April 23rd – today – officially marks the beginning of World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week, and to celebrate, let’s all go to Los Angeles and partake in the protest against UCLA’s Medical Research Unit. Anyone with me? Great, I’ll see all five of you on the corner of LaConte and Westwood at noon. For the other thousands of students, why not?
As animal rights activist and founder of Last Chance for Animals, Chris DeRose once said, “If you heard somebody screaming for help next door, wouldn’t you try to do something? Sure you would. You’d come running even if you couldn’t actually hear the screams, especially if you knew that person was being tortured to death and needed your help – and the animals are screaming for our help, right now!”
So why is the support for these tormented creatures not overwhelmingly high? Is it because ignorance is bliss? Is it because too many people can justify the torture by seeing the so-called benefits it has on the human race?
This incredibly specieist way of thinking couldn’t be more inaccurate. The strategically concealed reality is that over 20 million animals (dogs, cats, monkeys, pigs, mice, rats, sheep, etc.) die every year from cruel and inhumane experiments. I don’t mean cruel as simply as they don’t give the animals water for a day or two. I mean cruel like attempting head transplants on live monkeys, with the idea of using painkillers being so far-fetched, it’s almost laughed at.
Strapped and tied down, these monkeys are unable to do much more than scream and cry at a pitch so unbelievably painstaking.
No rules exist behind theses metal doors, inside the torture chambers we call medical facilities. And most of the animals are conveniently unprotected by the Animal Welfare Act, and therefore subjected to any kind of experimentation the scientists can think to do. According to all-creatures.org, the tortures animals are subjected to include being given addictive drugs, electric shock, food and water deprivation, isolation, severe confinement, caustic chemicals, burning, blinding, chemical and biological weapons, radiation, etc., and it does not stop there.
And the thing that boils my blood even more is that it has no merit whatsoever. Many doctors have openly spoken out about the invalidity of animal research. According to Herbert and Margot Stiller, “Practically all animal experiments are untenable on a statistical scientific basis, for they possess no scientific validity or reliability. They merely perform an alibi for pharmaceutical companies, who hope to protect themselves thereby.”
Not only are they irrelevant, but a waste of your money, too. Let me give you a little update on what some of your tax money is funding.
According to the same Web site, currently, 245 projects are studying effects of cocaine in rats, costing around $98 million; 108 projects are studying effects of cocaine in mice, costing $43,268,148; and 46 projects are studying cocaine in macaque monkeys, costing $18,429,026. In total, 399 projects currently study effects of cocaine in three different species, costing an estimated total of $159,851,769 annually.
It has been said many times that the unbelievable cruelty and the philosophy behind vivisection is not all that far from concentration camps and slave trade.
It’s cruel, it’s barbaric and most people won’t give a shit because it doesn’t affect them. Much like AIDS in Africa doesn’t affect them, it’s still a looming problem – a problem that doesn’t go away by simply closing your eyes.
There is so much more to the world than what you see every day. There is so much more than going to school, then worrying about finding a job that pays well enough to support your desire for the most up-to-date Louis Vuitton purse. I find it so heartbreaking that people are too set in their mode of comfort and routine to ever question the reality of things. We need to change our philosophy toward animals, starting by learning compassion for them.
But simply telling someone about animal experiments isn’t usually enough to evoke behavioral changes. As they say, “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll learn forever.” Please get involved and see for yourself the barbarity.
Celine Dilfer is a senior communications major.
