Animal-rights activist forces pharmacy out of Texas shopping mall

By David Paulin

A family-run pharmacy in Texas, which opened the day before Pearl Harbor was bombed, is the latest victim of a tyrannical mall owner -- an animal-rights zealot who has reportedly driven away a number of business from the mall she inherited, due to strange edicts in her leases.

"Every drug we sell depends on animals, so there was a potential for trouble in the long term there," Mark Newberry, the pharmacy's owner, told columnist John Kelso of the Austin American-Statesman. "Every drug that humans take has been tested on animals in clinical trials."

The once-popular Tarrytown Shopping Center in an upscale part of Austin, Texas, has been in decline since 1999, according to local media reports. That's when Jeanne Crusemann Daniels, of Houston, inherited the place from her mother. Soon, Daniels -- a supporter for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- demanded that tenants comply with her worldview.

As Kelso explains:

Since Daniels inherited the shopping center in 1999, several restaurants that sold meat products -- the Grocery, Texas French Bread, Formosa, the Holiday House -- have moved or closed.

A former hardware store in the shopping center was told to stop selling mousetraps. The Austin Shoe Hospital was asked to keep the leather shoelaces in the back out of sight. Steve's Liquor couldn't sell caviar in its Christmas baskets. There were restrictions on how to deal with pests, such as insects. Under Daniels, bereavement counselors might be sent to an ant hill after spraying.

The popular mall's demise happened in the "blink of an eye" after Daniels took over, according to an article in Texas Monthly magazine in September, 2007: "Her flunkies insist that the center is 'thriving' and point to its 93 percent occupancy rate, but there is no place to buy groceries, no place to eat lunch, no heart, no soul.

All of which should serve as cautionary tale that this sort of wackiness only happens in California.