How could this happen in this century (and in US of A)? We are not talking about Neanderthals here, these are neuroscientist's - disgusting (Lawrence A. Hansen needs to be lauded for writing with such honesty):
"One especially disturbing example of primate vivisection repeatedly approved by many university animal-care-and-use committees is a decades-long series of highly invasive experiments performed on rhesus monkeys to learn more about the neuronal circuitry of visual tracking in the brain. The luckless monkeys undergo multiple surgeries to have coils implanted in both eyes; holes drilled in their skulls to allow researchers to selectively destroy some parts of their brains and put recording electrodes in others; and head-immobilization surgeries in which screws, bolts, and plates are directly attached to their skulls. The monkeys are anesthetized during these surgeries. After a recovery period, they are intentionally dehydrated to produce a water-deprivation "work ethic" so that they will visually track moving objects for the reward of a sip of water.
First impressions are usually correct in questions of cruelty to animals, and most of us cannot bear to even look at pictures of these monkeys, with their electrode-implanted brains and bolted heads, being put through their paces in a desperate attempt to get a life-sustaining sip of water. Such treatment is justified in the corresponding grant application by invoking the possibility that the resulting data may allow us to find the cause and cure for human diseases such as Alzheimer's.
But those of us who have spent decades in research on Alzheimer's disease recognize that such a justification is an ethical bait and switch, since the neural pathway being investigated in these experiments is not even involved in Alzheimer's disease. These experiments in the basic neuroscience of visual tracking are so thoroughly unrelated to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease that in more than 28 years of research in the neuroscience of the disease, I have never come across a single reference to them in any scientific literature on neurodegenerative disease.
When neuroscience researchers concoct connections between their vivisection of primates and far-fetched, entirely theoretical potential future benefit for human welfare, they are tacitly admitting that the general public, which ultimately pays for their research, would recoil in horror from their more grotesque monkey experiments and would overwhelmingly condemn the work if they knew that those experiments were not directly related to human welfare. Such experiments are always carried out far away from public scrutiny, and the researchers performing them will never submit photographs of their research subjects for the cover of Science or Nature.
Since most invasive monkey research is not directly linked to alleviating human suffering, what is the real motivation of scientists doing such things to our cousin primates? The investigators are not sadists, although they may seem to be from the monkey's point of view. Researchers simply see themselves as doing neuroscience, reasoning that if you want to learn about how brains are wired, the easiest and most direct way is to selectively damage a living brain and see what happens.
People have a natural empathy for their fellow primates because we recognize ourselves in them. Most of us also recognize a special bond with dogs and cats, after 10,000 years of selective breeding have produced companion animals hard-wired to love humans. One animal-laboratory technician at UCSD quit his job because a dog he was transporting to her fate on the vivisection table tried to shake hands with him.
It seems to many that treating dogs and cats the same as rodents or as animals killed for food would constitute a deep betrayal of an ancient bond between species. In short, primates warrant special status because they are so much like us, while dogs and cats deserve special protections because they like us so much.
You might think that in a dispute when one party asks the other to meet it 0.1 percent of the way, a mutually agreeable resolution could be readily reached. But no, researchers will not renounce vivisection of monkeys, dogs, or cats.
Research universities' animal-care-and-use committees dominated by animal experimenters routinely approve such vivisections because it is simply human nature to become hardened, if not indifferent, to pain we routinely inflict on others. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity."
The trend toward outside supervision of animal vivisection parallels the point made by Georges Clemenceau, a French statesman and physician, who said, "War is too important to be left to the generals." Ethically aware citizens are increasingly concluding that primate vivisection is too important to be left to the researchers who dominate their university animal-care-and-use committees.
Read this piece first thing today morning and I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. One of the lousiest day ever, period. Couldn't stop hugging Max, the only thing that bought solace in world where barbarism is euphemism-ed as inventible. These heinous studies are oxymoronic when neuroscience is at the forefront of honing our morality. It's ironic that Thomas Willis in circa 1664 was more humane than these barbarians.
People have a natural empathy for their fellow primates because we recognize ourselves in them. Most of us also recognize a special bond with dogs and cats, after 10,000 years of selective breeding have produced companion animals hard-wired to love humans. One animal-laboratory technician at UCSD quit his job because a dog he was transporting to her fate on the vivisection table tried to shake hands with him.
It seems to many that treating dogs and cats the same as rodents or as animals killed for food would constitute a deep betrayal of an ancient bond between species. In short, primates warrant special status because they are so much like us, while dogs and cats deserve special protections because they like us so much.
You might think that in a dispute when one party asks the other to meet it 0.1 percent of the way, a mutually agreeable resolution could be readily reached. But no, researchers will not renounce vivisection of monkeys, dogs, or cats.
Research universities' animal-care-and-use committees dominated by animal experimenters routinely approve such vivisections because it is simply human nature to become hardened, if not indifferent, to pain we routinely inflict on others. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity."
The trend toward outside supervision of animal vivisection parallels the point made by Georges Clemenceau, a French statesman and physician, who said, "War is too important to be left to the generals." Ethically aware citizens are increasingly concluding that primate vivisection is too important to be left to the researchers who dominate their university animal-care-and-use committees.
Read this piece first thing today morning and I couldn't stop thinking about it all day. One of the lousiest day ever, period. Couldn't stop hugging Max, the only thing that bought solace in world where barbarism is euphemism-ed as inventible. These heinous studies are oxymoronic when neuroscience is at the forefront of honing our morality. It's ironic that Thomas Willis in circa 1664 was more humane than these barbarians.
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