Never Assume Anything About Your Friends

In the unending quest to find a kindred animal rights soul amongst my current friends, I ventured into animal testing territory with three friends over lunch this week (two guys and a woman). One guy I already knew was pretty hopeless (as he always eats some au jus sandwich). But I had hopes for the other two because they both started up the lunch talking about how they both bawled over that book Marley and Me. (It's about a dog and his family and it was made into a movie with Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson) The woman is a huge animal lover too who has five rescued horses and about four dogs.

So it was weird when we got on the subject of health care reform and pharmaceuticals. It was a natural progression for me to talk about how drug companies are basically out for profit, not to save people. Most of their testing is repetitive, useless, and/or designed to create clones of drugs whose patents are about to run out. I raised the example of how I thought there would be alternatives to animal testing by now if there would be profit involved. There's just no profit motive to encourage innovation.

Not a word from the woman. She is usually so passionate about these things, but nada. All I can think of is that her husband is a trauma nurse and maybe they've had this conversation before. Or maybe she disagrees with me. My male friend agreed, but chose to focus on the drug companies' business practices themselves for the rest of the conversation.

Oh, well. At least I tried....but, really, they cry over Marley and Me but not the real animal tragedies out there. Brother.