NOW THIS WAR HAS TWO SIDES

THE TRUTH ABOUT VIVISECTION

1.) Experimenting on animals is an inefficient and cruel way to gather data.

2.) Experimenting on animals is a massive waste of monetary and human resources, while millions suffer and die from easily treated maladies.

3.) Even if experimenting on animals could reliably help humans, and it does NOT, it would still be unethical, just as killing oppressed peoples in Nazi Germany to study hypothermia was unethical.

Introduction- Description of animal suffering

Felix was the name given by Tipu Aziz (a primate vivisector) to one of the many macaque monkeys whom he saw fit to torture in his laboratory. Aziz KILLED Felix on or about September 11, 2007 after injecting a toxin into his veins, which made his limbs shake and his muscles seize up, a common symptom of Parkinson's. The irony of the name Felix should not be lost on us. Felix, interestingly enough, is from the Latin for “happy”. Aziz has freely admitted: if it was left up to him he would KILL animals in order to test cosmetics and believes humans should be experimenting, without their permission, on Great Apes, our closest cousins in the animal kingdom. Fortunately, both cosmetic testing on animals and great ape experimentation are illegal in Aziz’ home country of the UK.
For 10 years beginning in 1984, a chimpanzee named Jerom was infected at Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia with three different types of the HIV virus, all of which differ from the type that typically infects humans. During his illness, Jerom was plagued by diarrhea and wasting, and his immune cells and platelet counts declined over the years. His caretaker, Rachel, witnessed his physical and emotional deterioration in his final months, and described Jerom’s condition in September 1995:

He was so severely weakened by the wasting that he had a difficult time holding his head up. He would sit with his knees drawn up and held his chin in his hand: he had to manually turn his head in the direction he wished to face. At times he would hang his head and sob quietly; other times he would climb down from his bed board and curl up in a fetal position on the floor in front of me.

Jerom’s suffering has done NOTHING to further AIDS research. According to Rachel, there was “no active experimental research being performed on Jerom. It seemed that his only duty was to wait while the disease progressed.” Jerom would receive no HIV treatments, experimental or otherwise, and instead had only to look forward to opportunistic infections, chronic isolation from his fellow chimpanzees. After Jerom’s death, his blood was transfused into three other chimpanzees at Yerkes. However, his infected blood FAILED to induce any significant illness in any of them. NO chimpanzee - including Jerom - has EVER died of the same form of the disease we call AIDS.

Jerom and Felix are two of tens of thousands of glimpses into the minds and laboratories of those who abuse animals daily in their fraudulent profession, serving to remind us all that:

On a daily basis, non-human animals are drowned, suffocated and starved to death; they have their limbs severed and their organs crushed; they are burned, exposed to radiation, and used in experimental surgeries; they are shocked, raised in isolation, exposed to weapons of mass destruction, and rendered blind or paralyzed; they are the given heart attacks, ulcers, paralysis, and seizures; they are forced to inhale tobacco smoke, drink alcohol, and ingest various drugs, such as heroine and cocaine.

Scientific Invalidity of Vivisection

Physician Charles Mayo, founder of the prestigious Mayor Clinic, stated in the early 1900’s-- “I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.”

As a practicing physician and surgeon in the United States, I have spent the past twenty years of my life saving patients from death and disease, most of which results from what they eat, drink and smoke.

As a former animal researcher, I know the realities of animal laboratories, the horrors that will never be shown on tours or routine inspections. I also know the fallacy of expecting animal research to yield results useful in treating human medical conditions, the fallacy of research data thrown away in the garbage along with the thousands of lifeless and mutilated bodies of once sentient, feeling individuals, individuals who had an expectation to live free from suffering and death.

I’ll bet most of you didn’t know that 85% of all the data gathered from animal experiments is literally THROWN AWAY, tossed in the trash because it has no use to anyone, human or non-human; it’s never even published, much less found useful in treating or preventing human illness. And the fifteen percent that is NOT thrown away? Like the mounds of data I had published in numerous scientific journals, that animal data doesn’t result in saving a single patient.

I’ll bet most of you didn’t know that errors in medical treatment and unintended side effects of legally prescribed drugs, all tested as safe on various species of non-human animals, are currently the 4thleading cause of death for Americans. Statistically, there is a greater chance of being killed by a hospital than having an airline mishandle your luggage.

In 1971, 35 years ago, then-American President Richard Nixon declared WAR ON CANCER! How is that war going? NOT WELL. Despite artificially inducing cancer in more rats than you can shake a stick at, MORE AMERICANS ARE CONTRACTING AND DYING OF CANCER-RELATED DEATHS THAN EVER BEFORE.

In 1970, the age-adjusted mortality due to cancer was 189.6 per 100,000. In 1994, it was 200.9 per 100,000, a 6% INCREASE! And it continues to go UP not down! The death rate from diabetes in the US in 1900 was 11 per 100,000. In 1954, 32 years after the development of insulin, it was 15.6 per 100,000. In 1990, 19.5 per 100,000.

Every study that tried to produce cancer or other bad effects in animals from smoking failed to do so; and that’s exactly why the cigarettes companies wanted them to continue.

When a US government agency reviewed drugs marketed between 1976 and 1985, they found 52% were more dangerous than animal studies had predicted, with adverse side effects including PERMANENT disability and DEATH. The best guess for the correlation of adverse reactions in man and animal toxicity data is somewhere between 5% and 25% (flipping a coin is more predictive!)

There are far better alternatives to animal research that should be employed; some but not all are below: Autopsies Biocompatible Materials Blood Gas and Blood chemistry Analysis CAT, MRI and PET scans Clinical Studies Computer and Mathematical Modeling Conformational Search and Optimization used in protein folding DNA Sequencing Drug Delivery Devices Ecological and Population Models of Disease Electrocardiograms and Electroencephalograms Epidemiology and Demographics Fast Fourier transforms used in spectroscopy and CAT scans Fast sequence alignment and database methods used in genomics Gene Chips Genetic Research In Vitro Research with human cell lines Microdosing Microscopy Micro dosing Monitoring Devices Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Post-Marketing Drug Surveillance Separation / Purification Methods Single molecule specroscopies Ultrasound X-Ray Crystalography

Economics

The pharmaceutical industry in the US spends $21 billion (with a B) dollars per year marketing their products, twice what they spend on Research and Development. No surprise our health care costs are increasing 8% per year, and are expected to reach over 20% of the US Gross Domestic Product by 2016.

And yet, the US ranks a low 22nd among nations in life expectancy, and loses more lives to diabetes and has higher infant mortality than Japan, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland.

Here are just a few of the sick and unethical experiments and what they cost the tax payers:

Paralyzed decerebrated cats can be induced to vomit through neural stimulation or emetic drugs. Rockefeller Univ, NY, $1,654,748

Old rhesus monkeys do not learn as quickly or remember as well as young monkeys. BU and yerkes $1,225,000

Crack cocaine is addictive and can impair complex behavior in animals. NYU $2,500,000

Oh yeah, and deep brain stimulation, discovered by chance, through human surgery, by a team lead by LA Benabid in Grenoble(France) in 1987, which continues to be perpetrated on innocent non-human primates by men sitting here in this room.

Now consider what moral and ethical researchers who truly cared about people would be working on:
· They would save the 20,000 children who die in misery each week worldwide of preventable diarrheal diseases, by simply finding ways to provide them with clean water to drink. · They would make sure the millions of people dying of Malaria, TB and AIDS had access to basic drugs and healthcare already proven effective. · They would provide basic healthcare services to the more than 50 million Americans who cannot afford and therefore lack assess to health insurance, vaccines, and the even the most basic medical treatments.

Comparisons to other movements

Really, it’s of little importance to me whether experimenting on animals is useful to humans; as a surgeon I understand the need for informed consent by a patient prior to violating the integrity of their bodies or their minds. Throughout history, there have been many instances of such violations; Black women underwent operations in the 1800’s without informed consent or even their permission. That was wrong!

Black men were used as test subjects without consent or even knowledge as recently as the 1950s, when they had treatment withheld for syphilis, in order to chart the natural course of the disease when left UNTREATED. That too was wrong.

Doctors in Nazi Germany used thousands of people against their will to study a variety of medical problems. Hypothermia experiments placed human subjects in ice-cold water to study the effects until their death. This data was published in the same medical journals I read today, amidst much debate; but that data did go on to help some humans subsequently. But does THAT make the methods behind the results valid? Most would agree it was unethical, and that it was wrong.

Those who defend and profit from the violence of animal suffering, predispose themselves to accuse animal advocates of condoning violence. In looking at other historical movements that sought to end the obscenity and egregious violence perpetrated on innocent victims, including the fight against apartheid in South Africa, the fight to free black slaves in the US and the fight for the rights of indigenous cultures, violence has always been used as one tool in an arsenal of tactics to alleviate their oppression. In a battle for the moral and ethical high ground, in the fight on behalf of the most oppressed, abused and tortured beings the world has even known, there will likely continue to be human casualties.

Indeed, many animal rights campaigners have already been killed in the struggle. So far, all the human casualties have been animal rights campaigners, but I believe in the future, that will change.

But these references to violence and terrorism by the abusers themselves only serve to trivialize the suffering of billions of animals who are tortured to death every year. Their’s is the true violence, their’s is the true terror, against which pales the occasional use of force to stop animal abuse.

Conclusions

If I haven’t already been, I will be called an extremist.
]Well I would agree with philosopher Tom Regan when he stated:

“I am an extremist when it comes to rape-I am against it all the time. I am an extremist when it comes to child abuse- I am against it all the time. I am an extremist when it comes to sexual discrimination, racial discrimination-I am against it all the time. I am an extremist when it comes to abuse to the elderly- I am against it all the time. The plain fact is, moral truth often is extreme, and must be, for when the injustice is absolute, then one must oppose it-absolutely. And the injustice of vivisection is absolute.”

As long as humans continue to oppress, exploit, imprison, enslave and kill non- human animals for their own perverse pleasure or profit, there will be a movement to secure their freedom. Members of this movement will span the spectrum from humane societies to political activists, from little old ladies in tennis shoes to those revolutionaries who use illegal and violent means to stop sadists who torture and kill primates and other innocent non-human animals as they seek their own profit and prestige.

The time has long passed for tolerance of animal abusers, rapists and child molesters in our society, and if necessary, those people should live in greater fear that what they do to others might be done to them.

The French Resistance didn’t worry about what was legal under the occupying Nazi regime, nor did the Algerians worry about the legality of their resistance to French occupation. Just because something is legal, does not mean it is right; what Britain did in India was legal, as was the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and US Japanese interment camps during World War II. When something is so abhorrently wrong, but still legal, it is not only acceptable, but mandated, to break these unjust laws for the sake of compassion and integrity.

---Jerry W. Vlasak, MD