Friday, 5/9/97 ‘Experiments’ only mask abuse Vivisection
considered unscientific research, a way to justify grants
By Jack Carone As one of the speakers quoted in your front-page
coverage (April 25) of the anti-vivisection rally in Meyerhoff
Park, I would like to clarify several points and take exception to
others. Regarding grant overhead (additional funds received by the
university over and above the award to the "investigator"), I did
not say that UCLA receives 50 cents on the dollar, but rather that
sums as high as that can and are received by institutions on the
vivisection dole from our tax coffers. In fact, a number of
universities have received more, sometimes up to 70 percent of the
original grant. There was a major investigation into this practice
several years ago. UCLA’s exact take is a matter of public record,
there for anyone who wants to inquire. The writer of the article
attempts to create a contradiction out of our concurrent beliefs
that animals are like us, and yet different in ways which make
cross-species extrapolation of data impossible. Not only is this
not a reporter’s job, but it also is a specious observation. We
oppose vivisection on scientific grounds due to the profound
biological and physiological differences between species, the
multifactorial laboratory perversion of the natural life of the
animal with resultant changes due to stress, fear and mistreatment,
and the artificial creation of symptoms which do not occur in the
ways they would in a real disease process. We also observe that,
like us, these other life-forms cling to life and want to survive,
have family and other social ties and structures, have food
preferences, seek comfort, dislike pain, and so on. Both their
similarities and their differences indicate that they should not be
subjected to this treatment, on scientific and moral/ethical
grounds. Jerome Zack’s claim that federal guidelines protect these
animals is a cynical attempt to mislead your readers. The Animal
Welfare Act dictates what are essentially housekeeping practices,
but does not protect the animals from the morbid whims of the
vivisectors. The Animal Research Committee is a "yes" entity. Ask
Mr. Zack how many protocols this committee has rejected. It will be
a short answer. Greg Heisey’s tall tale about "research" animals
being unimpaired and having long healthy lives is a total insult to
our intelligence and is disprovable. Go to the UCLA Medical
Library, which contains floor after floor of signed confessions of
animal abuse in the laboratory. Read the thousands of articles
detailing these exercises in morbid curiosity for profit. You will
find that these animals are "sacrificed" and necropsied, many of
those brains sliced and stained to generate even more meaningless
data to justify more grants. Win-win situation? The animals sure
don’t win, the taxpayers lose, no sick human with a human brain
gets any help. So who wins? You guessed it! The Research Welfare
Club of UCLA and every other university and hospital that is still
fleecing the public and conducting an animal holocaust. Being a
member of the Board of Directors of Last Chance for Animals, and
having been present on the day that the UCLA cat vivarium was
entered by our group, I can say that Heisey’s claim that we did not
take pictures inside is false. We took in with us a professional
video and still-photo crew, which finished its shooting and exited
as security arrived. The security force assumed they were a TV crew
and ignored them. There was never any intention of removing any
items from the vivarium. The tape, which aired around the world for
several years, spoke for itself. The photo of a UCLA dumpster full
of dead cats spoke for itself. Further, the assertion that old
pictures are used to mislead is itself a lie, since vivisectors
like Michael Chase essentially have repeated similar animal
mutilations for decades, with countless others duplicating those
"experiments." One picture of a similarly abused cat legitimately
serves as a representation of this shared scientifically fraudulent
barbarity. We will, of course, welcome submissions of recent
atrocity photos if Mr. Heisey will forward them to us. We will also
debate any of the parties quoted in your article, in public, on
television, any time. That UCLA students and faculty not involved
directly in vivisection walk around the campus oblivious or
apathetic to the death camp all around them is disgraceful, and
those people are silent collaborators. This continued
anachronistic, institutionalized and unscientific animal torment
flies in the face of its history of failures. The leftover rhetoric
constantly reheated for new pro-"research" press-kits is so easily
exposed that some new alibis should be dreamed up, just for
variety’s sake. Vivisection will end. If it does not end by
rational assessment, some coming generation will stop it.
Accompanied by a soundtrack of weak excuses and falsehoods, how
much more damage to humans and other fellow Earthlings will we have
to endure until then? Carone is a member of the Last Chance for
Animals Board of Directors. Related Links: PETA