Reading this produces a powerful desire in me to go out with LM and organize demonstrations in defense of the right to hunt foxes.
Hong Kong real estate one week; Blair putting the kibosh on animal testing? What's it all about, Alfie?
Nothing.
The planet earth is losing animal species at the greatest rate since the extinction of the dinosaur. Insane cruelty is taking place in Borneo rainforests as impoverished peasants burn down old-growth in order to eke out a living on cleared land. Meanwhile, orangutans and other endangered species disappear forever. The level of desperation in East Asia is beyond belief. The NY Times reported that there is widespread consumption of tree bark for food in the Thai countryside. So Burford gets googly-eyed over the Hong Kong stock market and concessions to the British animal rights movement.
The only way serious assaults on humanity and nature are going to be eliminated is when the thieving, warmaking, ecology-despoiling capitalist class and their puppets lose their political and economic power. Fostering illusions that any real change can take place while they still rule the world is on the same moral plane as defenders of slavery in the 1840s who decried the radicalism of William Lloyd Garrison as "impractical."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)