Animal Testing and Vivisection
On Taking Animal-Tested Drugs, by Woman Battling Leukemia
Published March 04, 2009 @ 02:53PM PT
This is your must-read post of the day:
"Why I Take Animal-Tested Drugs," by Simon Chaitowitz
One of my doctors has told me to get my affairs in order, which is why I'm writing this column. I want to explain why someone who takes so many animal-tested drugs is opposed to animal research.
I have full-blown leukemia and the chemotherapy I'm taking doesn't seem to be working all that well. And even if it does kick into high gear soon, it's not a cure, only a brief delay of the disease's progression. One way or another, my odds aren't good.
Still, I keep popping pills each morning and night, sitting for many hours each week with an IV in my arm, dealing with all the side-effects of treatment, hoping for a miracle. Some people may call me a hypocrite -- to take advantage of the benefits of animal research. Let me explain. . . .
It is moving, it is honest, it reminds us of all the many reasons that animal-based research is a terrible idea--for animals and humans alike--and you really must read it.
Abuse of Primates in Research Labs Exposed on ABC Tonight
Published March 04, 2009 @ 01:23PM PT
The animal rights blogosphere is buzzing today about the episode of Nightline that will air tonight at 11:35 EST, featuring an undercover investigation of a research lab that experiments on primates. You can read the story on ABC's Web site--"Ex-Employees Claim 'Horrific' Treatment of Primates at Lab: Hidden-Camera Investigation Goes Behind Closed Doors at New Iberia Research Center"--in advance of watching the program tonight.
"Nightline" obtained the results of a nine-month undercover investigation by the Humane Society of the United States. A Humane Society investigator took a hidden camera inside the New Iberia Research Center for most of 2008. The video shows what the Society says is the way monkeys and great apes are treated behind closed doors.
The New Iberia Research Center is a public facility, and its research includes contract work for pharmaceutical companies and hepatitis studies. The lab receives millions in public funding but limited public scrutiny.
"Facilities are very secretive in general," said the investigator, who asked to remain anonymous because of the investigation. "It's hard to get a lot of good information out of what really goes on. You rarely see images other than what is kind of posted on the Web sites. Going undercover in a place is the only way you'll see what's the truth."
Continue after the jump for more on the program and investigation, including discussion of the need to remember other animals used in research when advocating for primates.
Saving Animals from Medical School Labs
Published March 01, 2009 @ 07:38AM PT
Late in the game in terms of the campaign, I was planning early on Thursday to talk about the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine's effort to stop the dog labs at the University of Michigan. But I was distracted into writing about something else, and it's best that I was distracted--because my post would have been obsolete within mere hours! Early Thursday evening, I received the e-mail many did, announcing that the 20,000+ e-mails sent already to the University of Michigan calling for an end to their cruel use of dogs in their trauma training lab had been successful: the school announced on Thursday that "it will use only simulators in the Advanced Trauma Life Support course. . . . No dogs or other animals will be killed in the school’s ATLS course, according to a university statement."
And then, though I planned to talk more about this today and about the PCRM's next campaign in its continuing effort to stop live animal labs, when I opened up my Google Reader this morning, I saw that Mary at Animal Person had already posted on this topic earlier this morning! Great minds and all that. So I send you there:
Animal Writings on Animal Research: The Problems and the "Glimmer of Hope"
Published February 14, 2009 @ 07:45AM PT
Gary at Animal Writings has been paying special attention to vivisection--animal research--issues for the last few months; you may recall that I linked to some of these posts in December ("Animal Writings: Scientific Flaws of Cancer Research on Animals") and January ("Colossal and Consistent Failures Using Chimpanzees to Model Human AIDS"). And although all Gary's posts on this topic and on his blog are worth checking out, I direct you now specifically to two of the most recent ones:
"Carnival Against Vivisection: A Glimmer of Hope" begins,
Here are two anecdotes from friends of mine who have worked in medical research laboratories, mostly on NIH-funded projects, for years...
"Roger" had worked on studies with and without animals. He took pains to be gentle to the animals, even to insects and worms. Even those creatures have tasks they seem to want to accomplish, and perhaps even with their relatively primitive systems they have the ability to sense not only pain but well-being. After a period of ambivalence, he told his boss that he could no longer experiment on animals. Now he does only non-animal research, and is almost totally vegan.
"Laurie" has also worked in medical research for a long time, and indicated to her supervisors quite a while back that she will not do any research that harms animals. She became an ethical vegan mid-way into her scientific career. She contends that the only thing standing in the way of total non-animal research in medical labs is the will to make that conversion.
Follow the link to read the rest of the post.
And then read Gary's "Carnival Against Vivisection: Wrap-Up (Almost)." Again, just an extract from the beginning:
The vivisection industry is rife with experiments that inflict substantial pain and suffering on animals, ostensibly to find cures for diseases that we largely bring ourselves. Government health agencies spend scant resources on true prevention campaigns, which would produce a wealth of benefits for relatively little cost. Due to inherent differences between species, and the contrived methods by which vivisectors imitate human disease in animals, many if not all animal model exercises are of dubious scientific value. Notwithstanding the questionable reliability (if not proven unreliability) of animal models, a relatively tiny portion of health research funds are allocated to developing non-animal alternatives.
Many animal experiments do not even pretend to be an effort to cure AIDS or heart disease or cancer. They are studying yogurt-tasting preferences, or trying to induce gayness in sheep, or concocting hideously crude models of PMS. In product testing labs, scientists and staff pour caustic chemicals into the skin and eyes of restrained animals—for profit, not because of scientific or regulatory reasons.
When we treat animals—sentient beings with profound interests, an intense will to live, and an enormous capacity for suffering—as expendable trash, to make a buck, or out of moral laziness, or due to apathy, something is brazenly wrong with society.
And from toward the end:
I think I understand the strategy of many animal activists to concentrate almost entirely on farmed animals and promoting vegan diets: Since around 99 percent of animals bred and killed at the behest of humans live and die in the animal agriculture industry, by getting people to change their diets, we can save the most number of animals and reduce human-caused animal suffering most quickly. I have no qualms with that, and for the most part I follow that same strategy.
But I can't ignore individuals who are suffering and being killed just because they're not in the category at the front of the line. The monkey wasting away alone in a tiny cage in a vivisection lab suffers as intensely as the sow stuck in a maddeningly tiny gestation crate. Each individual's pain and suffering is overwhelmingly important to them. I feel that way with humans, too. I understand attending to crises that affect a great number of people, such as populations starving from drought, war, or corrupt despotic governments, or victims of massive natural disasters that impact population centers. But I can't forget about the political prisoner rotting in a concrete cell in some small, little-known (to us) country. I can't, in essence, say to him or her, "We'll get to you later, once we're done fixing the situations in Darfur and the Mideast."
The Cycle of Violence
Published February 01, 2009 @ 10:23AM PT
In the comment thread to Saturday's post about the mass killing of starlings in New Jersey, Change.org member Sue shared a thoughtful, thought-provoking quotation about the cycle of violence that humans perpetuate against other animals and fellow humans as well--one form of violence forms the basis for another form, and so on and so on, and if we could stop one kind, we could make real progress toward stopping so many others. I now share that quotation with the rest of you. It features a line of thought that I've considered before and read and heard elsewhere, but I'd not yet seen this quotation in its entirety. Much thanks to Sue for posting it:
Isn’t man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife - birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes, and dingoes - by the millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out a card praying for "Peace on Earth."
– from the preface to Old MacDonald's Factory Farm, by C. David Coats
Close-up of sheep: jpockele at Flickr
The Images and Truths We Cannot Hide From
Published January 27, 2009 @ 05:17AM PT
Julie, rescued resident of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Photo credit: WFAS.
Any punk or ska fans out there? This music video from John Feldmann of Goldfinger, with a personal, informal, unedited introduction (~1 min.) from lead singer Feldmann, features the song "Free Me," which Feldmann wrote after encountering a truck of chickens headed for slaughter while on tour.
The music video, after you get through the introduction, includes brief but very real glimpses into the experiences of animals in the various situations in which we exploit and, yes, even torture them. The "spent" dairy cow and veal calf at the livestock auction; the fox at the fur farm; the thrashing hooked fish; the monkeys, dogs, and cats in the lab; the elephant at the circus; the pigs and turkeys at the farms; the crated veal calf; the egg-laying hens and chickens raised for flesh; the tied-up dog outside; the chickens, pigs and cows at the slaughterhouse. If you still participate in or support any of the represented industries or practices through your diet, lifestyle, purchases, or donations, you must watch videos such as this. Refusing to watch when, through the decisions you make every day, you're supporting and even demanding the practices shown, is--and I'm sorry, but it's true--cowardly and irresponsible. Once upon a time, I didn't want to know either; I get that. I get that it takes courage to face the truths that it would be easier to ignore. But please find that courage. Please watch.
And if after watching this, you seek comfort in, for example, the fact that you are eating or now will eat animals from so-called humane farms and not animals such as the hens you saw in the battery cages, please pause and remember the slaughterhouse scenes. Please pause and remember the calf (byproduct of the dairy industry) at the livestock auction. Please pause and remember how clearly the animals shown wanted to live. None of this is different for the "free-range" animals. There is such a thing as compassionate living. But there is not such a thing as humane animal research or humane animal entertainment. And there is most certainly no such thing as humane animal agriculture or humane killing.
The vast majority of us have choices about what we eat, and we make a conscious decision every time we sit down to a meal--do we choose compassion, or do we decide that our simply liking something is worth the massive number of deaths and myriad unavoidable forms of suffering required for us to continue eating in the ways we think of as convenient?
Puppies Are Lucky to Be Experimented On?
Published January 26, 2009 @ 03:50PM PT
Wow, this is surreal. I don't have time to go into any deep analysis at this exact moment, but I at least want to share this notice sent out by PCRM this afternoon, even if I can't write about it just yet.
Edit: I meant to clarify this, and in my rush to post and get back to other work, I forgot--the puppy named Lucky is not the one who is experimented on in this coloring book; he's the one who benefits from research on other animals (in this case, mice). But dogs are experimented on in research labs as well, hence the title of the post and the irony of animal research being presented as great for dogs.
NIH Misleads Children About Animal Experimentation
It has just come to our attention that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in conjunction with an animal research industry trade group, is providing false and misleading information about animal experiments to children.
Alarmingly, the NIH promotes, on its Web site, a children’s coloring book that gives a skewed view of animal experiments. The coloring book implies that researchers are trying to cure animals that are already sick—rather than purposely infecting them with diseases—and ignores the fact that animals suffer and die in the process. The coloring book, entitled The Lucky Puppy, was produced by an industry trade group, the North Carolina Association for Biomedical Research, whose members have a financial interest in the continuation of animal research.
The coloring book is available through the following link: http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/images/coloring/luckycolor.pdf.
The book erroneously portrays the lives of animals in laboratories as pleasant and carefree. Published scientific research and numerous undercover investigations clearly demonstrate that animals in laboratories suffer pain and distress from experimental procedures and routine laboratory practices. The coloring book also makes misleading claims about the benefits of animal experiments, implying that research findings from experiments on animals are directly applicable to both the animals used in research and to humans.
With PCRM's help, you can send a message to the public liaison for the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, asking her to remove the link and explaining why you find it offensive, misleading, and inappropriate. Do that here.
