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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Censorship

"It's important to know what the cost is to the animal. It's important to know what the potential benefit is to, in this case it's humans, but a lot of animal research also benefits animals. And then you you you come up, you compare those, and decide for yourself whether or not something you think it's ethical, and that where people have a right to differ." -- UW-Madison Research Animal Resource Center Director and university spokesperson Eric Sandgren, February 15, 2013, in a statement to WMTV, NBC 15, on the occasion of James Cromwell's participation in a disruption of a meeting of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents to protest the Regents continuing support for highly invasive and painful brain and ear experiments using cats in Tom Yin's laboratory.
Pictured here is one of Yin's victims, Double Trouble. 


I can't get Sandgren's statement out of my head; it is grotesque and matter-of-factually misleading and dishonest. Moreover, many people at the university and at the Wisconsin Department of Justice must know the facts and yet they stand mute.

PeTA spent three years in court trying to get these photos from the university. The Wisconsin Department of Justice acted as the university's counsel -- at the public's expense -- and argued to the court that the photos shouldn't be released.

It was only when they were caught lying about the "proprietary" nature of the hardware that can be seen in the photos that the university, through their Department of Justice de facto accomplices, finally gave up, tacitly admitting that their arguments had been fabricated nonsense.

"Decide for yourself whether or not something you think it's ethical," says Sandgren, all the while knowing that the university had unsuccessfully tried for three years to keep you from knowing, to stop you from seeing the pictures of only one of the cats butchered in Tom Yin's lab.

"It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards...." -- George Bernard Shaw. The Doctor's Dilemma. 1909.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My mom was making funeral plans to have money put aside when the time would come for her next journey as she calls it. I told her if she donated her body to medical science she could use her $5,000+ dollars and take a trip and also continue to donate to animal sanctuary's.

I told her donating her body can make a difference and students would not have to kill, dissect other animals. We both are going to donate our bodies. She has High Cholesterol, I have Epilepsy. What better way to learn more about this than to look inside of us.

On a happier note, my Chron's disease is in remission, I did it with diet and no drugs...

I wish more would do this than maybe more animals would and could be spared the cruelty that these so called scientists do not for my Epilepsy or Chron's, but for the lining of their wallet.

Sincerely
Mimi