Randomly Noted

It goes without saying but I have to say it: stealing a CEO’s mother’s ashes and torching his home should deal an enormous setback to Europe’s animal rights movement. It’s an already discredited effort, of course, what with activists having already terrorized workers in the U.K.’s drug-testing industry (and their families.) As the WSJ’s Jeanne Whalen reports, Novartis AG, the big drug maker based in Switzerland, alleges animal rights militants stole CEO Daniel Vasella’s mother’s ashes from the Swiss town of Chur, and burned Vasella’s lodge in Bach, Austria. The desecration of Vasella’s mother’s grave happened about a week ago; the alleged arson was early Monday. U.K.-based Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has come out and said it wasn’t behind the acts. Police are probing. Whether or not SHAC was involved in the Novartis incidents, the group has a sordid history, including harassing employees of a British testing lab with U.S. facilities called Huntingdon Life Sciences. People who want the world’s drug makers and testers to use animals more humanely should act humanely. I would also add this, from a Novartis spokeswoman: “It is important that people realize that it is not possible to discover novel products … which save thousands of human lives every year without some use of animal data, which is required by regulatory authorities.”