Last week the Animal Liberation Front took credit for releasing more than 14,000 or so mink from a fur farm in Iowa — the largest mink release to date in the United States by the group. A follow-up on the story by the Associated Press reports that about one-third of the animals have been returned, but the mink are still turning up, many of the dead from exposure and starvation (the mink don’t know how to survive in the wild).

Mills County Sheriff Mack Taylor, under whose jurisdiction the mink release falls, reports that he is working with the FBI to identify the perpetrators, though an FBI spokesman quoted by the AP story notes that finding those responsible for ALF attacks is extremely difficult.

Taylor stated the obvious in the story, telling the AP that ALF “spokesman” David Barbarash, who sent the press a release about the mink release and another ALF action in Iowa, is, in the AP’s words, “a prime target for charges of conspiracy to commit a crime.” Barbarash previously spent four months in jail in 1994 for releasing cats at a laboratory at the University of Alberta. Barbarash claims he does not take part in the ALF acts, but rather just passes along the anonymous information that is sent to him by the activists.

Source:

Fallout continues from mink release in northeast Iowa. The Associated Press, September 18, 2000.