I am, as usual, late to the party reacting to the news that UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach has given up research on primates owing to “pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project”. As reported by Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach’s name and home phone number are posted on the Primate Freedom Project’s Web site, and colleagues and UCLA officials said that Ringach was harassed by phone — his office phone number is no longer active — and e-mail, as well as through demonstrations in front of his home.
In an e-mail this month to several anti-animal research groups, Ringach wrote that “you win,” and asked that the groups “please don’t bother my family anymore.”
The North American Animal Liberation Press Office, a resource for the media on “animal liberation actions,” according to the group’s Web site, posted a news release from the Animal Liberation Front, a separate group that sometimes engages in illegal activities, about Ringach’s decision. The press release describes Ringach’s research as torturous and “a far cry from life saving research.” UCLA officials said that groups like ALF often misconstrue information, and that, in the interest of researchers’ safety, the university is not releasing detailed information about projects being attacked by such groups.
Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks’s elderly neighbor’s house, and did not detonate.
First thing’s first: an organization that is putting Molotov cocktails on people’s doorsteps — not to mention on their targets’ neighbors’ doorsteps — is beneath contempt. Even if I agreed with everything else they were for (which I don’t), this alone would make these people my sworn enemies.
Harassing people’s kids, while generally non-lethal, is similarly cretinous. The idea here is not to expose daddy’s animal-experimenting ways to junior and his peers, thus shaming daddy out of his line of research. Rather, the message is, we can get to your kids; there is nowhere you can hide from us. Anyone who tries to claim this isn’t the intended message has serious false consciousness about the damage a Molotov cocktail can wreak.
Resorting to violence and intimidation always strikes me as a sign that one hasn’t found a persuasive argument to offer in support of one’s aims. In this case, if the worry is to protect primates from unnecessary harm (including emotional stress), it seems there’s a pretty clear contradiction in exposing humans (also primates) to harm.
But, sometimes the problem isn’t that one does not have a good argument, but that the argument, and all serious efforts at suasion, meet a brick wall. What are you supposed to do then?
Imposing your will on others — violently — is not generally a good answer. But could there be circumstances in which a wrong is being done — a wrong that ought to be stopped — and all your persuasive powers are coming up empty?
What stopped the PHS (“Tuskegee”) syphilis experiment was not the arguments PHS investigator Peter Buxtun made to the agency, but public exposure of the study by newspapers. To a certain extent, the public outcry in 1972 could be viewed as the success of suasion — the newspaper stories persuaded the public that this was bad research, and the public persuaded the government to shut it down. But what if the newspaper stories had come in the 1930s or ’40s, when public attitudes about the humane treatment of poor African American men were such that there might have been no outcry at all?
What if you knew about the syphilis experiment in 1940, had made vigorous arguments that it was immoral and ought to be stopped up and down the chain of command in the PHS, and were told to just go away? What ethical options would you have left? What would you be obligated to do?
Before you accuse me of comparing apples and oranges, I don’t want to claim today’s animal research is on a par with the PHS syphilis experiment or Nazi experimentation on humans. The textbook examples of immoral experiments on humans tend to be distinguished by their bad science as well as their abominable treatment of human beings. Academic scientists in the U.S. today have to jump through lots of hoops to do experimentation with animals or humans, all designed to reduce the number of animals or humans used and to treat them as humanely as possible. Yes, sometimes researchers don’t take the regulations as seriously as they should, but when they get caught breaking the rules, enforcement is supposed to straighten them out.
But, if enforcement doesn’t happen like it’s supposed to, what then?
I really don’t want to live in a world where people have given up trying to persuade each other and go right to violence and intimidation. At the same time, it seems imaginable that the people or agencies with control of experiments might sometimes knowingly tolerate stuff that is not good — stuff that involves avoidable harm to animals and humans — and I don’t have a good idea what one is supposed to do next in the event that one exhausts all the proper channels.
Harming one’s fellow human is a bad option. Letting a harm persist unchallenged is also a bad option.
Insights here are welcome.
You say:
I’m afraid this isn’t the best example to use. The Tuskegee study was not unethical when it was first designed and implemented as the treatment for syph was worse than the disease, especially considering progression to tertiary syphilis is not 100%. The problem with Tuskegee was that after antibiotics were developed the study was not terminated and the participants treated with the standard of care. Instead people who were known to be positive for syphilis were left untreated and lost to follow up for about 30 years after a cure was developed. In retrospect people think that the whole experiment was horribly unethical, but they don’t seem to remember in the 30s, we didn’t have penicillin. We pretty much had to poison people to cure the disease using drugs like guaiacum and mercury or the arsenic-containing salvarsan. If the progression to tertiary syphilis is about 30% and the treatments are poisons that may kill or seriously harm more patients than that, it was a valid question to ask if the treatment was better or worse than the cure.
If you have a situation you find morally intolerable and there is no outcry – indeed, many seem to vaguely approve – then there is some deeper disconnect going on, something fundamental, and whatever your focus should be the precise situation that occasioned your outrage is likely not one of them.
You and the society you live in are deeply mismatched. One example would certainly be an ardent abolitionist living in a society that enthusiastically condoned and made use of slavery of course. Another would be deeply fundamentalist (in its non-derogatory meaning) religious people living in a western liberal democracy.
No quick fix, no small tweak of the current norms or of your worldview is going to mend that rift. It takes literally generations of patient prodding to change a society – and becoming violent or intolerant about it will delay that change or lose what you’ve accomplished already. Changing yourself is equally impossible; the most you can do in many cases is probably accept that your children need to live in the world and not push to make them hold your views to the same extreme degree you do yourself.
Or you can split. There’s many religious groups that have ended up doing just this: close themselves off from the world to live according to their own precepts. Ecological activists, likewise, have gone off to communes or other cooperative enterprises. Abolitionists and slaves alike fled to more hospitable places rather than take the fight where they were. All also in the hope that your example – and the example of societies more palatable to you – gradually change the ways of your own.
Bot no, when you hit that brick wall – whether it be because your society is deeply unjust or your ideas deeply flawed – there really is nothing you can do in the short term.
What makes you think that violence and intimidation is a tactic of last resort, instead of the primary goal?
Try the following situation:
You aren’t very persuasive, or smart, or popular, or wealthy. The uncaring world is passing you buy, and you feel helpless to affect it in any way. So, you decide to do whatever it takes to make an impact, any impact.
A little bit of internet skill, ruthlessness, and organization can give anybody the power to threaten any ordinary citizen. So pick a cause, any cause:
Maybe you don’t like animal experiments.
Maybe you don’t like the occupation of Northern Ireland, Palestine, or Sri Lanka.
Maybe you don’t like women who fail to wear burqas.
Either way, once you have a cause to justify your anger, the sky’s the limit. The lesson of the 21st century is that any washed-up failure of a human being can change his world through violence.
I think I’m with Lab Lemming on this one. We’re not talking about people who have been enslaved, or lost their land, or are being killed for their ideology. Instead we’re talking about people who for the most part are totally ignored by the majority of Americans because, really, their arguments are kind of dumb. I’ve encountered ARAs who tell me, for instance, that we don’t need animals for research because we can model biology with computers (**sound of hand slapping forhead**). They often refuse to acknowledge, just like all other denialists, that biology is essentially impossible without the use of animals, and animal products. After all, say we only use cell culture models (ridiculous as that is), where would we get the serum to feed them? Or the antibodies to probe for proteins? Or the cells themselves if you study primary lines like me? Not everyone can study immortalized lines. How about knockout mice? How will we study genes if we can’t manipulate them in vivo? That’s just scratching the surface of how dependent biology is on animal research, and these people tell me I should do it on a computer.
Alternatively, consider that this idea of total animal liberation, as espoused by prominent members of PETA, makes no sense. Are we going to treat all animals like sacred Hindu cows? Are we going to effectively become Jainists because all life is sacred? Are we going to ignore that human life is impossible without the destruction and consumption of other life? I can think of about a billion examples of how these arguments are just silly, humans should not feel guilty about killing for our survival or even our comfort. Are we going to start tolerating a tapeworm in our bowels because it’s an animal and is deserving of respect? Or malarial parasites? Maybe our immune system is evil because it kills life constantly to maintain our own? Should we not build buildings because we might upset the moles in the ground or the birds that fly into our windows? Shall we not drive because we run over squirrels, possums, deer, and millions upon millions of bugs hitting our windshields? Shall we not shower for the sake of the mites covering our bodies? Shall we never use pesticides to prevent our crops from being eaten (and even organic growing uses so-called organic pesticides like sulfur – ironic). Further where are these rights for animals coming from and how far do they go? Do they get the same rights as us? Do the have the right to free speech, association, and the right to petition congress?
I don’t think these ARAs are therefore reasonable or mature people, I don’t think they understand how life works on this planet, in favor of some weird hippy view of oneness with nature which is impossible. Nature will try to kill you any chance it gets, it does it all the time, we are not “one” with it. Their criticisms of scientists being cruel is also silly, given our IRBs, ACUC committees, animal protocols, and vets supervising all of our animals all the time. Not to mention, stressing or mistreating your animals is just bad science, it isn’t just bad morally, it isn’t good for your data.
So, to summarize, I think we’re not talking about an inevitable historical progression type of movement like abolitionism or civil rights. They are trying to instead force us into a completely unrealistic mode of living, in which deference is given equally to all animals as to human life. This is silly, unrealistic and unfair. Our genes didn’t fight and struggle and get eaten for billions of years to get on top of the food chain to cede it back to other animals just because some of us are feeling survival guilt. And life without destruction of other life is impossible, barring the ability to carbon fix via photosynthesis, and I’m pretty sure we’re not going to develop that any time soon.
Lab Lemming, I’m in total agreement that most of the violent extremists out there aren’t using these tactics because they’ve run out of reasonable ones — which is why I find this lot so execrable. The thinking that makes violence the best option for getting your way is so bewildering to me that I couldn’t even begin to work out a good plan for reaching that stripe of extremist.
Janne, your comment captures a lot of what I’m wrestling with here. I guess I want to believe that humans ought to be willing to deal with each other and examine the “mismatches” in order to find somethingv like common ground, but that’s Hard Work, and we humans are notorious for our sloth.
Quitter, from the reading I’ve done on the syphilis experiment, I think it’s hard to make a completely persuasive case that it was ethical when it started. It’s true that penicilin was not in use at that point to treat syphilis, and that the arsenic and mercury based treatments were pretty nasty. But, does that make a study which aimed to follow the natural history of untreated syphilis ethical or scientifically sound?
Consider that there was already a study of the natural history of untreated syphilis (conducted in Norway and published in 1929). Why, scientifically, was another such study warranted? Notice that it wouldn’t help at all to prevent further cases of syphilis, nor was it anticipated to shed any light on how syphilis could be treated.
What seems to have prompted the PHS study was the though that syphilis might develop differently in black people than in white people. Finding out whether this was so might have satisfied someone’s scientific curiousity, but again, it’s not clear what help this knowledge would have been to people with syphilis or people at risk of infection. Also, a notable bit of bad experimental design: the PHS actually gave the study participants some treatment (and then put pressure on the physicians they might come into contact with over the next few decades to withhold any treatment that might do anything for the syphilis) — so this could no longer be considered a study of the natural history of completely untreated syphilis, nor could any meaningful comparison be made with the Oslo study.
So, the science was lacking. And, arguably, the treatment of the human subjects was lacking from the very start. A group of poor black sharecroppers in the American South was recruited, not told what was being studied (thus preventing them from taking any meaningful steps not to infect sexual partners), led to believe that their regular visits to the doctors involved “treatment” for whatever it was that ailed them, and pressured into staying in the study. They were lied to in a way that no one would have found acceptable — even in 1932 — if the study had involved middle-class whites. Ethically, that’s a problem. And, it was a problem despite the fact that there weren’t yet regulations requiring that human subjects be treated with a certain level of respect. Regulations are a matter of what’s legal; ethics are a matter of what’s right.
While you’re right, by todays standards the PHS study fails on multiple levels such as lack of informed consent, a study based on race of questionable benefit to the participants, and total failure of ethical followup or termination of the study in the face of new results, namely in 1942 the purification of enough penicillin to treat a human subject and subsequent wide availability of the drug after WWII.
But you have to remember that ethics was simply not as mature back then as it is now, and it’s not like these guys were sitting around cackling and thinking of how to destroy the black race. It was a mixture of things, including racism for sure, but I think the worse aspects of the study were just poor planning and follow-through. Certainly, this study would not have been performed on rich white men, or if it were, it wouldn’t have been done so badly. But I think we’re getting close to ascribing active malice to the study, which I don’t think existed, and the racism involved isn’t of great value to a modern ethical discussion.
I’m not disagreeing with you that the comparison between early animal research and tuskegee is apt, but I think the similarity between Tuskegee and early animal research is a more valuable comparison when you view it as more an issue of negligence and laziness. For instance, I think early studies using animals that sparked animal welfare legislation in scientific labs were probably afflicted by a similar problem. The scientists weren’t actively out to be cruel and sadistic, but because of careless, laziness, and lack of regard for study participants animals were treated in an inhumane way. I have a tech who was a vet for animals being used as surgical guinea pigs in the 70s. She used to say the problem wasn’t cruelty of the surgeons, but that they were just lazy, they would do the surgery and not return the next day to check on their patient so the animals would be suffering from infection or reopened wounds and have to be put down. Then we got our asses collectively whipped in line and now vet supervision is very strict and you simply can’t get away with being lazy any more (at least not at our university). I think it’s similar with tuskegee, the inhumanity was from their laziness and disregard of followup, far more than any other causes even race clearly played a part. I just feel the valuable lesson about Tuskegee is lost if we focus solely or mostly on the issue of race.
The great thing is also that not only do the corrections to prevent this kind of disregard for any kind of study participant make studies more humane, I think they also improve the quality of the science. As much as ACUC protocols can be a pain to figure out, the current system of monitoring and forcing careful planning of one’s studies on animals has the side-effect of making the science itself better. The same is true on the human side with IRBs and planning and approving protocols of human study. These safeguards were put in place because our mistakes caused inhumane suffering of people or animals, but it should have been in place anyway just to make the science better. The problem with using the emotionally laden examples of Nazis and PHS is that in terms of modern ethical discussions they simply aren’t that valuable anymore to the problems we are facing. We all agree that stuff was bad, it’s obvious. Modern ethical violations are likely to be a lot more subtle, things like downplaying side effects and failing to notify IRBs of negative outcomes or slight changes to protocol (like in the Jesse Gelsinger case). Or, in things like failure to recognize conflict of interest or performing studies that serve more of a marketing goal rather than a scientific one. Those are the discussions we should be having now, and I just don’t find the discussion of PHS or Nazi science as relevant any more. The problems we have today aren’t nearly as clear cut as those.
I think I was trying to grope for the idea that perhaps at times there really is no common ground to grope for – the perceived injustice in society really is intolerable for those seeing it as such; and the society does not see anything wrong with the situation (indeed, they’re probably seeing something deeply disturbing in the views of this minority) and is not going to change. And were it to change, you’ll just have created different minority groups facing an newly intolerable society.
We need a mechanism to resolve that unresolveable situation.
And one way has historically been for minority groups to split with their society altogether – you have groups like the Quakers, Shakers and so on that did so, and there’s many other small (usually but not always religious) groups attempting the same today. The problem for them is, it’s getting more and more impossible to do so. There’s no unclaimed lands to emigrate to, no open vistas to head for.
We all have to live together today, no matter how it may chafe. I don’t know how to resolve that. One faintly possible way might be (warning: buzzwords ahead) through the net. Physically stay in a place, but keep the local interactions to a minimum – don’t leave your small enclave of likeminded people, only doing the minimum interaction necessary for your daily life – and engage instead in your fellow community wherever the members may physically reside. It is becoming nominally possible for at least some professions to have a profession, even a career, largely online, without having to engage in your local society at all. Perhaps when this becomes not only possible but realistically doable for many or most members of a subsociety will the tension of residing in a mismatched society ease. When you never have to confront the societal norms you dislike, you no longer have to dwell on it.
These are your students.
I think it’s funny, the people who complain about (and occasionally even debate) and take action against animal experimentation are basically also cowards. There was a smakk kerfuffle about animal experimentation at my college, but there was a racetrack just up the road. Nothing ever happened there, that couldn’t have been because it was Mafia-connected, now could it?
So end the end, what happened to the primates in the cancelled program?
Quitter,
I don’t think your arguments against animal liberation show that animal rights activists are unreasonable immature people whose “arguments are kind of dumb”.
Your sole argument seems to be that “total animal liberation” would be hard to achieve because we regularly harm and kill members of other species. But this fact does not show that “humans should not feel guilty about killing for our survival or even our comfort”. How does it follow from the fact that it is hard (or even impossible) not to harm animals that we are justified in harming them?
First of all in relation to your argument, the concept of animal liberation does not entail that all animal life should be counted equally or even that all animal life is valuable. At the very least we can restrict those beings whose lives have value to sentient beings – that is, beings who are concious and have the ability to feel pleasure and pain. This does not mean that all sentient beings lives are equal either. Human beings who are intelliegent and rational and who see themselves as beings with a past and a future can be said to have more valuable lives than other animals. Does this mean that animals may be sacrificed for our benefit? No. I believe that my life is more valuable than that of an alzheimers patient but I would not do harmful experiments on them for my benefit.
“Do they get the same rights as us? Do the have the right to free speech, association, and the right to petition congress?”
Do children have these rights? No, because they do not have the ability to do these things. This does not mean we are justified in exploiting children.
In the end your argument seems to be based solely on the fact that it would be impossible to live without harming or killing other species, so this is justifified. But it is also impossible to live without harming or killing other humans. Every year thousands of people die unintentionaly in car accidents. Does the fact that all human life is valuable mean we should give up cars? No, the benefits of car use outweigh the harms. Does it mean that the view that we should not harm other humans is wrong because “life without destruction of other life is impossible”? No.
Quitter writes:
“[Y]ou have to remember that ethics was simply not as mature back then as it is now … I just don’t find the discussion of PHS or Nazi science as relevant any more. The problems we have today aren’t nearly as clear cut as those.”
“[W]e got our asses collectively whipped in line and now vet supervision is very strict and you simply can’t get away with being lazy any more (at least not at our university).”
With all due respect, Quitter’s view of the current animal research situation in the US is less than accurate. Where to begin?
How about this: the United States Department of Agriculture Inspector General’s Office says that APHIS is failing to enforce even the minimal requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. 10/20/2005 – APHIS Animal Care Program Inspection and Enforcement Activities http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/33002-03-SF.pdf
Or this:
Statement from the Director: CDC Animal Care and Use
Published: November 16, 2006
“We are deeply sorry for the mistakes in our animal care and use program that led to the mishandling of animals in our care, including, sadly, the accidental death of non-human primates. CDC conducted a comprehensive review and determined that there was no single cause for the deficiencies, but a series of issues that led to these failings, including fragmented oversight, lack of centralized accountability, inadequate training, programs that outgrew resources, and outdated information management systems and equipment. The problems worsened over many years, and temporary fixes were simply inadequate to improve a system that really required a complete modernization and top leadership attention.”
Oversight at the facilities I have investigated is uniformily problematic. At UCSF, APHIS found that workers failed to report violations of the Animal Welfare Act for fear of reprisals. At the Oregon primate center, even other scientists there spoke out about some of the studies once undercover video was made public. At UW-Madison, just in the past few years, cows have died from neglect, monkeys have been killed in cage washers, monkeys have died from various instances of neglect and incompetence, and this is all documented by the USDA. About two years ago, a primate vet received a $260,000 settlement after she was terminated over her concerns that the animals were not being cared for properly. This was Dr. Jennifer Hess.
I know two USDA APHIS inspectors who have quit because of the agency’s lack of real interest in enforcing the AWA. Dr. Isis Johnson-Brown’s case is particularly telling.
But aside from the fact that the oversight system, nationally, is broken, or maybe has never worked, there is the very large problem of the research itself not being very good science. Examples are many, but it is always argued that any number of studies are just anecdote and don’t really inform us about the situation in general.
In fact, almost no scientific evidence is available upon which to make a claim that the animal model is a predictive or productive research modality. There is however, at least some scientific evidence that strongly suggests that the science is not very good.
One study that is a good indication of the failure of modern animal-based science to self-correct (a key element in real science) is Plous S, Herzog H. Animal research. Reliability of protocol reviews for animal research. [Science. 2001 Jul 27;293(5530):608-9.]
Plous and Herzog:
“… [W]e conducted a study of randomly selected IACUCs from U.S. universities and colleges. Seventy committees were drawn from a master list of 916 IACUCs maintained by the U.S. Office for Protection from Research Risks. Of these 70, 50 agreed to participate in the study. Thirty-four IACUCs came from research or doctoral universities, seven came from master’s colleges or universities, six came from specialized institutions (e.g., medical colleges), and three came from liberal arts colleges. In all, 494 of 566 voting members (151 females and 343 males), or 87% of those approached, took part in the study.
Each IACUC was asked to submit its three most recently reviewed protocols involving animal behavior, including the committee’s decision on whether to approve the research in question. All information identifying the investigator or institution was then removed from the protocols, and each protocol was randomly assigned to be reviewed a second time by another participating IACUC. Voting members of the second committee were sent packets containing three masked protocols with a request to review the protocols and to send us a completed evaluation anonymously in a prepaid envelope.
Once we received reviews from individual committee members, the IACUCs were asked to meet as a group and render a final evaluation for each of the three protocols. Committees were asked to follow their standard operating procedures and to discuss the protocols as they would any other research proposal.
Protocol evaluations from the originating committee and from the second committee were not significantly related to one another…. This absence of a relation was found not only across the full set of 150 protocols, but for relatively invasive research involving procedures such as electric shock, food or water deprivation, surgery, and drug or alcohol research…; for protocols involving euthanasia …; and for protocols in which the reviewing IACUC expected animals to experience a significant amount of pain…. Thus, regardless of whether the research involved terminal or painful procedures, IACUC protocol reviews did not exceed chance levels of intercommittee agreement…”
They noted that reviewers reviewing protocols from other institutions found them unintelligible, of poor design, and that they seemed to be asking unimportant questions.
All of this aside, I think Quitter’s main error (much more problematic than the demonstrable error that serum or monoclonals must be animal derived) is in his/her rationale for his/her belief that humans should not be too concerned about harming other animals. Such ideas may be related to the industy’s poor results overall since similar claims are regularly voiced by others working in this area and seem to be anything but evidence of clear thinking.
Here’s the problem: very strong evidence indicates that members of at least some species experience the world and life in ways that are essentially not distinquishable from the way we ourselves experience the world and life. My favorite best example of this is the short paper Masserman J, Wechkin S, Terris W. 1964. ‘Altruistic’ behavior in rhesus monkeys. [American Journal of Psychiatry. 1964. http://www.madisonmonkeys.com/masserman.pdf ] But since 1964, the amount of evidence has grown leaps and bounds.
It comes down to this: Through the use of scientific methods, careful observation, controlled experimentation, repeated demonstrations, and various manipulations, we have discovered that animals other than ourselves have complex minds with sophisticated mental capabilities like analogical reasoning (Fagot J, Wasserman EA, Young ME. J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process. 2001), numerical computation (Sulkowski GM, Hauser MD. Cognition. 2001), a sense of fairness (de Waal, Sci Am. 2005), tool use (Ducoing AM, Thierry B. Anim Cogn. 2005), and they possess unique and describable cultures (Sapolsky RM, Share LJ. PLoS Biol. 2004).
In other words, we have discovered another group of intelligent and emotional beings within our midst. This discovery should give us pause. We cannot rely on the scientists using these animals to make the right moral choices; they have proven that they see these profound similarities as reason to exploit these animals further; as a justification for hurting and killing them. (For instance, see Burbacher TM, Grant KS. 2000. Methods for studying nonhuman primates in neurobehavioral toxicology and teratology. Neurotoxicology and Teratology.) Such a position is clearly immoral or evidence of criminal insanity.
So what should those who knew what Mengele was doing have done? What is the moral imperative? Did people have a moral responsibility to help slaves escape? Was John Brown wrong?
The notion that humans are here and the rest of creation is over there, seems to disregard evolution. There is a continuity in all living things because we are all decendents of some common ancestor. As we become more closely related in evolutionary time, we should expect to find ever more similar characteristics, and we do.
But this plain fact is largely ignored by society at large, and its ethical ramifications are almost never addressed. Among the public, this is cause for some concern, but among scientists, and especially among biological scientists, the failure to seriously address this matter is a sign of something darker.
In the absence of clear evidence that experimenting on animals leads to much benefit to humans, the only justification I have been able to discern is money.
Before shouting that I am mischaracterizing an entire industry or profession, ask yourselves this: how many volunteer vivisectors have you heard of? Doctors, nurses, teachers, business people, farmers, carpenters, I can think of instances of people volunteering in almost every profession. But I’ve not heard of Vivisectors Without Borders.
Some activists, familiar with the history of the failure of rational discourse, legal action, and legislation to curtail the harms we do to other animals, and who have begun to understand the implication of the statistics regarding the number of animals being harmed, feel ethically compelled to coerce change.
It’s an absolute shame that nothing more civil has yet worked.
I represented myself in a lawsuit against UCLA.
I got injured at a demonstration when I asked UCLA why they won’t debate animal experimentation. Why they ingore requests and have not debated in 20 years while vivisection is funded with tax money.
On August 4, 2006, I took the deposition of UCLA’s medical expert witness and seconds before I started with my questions, I told UCLA that I finally had a lawyer after almost 3 years.
On August 4, 2006, Dario Ringach quit and announced “You Win”
This move was also tied into The Animal Enterprise Terrorist Act to try and “Win” the public’s sympathy.
UCLA may be afraid of some activists but they are definately afraid of debating vivisection and lawyers.
SAME DAY folks. I don’t belong to an animal rights groups, I am a non violent tax payer wanting to see UCLA debate what they claim is helping human beings.