The Boston Animal Defense League (BADL) is a loosely knit collective of activists and their supporters striving for a more just world for animals, humans, and the earth we share as home. Our main grassroots work includes education about vegan lifestyle, animal liberation, and especially vivisection (cutting up a living animal and labeling it science.)

At the most basic level, the exploitation of human and non-human animals comes from the same source: the profit motive of capitalism.

Humans are only valued because they can produce more and more useless commodities for mass consumption. They are only a resource, an expendable labor force, to be discarded when they can no longer produce wealth.

Animals are also used as a resource, as commodities to be produced in large factory-farms where they are pumped full of drugs and antibiotics just to keep them alive long enough for them to reach their "peak productive capacity." In other words, they are bred from birth to yield maximum meat per unit.

The inherent value of both humans and non-human animals is eliminated. Their lives are reduced to the raw ability to produce profit.

One of the local corporations that tests their products on live animals is Procter & Gamble, which just bought Gillette here in Boston. We have called for a boycott of their products, and hosted the Boston international day of action on May 21st. We will continue our campaign once P&G has completely moved in, and people's jobs are gone.

Our chapters in Boston, Long Island, Los Angeles, and New Jersey are working with dozens of grassroots animal liberation organizations to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), the world's second largest contract research laboratory for animal testing. Five undercover investigations have found cruel conditions, direct abuse of their animals, criminal activities, and fraudulent science. HLS has become the target of the largest grassroots animal liberation initiative in the world.

For HLS, animals are also used as a resource in the production of faulty science. Primates are cut open without anesthetics, four-month-old beagle puppies are violently shaken and punched in the face, and cats have metal rods pushed through their skulls. Yet this does not further science or human health.

The public and the press seem to believe that progress in human medicine is reliant upon animal testing. Such consensus does not exist in the scientific community.

Scientists and MDs in Americans For Medical Advancement (AFMA) and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), many of whom are former animal researchers, argue that cellular differences between humans and non-humans and among different species of non-human animals are too great to extrapolate experimental results from one species and apply it to another.

Eighty per cent of all drugs that pass animal tests fail the first time they are tested on humans.

Research contractors like Huntingdon Life Sciences do not act with scientific objectivity. They must produce results which suit the interests of their corporate clients.

Huntingdon Life Science's second largest contractor is Novartis Pharmaceuticals, which has recently opened facilities here in Cambridge. Novartis is a huge corporation that keeps HLS funded and in business.

We welcome volunteers. The best way to get involved in this movement to stop the exploitation is to attend an open BADL meeting. We meet every 2nd and 4th Monday of the month, at 7:00PM at the Lucy Parsons Center, 549 Columbus Ave in Boston's South End.

We work actively building community with other social change agendas. We table with Food Not Bombs every Wednesday in Central Square to help spread the vegetarian message. We take part in prisoner support benefits and workers-struggle protests. We table at numerous concerts, as well as hosting our own marches, speakers, workshops, and meetings. Volunteer opportunities are always available. Help organize direct action events, fundraisers, tabling events, join the literature brigade, paint signs and banners, or silkscreen t-shirts and patches.

Contact Boston Animal Defense League at animaldefense.info/boston or adl-boston@hush.com

[NOTE: The May issue of The Bridge reported the April 23rd animal rights demonstration in Cambridge without even mentioning the people who actually sponsored it, namely BADL. Bridge Troll, who had to eat a lot of those newspapers, will have the newspaper committee for dinner if it happens again.]