WEEK OF ACTION DAY 5 >>

A sign of things to come!

Over 20 dedicated animal activists showed up at the home of Jennifer Ichida on Friday the 20th. Jennifer is a brand new primate researcher who conducts pointless and invasive neuroscience studies on primates. She uses stereotaxic devices like the one shown on our "Science Gone Mad" posters to allow her to experiment on full conscious monkeys. What sleaze!

When we arrived we tried to make contact with Jennifer. We went and knocked on the door and spoke with someone else in her unit. She lives in a house divided into 5 units in the Avenues of Salt Lake. Her home is in a great location for outreach, protesting, and also geographically it's centrally located. We're sure we'll be back time and time again.

The person we spoke with said she was out for the evening - but we have reason to believe the Jennifer was home and staring outside her window with lights off while we were outside. We decided either way, we wanted to stick around for a while to educate her neighbors and maybe wait for her to come home so she can have a friendly chat with us.

Then the Gestapo - er, Salt Lake City Police - arrived on the scene. The cop told everyone "show's over! Time to go home fellas!" No response. We all had our backs to him. We know our rights and we'd welcome unconstitutional arrests. Salt Lake has a history of illegally harassing animal activists and stripping away our rights only to pay for it later. Entire campaigns have been funded by lawsuit victories against SLPD. The police officer told us that if we didn't leave we were all going to be arrested.

He walked up to a random protestor and told him to sit on the ground because he was under arrest. When an activist went up to ask him why he was being arrested, he decided to arrest that activist as well. He also threatened to arrest our legal observer for filming the incident (they referred to this as 'interfering with an officer' - we believe cameras DO interfere with police officers and that's why we bring them!). He continued to ask the activists who were under arrest questions and he only got silence in return. He continued to give us several more "final warnings" to leave or else we would be under arrest. When he saw we weren't leaving - he UNARRESTED the activists and said that there was no crime being committed. Needless to say, Ichida was quite upset that he wasn't able to stop us from exposing her to her neighbors. Video clips of tonight will be online soon.

After the fiasco with the police, we put leaflets on all the parked cars on the street, handed DVD's of cruelty footage to her neighbors, and one of the other people IN HER OWN BUILDING said they had better hide their cat from a monster like her. That's a good idea friend, and you may want to have a chat with Jennifer to find another line of work or we'll be back over and over again. We get no sleep at night knowing that people like Ichida live in Salt Lake. We won't relent.



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