by Suzanne Houghton

Created on: July 04, 2009

Ordinarily, in the early morning hours at McMullin & Sons Fur Farm, there isn't much to see. At most, there may be some restive movement from the many cages containing the hundreds of domestic mink owned and cared for by the McMullin family of South Jordan, Utah. But on the morning of Tuesday, August 19, 2008, the unrest came from a very different source.

Furtive human figures, clad in black and under cover of darkness (the better to conceal their identities), broke into the farm and began to wreak havoc. Their primary objective was property damage and theft; their secondary objective was to avoid getting caught. By the time they fled the area, these terrorists had broken into about 800 cages in an attempt to "free" the domesticated mink, and had also abandoned other farm animals around the property.

On March 5, 2009, two of the thieves, William Viehl and Alex Hall, were indicted by a grand jury for their role in the McMullins' farm raid. These thieves, if pressed, probably would claim the purest of motivations for their actions. They would protest that they had the best interest of the animals at heart - that their philosophy holds that animals are not meant to be the property of humans, and that the mink should be free to roam the wilds of Utah as nature intended, not to spend their lives caged and then slaughtered for the fur trade. They believed their actions were both just and compassionate toward the mink.

Further inquiry into the incident, however, reveals a number of tragic and far-reaching consequences. Domestic mink, who have never lived in the wild a day in their lives, do not know how to care for themselves away from the farm. Most of the mink whose cages were opened simply refused to leave their cages. Of those who fled, many ran toward a nearby busy highway where they were promptly crushed to death by passing traffic. Other mink were later found near a local school, nearly dead from stress and dehydration.

Based on studies conducted by the University of Copenhagen, the few mink who disappeared into the wild would probably die within two months of their forced liberation - and any who managed to survive past this time would be at a distinct genetic disadvantage due to the domestic mink's smaller brain and internal organs.

Despite the thieves' desires to "free" these animals, domestic mink have very little capacity to adapt to their outer environment. Further, the thieves seemed to have little to no concern for the rights of the human beings

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