by Wes Wynne
It was inevitable. Two elements of the American counter-culture - animal rights proponents and AIDS activists - were destined to come to blows at some point. It finally happened in June, 1996, when members of the AIDS-awareness group ACT-UP crashed the annual Animal Rights Awareness Week held in Washington, D.C. The organizations on hand to support animal rights (AR) had been lobbying for the severe curtailment, and in some cases the total elimination, of lab animals for use in scientific testing.
But the elimination of animals in testing would be disastrous in the war to find cures for diseases like AIDS. The patent immorality of AR legislative efforts was finally regarded as dangerous enough for ACT-UP to take a stand. Their protest has placed Hollywood gliteratti and haute cÙture socialites who support both causes in a decided bind. But the ACT-UP protest, and their outraged response to the misinformation being spread by anti-testing groups, was long overdue.
A recent publication by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) shows why animal rights extremists must not succeed in preventing the use of animals for medical experimentation. It tells the story of 8-week old Charlotte Evert, born with a lethal heart condition. Her illness caused a narrowing of the arteries between the heart and the lungs. Charlotte was12 months old when she underwent open-heart surgery to save her life, but at age three, her heart was failing again due to the strenuous pressures needed to pump blood to her lungs. Rather than face the dangerous risk of a heart-lung transplant, she received an experimental operation called balloon angioplasty. The operation was a success. Charlotte Evert is now living a normal life and will probably never have to face the hazard of a heart-lung transplant.
The procedure she received involves passing a catheter through the blood vessels to points where the arteries are pathologically constricted. There, a balloon that surrounds the catheter is inflated, widening the arteries so blood can flow normally. More than 200,000 people in the U.S. now undergo the operation each year, many of them children like Charlotte Evert, born with defects which would have been incurably fatal only a generation ago. Balloon angioplasty was developed in the 1970s in clinical tests with dogs. Without them, the procedure's development would have been delayed indefinitely, at the cost of many human lives.
The use of dogs for the testing of new surgical techniques is only one way in which research with animals has saved lives and prevented human suffering. Animals are used extensively in the testing of all new drugs to determine their toxicity, side effects and appropriate dosage levels. In some cases, drug development stops when animal studies indicate that the side effects are too dangerous to merit approval for human prescription.
The historic importance of animal work is evident in numerous medical advances, including the development of the first polio vaccine in 1953. Non-human primates were used along with other important tools of research, such as cell cultures, to put an end to the disease. Earlier on, in 1921, insulin was isolated thanks to experiments employing dogs; this advance led to successful treatment of diabetes. Today, ongoing research involving animals is used to study cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and many other illnesses, and the search is not just for more effective treatments, but cures.
Despite the unambiguous and widespread benefits that have accrued from research using animal subjects, there are many who dissent against such research and militate actively for its abolition. Almost as a reductio ad absurdum of moral relativism, these individuals claim that animals are the moral equivalent of human beings. This odd thesis is no longer merely the chatter of a few intellectuals cloistered in ivory towers, but rather in the past two decades it has become the rallying point for a growing and powerful movement that threatens the continued development of biomedical and behavioral science. The modern animal rights movement in the past twenty years has grown enormously from a small fringe group of British cognoscenti, into a heavily funded activist network involving hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, America and Australia. Its tactics have variously been political, terroristic, and indoctrinational.
Perhaps nothing captures the philosophy of the movement better than a quote by Ingrid Newkirk, the director of the largest and most powerful animal rights group in the United States, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). "A rat is a pig is a boy is a dog," said Newkirk to Katie McCabe of The Washingtonian. In other words, no ethical distinction is to be made between humans and animals; the death of a rat or pig or dog is just as tragic as the death of a boy. Consequently, any animal that must be sacrificed in animal research is a victim of wrongful death in the eyes of animal rights activists. According to PETA, any killing of an animal for reasons other than self-defense or mercy killing is equivalent to murdering a human being.
One perennial tactic animal rightists have used to gain support and funding comes from generating fear among pet-owners, who are told that researchers may be acquiring pets for experiments illegally from pounds. Pounds have in fact been the source of research animals, which are put to death by pounds and shelters after a waiting period during which an owner may claim them. But in fact, dogs and cats combined account for no more than two percent of the total number of research animals used each year, and only a fraction of the 12-20 million dogs and cats euthanized each year by animal shelters. Nevertheless, the scare tactic has been effective: by 1991, thirteen states had passed legislation prohibiting researchers from buying stray and homeless animals from pounds. More money must now be spent on animals bought from breeders at hundreds of dollars apiece. The expense leaves less money for research, and the animals which would have been used for research are merely killed by the pounds and shelters. In the end, more animals, not fewer, have died as a result of the new laws.
Among the other tactics of manipulation employed by AR activists is the indoctrination of young people. PETA provides propaganda packets to teachers, students and libraries, and PETA chapters have been formed in high schools. Some of the materials include such things as "a maze game in which children devise an escape route for a mouse trapped in a laboratory with a scientist holding a syringe and knife." Other literature includes instructions on how children can protest the use of animals for teaching purposes. One of the vilest manipulations has been to compare animals sacrificed in research to the people who died in the Holocaust. Activists have affirmed that the aim of ending animal research is as just and as necessary as the liberation of Jews from World War II death camps. Said a co-director of PETA: "Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses."
The following instances are just a few of the many cases of destruction and violence that animal rights activists have perpetrated in the name of animal liberation.
Item: On July 4, 1989 the lab of sleep researcher John Orem was raided at Texas Tech University. Research animals were stolen and damage in excess of $50,000 was done to the lab and the equipment in it. But those costs were perhaps less important than the lost time and lost data. Dr. Orem was studying cats to find the key to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, wherein infants suddenly stop breathing while asleep. SIDS takes the lives of 8,000 babies each year; it is the leading killer of infants in the first year of life. With the cats he was studying, Orem had identified two groups of brain cells that control respiration. He had hoped his work might lead to an eventual drug therapy to prevent SIDS. Orem's cats could have saved lives, and the research done on them caused them no pain. Orem had used behavioral techniques to teach them to hold their breath in order to monitor brain cell activity during apnea. He used only ten cats a year, and the NIH called his veterinary practices a "model of excellence."
Item: Robert Phalen, a research student at the University of California at Irvine had thirteen beagles stolen from his lab. The Animal Liberation Front had distributed a press packet to local newspapers within a day of the theft. In it were claims that the animals were covered with sores and had been left without water, and had had their teeth removed to stop them from chewing through their cages. Yet according to Congressional testimony, a recent inspection by veterinarians had shown the animals and the conditions in which they had been kept were excellent. Yet Phelan was the victim of harassing phone calls and hate mail; his home was picketed by demonstrators.
Sometimes the tactics are more than destructive; they're violent. An English vet was injured by a bomb in June, 1990, when it exploded under her car as she was driving to work. The week before, a researcher at Bristol University had a bomb explode under his car, burning and maiming an infant nearby. In the U.S., an animal rights extremist was convicted several years ago for attempted murder and other charges after planting a bomb in 1988 at the headquarters of a surgical equipment manufacturer which used dogs in the testing of surgical staples. The target was the company chairman.
On English radio an Animal Liberation Front spokesman said of one animal researcher, "The sooner he is killed, the better." Some have concluded that the ALF is intimately tied with other, more mainstream animal rights organizations. Though such supposedly legitimate groups deny any connection with the terrorists, statements like the following, from a PETA spokesman, cause one to question such assertions. "While PETA remains a legal, above-ground organization, we recognize the need for illegal actions to bring to light what goes on in laboratories, which is otherwise hidden from public view."
The horror stories of attempted assassinations, of lab break-ins and of media blitzes against targeted researchers have not gone unnoticed by the peers of the affected investigators. The regulations that animal rightists have succeeded in getting implemented also have made the impact and danger posed by the extremists evident to virtually anyone whose research involves the use of animals. Beyond the research community, awareness is also increasing. On the medical front, one physician writes that he fears that even partial success of the animal rights movement would result in higher costs of developing new medicines, a reduction in the safety of new medications if activists force curtailment of toxicity testing, and lowered availability of new medicines.
Several years ago, one researcher wrote that the efforts of extremists have met with such success because researchers have been disorganized and relatively powerless. But this has changed. Two major national organizations have been formed to educate the public and elected officials about animal research, the National Organization for Biomedical Research and the Foundation for Biomedical Research. Both groups are headquartered in Washington, D. C. A few years ago, the latter was able to convince a New York advertising agency to develop a national ad campaign for them, free of charge. Several major newspapers featured the resulting ads, perhaps the most famous of which depicted a photograph of a group of animals rights protesters. Above the photo appeared the comment, "Thanks to animal research, they'll be able to protest 20.8 years longer." That figure is an estimate of the amount that the average life expectancy has been extended due to biomedical research using animals.
Hopefully, such victories are good omens for the future in the battle against such extremism. The war against the animal rights activists will be fought for many years to come, despite the vacuity of their arguments. Their unrelenting campaign is clearly not motivated by rationalism. If anything, a strong misanthropy may lie the root of it all. As one activist expressed his belief, "Mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the Earth." People like young Charlotte Evert and those awaiting a cure for AIDS will not be easily convinced of that. With luck, neither will the citizens of the developed nations where scientific research is concentrated.
Wes Wynne is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology.