Bacon company is threatening legal action against the owner of an animal rights website

For immediate release: 7pm Friday 16th December 2005

Lawyers for the Premier Bacon Company have threatened legal action against the owner of www.premierbacon.co.nz if the site is not handed over to Premier Bacon by 5pm today. The site is owned by animal rights activist Mark Eden who is using it to host a website critical of factory farming of pigs and Premier Bacon in particular. Eden is part of the Wellington Animal Rights Network, a group that has been campaigning against factory farming and recently organised a protest in which several people chained themselves to a Premier Bacon delivery truck.

Previously Premier Bacon had managed to shut down the site for a few days due to copyright problems, but the website was up again within days.

This week lawyers have issued a letter demanding that Eden shut down the website and hand over ownership of the domain name to the Premier Bacon Company or court action will follow.

Mr Eden says he will not close the website and will fight to keep it operating. "The website shows the truth about the cruelty of factory farming. WARN believes that information is a truthful and fair criticism of the Premier Bacon Company. We will fight to retain ownership of the website and will continue to publicise the fact that Premier Bacon is directly involved in the abuse of animals" said Eden.

"I do not like bullies and I do not like animal abuse, so I'm certainly not going to hand over ownership of the domain name without a fight. The Premier Bacon Company is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of pigs ever year, and that is the real issue here, and its an issue that we are going to continue to highlight as much as we can".

A copy of the letter demanding the handover of the domain name is here: http://www.premierbacon.co.nz/pdfs/letter.pdf

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