Thursday, September 26, 2024

"Over 60 Years of Humane Animal Care"



http://web.archive.org/web/20240925192908/https://primate.wisc.edu/primate-info-net/pin-factsheets/pin-factsheet-gelada-baboon/

I went vegan in 1972 for ethical reasons, a decade or more before I heard the word. In 1997, I learned that there was a giant federally-funded place called the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center that raised monkeys and employed a legion of scientists who did hideous things to them. I learned that there were seven of these hellholes scattered around the country.

(I was so alarmed by what I learned that I protested at each of these hideous places for 10 days at a time. A year later, I did it again, but this time there was a group of other concerned people with me and we protested at other labs that also used monkeys.)

The Regional Primate Research Centers rebranded themselves as "National Primate Research Centers" but nothing changed; it was just a public relations gimmick.

After 25 years of gathering information, documenting their hideousness, protesting, and criticism, I was pretty burned out. I still am.

But, these dickheads can still push my buttons. All of these shit-holes have public relations staff. That's a nice way of saying lying asshole who makes excuses for the hideous things that are done to the animals and their BS publications that claim their experiments lead to important to medical progress.

The claim above, "Over 60 Years of Humane Animal Care" really pushed my buttons. Part III of my 2017 book, "We All Operate in the Same Way", Oversight and Regulation, documents many examples of the failure of oversight and violations of the (very weak) Animal Welfare Act. The notion that there is anything humane about these hell-holes is the epitome of complete nonsensical public releations crap.

I stumbled across this bit of BS because I was reading about geladas, a species of Old World monkey found only in the Ethiopian Highlands. I stuck it in Google and got the Wisconsin hit. The notion that primate vivisectors are a good source of information about the natural history of all primates is just a bit of public relations. They often claim to be "primatologists." They want the uniformed public to think they are like Jane Goodall or Dianne Fossey. Jeez.