "heat" as a sort of "occupational hazard." The Constitution is still in effect (however marginally), and I intend to continue to take full advantage of its supposedly irrevocable First-Amendment rights to assemble and speak freely.

We protect ourselves by making sure that every time we protest we are accompanied by a legal representative who knows and counsels us on all relevant local and Constitutional laws, statutes, and ordinances. We take care that way not to inadvertently violate some rule for which the police can cite and send us before a judge. Also, the officers know that they won't be able to lie about what we can and cannot do with a lawyer present who is much more fully conversant with the law than they are!