Spanish parliament to extend rights to apes

Reuters:

Spanish parliament to extend rights to apes
Wed Jun 25, 2008

By Martin Roberts

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

more...

Looking at Richard Davidson's Assertions

During WISC-TV’s Sunday, June 22, program, "For The Record," Dr. Richard Davidson made a series of assertions to justify the use of monkeys in his invasive brain experiments and his study of fear and anxiety.

Davidson: ... the judicious use of nonhuman primates to address illness models is absolutely crucial. The disease that we are primarily focused on is depression. Depression is the worldwide leading cause of disability for individuals age 5 and older.

The following table is from the National Council on Disability’s letter to the President of the United States, “Keeping Track: National Disability Status and Program Performance Indicators.” April 21, 2008.

In the U.S., at least in the adult population, it doesn’t appear that depression is the leading cause of disability. It isn’t clear what part of “Mental Disability” would include depression, but it’s certainly not all of it. See for instance: Defining mental illness: An interview with a Mayo Clinic specialist.

Davidson: There are almost 100 suicides per day in the United States every year, and those suicides are primarily committed by people with depression… and so it is very clear that the current understanding and current treatments for this devastating illness are thoroughly inadequate to address the magnitude of this problem.

I believe that the judicious use of nonhuman primates for this research has the potential of saving enormous numbers of lives...

This is a graph illustrating data from the 2008 New York Times Almanac (p 384.)


It seems reasonable that a health problem’s magnitude should be judged in relation to other health problems, in this case, causes of death. What Davidson and others are really saying in claims like his, is that any and every cause of human death is of sufficient magnitude to justify the use of nonhuman primates in harmful experimentation. In other words, the magnitude of the problem is inconsequential when deciding whether or not to hurt animals; otherwise, Davison would have to argue that the causes with lower magnitude than suicide aren’t important enough to justify the use of animals. Claims about “the magnitude of the problem” serve only to make his work look more important than it actually is. This is what all vivisectors say about their own work no matter what area or problem they are studying.

Me: [paraphrasing: “The oversight system has been shown to be a failure, but that’s beside the point.] The question that we’re more interested in is how similar to us does another species have to be? We’ve already begun to … ban research on apes around the world. Some countries have already banned research on chimpanzees. Austria has banned research on all apes; that includes all the way down to gibbons. [As if there is an up and down.]

So how similar to us do they have to be? What are the characteristics that an animal has to have before you would think it would just be wrong to hurt it?

I would never hurt you no matter what the benefits for me would be. But you’re saying that the benefits can be so good for you that it’s ok to hurt an animal. So there must be some clear qualitative characteristic that I have that they don’t have, and I just don’t understand what that is.

Davidson: If I can just respond to that. First of all let me clarify the issue of hurt.

In the work that we, I’ve collaborated on in nonhuman primates, I think the word hurt is very misleading. The protocols that we use do not involve pain to the animals. In fact, the research that we do in humans, I would say, we are permitted to inflict more pain, if the protocol requires it, than we can in nonhuman primates.

And so, I think it is deeply misleading to use the term hurt.

This is an astounding statement. If he is being honest, then he simply doesn’t recognize that the monkeys in his studies are being hurt. That’s a degree of numbness to animals’ experiences that seems psychotic or else, he was intentionally misleading.

First, we have to put the monkey labs in context.

Viktor Reinhard, former UW primate veterinarian, has asked: "Is it really so farfetched to compare this situation with that of human prisoners kept in concentration camps?"

In the wild, rhesus monkeys remain with their mothers in their natal groups for many years. Some will spend their entire life in the same group. In the labs, the babies are taken from their mothers early on, in the Harlow lab, where Davidson’s monkeys are bred and kept, they are taken from their mothers at three months of age according to lab director, Christopher Coe.

In the wild, rhesus monkeys live in environmentally complex habitats and interact with many other monkeys in complex social hierarchies. In the labs, they are housed in small barren cages.

The subset of moneys selected by Davidson and his colleagues for use in these studies on fear and anxiety were identified by them as being much more anxious than other monkeys. Thus, they are using the monkeys most likely to be frightened by threats and disruptions.

The monkeys are taken from their home cage to a lab where they are frightened. In various studies, they are confronted with larger unfamiliar monkeys, staring lab workers, and real and rubber snakes.

Afterwards, their scalp is sliced open, a hole drilled through their skull, acid is injected into their brain or parts of their brain is cauterized and sucked out, and then the wound is sewn up. Once they "recover," they are again confronted with the frightening objects, and changes in their behavior are noted. In some studies, the monkeys are killed and their brains examined.

Davidson says, “I think it is deeply misleading to use the term hurt.” Can you imagine doing these things to a child, getting caught, and then claiming that you hadn’t hurt them? Davidson is allowed to hurt human subjects more than this? Doing so would land him in jail. Davidson’s claims are grossly misleading.

Here are some excerpts from his published work:

“This study assessed the role of the primate OFC in mediating anxious temperament and its involvement in fear responses. METHODS: Twelve adolescent rhesus monkeys were studied (six lesion and six control monkeys). Lesions were targeted at regions of the OFC that are most interconnected with the amygdala. Behavior and physiological parameters were assessed before and after the lesions. RESULTS: The OFC lesions significantly decreased threat-induced freezing and marginally decreased fearful responses to a snake.”

“One microliter of ibotenic acid was infused … into 16-23 sites distributed over the entire volume of the amygdala on each side of the brain. During surgery, mannitol was administered over 30 min to control brain swelling. After the ibotenic acid injections were made, the midline incision was sutured, and the animal recovered from anesthesia. To ease postsurgical discomfort, buprenorphine and acetaminophen were administered.”

“In primates, during times of need, calling for help is a universal experience. Calling for help recruits social support and promotes survival. However, calling for help also can attract predators, and it is adaptive to inhibit calls for help when a potential threat is perceived. Based on this, we hypothesized that individual differences in calling for help would be related to the activity of brain systems that mediate goal-directed behavior and the detection of threat. By using high-resolution positron emission tomography in rhesus monkeys undergoing social separation, we demonstrate that increased [18F]-fluoro-2-deoxy-d-glucose uptake in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and decreased uptake in the amygdala independently predict individual differences in calling for help.”

Davidson: “I think that for the very reasons you are describing because some similarities in particular brain structures, in specific, the circuits that are important in regulating emotion, there is I think, a lot of reason to believe that the information that we can glean from nonhuman primates will be extremely important to us and much more important than research at the rodent level for certain key questions.

And I think that this work can be done on a limited number of animals. I think that we need to continuously ask ourselves whether the procedures that we are using are absolutely necessary [and whether] the number of animals is necessary. And I think that there is a lot we can do to keep it to a minimum.

But I think given the magnitude of the human suffering that we are attempting to address, I think that it is in fact irresponsible not to engage in research where there is a clear promise of a new direction that may be pursued to minimize suffering and to minimize mortality and morbidity on a massive scale.

I’ve already shown that the magnitude argument is spurious. But what of his “clear promise of a new direction” argument? Clear promise? A clear promise is about as alien to basic research as sunshine is to the bottom of the Mariana trench. Most basic science researchers admit that they don’t know how their work will be used or even whether it ever will be. They argue that basic research is simply the accumulation of knowledge that might someday be put to some good use. Clear promise? Davidson needs to do his homework. The Institute of Medicine at the National Academies of Science convened a Clinical Research Roundtable in 2000 to analyze the success of basic research. They reported in 2003 that there is a “disconnection between the promise of basic science and the delivery of better health.” See too: Rodriguez, WR. Can biomedical research in the United States be saved from collapse? 2004 MebMD, Veritas Medicine.

And finally: Is Davidson a liar?

He says that he doesn’t have any monkeys and that he doesn’t receive federal grants for experiments on them.

These are true statements, but they probably misled the viewers. The Principle Investigator, or PI, on the grants that paid for the experiments on monkeys that Davidson put his name on, was Ned Kalin, MD., chair of the UW department of psychiatry. But Kalin probably does little to the monkeys himself. Their third colleague, Steve Shelton is likely the actual hands-on vivisector. But so what? In a meeting between Davidson and a group of activists he said that he had access to about 30 monkeys, that he had been involved in some of the surgeries, and that he had seen their living conditions.

Why then, did he try to claim that he is very removed from primate experimentation even while his name is on more than a dozen papers documenting highly invasive experiments on monkeys’ brains? I suspect that the answer has something to do with his embarrassment and his opinion of people’s gullibility.

For The Record: Primate Research at UW Madison

For The Record: Primate Research

WISC-TV's Neil Heinen and his panel debate the ethics, politics, and
potential of primate research and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's significant role in these controversial studies.

A ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses

From The Associated Press

Report compares costs of animal disease outbreak
By TED BRIDIS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government acknowledged that an outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations being considered for a new high-security laboratory — an event it considered highly unlikely — would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than an outbreak from the isolated island lab where such research is now conducted.

The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department study, released Friday, calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering. That would be roughly $1 billion higher than the government's estimate of losses blamed on a hypothetical outbreak from its existing laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y.

....

A simulated outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses.

The writing on the wall

Law Commission tips surge in animal rights push

Wednesday, 18/06/2008

The body that researches legal issues for the Federal Government says animal rights will be the next big social justice movement to hit Australia.

The Australian Law Reform Commission's latest journal focuses on the rights of animals and how to legislate for better treatment.

President Professor David Weisbrot says it's the Commission's job to comment on emerging social issues.

"Just a few years ago, not a single Australian university taught a dedicated course on animal law, and now I think it's something like a dozen or more and four or five in New Zealand," he says.

"So it's really come out of nowhere.

"I liken it to when I was at law school about 25 or so years ago, when there were very few environmental law courses, and now it's of course a staple."

See: Australian Law Reform Commission Many essays.

"For the Record"

I’ve just come home from taping a segment for the Sunday morning program “For the Record” on Madison’s CBS affiliate WISC-TV 3. I was on a panel talking about animal experimentation with my colleague, Rick Marolt, and UW researchers Eric Sandgren and Richard Davidson. You should be able to see the segment on line after it airs on June 22, 2008.

The most interesting insight was the result of off-camera discussion. Davidson seemed more than baffled by the primary point: that monkeys are so like us that any rational explanation for why we shouldn’t experiment on non-consenting humans would logically extend to them.

He could only repeat his position that if experiments on monkeys lead to improvements in human health care, then he’s for it. Period. He got a little huffy about it. When asked what characteristics monkeys have or are lacking that make it ok to use them, he would only say that if it helps humans, it’s ok. It’s like he couldn’t get his mind around the question.

The Pain of Animal Experimentation

[From SAEN!]

by Michael Budkie

Animal experimentation is a huge issue. It’s so big that we really have no adequate idea of how many animals are victimized in labs every year. About 1100 labs in the U.S. perform animal experiments. Tens of thousands of animal die every day – one at a time.

It is impossible to make sense of this issue. Duplication, (non) regulation, experimentation, brutalization. Protocols, inspection reports, animal use reports, grant applications, journal articles – this issue is comprised of a sea of paper. Too much to read. When you spend your days and nights looking at all of this you become an expert, whether you really want to or not, an expert in pain and suffering.

In the roughly 20 years that I’ve been an animal activist I have worked almost exclusively on the animal experimentation issue. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of inspection reports, research protocols, and health care records for dogs, cats, goats, and primates. After awhile you start to look at things not in terms of the pain and suffering, or the insanity of the experimentation, but for the quality of the information. Dealing with all of this suffering, greed, and death tends to rob you of your emotions. You start to keep a distance, speaking in terms of press coverage, and reaching people with the truth. You separate yourself from the pain – the pain of the animals – and your own. You start to function almost like the staff of animal laboratories. If you think in terms of the individual lives lost it will be far too painful.

Then it happens. Something grabs you and won’t let go. It might be a picture, it might be a specific animal, or it might even be a phrase.

Marilyn Carroll performs drug addiction experiments on primates at the University of Minnesota. This is nothing new. In fact, this project has been funded for 28 years. Carroll is actually funded through 4 separate grants, totaling roughly $1.1 million annually. Three of these grants have portions of unknown size that are devoted to salary. The fourth grant is nothing but salary, and it is funded in the amount of $138,988 per year. It would not be surprising if Marilyn Carroll received something in the vicinity of $200,000 per year as salary. The motivation for animal experimentation should be clear – it is very profitable, both for the institution and the individuals. This situation is not unique. Marilyn Carroll is only one of many researchers at the University of Minnesota, and this is only one of many labs. These numbers are repeated numerous times across the United States. The only things that change are the names of the individuals and the labs that they are located in.

Possibly the most common result of experimentation and confinement in the laboratory, at least for primates, is insanity. The laboratory environment is so artificial, so utterly contradictory to virtually every aspect of what is normal behavior for a primate, that insanity is almost unavoidable. It is a normal reaction to an extremely abnormal situation.

The abnormality of the situation of primates within the University of Minnesota is revealed very clearly by the medical records which the lab maintains for the primates used in this experimentation. On 8/9/05 primate 05GP20 is listed as “Temp was up due to primate jumping back and forth wildly.” On both 7/26/05 and 7/28/05 primate #312A is described “Still overdosing on current drug dosage, ataxic, hypersalivating, disoriented.” On 4/2/07 the same primate is listed with generalized alopecia and “On current drug dosage ataxic, hypersalivating, disoriented.” On 8/23/05 primate #312E shows evidence of self-mutilation: “did bite knee after observation.” Primate #45C on 3/21/06 is listed as “extremely thin, body condition is poor, severe alopecia . . . bruising on top of left ankle.” Monkey #45D on 11/15/05 is described: “ . . . ripping hair from the armpit area and chewing on the fur, each time he would grab a tuft of fur he would vocalize” Records for primate #78B dated 9/7/05 disclose “extreme alopecia” and #78B still has severe alopecia on 9/11/06. #25A lost part of his tongue on 3/22/05. Primate #25b was overdosed on 9/14/04 and was observed 11/15/05 “ . . . ripping hair from the armpit area and chewing on the fur, each time he would grab a tuft of hair he would vocalize.” Two separate primates are described this way. How many more are behaving like this without being noticed?

These terms describe lives of suffering, days of agony. The primates have little to look forward to other than the addictive drugs that at least temporarily remove them from reality.

Sometimes, when you least expect it something reaches out and grabs you. It’s not what you wanted to happen, and there may not be anything particularly different about the information, but it touches you – and you just can’t let go.

“NHP was observed by LACT ripping hair from the armpit area and chewing on the fur, each time he would grab a tuft of hair he would vocalize.”

The picture that this sentence creates in my mind is so clear that it is inescapable. The psychic agony of this monkey is so abject, so pure, so utter that it can drown your soul. I have been swamped by this image for days.

I did not choose this existence. Looking for suffering as though I was some ghoulish spectator at dismemberment is not the goal of my life.

But freedom is.

The only rational reason that any human being could have for immersion in this world of cruelty is to end it. When I read about puppies that have drowned in floor drains (Michigan State University), primates that are dissected while still alive (Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research) or a female sheep that dies with two rotting lambs inside her womb (North Dakota State University), these things are at the same time both tragedies and truths. They are ghastly and they are reality.

Each one of the thousands of pieces of paper that describe the horror of animal experimentation also describes some aspect of the life of an individual animal. The existence of these victims is sketched out one page at a time. Inspection report, daily care log, surgical record, necropsy (post-mortem) report. The deaths of infants and the decades-long lives of intelligent animals like rhesus monkeys whose reality is utterly unreal to them, all of these things are captured one page at a time. They are not just statistics to be added and subtracted; they are individuals whose lives matter.

It is up to us to try to give their lives some collective meaning. It is our duty to make sure that their deaths were not in vain, that they do not go unnoticed. They must be honored, and remembered.

We have a very simple choice to make. We can either sit on the sidelines and let these images overwhelm us with grief or we can use this pain, the pain that we share with these animals because they are so much like us, as our motivation for action.

I choose to act. I choose to try to give these countless lives and deaths some meaning. And I have made that choice anew virtually every day since 1986.

This is the world of animal experimentation. Welcome to it.

AAALAC is just propaganda

AAALAC International is a private, nonprofit organization that promotes the humane treatment of animals in science through voluntary accreditation and assessment programs. AAALAC stands for the "Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care."
.....

AAALAC's purpose is to provide an open, fair and impartial peer-evaluation that results in valuable suggestions and information organizations will use to improve their programs and achieve new levels of excellence.

Impartial?

Christian E. Newcomer, V.M.D., Dip ACLAM

Dr. Chris Newcomer recently became the Executive Director of AAALAC International on June 1, 2008 culminating his 24 years of participation in AAALAC International site visit activities as an ad hoc consultant and a member of the Council on Accreditation. Dr. Newcomer recently held a position on the faculty and in the administration of Johns Hopkins University as Associate Provost for Animal Research and Resources. He is a current member of the NABR Board of Trustees. An International Forum for Animal Research Policy [Requires registration. Many pages password protected.]

But NABR is anything but impartial.

The National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) is the only national, nonprofit organization dedicated solely to advocating sound public policy that recognizes the vital role of humane animal use in biomedical research, higher education and product safety testing.

Impartial my ass.

Protests at UC animal-lab workers' homes

Protests at UC animal-lab workers' homes
Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Officials have been trying to keep it quiet, but 24 UC Berkeley researchers and seven staffers have been harassed by animal rights activists in recent months, in some cases having their homes or cars vandalized.

"What they all have in common is that they all work in animal research," UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders said of the targeted employees...

Even a researcher who studies bird singing has been harassed and had his house vandalized.

"To study bird songs, you need to get them into the lab," Sanders said. "You want to record them and see how they raise their young."

It's not exactly the animal torture chamber one usually associates with the most negative depictions of animal research. But "apparently, these activists don't believe in any kind of animal research," Sanders said....

The researcher studying bird song is, apparently, Frederic Theunissen. UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders should either do his homework or quit lying. Here are a couple excerpts from Theunissen's published papers:

To measure the overall maturation of the lower auditory system, we obtained audiograms from auditory brain stem responses. All animal procedures were approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee at University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco (UCSF). [I'm reassured.]... For the experiment, the bird was placed on a bird sling inside a double-chambered sound-proof box. The bird's head was carefully taped onto the sling to prevent any movement. Free-field sounds were played from a speaker placed directly in front of the bird at 15 cm. Before each experiment, the sound delivery system was calibrated using a Ban dK microphone. Three adult males and one female (n = 4) were used for the adult data; three 20-day-old females (n = 3), two 10-day-old males, and two 10-day-old females (n = 4) were used for the juvenile data. The threshold levels for males and female birds were statistically indistinguishable in the adult or when the adult and 20-day-old data were combined...

The evoked potentials were recorded using low-impedance pin electrodes. A recording electrode was placed into the cerebellum just above the auditory brain stem. A second, differential electrode was placed in the forebrain.... (Amin N, Doupe A, Theunissen FE. Development of selectivity for natural sounds in the songbird auditory forebrain. J Neurophysiol. 2007.)

"It's not exactly the animal torture chamber..."

SUBJECTS. Two female rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were used in these experiments. Both monkeys were trained on the task described in this study. They weighed between 8.0 and 9.0 kg. All surgical, recording, and training sessions were in accordance with the National Institutes of Health's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and were approved by the Dartmouth Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Neither monkey had been operantly trained to make behavioral responses to auditory stimuli.

SURGICAL PROCEDURES. Surgical procedures were conducted under aseptic, sterile conditions, using general anesthesia (isoflurane). These procedures were performed in a dedicated surgical suite operated by the Animal Resource Center at Dartmouth College.

In the first procedure, titanium bone screws were implanted in the skull and a methylmethacrylate implant was constructed. A Teflon-insulated, 50-gauge stainless steel wire coil was also implanted between the conjunctiva and the sclera; the wire coil allowed us to monitor the monkey's eye position (Judge et al. 1980). Finally, a head-positioning cylinder (FHC-S2; Crist Instruments, Hagerstown, MD) was embedded in the implant. This cylinder connected to a primate chair and stabilized the monkey's head during behavioral-training and recording sessions.

After the monkeys learned the passive-listening task ... a craniotomy was performed and a recording cylinder (ICO-J20, Crist Instruments) was implanted. This surgical procedure provided chronic access to the vPFC for neurophysiological recordings. (Cohen YE, Theunissen F, Russ BE, Gill P. Acoustic features of rhesus vocalizations and their representation in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. J Neurophysiol. 2007.)

"[A]apparently, these activists don't believe in any kind of animal research."

Female choice plays a critical role in the evolution of male acoustic displays. Yet there is limited information on the neurophysiological basis of female songbirds' auditory recognition systems. To understand the neural mechanisms of how non-singing female songbirds perceive behaviorally relevant vocalizations, we recorded responses of single neurons to acoustic stimuli in two auditory forebrain regions, the caudal lateral mesopallium (CLM) and Field L, in anesthetized adult female zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Using various metrics of response selectivity, we found consistently higher response strengths for unfamiliar conspecific songs compared to tone pips and white noise in Field L but not in CLM. We also found that neurons in the left auditory forebrain had lower response strengths to synthetics sounds, leading to overall higher neural selectivity for song in neurons of the left hemisphere. This laterality effect is consistent with previously published behavioral data in zebra finches. Overall, our results from Field L are in parallel and from CLM are in contrast with the patterns of response selectivity reported for conspecific songs over synthetic sounds in male zebra finches, suggesting some degree of sexual dimorphism of auditory perception mechanisms in songbirds. (Hauber ME, Cassey P, Woolley SM, Theunissen FE. Neurophysiological response selectivity for conspecific songs over synthetic sounds in the auditory forebrain of non-singing female songbirds. Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, USA. J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2007.)

Asking for comfort...