County May Consider Ethics of Primate Experimentation

Alliance for Animals

P.O. Box 1632, Madison, Wisconsin 53701
Phone: 608-257-6333
E-mail: alliance@allanimals.org
www.allanimals.org

May 21, 2010

News Advisory

Contact: Rick Bogle 608.222.2348
rick.bogle@gmail.com

County May Consider Ethics of Primate Experimentation

Dane Co, Wisc ..... A resolution to establish a Citizens’ Advisory Panel to study the use of monkeys in Dane County was introduced at the Dane County Board of Directors meeting last night, May 20, 2010. Thirteen Dane County Supervisors cosponsored the resolution.

Dane County Resolution 35 was referred to the Executive Committee and the Health and Human Needs Committee for deliberation.

The resolution would establish a panel of citizens to gather information from a broad base of knowledgeable sources concerning the care and use of the monkeys in Dane Co.; the ethics of the experiments being conduced; and barriers to retiring animals no longer wanted by the labs.

Dane County has quietly and without notice become the monkey experimentation capital of the world. More monkeys are used in Dane County than any U.S. state, and almost as many as in the entire European Union.

“This is a very significant step in our ongoing efforts to stimulate and nurture public discussion and well-informed consideration of this important and very controversial issue,” said Rick Bogle, co-director of the Alliance for Animals. “Dane County’s position as the world’s top user of monkeys should give us pause when we consider the evidence that they suffer just like you or I would if we were being treated like they are being treated. It’s time to bring the details out of the closet.”

The county supervisors who are co-sponsoring the resolution deserve much praise for their integrity and moral courage.

For more information and to view a copy of Resolution 35, see www.MonkeysInDane.info


--end--

Dear Librarians of the World

I was digging through some past correspondence and happened on the letter below. FYI, they never replied.

via: USPS; hyperlink added.

January 1, 2007

Wisconsin Library Association
5250 East Terrace Drive, Suite A
Madison WI 53718-8345

Dear WLA and the Intellectual Freedom Round Table:

I am writing to complain about an instance of censorship of information that may have, and should have, involved University of Wisconsin librarians.

Attached, is an article from the Isthmus that provides some details of the situation. (Primate tapes get trashed, 08/11/2006.)

Briefly: the university denied public records requests for information held by the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. Sixty-two days after one denial, documents, photographs, and sixty boxes of videotapes were destroyed by the primate center.

This matter should be of concern to the WLA for at least two reasons.

1. Important historical documents and unique visual records have been lost forever through an act of intentional destruction carried out under the auspices of the University of Wisconsin even as members of the public were asking for that information.

2. The Lawrence Jacobsen Library is housed at the primate center. It is a part of the primate center and a part of the University of Wisconsin General Library System. The library violated its mission when it chose not to collect this unique collection of information regarding research occurring at its own institution:

The Wisconsin Primate Research Center Library and Information Service supports the research and outreach missions of the National Primate Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The library acquires, organizes, develops, provides access to, and delivers information resources in a variety of formats to Center scientists and staff, University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and students, and persons worldwide with an interest in primatology. Essential to this mission is the effort to comprehensively collect and provide access to print, audiovisual and digital materials related to nonhuman primates in research, conservation, education, and veterinary care.

The mission of the June Northrop Barker Archives, part of the Lawrence Jacobson Library:

The June Northrop Barker Archives serves to enrich and support the cross-disciplinary field of Primatology by acting as a repository for the history and science of this emerging field. To do this, the Barker Archives solicits, collects, organizes, describes, preserves and provides access to the research and historical documents, as well as the records of the international, national and regional organizations related to the field of Primatology.

The destruction of these documents, photographs, and sixty boxes of videotapes is grossly at odds with the library’s mission. Even if the tapes were damaged, the librarians should still have saved, repaired, and archived that information, and made it available to the library’s present and future users.

So much unique information has been irretrievably lost to the public – to say nothing of the loss to history and science – while these librarians either did nothing to prevent this loss or have remained silent after the fact.

The librarians at the Lawrence Jacobsen Library violated a fundamental professional ethic of the field of librarianship:

The American Library Association defines intellectual freedom, a fundamental professional ethic of the field of librarianship, as the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored. Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.

These librarians did not advocate for the intellectual rights of those seeking the information. The destruction of this information raised barriers to an exploration of all sides of the question of primates in research and animal rights. The Lawrence Jacobsen Library may not have been able to stop the destruction of this information, but book burning is book burning, and librarians must call attention to it wherever it occurs.

I am enclosing copies of letters to the Lawrence Jacobson Library, the University of Wisconsin’s General Library System, the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies, and to the ALA regarding this situation.

I hope the WLA will take strong action on this matter.

Sincerely,


Rick Bogle

Fear in place of thought

Listen carefully to O'Connor's argument for why he uses monkeys. He seems to argue that fear alone is sufficient reason to keep paying him. He seems to argue that any and every effort is justified to solve a serious problem -- and never mentions the complete failure of the method he is using. Critical thinking must not have been part of his alma mater's curriculum, or ethics.

Poop Aways Surfaces.

UW-Madison professor barred from lab for potentially dangerous experiments

By DEBORAH ZIFF and RON SEELY | Wisconsin State Journal | Posted: Tuesday, May 11, 2010

A UW-Madison professor who studies the infectious disease brucellosis lost his laboratory privileges because university officials said he conducted unauthorized experiments that could have posed a risk to human health.

Gary Splitter, a tenured professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine, won't be allowed to work in a lab for five years because of the violation, a stiff punishment for a faculty member whose livelihood depends on publishing papers based on lab experiments. It's a rare discipline, said UW-Madison Provost Paul DeLuca.

Splitter's lab created antibiotic-resistant strains of brucellosis and inserted them into mice, university officials said, without approval from local or federal agencies. The concern is that if someone contracted the antibiotic-resistant version of the disease created in the lab, they could not have been treated.

University officials said the experiments were conducted in a lab with a high safety level and the resistant brucellosis strains in question were destroyed by university biological safety employees after they were discovered. One lab worker did get infected with brucellosis, DeLuca said, but it's not clear it was from the experiment under investigation. The person recovered, he said.

more...

See too: UW-Madison: Bumbling Oafs or Big Fat Liars?

The Dalai Lama is Coming Back to Madison, or "'Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy."

He shows up every so often. His buddy Geshe Sopa runs the monastery just outside Madison called unimaginatively and ironically Deer Park after the deer park in Benares where the historical Gautama Buddha is said to have first espoused The Four Nobel Truths.

Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, is coming this time around to help inaugurate the twisted brainchild of his demented apostle, His Holiness, The Richard Davidson.

“Investigating Healthy Minds”: A public dialogue with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and Richard Davidson, moderated by Daniel Goleman, author, “Emotional Intelligence,” and “Ecological Intelligence”
Special guests: Governor James Doyle; Madison Youth Choir
2:15 – 3:30 p.m.
Capitol Theater, Overture Center for the Arts
201 State Street
Madison, Wisconsin

They will apparently share a dais (probably just two chairs, but we’ll see) at the Overture Center and intone polysyllabic platitudes about kindness, compassion, and mind before a crowd of adoring self-absorbed imbeciles hoping to find Nirvana in the words of a glutton and a psychotic. In all fairness, most of their fawning public are simple ignoramuses, or just simple.

I’ve written a god-awful passel of words describing the cruelties applied by His Holiness, The Richard Davidson in the labs of his cronies Ned Kalin and Steve Shelton, and have ranted at extraordinary length about the hypocrisies of Tenzin Gyatso, the child who was taken from his parents and indoctrinated into the belief that he is the literal reincarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion.

An easy observation in all of this is the unavoidable conclusion that Tibetan Buddhism is a sham. A lifetime of practice and intense study of its tenets leads nowhere. It results in absolutely no increase in kindness or compassion. When adherents do act with greater compassion, they do so in spite of their practice.

Anyway, you can read some of my past rants related to the two demigods mentioned above here:

My Enlightening Meeting with Lama Lhundub Sopa. April 15, 2007.

Group Asks the Dalai Lama to Renounce Support for Animal Cruelty. April 25, 2007.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a Callous Prick. May 10, 2007.

The Buddha of Compassion. May 19, 2007.

His Mental-ness. June 14, 2007.

Dalai Lama Disciple Makes Big Discovery! July 26, 2007.

Cruel Buddhist Sick Shrink. August 16, 2007.

Compassion and Kindness Redefined. October 24, 2007.

A Bad Trip. November 10, 2007.

Richard Davidson's Mushy-Headedness. April 13, 2008.

The 2008 PNIRS Conference. May 30, 2008.

"For the Record." June 17, 2008.

Looking at Richard Davidson's Assertions. June 24, 2008.

Trait-like anxious temperament in primates. July 8, 2008.

Memories of Dorothy and Intent. September 27, 2008.

Richard Davidson's Choices Are Evidence That Thinking Good Thoughts Won’t Make You a Good Person. February 3, 2009.

Richard Davidson. March 20, 2009.

Richard Davidson Big Bucks. September 1, 2009.

Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. April 25, 2010.

Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

The banner above probably invokes a sense of dark irony and distrust in many of us. It would me, so maybe I am projecting my emotions on my readers, and maybe you are not anymore bothered by it than you probably are by this:The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, a program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is under the direction of Richard Davidson, who, readers of this blog will know, I have criticized often for his two-faced, misleading, and mutually contradictory positions of promoting himself as a spiritually realized friend of the Dalai Lama who is concerned with the happiness and well-being of all beings (as he expresses by frequently reciting the quote above from Albert Einstein), with his lessor known and rarely mentioned by anyone other than me, research collaboration with UW Department of Psychiatry Chair, Ned Kalin, and Kalin's glorified diener, Steve Shelton.

I find the Center's banner grotesque, like the banner for the Eichmann Center. Compare what they say on their website with the other work Davidson does:But here's another part of his work:

An experienced surgeon made an opening in the frontal bone posterior to the brow ridge to expose the frontal cortex. Both hemispheres were lesioned in a single procedure by lifting the brain to expose its ventral surface. Using microscopic guidance, electro-cautery and suction were applied to the targeted brain area.” From: Role of the primate orbitofrontal cortex in mediating anxious temperament. (Kalin N. H., Shelton S. E., Davidson R. J. Biological Psychiatry. 2007.)

This just doesn't jibe with the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds stated mission:
Goals of the Center include the study of people's brains during contemplative practice and the use of contemplative practice to "nurture positive qualities of mind such as kindness [and] compassion...".

I suspect that there are kind and good people affiliated with the Center who intend to do good work. But imagine that the same could be said of people working at the imaginary Eichmann Center. Would the good works of some good people overshadow Eichmann's crimes or the nastiness of the Nazi's racial policies generally?

Maybe, like the carnage and monstrosities that occurred in South Africa and Rwanda, some forgiveness could be mustered if the perpetrators stepped forward and enumerated their crimes and asked for forgiveness; maybe. But that hasn't happened in the case of Richard Davidson. Davidson wants it both ways.

On the one hand, he wants to be seen and known as someone who has embraced the message in Einstein's quote: "Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty," while on the other, he argues that the potential benefit to humans from his highly invasive brain and behavioral experiments on particularly fearful young monkeys are excusable because he has "good intentions."

These two claims are mutually exclusive. It is highly unlikely that such diametric positions can coexist in a healthy mind. This leads me to wonder about possible research at the Center.

Richard Davidson should identify others who simultaneously hold similar contrary opinions regarding kindness and invasive experimentation (there are a number of such people.) This cohort should be randomly divided into two groups.

Group 1 should engage in a putatively compassion-enhancing contemplative practice while their brain is scanned, and once their brain activity settles and remains static for some period of time, they should be told of the details of Davidson's research on fear in young fearful monkeys and be asked to contemplate the monkeys' experiences.

Group 2 should begin by contemplating the details of the fear experiments and then be asked to stop thinking of that and begin the putatively compassion-enhancing contemplative practice, with their brains being scanned throughout.

Control Group 1 should be composed of random people selected only for age and gender similarity with Group 1. They should repeat the conditions in group 1.

Control Group 2 should be likewise composed and duplicate the the conditions in Group 2.

Post-screening by competent psychologists blinded to the participants' group assignments should attempt to identify those with healthy minds as defined by the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and those who don't. I hypothesize that the psychologists will identify the majority of those in Groups 1 and 2 as individuals with unhealthy minds, and will identify a significantly larger number of individuals with healthy minds from Control Groups 1 and 2.

If my hypothesis is borne out, we will have a collection of brain scans from people with unhealthy minds that might lead us to possible therapies to cure them. There would finally be hope for people like Richard Davidson.

UW Madison Seeks Legal Exemption from Having to Provide Sufficient Food and Water

Update on the post below: Fortunately, AB-747 did not pass out of the Wisconsin State Senate, so died without passage. The university is thus violating the state law requiring adequate food and water for all confined animals in every instance of inadequate nutrition, vitamin deprivation or overdosing, and water deprivation. Primate center vet Saverio “Buddy” Capuano recently reported to the All Campus Animal Care and Use Committee that monkeys used in common brain experiments in which they must perform some task (like tracking a light across a screen) typically lose weight due to, according to Capuano, the severe water restriction they are subjected to. The monkeys are kept chronically thirsty in order to motivate them to perform whatever task the vivisector has invented.

It is just a matter of time before the university renews its efforts to exempt itself from the state's Crimes Against Animals statutes.

---------

For the moment in Wisconsin, it is a violation of one of the state’s Crimes Against Animals statutes not to provide food and water to a confined animal sufficient to maintain good health:

Wisconsin Statutes > Criminal Code > Chapter 951 > § 951.13 - Providing proper food and drink to confined animals

951.13 Providing proper food and drink to confined animals. No person owning or responsible for confining or impounding any animal may fail to supply the animal with a sufficient supply of food and water as prescribed in this section.

951.13(1)
(1) Food. The food shall be sufficient to maintain all animals in good health.

951.13(2)
(2) Water. If potable water is not accessible to the animals at all times, it shall be provided daily and in sufficient quantity for the health of the animal.

A while ago, a bill was introduced by State Rep. Nick Milroy in response to a horrible situation involving an abandoned colt who literally froze to the ground during an especially harsh winter and despite an 11th hour rescue, eventually died. One motivating factor in the bill’s introduction was the fact that a young boy was witness to the colt’s misery and the adults' callous attitudes. The proposal, Assembly Bill 747, is known as Windchill’s Law. The wind chill at the time of his rescue was reportedly 50 degrees below zero.

The bill is laudable and stiffens the penalties for abandonment, the failure to provide adequate food and water, and provides enhanced penalties if a child witnesses the abuse or is forced to participate.

But like many otherwise good ideas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s self-interested involvement has injected a dark and ugly pathogen into its core with only little notice. [See: Isthumus 04/08/2010. "Will more animals suffer if law is 'strengthened'?"] The State Assembly, accepting the university’s council in good faith, was duped into exempting the university from one of the statutes affected by Windchill’s Law, WI 951.13, quoted above.

Currently, every animal at the university undergoing an experiment in which adequate food and water necessary to good health isn’t being provided, is yet another instance of the university's ongoing violations of the state’s Crimes Against Animals statutes. If Windchill’s Law passes as written, the university will be exempt from providing adequate food and water.

Once again we can see its arrogant belief that it should not be held to the same standards as the rest of the state.

The university genuinely that it shouldn't have to obey the same laws as everyone else. It sees itself above silly concerns like animals’ pain and suffering.

UW-Madison: "Animals in Research and Testing"

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has launched a new website dedicated to defending its use of animals. Only time will tell whether they will update the site or, like a similar page once produced by the Wisconsin Primate Center, it will be quietly removed when the silliness and vacuousness are finally recognized even by its authors.

The university has a tendency to rewrite history to serve its interests so I will take little screen shots to preserve them for posterity, or at least for a while.

They start of with an outlandish claim:
"This university accepts responsibility..." No, it doesn't and never has. It makes excuses for its repeated oversight failures and puts the consequences for its repeated failures squarely on the backs of the animals that were harmed.

Examples of this shirking and transfer of responsibility are too numerous to enumerate, but a few instances will demonstrate the plain facts.

1. When it was discovered that the university had lied in writing to Dane County repeatedly for eight years regarding its use of monkeys from the Henry Vilas zoo, at first they denied the plain undeniable facts, and then "accepted responsibility" for their lies, and then broke their repeated promises not to use the monkeys from the zoo in harmful experiments yet again by sending them to Tulane University to be experimented on there.

2. When it was discovered by the USDA that Ei Terasawa was violating her approved protocols, and as a consequence monkeys were dying, and that she may have been violating her protocol for 18 years, the university "accepted responsibility" by declaring that the discovery demonstrated that the oversight system was working. Although they suspended Terasawa's use of monkeys for two years, there was never an admission that the oversight failure is what led to the problems in her lab.

3. In 2003, the university convened a special committee meeting to review and deal with the multiple problems associated with Michele Basso's methods. In 2009, the university finally got around to suspending her protocols and use of monkeys. But after her threat of going public and exposing the Research Animals Resource Center's alleged failure to provide adequate care and follow-up, they "accepted responsibility" and reinstated her and let her go back to work screwing hardware to monkeys' heads.

The university makes a simple argument in defense of its use of animals: the ends justify the means. "... from the discovery of vitamins A and B complex and the elimination of rickets and pellagra, to the stunning promise of stem cell research." This is a bizarre statement. The advances they mention, the "elimination" of rickets and pellagra were not due to the isolation of vitamin A and B complex.

It is a matter of history that observations of variation in human diets led doctors to speculate that the causes of pellagra, beriberi, marasmus, kwashiorkor, scurvy, and rickets were diet-related. Sometimes, these observations were then tested by feeding animals various diets and looking for signs of illness. By 1906, it was recognized that dietary deficiencies were the likely causes of these diseases, and that diet modification could prevent and cure them. The isolation of vitamins A and B complex, though interesting, is not what led to the "elimination" of rickets and pellagra. (For more on the interesting history of the discovery of nutrition and diet related illnesses, see The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. Roy Porter. 1997. 551-560.)

Beside the false claim regarding the university's role in "eliminating" rickets and pellagra, the new web page points only to its unfulfilled promises: "Today, we conduct research on cancer, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s disease, heart and kidney disease, transplantation, diabetes...". Here, we see more wild promises and more suffering: The university argues that it really isn't the ends that justify the means, it is the infinitesimally small likelihood of benefit that justifies the certainty of the animals' misery.

Here's their wildest claim:"Research with animals, like research with people, must pass rigorous scientific and ethical review." This is complete nonsense. There is no ethical review. None. Their silly self-serving claim rests on a single fill-in-the-blank form that is required prior to a project's approval. For those scientists who have a hard time getting the answers just right -- answers that won't cause the USDA to raise an eyebrow in the unlikely event that an inspector happens to choose that particular form to review -- the "oversight" committee provides them with the exact wording they should use. The oversight committee's sole job is to assure that the project comports with the minimal requirements of the Animal Welfare Act.

In fact, The IACUC Handbook, Second Edition, Silverman, Suckow, Murthy Eds. CRC 2007, states clearly that the oversight committees can't make ethical decisions regarding the use of animals, let alone a "rigorous review."

Funding agencies and corporate administrators may weigh financial costs against potential benefit in distributing funds, but their is only a limited weighing of benefit against the harm to animals in any setting.

For the most part, the IACUC does not and cannot conduct this explicit ethical review. The IACUC is charged with reviewing the rationale (preferably statistical) for the animal numbers chosen, for instance, but not whether a particular line of research warrants that number. Similarly, the IACUC evaluates a technical claim that nonhuman primates alone are likely to provide the sort of data sought, not whether a particular project ethically merits the use of primates. Because the IACUC does not have the tools (or the regulatory mandate) to conduct a thorough assessment of the scientific merit (i.e., the potential benefits) of a proposed project, it cannot make a thorough cost-benefit ethical analysis. (p 159)

Rigorous schmigorous.

"The ethical foundation is the philosophy of utilitarianism, which deems an action acceptable only if potential benefits outweigh potential harms." They have shot themselves in the foot. There are only actual costs to the animals; musings about the potential costs are distasteful and underscore the hollow claim that the animals' experiences are given even a moment's notice.

"Animal research ethics are applied and taught at multiple places within the university and are built into the review of every proposed use of animals." Gibberish. If anything about the ethics of animal use is "taught" to the aspiring vivisectors it must be by means of rote recitation. Clearly, from the above mealy-mouthed nonsense, nothing approaching critical though is attempted.

I can't wait for the updates.

Dehumanization

I’m just finishing up Phillip Zimbardo’s 2008, New York Times bestseller, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Zimbardo, a boyhood friend and schoolmate of Stanley Milgrim, author of Obedience to Authority, was fairly well-known prior to The Lucifer Effect for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in which normal mentally healthy male college students randomly separated into either “prisoners” or “guards,” almost immediately internalized their roles: “guards” became increasingly abusive and “prisoners” often became obedient to the point of participating in cruel and demeaning tasks designed off-the-cuff by the “guards.”

The SPE, I learned from the book, is but one data point in the body of social psychology research that has looked at the behavior of otherwise normal people who find themselves in situations or working in systems that condone, encourage, or fail to stop behavior that would ordinarily be deemed cruel or monstrous.

The early part of the book is dedicated to a reenactment of the SPE, replete with much transcribed dialog and comment. It is a bit tedious. The middle section of the book is engrossing and provides insight into the characteristics of situations that can and have led to many instances of abuse and widespread atrocity. The latter part of the book is a look at the system and situation that led to the abuses that occurred during the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism.

For anyone with an interest in the factors that lead to the expression of the dark side of human behavior, The Lucifer Effect will be worth your time.

One commonality in many of the instances of abusive behavior, both in the controlled scientific studies and the historic episodes surveyed by Zimbardo is the dehumanization of the enemy, prisoners, or intended victims. Seeing someone as less-than-human apparently invites ill-treatment and even extermination. Zimbardo says repeatedly throughout the book that dehumanization goes far in explaining how and why someone feels motivated and empowered to harm someone else.

I was struck by this observation and Zimbardo’s consistent reliance on it to explain so many people’s abusive and even murderous behavior. Zimbardo does not need to explain to his readers why dehumanization is synonymous with the permission to inflict harm because it is an a priori assumption that hurting and killing non-humans isn’t a very serious matter and that it is even to be expected.

This deep and largely unexamined assumption is the bedrock upon which rest institutional guidelines governing animal care and use.

This goes a long way in explaining why, in an institution like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, animals are treated so poorly, situations that contribute to their detriment and suffering are allowed to continue for so long, why the internal inspections are so cursory and ineffectual, and why job performance related to the quality and efficacy of oversight of animal care and use is of little concern to the administration.

The system itself is intended to exploit to the fullest those who don’t need to be dehumanized because they aren’t human. Given the key role that dehumanization has played in atrocities like the Holocaust, the Rwandan massacres, the Rape of Nanking, the Melai massacre, the hundreds of instances of abuse and murder of prisoners during the War on Terrorism, and so very many others cases, it should come as no surprise that animals are abused so often in situations designed specifically for their systematic exploitation.

What Zimbaro’s and others’ work demonstrates is that those who are generally kind and compassionate easily transform into monsters in the right situation. The people involved in the atrocities named above were not exceptionally bad people; they were and are you and me. The evidence seems clear that our behavior is controlled to an overwhelming degree by the circumstances we find ourselves in. This explains why no one did anything about the boar who was unable to walk without falling down because of the inappropriate and slippery surface in the pen he was being kept in by researchers at UW-Madison. It is the "normal" behavior of those who work around the animals -- created and condoned by the system and situation they find themselves in -- to ignore the animals’ plight.

A recurring argument defending the use of animals is that they were made to be used by us; first, it is sometimes argued, by God, but now through our breeding programs. So not only are they less than human, and thus OK to harm, but additionally, they were made by us to be harmed, plastering on a further layer of justification for the suffering we heap upon them.

In the vernacular of the labs (and in most other industrial settings using animals), animals raised to be used as experimental subjects (or as food or fiber) are termed: purpose-bred. Using purpose-bred animals, it is argued, is less odious than using wild-caught ones. [See for instance: This Monkey Died for You. OHSU animal researchers fire back at their critics. Willamette Week, March 31st, 2010.] Set on a human stage, the weakness and ugliness of this argument becomes clear: would it be less immoral to raise children for the sex trade than to kidnap them off the street?

If dehumanization explains in large part our inhumanity to one another, it isn't difficult to see why people who hurt animals are confused by the arguments and outrage of their critics.

WSJ: Much more than a day late

My last post, Basso: Cover-Up? Conspiracy? Scandal. generated some (unpublished) letters to the Wisconsin State Journal asking them why they had not made the details of the Basso case public after having received at least 180 pages of documents from the university.

Perhaps embarrassed by their apparent soft-pedaling of the hard truth about the failures of their patron, the paper has now, after the fact and thus unlikely to be noticed by the general public, placed two documents on line. The first is the one first made public here, the May 4, 2009 letter from Welter to Mellon, and the second is Basso's and her lab's response to that letter, a document I did not have.

They are both now available on the WSJ website here.