Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Standing up to the Mythology of Animal Research

Security will be tight next week when thousands of veterinarians, technicians and others responsible for the use of animals in medical research converge on downtown Seattle. The American Association for Laboratory Animal Science organizers are afraid of violent protests from activists who are fed up with the indifference the members of this industry has continually shown towards their test subjects.

The president of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, Cynthia Pekow, was given a large amount of space in the “Seattle Times” Opinion section last Sunday, and in her commentary, she characterized animal activists as “terrorists.” Not everyone who stands up for the proper treatment of animals is a terrorist. Many of us are trying to save humans as well from life threatening dangers brought on by the scientific arrogance of so many researchers who use animals as medical subjects.

Mouse in the Psychology Department Research Lab at the Southwestern Assemblies of God University (Photo courtesy SAGU)

While I do not condone the violent acts of a few frustrated activists, I can totally understand their disillusionment with the system. If you had ever looked into the eyes of a tortured, suffering animal as I and so many others have, you would understand too.

My own journey of discovery about this troubling issue began in 1982 while I was working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. I was helping plan the Voyager space exploration mission when I became troubled by NASA’s plans to conduct what I considered very brutal experiments on monkeys on the space station. Something didn’t feel right about it and, being a scientist, I decided the way to find out was to get really deep into the issue.

I choose to volunteer for the Los Angeles chapter of the Fund for Animals, a nationwide animal rights organization. They were working on an issue that wasn’t getting much attention, but that I thought might be at the heart of the animal research debate.

It seems that many animal shelters around the country allow medical research facilities to drive a truck up to the back door, pay from $5 to $10 per animal, and load up as many dogs and cats as they can carry. These animals, most of whom had known only human companionship and comfort until getting lost, were headed toward a terrifying life as research test subjects. Buffy and Spot and Rover were now headed toward a wholly horrifying existence, destined to be cut open without anesthesia, injected with an overdose of a drug to see what the effect would be, or used to test new medical equipment.

Animals whose greatest challenge in life just a few hours before was to get their human companions to feed them more treats were now headed toward a life of human induced pain and suffering. This practice had become to be known as “pound seizure.”

The Fund for Animals was attempting to influence the local city and county governments, as a test for introducing a federal bill to ban the practice nationwide, to end the practice in Los Angeles. Since I had some experience working with the media, I volunteered to lead the Press and Media Committee. One of my first duties was to create a five minute video to be distributed to the local and national media outlets showing some of the horrors that these former pet animals experience during medical experiments. We had obtained tens of hours of video footage, much of it taken by an activist who had gotten a job at a large medical research facility and took the pictures after hours.

To put together five minutes of video meant we had to select the most appropriate scenes of what goes on in the basements of so many famous research hospitals. They couldn’t be too horrifying or the networks would not broadcast the video. But such images could easily be taken out of context, so we hired a doctor to be on our staff and did some research into the assumptions that the public has about animal experimentation.

We had to watch the films over and over again. Our lives were forever changed.

These monkeys are being held for use in experiments. (Photo courtesy Poeple for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

The powerful animal research lobby was also the major contributor to those guidelines.

The next most troubling myth we tackled was the belief that all animal experiments are resulting in some great leap forward in medical care and treatment of humans with life threatening diseases. During public hearings on the issue, the local research community always brings wheelchair bound people who would state how their lives had been saved by animal experimentation.

We quickly discovered, though, that contrary to widespread public assumptions, the reality is that there is no national program to properly coordinate the research projects that use animals. Hence, duplication of efforts are rampant, and it is not unusual to see 20 or 30 or, in some cases, more than 100 of the exact same experiments being conducted at any time.

There is no requirement that these researchers even speak with one another to compare results. There isn’t even a requirement that their research produce any useable results.

And in the U.S. medical research system, results that do not meet the expectations of the researcher are never published. They are considered failures and discarded, even though such information could be invaluable to others who are studying the same problem.

The pain and suffering endured by these former pets is horrendous. During the Fund for Animals campaign, I asked the head of the animal research laboratory at the University of Southern California why they use animals in their research experiments. “Because they are so much like us,” he replied.

I then asked, “But why, then aren’t the animals afforded even the minimum of consideration for the intense pain and suffering they endure?” He replied, “Because they are not like us.”

Those who experiment on animals want it both ways. It turns out, you can’t have it both ways.

Two year old dog at the St. Louis, Missouri City Pound. In Missouri, municipalities have jurisdiction over animal control, and there is no law against pound seizure. (Photo courtesy Pound Pals)

And those experiments that are using dogs and cats from the animal shelters are using animals whose backgrounds are totally unknown. There is no record of their genetic or health history, rendering the results of subsequent experiments suspect at best.

Our campaign was successful in convincing the Los Angeles city animal shelters to stop selling animals to research institutions. We were, though, unsuccessful on the county or the national level.

We discovered that the research community also keeps the public in the dark about the many inconsistencies that exist between animal and human physiology. In many cases, testing on animals rather than computer models or tissue cultures makes absolutely no sense from a scientific point of view. For example, rats and mice are the most common test subjects. Millions are used each year. Yet when human physiology is compared to that of rodents, the differences far outweigh any similarities.

Most importantly, the three year lifespan of rodents requires that massive doses of drugs be used for testing, more than a human would ever consume in many lifetimes. Certain drugs used for cancer chemotherapy that cause kidney damage in humans do not in rodents. Imuran, a drug used to treat certain serious diseases by suppressing the immune system, causes birth defects in mice, but not in humans. Rodents eliminate drugs from their bodies in three hours, compared to 72 hours in humans. Rodents get Vitamin D by licking their own fur while humans can only get it through exposure to sunlight or diet.

Rodents have no gall bladder and digest fats very differently from humans. There are many more examples of drugs and procedures that kill rodents but do not harm humans and vice versa. These examples extend to other species as well.

So why do animals continue to be used when alternatives exist? Because it is an industry, not a science, and huge businesses exist to breed or acquire animals destined for research, sometimes through very brutal methods. Parents of baby chimpanzees in Africa are still murdered by those acting on behalf of animal research supply houses, and the young chimps are kidnapped to sell into research facilities in the United States.

Sound familiar, like another period in U.S. history involving beings from Africa and slavery?

Animals are relatively cheap and, if you cast morals and ethics to the wind, you can brutalize them, throw them away if you make a mistake or the results are not to your liking, and just get more.

Many researchers are addicted to research grants, renewing them every six months even though they have no results to show – and the granting agencies do not require any - for all the animals that have suffered horribly and died.

The time is long overdue for the public to rein in medical researchers who practice poor, redundant, or unnecessary experiments on animals that have been proven to have feelings very similar to humans.

While some medical advances have been made using animals, in many cases the same results could have been more effectively obtained using alternatives. The double standard of morals and ethics must end. How can we expect our children to end the cycle of violence in our culture if those we look to for leadership and hope brutalize and torture forms of life we should consider our neighbors, not our slaves?

RESOURCES

1. The U.S. National Institutes of Health own investigator said in a 1998 report that 25 percent of the animal research they fund turns out to be fraudulent. Send an email message to the Director of the NIH at: director@nih.gov, saying that you want the funding requirements tightened up.

2. Most animals are not like humans and testing human drugs on them is ludicrous. If guinea pigs had been chosen as the animal subjects for penicillin tests, that drug would never have been released - penicillin kills guinea pigs. Learn about this aspect of the issue from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals at: http://www.peta-online.org/

3. Many charities support animal research. For a list of charities that do not, visit: http://www.geari.org/charitiesdonttest.html

4. Keep up with the pound seizure issue and find out what is done in your community at: http://www.banpoundseizure.org/home.shtml

5. Learn more about the issue of animals in research at: http://www.aavs.org/laboratories01.html

6. See a comprehensive list of websites addressing the issue at: http://www.aavs.org/relatedSites.html

7. For a good list of companies that do not test on animals, visit: http://www.peta.org/mall/cc/ccdonttest.html

8. Visit the Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal testing at: http://altweb.jhsph.edu/

9. Visit the site of the Medical Research Modernization Committee at: http://www.mrmcmed.org/critcv.html

10. Visit Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals at: http://www.psyeta.org/

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of "Healing Our World, A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html and “Of This Earth, Reflections on Connections,” available at: http://ofthisearth.org. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com}