Rod Cornado

All of this means that the nonviolent actions we participate in and support are likely to be viewed by the federal government as the work of extremists who may employ terrorism to achieve their goals. Of course, this same charge has historically applied to America's colonialist, anti-slavery advocates, African American community organizers, American Indian Movement members, anti-Vietnam war activists and now us. And, as proven in 1973 in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. federal law enforcement community and military forces are prepared and willing to use deadly force to stop their own citizens they deemed as enemies of the state. Now, we can argue till we're blue in the face that we're not real terrorists and those in the labs, slaughterhouses, fur farms, hunting blinds, factory farms, military and police forces are; but our voices matter little to the big money interests who place politicians, the police and judges in power - those who just so happen to be the very same people we oppose. The pharmaceutical, medical, agricultural/'food,' military, timber, mining and petrol chemical industries control the courts, Congress and the media, so it's best if we just recognize the likelihood of our beliefs being criminalized and prepare for the government repression which has already began.

In 1990-91, I spoke with many mink farmers and researchers who, believing I was a mink farmer, instructed me in ways to avoid my mink from losing their recessive genetic structures that gave them the fur quality and color variation that separated them from their wild relations. Captive mink are genetically 95% similar to their wild counterparts. The only difference besides behavior being fur color and quality which is solely maintained by a scientifically controlled diet, which is key to maintaining their genetic differences from wild mink. Black and dark mink being the closest genetically to wild mink.

Jim Leischow, a second generation mink farmer from Kenosha, Wisconsin described to me in a discussion at the 1991 Seattle Fur Exchange auctions how without a scientifically controlled diet, mink on any fur farm would lose their recessive genes, and over-powered by their dominant wild genetic structure, return to their wild roots in just a few generations. Leischow also detailed how a mink escapee that breeds with a wild mink would produce offspring that in one more generation would have lost all traces of any altered genetic structure.