Looking for Books about Animal Experimentation

I've finally decided to take the plunge and really learn about animal experimentation. It's a horrible topic and I post news articles about the abuses from time to time. But I want to be able to argue about it intelligently, citing science, not just morals. Apparently, there is a lot of argument out there than animal experimentation is even good for humans. Many times tests fail. A drug may work on an animal, but fail miserably on a human. Or vice versa. Drugs are not always predictable from human to human even. And how can one expect an animal with a human disease to react the way the human body does? It's essentially a crap shoot.

And, in this day and age, do we really need to be stuck with this archaic and barbaric method of research? Isn't there anything better?

Ghoulish Primate Experiment in South Africa

Warning! This is just horrible and sick, sick, sick. It's at a vomit level with me. From news24.com...

Johannesburg - A Bloemfontein man received a criminal record on Friday for a "backyard experiment" on a pregnant monkey, the NSPCA said.

The NSPCA in November 2008 charged Jordaan for his "merciless treatment" of a heavily pregnant vervet monkey. He had severed her spinal cord to paralyse her for a "backyard experiment.

"She had been captured from the wild... in the opinion of the NSPCA because she had been pregnant and therefore 'of use' for the pitiless treatment."

She said the monkey's infant was removed by Caesarean section on October 31. The procedure to sever her spinal cord had been performed the same day.

This paralysed the monkey from the waist down and made her incontinent. Her cage was “cleaned” with a hosepipe....

Kotze said Jordaan had apparently doing "stem cell research" to help people walk again after a friend of his had been paralysed in an accident.

Jordaan allegedly submitted a research application to the University of the Free State, but its animal ethics committee rejected it. He was told to rewrite and resubmit it. He was not prepared to do so and said he would continue the research on his own, Kotze said.

Welsh Report Shows Increased Animal Research at Cardiff University

Here's an article about an increase in animal experiments at Cardiff University in Wales. According to a Wales on Sunday investigation, the number of animals used at Cardiff has risen by 13 percent since 2006.

In four years it experimented on 157,839 mice, 17,324 rats, 11,096 fish, 1,941 birds, 1,253 guinea pigs, 933 pigeons, 884 frogs, 207 cats, 54 rabbits and 18 tree shrews from the tropics of south-east Asia.

By comparison, Bangor University used 1,464 mice and 664 fish, Aberystwyth used 289 cattle, 153 mice and 102 sheep and Swansea used 1,208 fish.

Ex NASA Employee Joins PETA Protest

April Jean Evans was a NASA engineer, but resigned her position in protest over radiation experiments on monkeys. That takes a lot of courage and conviction. She's living with her brother now and falling into debt, but she is dedicated to working with PETA and other organizations to try to ban primates in experiments.

It was a PETA protest outside her work location that alerted her to the experiments in the first place...showing that any action in defense of animals may have impacts on people that we don't even realize.

Canadian Council Says Mouse Pain Study Was Ethical

I understand that, per the researcher's words, you have to create pain to study pain, but was this study really necessary? There's just something that sits in my gut and says this is wrong...

From CBC News...

The research in question took place over many years and involved inducing various degrees of pain in mice using methods such as dipping their tails in hot water or injecting them with mustard oil or vinegar. The faces of the mice were then photographed to understand how they express pain.

"No one likes putting animals in pain," said Mogil, who holds a Canada research chair in the genetics of pain. But he said in the case, the pain was necessary and scientifically justified.

....However, Leslie Norins, the publisher of the newsletter that led to the council's investigation, questioned Mogil's research methods.

"Mice were purposefully subjected to intense pain without anesthesia," said Norins. "In our reading of the national guidelines, this came very close to a violation.

Why I Question Animal Testing 2.2

I particularly question the use of chimpanzees in medical research. From what I recall, chimpanzees share at least 95 percent of human DNA, although the number that floats around the most is 98.6 percent.

The following is from The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan....

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as "human rights"? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?

I recently was escorted through a large primate research laboratory by its director. We approached a long corridor lined, to the vanishing point as in a perspective drawing, with caged chimpanzees. They were one, two or three to a cage, and I am 80 percent sure the accommodations were exemplary as far as such institutions (or for that matter traditional zoos) go. As we approached the nearest cage, its two inmates bared their teeth and with incredible accuracy let fly great sweeping arcs of spittle, fairly drenching the lightweight suit of the facility's director. They then uttered a staccato of short shrieks, which echoed down the corridor to be repeated and amplified by other caged chimps, who had certainly not seen us, until the corridor fairly shook with the screeching and banging and rattling of bars. The director informed me that not only spit is apt to fly in such a situation; and at his urging we retreated. I was powerfully reminded of those American motion pictures of the 1930s and 40s, set in some vast and dehumanized state or federal penitentiary, in which the prisoners banged their eating utensils against the bars at the appearance of the tyrannical warden. These chimps are healthy and well-fed. If they are "only" animals, if they are beasts which abstract not, then my comparison is a piece of sentimental foolishness. But chimpanzees can abstract. Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer, but I think it is certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison?

For all we know, occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees are possible.* The natural experiment must have been tried very infrequently, at least recently. If such off-spring are ever produced, what will their legal status be? The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due, and can, I hope, help to extend our ethical perspectives downward through the taxa on Earth and upwards to extraterrestrial organisms, if they exist.

Why I Question Animal Testing 2.1

This is a continuation of an earlier post about why I question animal testing.

Oftentimes, scientists seem to think that they just need to waive their PhDs and research projects in everyone's faces and we should all shut up and bow our heads to their great wisdom. But universities and scientists are not always there working for pure learning or the improvement of humanity. There may be a business component there as well. Now, some people may be just fine with that, but my point is that universities and their scientists are not necessarily being motivated by pure, altruistic purposes.

I read the following in a book about the pharmaceutical industry by Marcia Angell (the first woman to serve as the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and currently a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School) called The Truth about the Drug Companies. It is about the Bayh-Dole Act and it has really stuck with me....

{The Bayh-Dole Act} enabled universities and small businesses to patent discoveries emanating from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the major distributor of tax dollars for medical research, and then to grant exclusive licenses to drug companies. Until then, taxpayer-financed discoveries were in the public domain, available to any company that wanted to use them. But now universities, where most NIH-sponsored work is carried out, can patent and license their discoveries, and charge royalties. Similar legislation permitted the NIH itself to enter into deals with drug companies that would directly transfer NIH discoveries to industry.

Bayh-Dole gave a tremendous boost to the nascent biotechnology industry, as well as to big pharma. Small biotech companies, many of them founded by university researchers to exploit their discoveries, proliferated rapidly. They now ring the major academic research institutions and often carry out the initial phases of drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies that can market the new drugs. Usually when a patent held by a university or a small biotech company is eventually licensed to a big drug company, all parties cash in on the public investment in research.

.....The Reagan years and Bayh-Dole also transformed the ethos of medical schools and teaching hospitals. These nonprofit institutions started to see themselves as "partners" of industry, and they became just as enthusiastic as any entrepreneur about the opportunities to parlay their discoveries into financial gain. Faculty researchers were encouraged to obtain patents on their work (which were assigned to their universities), and they shared in the royalties. Many medical schools and teaching hospitals set up "technology transfer" offices to help in this activity and capitalize on faculty discoveries. As the entrepreneurial spirit grew during the 1990s, medical school faculty entered into other lucrative financial arrangements with drug companies, as did their parent institutions. One of the results has been a growing pro-industry bias in medical research-exactly where such bias doesn't belong. Faculty members who had earlier contented themselves with what was once referred to as a "threadbare but genteel" lifestyle began to ask themselves, in the words of my grandmother, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Medical schools and teaching hospitals, for their part, put more resources into searching for commercial opportunities.

Why I Question Animal Testing 2.0

I'm updating this rant from a few years ago regarding why I question animal testing. I'll probably do this in a series of posts because I just can't seem to sit down for long periods of time to write.

I get frustrated when people accept a scientist's opinion in support of animal testing simply because that person is a scientist. I think one should try to understand that scientist's motivations. For whom do they work? Do they work for a drug company that tests on animals? Is their job therefore dependent on that company's success? Or do they work for a university which is dependent on grant dollars for research involving animals? It's very difficult to buck the system when your livelihood is at stake.

(to be continued)

NASA Funds Radiation Experiments on Monkeys

Another animal experiment I would not support as a US taxpayer. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine are calling attention to it.

The research project, led by Jack Bergman of McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate in Belmont, Mass., was one of 12 awarded radiobiology research grants through NASA's Human Research Program, the space agency announced October 27. In Bergman's study, according to Discovery News, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys would be subjected to radiation and periodically tested to gauge how exposure affects performance in a variety of learned tasks. Stellar and galactic radiation would bombard astronauts on missions to Mars, but the health effects of such a trip are not well known.

Trips to Mars? I am so sorry, but the likelihood and necessity of trips to Mars are immeasurably low right now. Of what benefit is this to humanity in the here and now? This is so frigging frivolous. If we are going to subject animals to great suffering (radiation for heaven's sake), don't let it be for something like this. We are nowhere near that.

To be honest, I like science fiction and find the universe fascinating, but I do not support NASA funding. I believe that money to explore space can go to help an impoverished nation. Or better yet, to protect and cherish the planet WE CURRENTLY LIVE ON.

There's nothing to currently do on Mars, but plant a flag and play with some rocks.

A Trip to an Animal Lab

Well, kind of. It wasn't a full-fledged tour, but disturbing nonetheless.

I can't really talk about what I do except that I work in government. In a brief tour of a particular biotech research company, I was taken to the animal lab. They did not experiment on primates (I asked!), but did experiment on mice and guinea pigs. Interesting that many of the grants this place gets specifically say they can't experiment on any domesticated animals (cats and dogs I guess.).

Anyway, I couldn't enter the actual rooms where the animals were kept because I would have had to wear a bio-hazard suit. But I did get to walk around the floor. It was a rather grim place. There was a poster in the lunch room with four cute animals (a dog, cat, rabbit and something else.) It reminded me of an adoption poster at the animal shelter. But when I got closer, I read, "Animal research opens minds." It was a jarring moment. This adorable poster that draws you in to the sweet faces of these animals basically proclaims that it is a good thing to use their bodies for medical research, which almost always leads to pain and death. It was an incongruous message.

Then, heading out, I noticed three little knitted mice. My tour guide was a little uncomfortable and said, "Yeah, that's a little morbid. One of the employees' moms knitted those."

One knitted mouse had a little sign that said, "I want my mommy."

The other had a sign that said, "RIP."

Now I'm way more morbid than most people in my tastes and sense of humor, but even I found this to be very disturbing. It certainly doesn't fill me with confidence in these people's skills in compassion and humane care.

Weird, weird, weird. Just thinking about it makes me crave a shower.

Animal Researchers Use Billboards to Promote Themselves

The "brave" animal researchers are taking their argument to the public and bypassing animal right activists.

Here's an example...a billboard funded by the Foundation for Biomedical Research.

"Ever had leprosy. Thanks to animal research, you won't."

I for one welcome them coming out of the woodwork and forcing animal research into the public forum. Let's discuss the research. Let's talk about what they do, and why, and how. Let's talk about the redundancy, the waste, the pain. Let's see the pictures. If we can't outlaw the practice, perhaps researchers will become more transparent. Then we can finally stop the horrific abuses that they perpetrate within their windowless ivory towers.

UC Davis Named in Criminal Complaint for Mistreatment of Lab Animals

From the Los Angeles Chronicle...

The University of California, Davis is the focus of a major federal complaint charging it and two other nationally known university research centers have killed dozens of primates through traumatic injuries, veterinary negligence and other violations. The others are the University of Michigan and University of Louisiana/New Iberia.

A protest will be held today at the UCD Quad (1 Shields Ave.), sponsored by SAEN {Stop Animal Exploitation Now}, an Ohio-based animal research watchdog group.

SAEN said UC Davis is responsible for the deaths of at least 14 monkeys over an 11-month period from June of 2008 to April of this year, and that the deaths violated federal law. The primate center at UC Davis has been cited several times after monkeys were killed in preventable lab mishaps.

Two Examples of Mice Experiments - Valid or Not?

I came across these stories about two different medical experiments using mice.

In this experiment, scientists tested whether lighting can cause depression. They used different lighting situations to see how they affect mice moods. One of the conclusions? That children who watch television late at night could be “more likely to develop depression."

I'm not convinced that I as a taxpayer would approve funding of this project. Aren't there better things to research? You would need to be watching television late at night regularly in order for the lighting to have an impact. Children shouldn't be regularly watching television late at night for many reasons other than depression. Like they should be sleeping! Are parents who are not paying attention to their kids suddenly going to send them to bed because they might get depressed? Plus, are mice comparable to kids (although I would prefer mice subjects to primates who are so much more sensitive)?

Whether intentionally or not, the title of the article catches the frivolity of the research...."Don't let your mouse watch TV."

Please.

Here's another experiment using mice to determine whether stress and chemicals in plastic is leading to messed up male genitals and, therefore, infertility. The mice are exposed to certain chemicals to see the impacts. But see the qualifications in the article....

....The animal research has offered one explanation for the rising number of babies born with these conditions. However, it involved exposing rats to chemicals at levels that humans are usually not exposed to. This means the conclusions should be treated with caution.

....As this study was mainly about the effect of high doses of a chemical called phthalates on the number of rats born with undescended testicles, it is premature to report that stress has a part to play in reducing fertility in men.

So, why put the animals through this if it's not even a reflective experiment. Sounds like they did it because they could and who cares if you destroy a few carcasses for the hell of it.

Student Researcher Says "Hooray for Animal Research"

This kid is a biochem major at the University of Southern Mississippi. He's helping to investigate possible drug cures for obesity.

Listen to this...

Freeman says that the most difficult thing he has encountered so far in his research comes not from the lab, but from people’s attitudes about animal testing. He said this research, along with other research that could vastly improve human quality of life, could absolutely not be done without animal testing, and wishes more people understood that “animal research is not cruel or inhumane, it benefits us all.”

Interesting that animal research is not cruel or inhumane because it benefits US. Does it benefit the animals? Why do humans always have to get everything we want and we have to do it at the pain and expense of animals?

And by the way, I can tell you the cure for obesity. Diet (eat less!), exercise (walk more!) and counseling to ease off the psychological dependence on food. Drugs are not the cure for everything, although they are very profitable for whoever licenses them.

Another young person indoctrinated by the animal researchers.

What if the Public Truly Probed Animal Research Funding?

This is a great short column by Martha Rosenberg. It's in response to the arrest of Yale animal technician Raymond Clark for the murder of Annie Le, but makes some important points about animal research.

There's a reason for the security that keeps Beagle burn videos from surfacing like egg farm videos. Animal research is too lucrative for the university/government/pharma complex to risk macaques on YouTube and the public judging the asinine and repetitive experiments many researchers know they live on.

Do you think Northwestern University--or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--want to acknowledge that every year from l978 through l985 Associate Professor Dr. Charles Larson fused monkeys' necks to their skulls and deprived them food five days per week to make them cry out in a specific manner according to Concerned Citizens for Ethical Research? At a tax payer cost of $472,370? To "gain insights into some of the neurological disorders affecting vocalization?" Even as his colleagues scoffed?

...No, for animal researchers the bigger fear from Le's murder than technicians like Clark is the public seeing the heaps of unsupervised government pork behind their Plexiglas curtain. No wonder the research community wraps a "saves lives" cloak around its work whether falsified journal articles or Larson's "speech" studies.

It keeps the public from saying YOU'RE FUNDING WHAT? For how many years? With what results? about its tax dollars.

Benicio del Toro Writes Letter Opposing Monkey Breeding Facility in Puerto Rico

Actor Benicio del Toro has written a letter to the governor of Puerto Rico opposing a new monkey breeding facility.

The Puerto Rican actor has penned a letter to the governor of Puerto Rico urging him to halt the construction plans for Bioculture's massive monkey-breeding facility. As you might remember, Bioculture—a company that supplies primates to laboratories—plans to capture monkeys from their homes in Mauritius, hold them captive in Puerto Rico, and then sell thousands of their babies for use in painful and deadly experiments around the world.

Why Is the Federal Government Awarding Contracts to a Company That Was Involved in Smuggling Primates?

Worldwide Primates Inc. was started by Mathew Block to import primates into the US for animal experimentation. In 1993, he went to prison for smuggling baby orangutans. Despite this, it looks like this has been no barrier to his company getting federal contracts. Here is a synopsis from a Brown University web site about his case:

Matthew Block, of Worldwide Primates, Miami, FL, was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison, three years of supervised probation, and a $30,000 fine at a 2-day sentence hearing on April 16, 1993. Block pleaded guilty in February to felony conspiracy to violate the Lacey and Endangered Species Acts by conspiring to smuggle orangutans. This is the case in which six infant orangs were discovered on February 20, 1990, at the Bangkok airport in two small containers marked "Live Birds." Three of the infants died of injuries and diseases, one has disappeared from a rehabilitation center in Borneo and is presumed dead, while the other two are still being rehabilitated. The International Primate Protection League was active in exposing and urging prosecution of this case.

Now, Matthew Block is not listed as a principal of the Corporation according to the Florida Department of Corporations. The principals are Brooke Block (his wife) and Gertie Block (his mother). Is the Matthew Block listed as the contact on this job announcement from June of this year the same one that went to prison? If so, what is his role in the company that he founded?

According to this website, Worldwide Primates has received $2,411,795.00 from the Dept. of Defense since 2000. DOD contracts are not the only government contracts that they have been pursuing.They were denied contracts by HHS back in 2003 due to what the government said was an insufficient response for their RFP. But, according to City-Data.com, they have been successful in getting other government contracts"

WORLD WIDE PRIMATES INC (16450 SW 180TH ST in MIAMI, FL; small business): $362,855 in 5 contracts from 2002 to 2006

Contracts for Live Animals, Not Raised for Food, Laboratory Equipment and Supplies by Army, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health
Signed by year: 2000: $0; 2001: $0; 2002: $42,000; 2003: $0; 2004: $37,145; 2005: $282,120; 2006: $1,590.

Biggest contracts:
$232,500 with Army for Live Animals, Not Raised for Food. Signed on 2005-08-12. Completion date: 2005-10-17.
$49,620 with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Live Animals, Not Raised for Food. Signed on 2005-12-22. Completion date: 2006-03-20.
$42,000 with National Institutes of Health for Live Animals, Not Raised for Food. Taking place in MT. Signed on 2002-08-15. Completion date: 2002-11-15.
$37,145 with National Institutes of Health for Live Animals, Not Raised for Food. Signed on 2004-04-15. Completion date: 2004-05-05.

Aside from the moral issues involved in animal experimentation, why are US taxpayer dollars going to a company started by a man who went to jail for smuggling, and then transferred control of the company to his wife and mother?

RSPCA Collects 68,000 Signatures Supporting an End to Animal Research

That's an even larger number if you realize that each signature probably represents a few non-signers who feel the same way.

I really believe the more people learn about what research animals go through, the more common decency becomes a factor. The problem is that people don't really look at the pictures, read the stories or think about what's happening. They are too disturbed, frightened, or threatened to do so. But how many animal research supporters (non-scientists) actually step into a room and observe an experiment? How many of them actually see these animals in the labs?

That's why so many people don't want to talk about these issues. It upsets them. But their silence and cluelessness is essentially their consent.

The RSPCA collected these signatures leading up to the the 7th World Congress on Alternatives & Animal Use in the Life Sciences in Rome.

[The conference] began on the 30th of August and runs until the 3rd of September, two members of the RSPCA’s Research Animals Department are attending the event together with worldwide representatives of NGOs, industry and science as well as authorities and decision-makers.

68,315 people signed an online RSPCA petition stating "We, the undersigned, call on the British Government to work towards ending the use of animals in experiments, replacing them with humane alternatives."

Unacceptable Trade in Primate Research Animals

I'm so glad I have this blog and other web outlets to highlight these kinds of stories. If not for these outlets, I would have to sit in a slow simmer as none of my "friends" can handle or understand the outrage. I think they just want to live in happy denial. If they think about what's going on and their role in it, then they might actually have to care.

Here's a post on the Red, Green and Blue blog about the unspeakable trade in macaque monkeys as research subjects. Around 10,000 are bred and exported from Mauritius to the US, UK and Japan. They are considered an environmental pest because they are a non-native species that inflict ecological damage....but to deal with them this way is just unacceptable. Better to cull them than subject them to years of pain and loneliness in a lab.

It's Tough to Report about OHSU's Primate Lab

Sounds like there can be a whole lot of drama surrounding the Willamette Week's attempts to report about this place. Here's an example. I wish the Seattle weeklies would at least try to cover the University of Washington's Primate Center.