Gandhi’s AV legacy

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2001:
BRIGHTON, U.K.–Anti-vivisectionist C.K. Yoe won a year-long battle on June 8 when the Imperial Cancer Research Fund pulled a TV spot depicting the Indian vegetarian statesman Mohandas Gandhi. The ICRF won an appeal to the Independ-ent TV Commission, as the use of the image was approved by the New Delhi charity Gandhi Smarak Nidhi–but GSN withdrew the okay upon learning that the ICRF funds vivisection, which Gandhi abhored.

Primates freed for World Week

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2001:

CAPE TOWN, NEW ORLEANS, AMSTERDAM, SAN ANTONIO, PORTLAND
(Ore.)–April 25 brought freedom for the luckiest four of 14 baboons
who were rescued from neglect in October 2000 at the Centre Africain
Primatologie Experimentale in Mpumalanga, South Africa.
Seized under a warrant obtained by the Centre for Animal
Rehabilitation and Education, the four adult male baboons were
released into a private reserve in the Waterberg district of Northern
Province.

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Testing common gases

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2001:

 

WASHINGTON D.C.–American Petroleum Institute chief
toxicologist Lorraine Twerdok doesn’t like to do animal testing, she
told ANIMAL PEOPLE on April 12. Twerdok said the Petroleum HPV
Testing Group headed by the American Petroleum Institute would do
animal testing to the extent required to satisfy concerns about
public health and safety, but stipulated that using animals was
never their first choice of methods if another approach could be used.

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Institutional cases

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2001:

 

Walla Walla, Washington county prosecutor Jim Nagle has “determined that criminal prosecution was not warranted” for alleged violations of humane slaughter and anti-cruelty laws at the Iowa Beef Packing plant in Wallula, the Washington State Department of Agriculture announced in mid-April, 11 months after receiving undercover video from the Humane Farming Association which showed cattle being skinned and dismembered while alive and conscious. The WSDA case summary said that Nagle “concluded there was insufficient admissible evidence to prove criminal corporate liability” because “the acts were not done by employees in the course of employment,” and “unedited video showed that employees took corrective action” when conscious animals were seen. Therefore, the WSDA continued, Nagle “could not conclude that the alleged activity would benefit IBP or that there was evidence of intent to benefit…Neither was there any basis for imputing the alleged acts to” IBP, though the improper stunning allegedly resulted from trying to kill cattle at too fast a pace. Nagle was said to be “particularly concerned that the unedited video demonstrated HFA’s intent to promote a particular agenda through the edited tape, such that all evidence developed by HFA was discredited.” The ruling appeared to contradict the precepts of criminal law that crimes cannot be retracted and that physical evidence is not necessarily negated by observer bias.

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Huntingdon Life Sci strikes back

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2001:

 

HUNTINGDON, U.K.– Citing five years of “physical attacks on individual employees, death threats, bomb threats, destruction of property, burglary, harassment, and intimidation,” Huntingdon Life Sciences Group of England and New Jersey and the Stephens Group investment firm of Little Rock, Arkansas, which is the largest Huntingdon creditor, on April 19 sued Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, Voices for Animals, the Animal Defense League (N.J.), In Defense of Animals, and various individual activists for alleged violation of the U.S. Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organization statute.

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BOOKS: Sacred Cows and Golden Geese

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2001:
Sacred Cows and Golden Geese
by Ray Greek & Jean Swingle Greek
Continuum (320 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017), 2000.
256 pages, hardcover; $24.95.
Sacred Cows and Golden Geese came recommended by several ANIMAL PEOPLE subscribers as the most thorough and factually supported presentation yet of the scientific case against vivisection. Perhaps it is. It may supercede the obsolete texts by Hans Reusch, The Slaughter of the Innocent (1978) and The Naked Empress (1982), which until now have been the Bibles of scientific antivivisectionism.

Like the Reusch volumes, Sacred Cows and Golden Geese extensively reviews medical mistakes of the past that resulted from misinterpreting animal research. But when Reusch wrote, current biotechnology barely even existed in theory. Sacred Cows and Golden Geese hits at least in passing most major biotech developments.

The authors, anesthesiologist Ray Greek and veterinarian Jean Swingle Greek, bring appropriate credentials to their task. They footnote more copiously than Reusch ever did. They are also more discriminating in their use of sources. Most of their claims are anchored to articles from peer-reviewed journals, and most essentials of each citation appear verifiable via the Internet.

Gesturing toward popular appeal, Greek and Greek omit the horrific photos of old experiments that are a mainstay of most antivivisection literature. They explain that they hope to appeal to readers’ intellect, not just wrench hearts and stomachs. But Sacred Cows and Golden Geese is nonetheless more a sermon to the choir than a fair exploration of vivisection from a scientific perspective.

The “scientific” argument, essentially unchanged in at least three centuries, is that animal experiments harm human health because the differences among species are so great that findings cannot be reliably extrapolated from animals to people. The evidence, continuing to amass, is that animal experiments have often not accurately modeled human disease, response to toxins, and response to surgical technique. Much of the data is disputed.

Yet as Greek and Greek establish with quote after quote from researchers, there is general agreement throughout most of the medical and scientific community that animal testing has often failed to predict longterm hazards of carciniogenic chemicals; that older toxicity tests such as the LD-50 were pointlessly obsolete decades ago and have been done during the past 30 years more for legal reasons rather than for reasons of science; that such tests must be phased out and replaced; and that medical training has relied too much on surgery and drugs, instead of disease prevention through diet and exercise.

But all of this falls short of making a case that animal-based research is worthless and useless. To establish that a
screwdriver makes a poor chisel, for example, is not the same thing as establishing that a screwdriver is a poor tool to use for driving screws.

Greek and Greek describe the failures of vivisection without adequately explaining why researchers persist in doing it. The competitive nature of science and medicine and the magnitude of the rewards awaiting discovery tend to render conspiracy theories absurd. Further, the advent of genetic modification has begun to counter arguments about species differences. The organs of mice and pigs may indeed function differently from those of humans, but the differences narrow markedly when the organs of mice and pigs are grown from human genes.

One way or another, the scientific case against vivisection always circles back to moral and ethical arguments. Even if all the scientific problems with animal research could be resolved, the moral and ethical dilemmas would remain: just because a thing can be done does not mean that it should be.

Like Reusch, Greek and Greek ultimately come across much like “scientific” creationists, whose cases hang on the imprecisions and past errors of evolutionary theory. Scientific discovery is by nature imprecise. Science progresses because theories are constantly tested, revised, and retested in light of new findings. Animal research survives because on balance it seems to produce useful results. Whenever a more effective method of pursuing a particular type of investigation has evolved, animal research in that pursuit has dwindled, not least because using lab animals is expensive.

Innovation and moral concern about animal suffering may eventually end lab use of animals–not, however, because animal research “doesn’t work,” in scientific terms, but rather because a non-animal approach better serves the sum of the needs and wishes of society.

Chimp Retirement Act runs afoul of NIH monkey-business

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C.– – Alleged
monkey-business involving the Florida vote
count in the November 7 U.S. presidential
election may have thwarted monkey-business
by amendment in the House of
Representatives to the Chimpanzee Health
Improvement, Maintenance and Protection
Act of 2000.
Called the “Chimp Retirement Act”
for short, the amended bill cleared the House
on October 24, but was deemed unlikely to
get Senate attention when it didn’t reach the
floor before the election recess.

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TANZANIA IS HUB OF BABOON TRAFFIC

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2000:

ARUSHA, Tanzania– – Growing
global concern about the decline of primates in
the wild and the possibility of more stringent
regulation of primate exports has coincided
with a flurry of primate sales to laboratories by
African and Asian dealers whom some sources
liken to bar patrons rushing to grab one last
drink “for the road” at closing time.
One apparent hub of the traffic,
especially in wild-trapped baboons, is Arusha,
Tanzania, located near the Kenya border with
paved road access to international airports at
Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya, as well as
the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam.

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USDA agrees––finally––that rats, mice, and birds are animals

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

WASHINGTON D.C. – –
U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle
on October 4 agreed to hear arguments
from Johns Hopkins University
and the National Association for
Biomedical Research against a
precedent-setting agreement under
which the USDA Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service would settle
a lawsuit brought by the
Alternatives Research & Development
Foundation by bringing rats,
mice, and birds under the protection
of the federal Animal Welfare Act.
The proposed agreement
requires the USDA to amend the
definition of “animal” in the Animal
Welfare Act enforcement regulations
so as to remove the exclusion of rats,
mice, and birds which has been in
effect since 1970.

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