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.

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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's Rarefied Self-Image

I have said on a number of occasions that the UW-Madison vivisectors act as if they see themselves above the law. Just how stupid does someone have to be, after seeing all the university has done over the years, to still qualify the observation that the university feels it is above the law with "as if"? Pretty dumb, I would say. Mea culpa.

I won't have to say that any more. The university has announced to all who would listen that they are absolutely above the law. They have stated clearly and succinctly in the University System Omnibus Motion:

Liability Protections for Scientific Researchers: Specify that current law provisions prohibiting crimes against animals would not apply to persons engaged in bona fide scientific research at an educational or research institution or persons who are authorized or otherwise regulated under federal law to utilize animals for these purposes.

They slipped this provision into the pending state budget bill because they know with absolute certainty that the provision could not stand alone or weather informed debate. This is a dishonest ploy to exempt themselves from Wisconsin's "Crimes Against Animals" statutes, Chapter 951 of the state code.

If you check it out, you'll see that there are already two exemptions given to those experimenting on animals.

951.02  Mistreating animals. No person may treat any animal, whether belonging to the person or another, in a cruel manner. This section does not prohibit bona fide experiments carried on for scientific research or normal and accepted veterinary practices.

and then again,

951.06  Use of poisonous and controlled substances. No person may expose any domestic animal owned by another to any known poisonous substance, any controlled substance included in schedule I, II, III, IV or V of ch. 961, or any controlled substance analog of a controlled substance included in schedule I or II of ch. 961, whether mixed with meat or other food or not, so that the substance is liable to be eaten by the animal and for the purpose of harming the animal. This section shall not apply to poison used on one's own premises and designed for the purpose of rodent or pest extermination nor to the use of a controlled substance in bona fide experiments carried on for scientific research or in accepted veterinary practices.

There is also an exemption in 951.10 for people who wish to sell baby rabbits, chicks and other fowl to vivisectors.

If the university gets its way, and I suspect they will, they will be formally outside the law. Vivisectors will no longer be barred by statute from:

951.025 Killing an animal by means of decompression.
951.03 Dognapping and catnapping.
951.04 Leading an animal from a motor vehicle.
951.05 Transporting any animal in or upon any vehicle in a cruel manner.
951.07 Using certain devices: (a bristle bur, tack bur or like device; or a poling device used to train a horse to jump which is charged with electricity or to which have been affixed nails, tacks or other sharp points.)
951.08 Instigating fights between animals.
951.09 Shooting at caged or staked animals.
951.095 Harassing police and fire animals.
951.097 Harassing service dogs.
951.11 Selling artificially colored animals.
951.13 Not providing proper food and drink to confined animals.
951.14 Not providing proper shelter.
951.15 Abandoning animals.

The university's demand that they be exempt from Chapter 951 is breathtaking, stunning, telling. I worry about them though, being so high above the ground, they must all be experiencing nosebleeds, headache, and extreme lightheadedness, which in itself may explain their absurd self-image.

rarefied: Belonging to or reserved for a small select group; exalted in nature or character; exclusive.

Want to do something about this grotesque attack? If you live in Wisconsin or visit Wisconsin, or have simply only heard of Wisconsin, call the state legislators and tell them that no one should be exempted from laws against cruelty. Ask them to remove Item 27 from the University of Wisconsin System Omnibus Motion.

You can look up their phone numbers here.

UW Seeks Exemption from All Anti-Cruelty Laws

On Saturday, June 4, a motion was introduced and passed during the Joint Committee on Finance meeting. "The Joint Committee on Finance is a statutory, 16-member standing committee of the Wisconsin Legislature. The Committee's primary responsibility is to serve as the principal legislative committee charged with the review of all state appropriations and revenues." The motion as passed:

Liability Protections for Scientific Researchers: Specify that current law provisions prohibiting crimes against animals would not apply to persons engaged in bona fide scientific research at an educational or research institution or persons who are authorized or otherwise regulated under federal law to utilize animals for these purposes.

Obvious to anyone even minimally informed about the University of Wisconsin's many animal care and use problems is the fact that the recent sheep decompression case sent shock waves of fear throughout the campus vivisection labs. A few vivisectors just barely side-stepped having criminal charges filed against them. The only thing that saved them was the obvious confusion and neglect of a special investigator.

The heart of the motion that was passed is the claim that federal regulations and oversight are already sufficient. Local officials and citizens should simply wash their hands of responsibility and concern and leave all the decisions to those with a financial vested interest in the experiments and to the federal government. Obviously, the average Wisconsinite has no business questioning, let alone challenging, the activities of the demigods in white coats.

Here's a letter I've already fired off to a legislator or two:

Dear Representative xxx,

My name is Rick Bogle. I am co-director of the Madison-based Alliance for Animals, a state-wide animal advocacy non-profit.

I have just learned that the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee passed a motion which, if passed by the Legislature, will exempt all "bona fide" scientific research from Chapter 951 of the Wisconsin Statutes, "Crimes Against Animals."

This comes on the heals of the recent case involving decompressing sheep at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in which staff narrowly dodged criminal charges being filed against them.

If this motion is discussed, if and when it is taken up by the Legislature, it will be argued that current federal regulations are sufficient to regulate and guarantee humane care and treatment of the animals used in laboratories. Unfortunately, the record makes clear that this isn't the case.

The use of animals in labs is regulated at the federal level in two ways. Funding agencies like the National Institutes of Heath (NIH), the sponsor of the overwhelmingly largest number of projects, and other agencies such as the National Science Foundation, require an institution hosting funded research to submit a document referred to as an Animal Welfare Assurance. (Sometimes called the PHS Assurance, and more commonly, just the Assurance.)

An institution's Assurance is the formal promise to the NIH that all research with animals conducted there will comply with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. The Guide, an industry authored text, stipulates minimum standards of care and use, requires a local oversight committee, and relies on federal, state, and local laws and regulations:

p 2: Introduction: "Animal facilities and programs should be operated in accord with this Guide, the Animal Welfare Regulations, or AWRs (CFR 1985); the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, or PHS Policy (PHS 1996); and other applicable federal (Appendixes C and D) state, and local laws, regulations, and policies."

p 8: Chapter 1. First sentence of paragraph 2: “Each institution should establish and provide resources for an animal care and use program that is managed in accord with this Guide and in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations...”

The NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) is responsible for oversight of an institution's compliance with the Guide. OLAW only very rarely conducts inspections, and instead relies almost entirely on self-reporting by an institution.

A second, more substantive regulatory mechanism is the Animal Welfare Act. The Act also stipulates minimum standards of care and requires a local oversight committee. The Act is enforced through (usually) annual inspections by veterinary medical officers (VMOs) of the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

The most recent evaluation of APHIS oversight of animal use in laboratories was conducted by the USDA Office of the Inspector General. It found widespread problems and a lack of meaningful enforcement of the Act. This report is available on line at
http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/33002-03-SF.pdf

In spite of the low marks given by the OIG, recent APHIS inspections of the University of Wisconsin, Madison have resulted in multiple citations for violations of the minimum standards set out in the Act. See for instance:
http://www.allanimals.org/files/USDA_2009.pdf

You may be unaware that the inspection reported in the document above was the result of multiple complaints to APHIS from inside the university. As a result of the problems discovered, a very rare OLAW/APHIS investigation was instigated. See:
http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=30944

We have learned from review of local oversight committee minutes that the investigation has been extended in scope on a couple occasions, the results have yet to be reported by the inspectors. Any action by the State Legislature prior to the issuance and review of the results seems premature.

The local oversight committees I have mentioned above are Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees. These IACUCS (I-Uh-Kuks) or sometimes just ACUCs (A-Kuks) are required by both the Animal Welfare Act and the Guide. They are universally considered the keystone of all oversight and regulation of animal care and use in lab
settings.

The ACUC system is also problematic. There has been a single evaluation of the system, and it was not very complimentary: Animal research. Reliability of protocol reviews for animal research. Plous S, Herzog H. Science. 2001. See:
http://www.socialpsychology.org/articles/scipress.htm and
http://www.socialpsychology.org/pdf/science2001-07-27.pdf?logged=true

More simply, current federal regulation and oversight of the care and use of animals in labs is weak at best and at worse allows without meaningful penalty many inhumane conditions and practices to continue.

Washing our hands of any concern or responsibility for the care and use of animals in local laboratories based on the claim that the federal government and local employees of the labs can be trusted to adequately monitor and regulate the care and use of animals seems at odds with the plain facts.

If the motion to extend a blanket exemption from Chapter 951 to animal-using labs and scientists passes, local citizens will have no power whatsoever to question or challenge even the most gruesome questionable use of animals even when state laws forbid anyone else from doing those things. Apparently, it will be legal in our state for scientists to starve animals to death, to stage fights between them,
or to use painful devices on horse's bridles. That seems unfair and uncivilized to me.

I urge you do do all you can to oppose and defeat this oddly anti-local control initiative.

If I can be of any assistance whatsoever please do not hesitate to call on me.

Sincerely,

[Me]

Standing Above the Law

“It’s grotesquely painful and unambiguously illegal, but fuck the sheep, the university can do whatever it wants,” said Brian Blanchard, Dane County District Attorney in response to having it called to his attention that beginning in at least 1988, the University of Wisconsin, Madison has repeatedly violated one of the state’s “Crimes Against Animals” statutes. The law bars killing animals with decompression. Apparently, the university intends to keep breaking this law and DA Blanchard could care less.

Blanchard didn’t actually say, “fuck the sheep” of course, but he might as well have. Read his letter.

In 1985, the Wisconsin State Legislature passed into law statute 951.025. This short statute is short and unambiguous:

Decompression prohibited. No person may kill an animal by means of decompression. (Bolded text in the original.)

Even DA Blanchard acknowledges that the university’s attempt to distort this plain language is as lame as a sheep crippled in one of its hideously cruel decompression experiments:

If the death of each sheep by means of decompression does not qualify as a forfeiture violation, one is hard pressed to imagine what conduct, not intentional or negligent, would fit the definition of a forfeiture violation. No intent whatsoever is required. The plain terms of the substantive statute and its penalty provision ban any practice that kills by this means.

It is irrelevant that Wisconsin’s flat prohibition appears to have arisen out of concern about use of decompression chambers as a euthanasia technique, because the plain language of the statute is unambiguous and no purpose other than a flat ban can be read into the statute. The legislature established a per se category of offense, assigned it to the forfeiture level, and decided not to shield bona fide research from its reach, regardless of the degree to which these experiments are scientifically sound and morally justified. Legislators settled on language that goes beyond the euthanasia context. Whether or not the explicit thought ever passed through the mind of any legislator, the legislature decided to use sweeping language that unambiguously prohibits the use of decompression chambers for any use, even peer reviewed scientific research, that kills an animal.

Why would the legislature have passed an unambiguous flat ban? Because rapid decompression is so terribly painful.

The fact that the university argued that it wasn’t breaking the law is illustrative of many of the deep-seated problems inherent in its use of animals (and the use of animals generally in research around the United States.)

You don’t have to be an attorney to understand the plain language of the law: “No person may kill an animal by means of decompression.” Period.

Yet, instead of admitting that it had violated this simple restriction, the university argued that the plain language doesn’t mean what it says. Likewise, it claims that the experiments in its labs are humane. (Here's their response to Blanchard.)

The university argues: “There certainly has been no … reason to believe there was any debate regarding the legitimacy or legality of this research until this particular complaint was lodged.”

University of Wisconsin, Madison animal research oversight committees do not have any such discussions. Why would they? The university feels that it is exempt from all animal cruelty laws, and acts accordingly. The university has simply ignored the state law. If this isn’t the case, then there would be a discussion of the law in an oversight committee’s minutes, but the university acknowledges that it can find no record of such discussion.

The university’s self-interested lame arguments are to be expected. DA Blanchard’s decision to ignore decades of violations and his apparent decision to turn a blind eye to all further violations reinforce the notion that working within the confines of the legal system is bound to fail on a matter so deeply entrenched in society.

No matter how carefully or well-argued, the problem of human slavery was unable to be solved through a reliance on the law. Even after the Civil War, the law was unable to stop de facto slavery, and Jim Crow was robust even into the 1970s. (Some might argue that Jim crow is still with us today.) Throughout that fight for equality, the sometimes violent confrontations with law enforcement and with the defenders of the status quo were keys to victory.

This isn’t to say that legal efforts should cease or that the few and narrow legal avenues that are available should not be utilized, but that such work in and of itself is unlikely to be successful. It is unlikely to be successful because the authorities in positions to enforce the laws are so often part and parcel of the system that is being challenged. Like judges and police officers in the South who were themselves bigots, today’s officials making decisions about enforcing anti-cruelty laws eat the animals they are being asked to protect. That’s a recipe for consistent failure.

We may see a further instance of this phenomena when the NIH learns of the university’s now clear and unambiguous violation of its Animal Welfare Assurance. Unlike the Animal Welfare Act, enforced by the USDA through nominally annual inspections of labs using species covered by the Act, the National Institutes of Health relies on a signed statement by an institution receiving funding from the NIH. This statement is a written promise to the NIH that the institution will adhere to The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (The Guide). (National Research Council, 1996.)

Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (the policy regulating NIH-funded research using animals) explains that the Policy “does not affect applicable state or local laws or regulations which impose more stringent standards for the care and use of laboratory animals.”

The Guide states:

Animal facilities and programs should be operated in accord with this Guide, the Animal Welfare Regulations, or AWRs (CFR 1985); the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, or PHS Policy (PHS 1996); and other applicable federal (Appendixes C and D) state, and local laws, regulations, and policies. (p 2)

The University of Wisconsin, Madison has assured the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare in its Public Health Service Assurance (A3368-01) that it would follow the The Guide, but since at least 1988, researchers at the university have been killing sheep by means of decompression. The most recent instances of these crimes against animals and noncompliances with its PHS Assurance are documented in “Oxygen pre-breathing decreases dysbaric diseases in UW sheep undergoing hyperbaric exposure.” Sobakin AS, Wilson MA, Lehner CE, Dueland RT, Gendron-Fitzpatrick AP. Undersea Hyperb Med. 2008.

I suspect that PHS Assurances will prove to be a sham. But we’ll see.

The decompression of the sheep

The decompression of the sheep
Alliance for Animals says UW researchers are violating the law
Bill Lueders on Thursday 08/27/2009

The animals are placed in a hyperbaric pressure chamber, then monitored for decompression sickness.

In early 2006, Leslie Hamilton spoke to a UW Veterinary School class about animals and the law. Afterward, one student approached her to say he had, as a part-time lab assistant, witnessed decompression experiments involving sheep.

"He was very bothered by it," recalls Hamilton, an attorney and member of the local Alliance for Animals.

Hamilton made an open records request seeking necropsy reports on sheep who had died. The UW refused on various grounds, including "trade secrets." The state Attorney General's Office declined to get involved. Sighs Hamilton, "We had to let it drop."

...

... The experiments, which the UW last fall classified as being in the highest category for animal pain and discomfort, are often fatal.

And that, Hamilton believes, makes them illegal.

State Statute 951.025 reads, in its entirety: "Decompression prohibited: No person may kill an animal by means of decompression."

The Alliance has written the federal authorities that oversee animal experiments and Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, saying the UW has been killing sheep through decompression at least since 1988. And more than 100 group members have sent postcards urging Blanchard to "investigate this matter and bring charges against those responsible for conducting and approving these cruel acts."

...

Eric Sandgren, director of the UW's Research Animal Resources Center, offers this response:

"We're still reviewing the complaint and preparing our response to Mr. Blanchard, so it wouldn't be appropriate for us to provide detailed comments right now. We do believe that the research studies at issue were fully compliant with the letter and spirit of all applicable state and federal laws governing the use of animals in research. The studies were humanely conducted according to generally accepted veterinary practices, and serve the important public purpose of helping people working in deep-sea environments, such as submariners, to survive a rapid ascent."

I don't think Eric Sandgren should go into law as a career. The question here is a simple one and the illegality of killing animals by means of decompression in the state of Wisconsin isn't arguable, though I won't be surprised if the UW attorneys try to argue the matter.

I don't think Eric Sandgren is familiar with generally accepted veterinary practices either.

He must never have read Appendix 4 of the AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia (Formerly Report of the AVMA Panel on Euthanasia) published in June 2007.

In Appendix 4, "Some unacceptable agents and methods of euthanasia," the American Veterinary Medical Association says:

Decompression is unacceptable for euthanasia because of numerous disadvantages. (1) Many chambers are designed to produce decompression at a rate 15 to 60 times faster than that recommended as optimum for animals, resulting in pain and distress attributable to expanding gases trapped in body cavities. (2) Immature animals are tolerant of hypoxia, and longer periods of decompression are required before respiration ceases. (3) Accidental recompression, with recovery of injured animals, can occur. (4) Bleeding, vomiting, convulsions, urination, and defecation, which are aesthetically unpleasant, may develop in unconscious animals.

Killing animals by means of decompression is illegal in Wisconsin and it's contrary to accepted veterinary practices.

This is doubly concerning because Sandgren is the director of the Research Animal Resource Center, which lists as one of its four main functions, to:

provide oversight and assistance in assuring compliance to all laws, regulations, and rules governing the care and use of laboratory animals.

So, the director, himself a veterinarian, is ignorant of the state's Crimes Against Animals statutes and is ignorant of the AVMA's guidelines on euthanasia. This lack of knowledge and delusional belief that the institution is obeying applicable laws goes to the heart of all the problems with the university's use of animals. They really don't know what they are doing, and are more than willing to say whatever they believe will pacify the public when a problem inadvertently slips into the public's field of view.

This problem can't be fixed. It's like trying to make the nuclear arsenal safe. The only sane and humane way to deal with it is to eliminate it.

Who killed Res 35?

The simple answer is the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In spite of repeated claims that any discussion about the ethics of experiments on monkeys would be pointless and redundant and not worth anyone’s time, this “trivial” matter motivated letters to the Dane County Board from UW-Chancellor Biddy Martin, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Paul DeLuca Jr., as well as public testimony from Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate School Martin Cadwallader.

Working behind the scenes with university on this matter that deserved no consideration, was apparently, Dane County Supervisor Chair Scott Mcdonell.

It seems reasonable, given the university’s reticence and decades-long history of lies, cover-ups, and spin that Res 35 sponsor Supervisor Al Matano was correct when he said that the proposed forums are “a cynical, manipulative ploy” intended to stop Res 35.

The proof is in the vegan pudding, of course, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the university actually comes up with. In the meantime, we can at least speculate and look at the make-up of the committee they have formed, the questions they say will be addressed, and those questions not mentioned, to get some idea of the possible results.

So here’s the committee make-up announced by the university:

Eric Sandgren, animal researcher, Director of the Research Animal Resource Center, and main UW spokesperson when local or national media covers embarrassing problems with the university’s animal use. He will lead the forum-planning group.

David Abbott, a UW-Madison professor and scientist at the Wisconsin National Primate Center.

Simon Peek, a veterinarian at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. Eric Sandgren is also a veterinarian, but veterinarian is not equivalent to a concern for animals. For instance, in a 2008 paper Peek explains that he used nineteen Holstein bull calves between 24 and 48 hours old and infused E. coli directly into their jugular veins over a three-hour period. The authors wrote: “During the 3-h period of endotoxin infusion, experimental calves demonstrated characteristic clinical signs consistent with endotoxemia; specifically mild tachypnea [rapid breathing], mild pyrexia [fever], and depression (increased tendency to lie down, loss of suckle reflex).” The big discovery? “This is the first time that biochemical evidence of cardiac injury has been documented in calves with endotoxemia.” The calves were sold commercially following the conclusion of the study. (Cardiac isoenzymes in healthy Holstein calves and calves with experimentally induced endotoxemia. Peek SF, Apple FS, Murakami MA, Crump PM, Semrad SD. Can J Vet Res. 2008.)

Robert Streiffer is a bioethicist at UW-Madison and chair of the Letters and Sciences Animal Care and Use Committee which approves all the experiments at the Harlow lab, among others. Streiffer argues that compliance with state and federal law is ethical use.

Patricia McConnell is an animal behaviorist, author and adjunct professor of zoology at UW-Madison. She has argued that we must eat sheep in order to stop them from going extinct. (Really.) She has often misled her students about the value of Harry Harlow’s horrific career at the university.

Lisa Kane is an attorney and author with an interest in captive elephant welfare, but only limited (if any) knowledge of animal research at the university.

And Paula Rinelli, who the university pointed out is a member of the Alliance for Animals. Ms Rinelli recommended Ms Kane in order to have someone else on the committee who shared her concern for animals. Ms Rinelli is not a representative of the Alliance for Animals and may even be a member of other animal rights organizations. Ms Rinelli has attended multiple university animal care and use committee meetings and is well-known to Sandgren. Ms Rinelli may have been asked to participate simply because she is an Alliance member, and having an Alliance member on the committee might make it seem more inclusive to the public and may have helped create a handy smokescreen for Supervisors trying to find a way to avoid a fair response to concerned citizens regarding Res 35.

So that’s the planning committee. Does it seem balanced to you?

Now let’s look at the questions Cadwallader and DeLuca have said will be addressed in the forums, and the questions they haven’t asked.

1. How are animals viewed in our and other societies?

A better question would be: How has the view of animals by our and other societies changed over the past 100 years?

2. What is the value of research with animals?

We can answer that question in two ways. Regarding the economic value: experiments on monkeys at the university brought in more than $46 million in research grants in 2008-09.

Regarding the value to patients: “judging by the only criterion that matters to patients and taxpayers—not how many interesting discoveries about cells or genes or synapses have been made, but how many treatments for diseases the money has bought—the return on investment to the American taxpayer has been approximately as satisfying as the AIG bailout.”

3. Are experiments involving animals necessary?

Yes, if the goal is to keep the research labs open and generating income for the university. No, if the goal is improvement in patient care.

4. Are there alternatives to animal use in research and teaching?

Yes.

5. Is animal research ethical?

Yes, when the animals are not confined or manipulated, as in observational studies. Yes, in clinical research intended to help the subject, or do them no likely harm.

No, when animals are confined for long periods or harmed.

6. How are experiments designed to answer a question?

If harming animals is unethical, then this question is unimportant.

7. Who funds animal research and how does the funding process work?

The National Institutes of Health funds the overwhelming majority of research at the universities. The funding process in incestuous. Researchers control who gets funded.

8. Who looks out for the animals?

No one. All claims to the contrary are either intended to mislead the public or else are claims made by a the tiny few caring insiders with essentially no power to protect any of them. The proof is in the pudding. Essentially every one of the untold thousands of animals used in the UW-Madison labs either dies as a result of the experiments or is killed.

9. What are the levels of oversight?

Given the repeated violations [USDA_2007][USDA 2009] of the minimal and weak laws slightly regulating the university’s use of animals, and the plain fact that essentially all of them die or are killed, the “levels of oversight” is an arcane matter with little consequence. The question in and of itself is propaganda.

10. What happens when animals are no longer needed for research purposes?

See above.

What questions or topics aren’t on this list?

1. Why did the university really shred 628 videos of their experiments on monkeys after denying repeated public records requests for just one of them?

2. What is actually done to the monkeys in Michele Basso’s, Ei Terasawa’s, or Maria Emborg’s experiments? Will there be videos shown at the forums or pictures projected?

3. Why is the university afraid of a non-aligned group of citizens asking questions about the ethics of experiments on monkeys?

4. How do they explain the repeated serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act?

5. Why weren’t UW-Madison animal researchers knowledgeable about Wisconsin’s Crimes Against Animals statutes?

6. Why does the university feel it should be exempt from the laws that govern everyone else?

7. Why did the university abandon the Vilas stump-tailed macaques?

8. Why did past primate center director Joe Kemnitz lie to a student reporter when asked about the university’s agreement not to use the monkeys at the Vilas Zoo? Why wasn't he disciplined?

[According to Bogle, Primate Center directors and members signed three different letters in 1989, 1990 and 1995, stating the center would not perform harmful experiments on the monkeys unless a monkey had unique genetic traits.

UW Primate Center director Joe Kemnitz said UW never entered into an agreement like that because it would not make sense.]

9. Why isn’t the university honest with the public?

10. Why is ethical to experiment on monkeys but not ethical to raise humans, lock them in cages for their entire lives, and perform painful experiments on them?

UW Violating State Law and PHS Regs?

From: http://www.allanimals.org/sheep.html

Wisconsin Statute 951.025, “Crimes Against Animals,” isn’t hard to understand. It says:

Decompression prohibited.
No person may kill an animal by means of decompression.

Decompression sickness, commonly called the bends, occurs when bubbles of nitrogen gas form in the blood, muscle, skin, the brain and other organs, or in bone. The pain can be excruciating and can lead to death.

Increased atmospheric pressure forces additional nitrogen into the blood. When someone is exposed to high pressure for a time, like a scuba diver or a sheep in UW-Madison's Hyperbaric Pressure Chamber, and then decompresses too quickly, the nitrogen forms bubbles as it turns back into a gas.

Since at least 1988,* vivisectors at the University of Wisconsin Madison have been killing sheep with decompression. In a 2008 report they explain:

Sixteen adult Suffolk ewes with no evidence of clinical lameness and with normal limb bone scans were subjected to a single 24-hour exposure of compressed air in a large, high pressure chamber at the UW Biotron Laboratory.

Afterwards,

Each animal was observed for clinical signs of decompression sickness such as limb lifting, a manifestation of the discomfort in limb bends, labored breathing or panting, indicative of pulmonary gas embolism, otherwise known as the “chokes” or respiratory decompression sickness (RDCS). The sheep were observed continuously for 4 h[ours] immediately post-dropout decompression. The number of limb-lifting episodes in each limb was recorded.

Decompression caused six fatal cases of the chokes or respiratory decompression sickness (RDCS).

All four “control” sheep that breathed only air during [decompression] died of RDCS. One sheep in each of the 15-min and 1-h [oxygen] pre-breathing groups also died of RDCS.

The Alliance has sent a complaint ro the National Institutes of Health's Officice of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW). We have also written to the Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard and asked him to investigate and prosecute those involved in these cruel experiments to the full extent of the law.

If you haven't done so already, please send Mr. Blanchard a polite letter asking him to investigate this apparent violation of Wisconsin's Crimes Against Animals statute.

Please send letters to:

Brian Blanchard
Dane County District Attorney
Dane County Courthouse Room 3000
215 S. Hamilton
Madison, WI 53703-3297

Read our letter to the District Attorney and our complaint to the NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare.

Get involved today.

*Oxygen pre-breathing decreases dysbaric diseases in UW sheep undergoing hyperbaric exposure.[.pdf] Sobakin AS, Wilson MA, Lehner CE, Dueland RT, Gendron-Fitzpatrick AP. Undersea Hyperb Med. 2008.

Dysbaric osteonecrosis in divers and caisson workers. An animal model. Lehner CE, Adams WM, Dubielzig RR, Palta M, Lanphier EH. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 1997.

Experimental respiratory decompression sickness in sheep. Atkins CE, Lehner CE, Beck KA, Dubielzig RR, Nordheim EV, Lanphier EH. J Appl Physiol. 1988.

Dear John Smalley, Editor, Wisconsin State Journal

Wisconsin State Journal
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Opinion
John Smalley, Editor

Why our journalists can’t sign petitions

The mission of the news pages — and the journalists who work on them — is to present fair, accurate and unbiased information, specifically devoid of our opinion.

Continues...

April fools?

Dear Mr. Smalley,

I hope you are sincere when you say that your newspaper ought to maintain an objective position everywhere but in opinion columns and on the editorial page. Kudos for believing this is the way things ought to be.

Unfortunately, this isn't the way things actually are.

The Wisconsin State Journal does what most, if not all news outlets do: it self-censors and reports in a way that shapes public opinion to conform with the paper's opinions.

Two or three years ago I talked with National Public Radio Ombudswoman, Alicia Shepard after getting tired of listening to Wisconsin Public Radio's blather about their uncensored coverage of stories you simply wouldn't hear anywhere else. I spoke to her about this false claim.

Problems and scandals involving the University of Wisconsin, Madison are rarely reported on by Wisconsin Public Radio, particularly so when the problems and scandals involve the use of animals in the university's labs. Ms. Shepard commiserated with me and lamented the fact that local public radio stations affiliated with universities commonly self-censor bad news about their host universities. She didn't have any idea how the problem could be fixed.

The Wisconsin State Journal has the same problem, and whether the self-censorship is recognized by the editorial board or not is a question that would be hard to answer by the paper's readers since your editorial meetings aren't subject to the same transparency as are government meetings.

But the absence of coverage of the problems and the glut of stories that appear to be positive propaganda, sometimes lifted almost verbatim from UW's own press releases, make it a little difficult to believe that at least some of the paper's staff aren't somewhat aware of the spin on the goings-on at the university.

It's not just WPR and the Wisconsin State Journal of course; I don't know of any local media outlets that don't jump on opportunities to praise the university and then shy away from the less savory stories. Not always, but usually. Even you colleagues at the left-leaning Cap Times have this problem, and I've written to them about it. Here's a letter to the editor:

Rick Bogle: UW stories left out bad news related to animals

January 11, 2012

Dear Editor: Two articles in the Jan. 4-10 Cap Times were noteworthy because of the similar topic of their omissions.

The first, “A brighter year ahead,” looked back on UW-Madison’s past year but made no mention of the university’s successful lobbying of lawmakers to exempt its staff from Wisconsin’s crimes against animals statutes. The exemption was slipped into the controversial budget bill without opportunity for public comment after researchers were caught violating the law by killing animals by means of decompression and by staging fights between animals.

The second article, a retrospective look at the retiring UW-Madison library director’s tenure, made no mention of the library’s role in or silence about the 2005 shredding of a cataloged 628-piece collection of 15 years of video records from the UW Primate Center, after it refused to provide a copy of one record that was requested as part of a public records request. The mission of the UW Library System’s June Northrop Barker Archives is to solicit, collect, organize, describe, preserve and provide access to the research and historical documents related to the field of primatology.

The list of problems and controversies involving animals at the university that have been left unreported or unremarked upon by the Wisconsin State Journal is long.

This selective coverage harms the public.

The harm is the false and uninformed opinions held by people who get their news primarily from local media. Local media has a compelling responsibility to cover important local news, and it is reasonable for local readers to believe that the important stories are covered by them -- fairly. Readers of the Wisconsin State Journals are unlikely to be conversant with or to have heard about the problems involving animals at the university. Their ignorance is the fault of local media.

If a paper opts to ignore a problem, that is, the paper self-censor, the public remains uninformed, is left with false impressions, or worse, is misled. This is particularly so when nearly all the "news" is "good" news.

Mr. Smalley, I hope your editorial will motivate you to look more critically at your paper's coverage of these matters and to work to meet the ideals you spelled out in your editorial.

Sincerely,

Rick Bogle

AETA and FACE

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) and the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act (FACE) have some similarities. I began thinking about this after an anonymous comment was left in response to my posts [here and here] about the silliness of the graph published in American Scientist (May-June 2008. p 186.) and the spurious supporting data from the Foundation for Biomedical Research.

Here’s the comment:

Of course, one has to divide the number of attacks by the size of the group under attack and compare to the baseline rate. But the basic point is that people are being targeted because of the (legal) work they do.

If one were to follow your twisted logic abortion doctors should not have been granted any additional protections (as killing people is already illegal.)

Considering the parenthetical point first, the anonymous commentator understood me correctly. Premeditated murder is illegal and carries with it the stiffest of penalties. It makes little sense to me to make the premeditated murder or attempted murder of some people a worse crime than the premeditated murder or attempted murder of other people. Doing so really does seem like twisted logic and seems wholly at odds with notions of equality.

But what about the definitions of the crimes and enhanced penalties spelled out in the AETA? Are these commensurate with the defined crimes and penalties stipulated by FACE?

Consider the AETA:

Offense- “Whoever travels in interstate or foreign commerce, or uses or causes to be used the mail or any facility of interstate or foreign commerce-- for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise; and in connection with such purpose-- … shall be punished as provided for…”

Sec. 43 (b) (1): “a fine under this title or imprisonment not more than 1 year, or both, if the offense does not instill in another the reasonable fear of serious bodily injury or death and-- (A): the offense results in no economic damage or bodily injury;”

Get that?

If you send a letter to someone (maybe even post to a public blog) and say that you think they should stop addicting monkeys to nicotine and killing them, and some local district attorney construes this to be harassment, even though the recipient of the letter does not fear for their safety and no economic damage is done, you could end up being fined and spending a year in jail.

Same thing if you cross a state line to protest at a puppy mill or slaughterhouse, apparently.

During the Congressional hearings that led to the enactment of the AETA, Republican Thomas Petri of Wisconsin, the primary sponsor, had Michelle Basso testify before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Basso is a primate vivisector at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. Basso was, apparently, a prime example of a victim of “animal enterprise terrorism.”

Basso’s testimony can be read here. My rebuttal can be read here. The “terrorism” leveled at her was allegedly unwanted subscriptions to book clubs.

If true, this is harassment. But it pales in the face of anything historically described as terrorism. Here, it seems, because she is a vivisector, special laws have been passed to single her and her ilk out for special protections.

This “terrorism” needs to be placed in perspective. Right now, in bookstores you can read all about creative ways to get even with people you don’t like. For instance:

The classic Getting Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks by George Hayduke (2000).

and the sequel, The Big Book Of Revenge: 200 Dirty Tricks for Those Who Are Serious About Getting Even by George Hayduke (2001).

Spite, Malice and Revenge: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Even (3 Diabolical Volumes in 1) by M. Nelson Chunder (1988).

Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even by Regina Barreca (1997).

Getting Even: Revenge As a Form of Justice by Charles K.B. Barton (1999)

And on and on. Calling these authors “terrorists” seems a bit of a stretch. Apparently, following the logic of the AETA, if your neighbor offends you and you send him or her a subscription to an unwanted magazine, you might be guilty of harassment, but if you send the same subscription to a vivisector when you learn that they are hurting animals, you are a terrorist.

Now consider the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE.) Unlike the AETA, FACE grew out of multiple premeditated murders, attempted murders, and multiple very serious attacks on clinics. In spite of the lopsided violence on the side of anti-abortion, the penalties stipulated by the AETA are either equal to, or greater than those under FACE. “For an offense involving exclusively a nonviolent physical obstruction, the fine shall be not more than $10,000 and the length of imprisonment shall be not more than six months, or both, for the first offense.”

The first point raised in the comment is interesting: “[O]ne has to divide the number of attacks by the size of the group under attack and compare to the baseline rate.”

According to the 2008 New York Times Almanac, the violent crime rate in 2005 (the most recent year of data reported) was 469.2 per 100,000.

Comparing the national rate with the rate of crime committed against vivisectors, even including crimes against those targeted because of their weak associations with vivisection (like most of the “incidences” included in the FBR database related to Huntington Life Sciences) there is virtually no crime committed in the name of animal rights, statistically speaking.

How many vivisectors are there in the US? This is a hard question to answer, but a very conservative estimate can be derived from statistics and estimates regarding the number of animals used. For 2006, UDSA-APHIS reported that there were just over 1 million animals of covered species used in US labs. The most common estimate of the number of rats and mice used annually in the US is 30 million. Let’s round the total to 30 million animals.

If we assume that the average vivisection lab uses 1000 animals a year (some primate vivisectors use less than 10 animals), there are 30,000 labs using mice, rats, and members of covered species. If there are 5 people working in each lab, then we can guess that there are maybe 150,000 vivisectors in the group that we want to compare to the baseline rate. (I suspect that the actual number is much higher; this doesn’t account for the animal breeders, dealers, equipment manufactures, food manufacturers, etc., but here, the conservative estimate will suffice.)

Using the FBR data, in 2005, considering only entries associated with vivisection, there were 34 “incidents,” the highest number ever, according to the FBR data.

Some examples of the incidents tallied by FBR for 2005:

“Over the previous two weeks, automatic dialing machines were used against HLS Investor Dalton-Grenier Company. Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 11, between 400 and 600 calls were placed every business day to Dalton offices and, eventually, direct to executives.”

“Activists vandalized 6 vans of a company that works with HLS.”

“Activists made home visits to executives at Boston Private, which owns 80% of a company that holds HLS shares.”

“Activists were arrested for giving a police officer fake identities after they were stopped on foot outside the Hoffman-LaRoche facility in Nutley, police said. The activists were later with charged with criminal mischief and criminal trespassing in connection with other vandalism of a home.”

“Activists reportedly contacted the pastor, secretary and parishioners of the church of the president of an HLS client and reported him as a child molester.”

None of the 34 reported incidents would have been included in the serious crime statistics reported in the New York Times Almanac. None.

Dividing the number of attacks by the size of the group under attack and comparing this to the baseline rate, we see there are at the very most 34 incidents per 150,000 vivisectors, or 24 (usually petty crimes) per 100,000 vivisectors compared to 469.2 serious crimes per 100,000 in the general population. (Serious crimes are murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft, and motor vehicle theft.)

All of this suggests a certain mania sweeping through the vivisection community. It is in the vivisectors’ interest to fan the flames of fear and further insulate themselves from public scrutiny. Scrutiny leads to criticism and outrage and threatens their livelihood and dark pastimes. Animal rights terrorism is a manufactured myth.

Weighing Suffering

Note: Juan Carlos Marvizon, mentioned below, hid his blog from the public after I posted this essay. I guess even he recognizes that the average reader would be shocked by his callousness and claims that animals can't suffer. The links below to his essays are now dead. So much for "speaking of research."

Vivisectors are a breed unto themselves. For some reason, some of them feel like they have to justify the terrible things they and their ilk do to animals; not all vivisectors of course, most of them don't say a word in public about the things they do to animals in their labs, and when asked are circumspect about it. Those who are driven to defend their industry frequently lament the fact that most of their colleagues would rather not draw their neighbors' and non-vivisecting friends' attention to the nitty-gritty of their gritty work.

If it weren't for the few outspoken apologists, we wouldn't have as much insight into their beliefs and worries as we do, albeit limited as it is.

One of the claims made by the outspoken vivisectors, and by all the pro-viv public front groups, is that they really do care about the animals and wish they didn't have to hurt and kill them. Images like this are common on the pro-industry propaganda websites:



The impression is that, doggone it, vivisectors are animal lovers too. The impression, not necessarily the truth.

In fact, some vivisectors don't think the animals they hurt can suffer. As wild as that sounds, it is worth noting that there are white doctors and nurses who still don't think people with skin darker than theirs feel pain the way they do. [Hoffman, Kelly M., et al. "Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.16 (2016): 4296-4301.] This is nothing new.

Juan Carlos Marvizon is a vivisector who likes to share his thoughts. He is a regular contributor to the misleadingly-named pro-vivisection group Speaking of Research. He uses rats to study pain. Here's a recent piece from him: More Thoughts on Animal Suffering, and a couple passages from the essay:

...I think that suffering requires the presence of a self because otherwise the existence of the subjective experience of suffering doesn’t make sense. This is a variant of the problem of consciousness: do non-human animals have a self? That’s doubtful. Maybe apes and dolphins do, rats and mice probably don’t. But, again, that is highly speculative. Hence, there has to be a scale of suffering. In that scale, humans are capable of much deeper suffering (and much deeper happiness) because we can see ourselves as selves with an existence extending in time, so we not only suffer in the present, but we can see that we have suffered in the past and that we will suffer in the future. Without episodic memory and extended consciousness, animals do not have selves with that continuity in time.

Questioning the ability of animals to suffer doesn’t mean that scientists are looking for a justification to inflict pain on animals. Rather, here scientists face two different moral imperatives. The first is the fundamental dictate of science of looking for the truth unhindered by cultural and societal biases. This leads us to examine the questions of animal pain and suffering in an objective way. The second moral imperative is not to be cruel to animals that can potentially suffer. It is because of this and the cautionary principle that we treat animals like rats and mice as if they can suffer, even when we don’t know for sure that they can. However, we do know with absolute certitude that humans can suffer, which is an additional argument to put human suffering before putative animal suffering. Therefore, it is morally justifiable to use animals in biomedical research to alleviate human suffering, while at the same time taking all possible measures to minimize the distress of animals involved in research.

He doesn't believe the rats he hurts can suffer because he thinks they don't have a sense of self. So, seemingly, whatever nominal welfare standard he is required to give lip-service to, it is to him not really necessary since rats are little more than animated machines, an opinion that has been relied on to absolve vivisectors since it was first voiced by Rene Descartes 1640.

He explains the terrible things he does to rats on his webpage:

Biography Dr. Marvizón’s research field is pain neurophysiology. He investigates chronic pain disorders at the physiological, cellular and molecular levels using the Latent Sensitization animal model. Latent Sensitization is triggered by injuries that cause long-term inflammation or nerve damage, such as skin incision, injection of inflammatory agents or nerve transection. This is followed by a period of increased sensitivity to mechanical (for example, poking with nylon filaments known as von Frey filaments) or thermal (focusing a hot light on the paw) stimuli. The key part of the Latent Sensitization model is that when that period of hypersensitivity has ended it can be reinstated temporarily by an injection of an antagonist of opioid receptors (mu, delta or kappa) or of alpha-2 adrenergic receptors. This reveals that the neural pathways that process pain remain sensitized but at the same time are suppressed by the activation of these opioid or adrenergic receptors. It is likely that similar process occur in chronic pain patients. Another important characteristic of Latent Sensitization is that pain can also be reinstated by stress (like making a rat swim in a bucket of water or exposing it to a new environment). Again, this happen to chronic pain patients.

All Marvizón’s nastiness aside, what initially caught my attention was his claim that "there has to be a scale of suffering." I think he's wrong in the context he is talking about. Obviously, suffering isn't the same for everyone in every circumstance. I suffer a heck of a lot more when I stub my toe really hard. Marvizón’s claim is that humans suffer more than other animals, and there is some sort of step-wise increase in their potential for suffering in species more like us.

This suggests to me that we should be able to compare these imagined levels of potential for suffering and come up with some sort of calculus that would give us the ability to weigh the potential benefits against the certain harms.

A straightforward case might be something like this: If we test some drug on 1,000 rats (and kill them) and it leads to saving 1,000,000 humans, would that be ethical? If we had some unit of measure, say a potential for suffering (pfs) score that we could assign to humans and rats, we could plug in the numbers and get an objective answer. Of course, such a scheme could be used to justify human vivisection as well, so maybe that plan would be too dangerous.

Nevertheless, if there is a scale of suffering, it could at least shed some light on the amount of suffering animals of different species might be subjected to from us using them. I suspect though, that people like Marvizón don't actually believe there is a meaningful scale of suffering. I think most people who use animals, even most people who simply eat them, actually believe that animals have no ethical weight at all.

Many people at least claim to care about other humans. This led me to wonder about the horrible things we do to each other. Among the worse, and almost universally decried as heinous (in public) is genocide. There have been a lot more cases of genocide that I thought, and they have been of various size. Here's a little graph I made based on data from Wikipedia; a range is given, I chose the high end number in every case:

43,003,883 people killed since 149BCE simply because they had the wrong religion, language, color... this led me to wonder how many people have been killed in wars. The upper estimate is 1 billion. When compared to the genocide deaths, genocide starts to look a little less serious (as if 43 million deaths aren't serious):

So combined, between war and genocide, we have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion, 43 million people, or 1,043,000,000 of us. The population of the U.S. is about 325,000,000 right now.

But, compare that number, a tally of killings over about 2000 years, with the number of animals we killed in commercial slaughter in 2017 alone: [Data for the animal numbers for this chart comes from http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/nass/LiveSlauSu//2010s/2018/LiveSlauSu-04-18-2018.txt and http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/PoulSlauSu/PoulSlauSu-02-26-2018.txt]

In this chart, genocide has been dwarfed to near nonexistence. The entire history of war deaths is a small slice of the pie. That's the number of animals killed in one year and the number of each other we have killed for as far back in history as we can look.

I was surprised by this data. It's hard to grasp the numbers involved, the individual animals it represents. Moreover, this pie chart represents a single year. The chart from the previous year is essentially exactly the same.

The purple section is repopulated every year. Every year. While the other sections, the white and sliver of blue, represent what happened in the past -- no new human victims are being represented in previous or succeeding charts.

We, as in the general public, think the war and genocide deaths are bad, evil things, yet, we kill many times over that number of animals every year. And that number does not include the animals we kill hunting and fishing, the millions of mice and rats killed in the labs, the dogs and cats killed because no one wants them, the poisoned animals, the trapped animals, the animals hit by cars, killed for fun, or culled in some notion of population management...

And for the most part, we say those deaths are proper and OK because they are legal or regulated or whatever.

And if that is so, then we must have in our heads some calculus, some ethical ratio that says one human life is worth, a billion animals? This is why the planet is in such dire shape. We are consumed by our own image. We believe ourselves to be gods.

In 2005, I launched an effort to establish a sort of living animal holocaust showcase between the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the Harlow lab. It turned out to be just another animal rights failure. The Anti-Defamation League wrote to tell us that they thought it outrageous to compare what was happening in the monkey labs to the Holocaust. This is my reply to them:

Mark Juster
Lonnie J. Nasatir
Anti-Defamation League
Greater Chicago/Upper Midwest Regional Office
309 W. Washington St., Suite 750
Chicago, IL 60606-3296

Dear Mr. Juster and Mr. Nasatir:

We are writing in response to your June 28, 2005 letter. You expressed concerns regarding the explicit comparisons the National Primate Research Exhibition Hall is making between the Holocaust and harmful experiments using animals.

The sentiments you express seem to be based on the simple implicit claim that whatever is done to an animal other than a human, cannot rise to the same level of moral concern as it would if it were being done to a human.

This is the common, widely held view of most people today. It is however, based on pre-scientific assumptions. Consider the following experiment:

Rhesus monkeys were trained to pull on one of two chains, depending on the color of a flashing light, in order to receive food. After training, another monkey, held in restraints, was displayed through a one-way mirror.

By pulling the chains in the correct fashion, the first monkey would receive the food reward, but one of the chains now delivered a powerful and painful electric shock to the restrained monkey. It was discovered that most of the monkeys would not shock another monkey even if it meant not being able to eat. One of the animals went without food for twelve days rather than hurting the other monkey. Monkeys who had been shocked in previous experiments themselves were even less willing to pull the chain and subject others to such torment. [Masserman J, Wechkin S, Terris W. 1964. ‘Altruistic’ behavior in rhesus monkeys. American Journal of Psychiatry vol. 121: 584-5.]

Quite clearly, the monkeys in this study were following the Golden Rule. If we choose to live a moral and ethical life, it would seem profoundly wrong to intentionally hurt others who seem to understand this radical and history-changing idea. It seems monstrous that we would take such animals from their homes in the wild, destroy their social systems, breed them, experiment on their children, and on them, and justify the entire endeavor with the claim that it might be beneficial to us. This seems to be a profound case of hubris.

You stated that it is disrespectful to compare the “alleged mistreatment of animals with the enormous human suffering that took place during the Holocaust.” You state that calling the National Primate Research Exhibition Hall “another” Holocaust museum “evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust.”

We are offended that decades of documented cruelty are dismissed in such an offhand manner. There is nothing being "alleged". We state the facts.

You claim that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. My personal understanding of the Holocaust is based on years of reading and teaching. I brought the National Holocaust Museum’s traveling exhibition to my small community in 1995. That same year I had a survivor come to my classroom and speak with my students. I have read most of the works written for adolescents many times over the years with my students. I have read many scholarly works devoted to various aspects of Germany’s policies and practices during the Nazi era.

When learning about the Holocaust, slavery, racial strife, the Killing Fields, and other examples of our inhumanity to each other, my students invariably asked why people allowed such things to happen; why didn’t they do some thing to stop them. Although I had no concise answer for them, we always agreed that the people who spoke out, who hid Jews, who helped blacks escape to freedom, who stood with the oppressed, were acting as we hope we would have acted if we had lived through those times.

Once the implication of the discoveries regarding animal mind are understood, the realities of the current situation become impossible to describe in terms other than those used to talk about past atrocities.

The Holocaust, I hope you agree, was not an experience unique to the Jews. The Final Solution was a unique aspect of the Holocaust. We do not claim that a parallel event is occurring today. There is no genocide occurring today in the primate labs. We do not claim there is.

I finished reading Vivian Spitz’s Doctors From Hell (Sentient Publications, 2005) just recently. As you may know, she was a court reporter during the Medical Case (Case #1) of the Subsequent Proceedings of the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. The convicted medical doctors and medical assistants were found guilty of Crimes Against Humanity. Their victims – their experimental subjects – were a very heterogeneous group comprised of common criminals, political prisoners, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsies, Poles, the infirm, Jews, and others.

It is this aspect of the Holocaust and the fact that no one was speaking out in protest, that we draw attention to in our literature. Given that in both situations, medical doctors and scientists were and are being given authority to make society’s moral decisions; given that the justifications are the same: we will benefit from their suffering and death; given that science has demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate, that the brains of monkeys and humans are so similar that the species’ subjective experiences are necessarily similar; given that scientists claim that monkey psychological reactions are directly applicable to humans due to our close evolutionary relationship and the attendant physiological and emotional similarities; given the demonstrable horrors of laboratory life, we feel that the parallels we draw are appropriate.

Further, given the lack of education regarding animal mind, the historic willingness to ignore that which government tells us to ignore, and the historical facts regarding the consequences of doing so, we feel obliged to call attention to the issue and to draw parallels with the Holocaust where parallels exist.

We believe that, if you consider this issue with an open mind and compassionate heart, you are bound to understand the accuracy and importance of what we are doing. Given your commitment to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive and trying to assure that it does not happen again, we sincerely hope that you will lend your voice to our growing list of supporters.

You state that our “objectionable use of Holocaust imagery ultimately taints your campaign and detracts from the message your organizations seek to convey.”

I hope you can see why I believe you are wrong. The message we seek to convey is that the suffering today is indistinguishable from past suffering. The silence today is indistinguishable from the past silence.

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. I have enclosed information about the Exhibition Hall. Please do not hesitate to contact us with further questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Rick Bogle

Planet Biddy

See: Biddy Martin: Animal studies save lives, limit suffering. Wisconsin State Journal. June 26, 2010.

Apparently, the simple idea that local citizens might actually look carefully at the experiments being conducted on monkeys at the university is a frightening idea to Chancellor Biddy Martin. Otherwise, she would welcome the opportunity to share the details with everyone in Dane County. Her protestation suggests loudly that she thinks there are details that should remain hidden and topics that should not be discussed. And that is the real reason she had her letter published today; the Board of Supervisors will discuss a resolution on Tuesday to consider the creation of a citizens panel to examine the use of monkeys in Dane County. See www.MonkeysInDane.info

Her letter seems to be an abuse of authority. As the Chancellor of our largest public university she has a clear obligation to speak honestly to the public. She did not do that here.

She begins with a shell game. Doctors in Italy transplanted adult stem cells from healthy tissue in a patient's own eyes and restored their sight. But Martin implies that the study of embryonic stem cells using monkeys at the university is somehow related to this report. It's not.

Then she brandishes UW researcher and Nobel Prize winner Howard Temin and says that his "His discovery of a key enzyme depended on several animal models, including monkeys, and peeled back the fundamental mystery of AIDS and other diseases that are caused by retroviruses." She should review his publications more carefully. The overwhelming bulk of his work was based on the study of chicken cell cultures infected with a tumor-causing chicken virus. She'll have to dig pretty deep to find any evidence whatsoever that his discovery of this enzyme (reverse transcriptase) "depended" on monkeys. And the bulk of his papers on HIV are reports of his study of HIV, available only from humans.

She then appeals to influenza; but much controversy surrounds the recent swine-flu scare and massive public expenditure on vaccine. She does not mention that researchers have criticized UW flu-researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka's work on the Spanish flu saying that it poses too much risk to public health. The recent chilling disclosure that antibiotic-resistant germs were being produced in a UW lab without permission from NIH, and the subsequent attempt to shun responsibility should be a wake up call to everyone who has believed that the university is trustworthy and careful.

She claims that the use of animals is highly regulated, apparently believing that the public and County Supervisors are too dull to remember the recent unprecedented joint inspection by USDA and NIH that found nearly 100 violations of the Animal Welfare Act, many of them quite serious. Or the possibility that researchers may soon be charged with criminal violations of Wisconsin's Crimes Against Animals laws. Or the recently aired dirty laundry involving the UW veterinary staff and Michele Basso over her years of fumbling and sloppy brain experiments on monkeys.

Chancellor Martin says misleadingly: "The university is committed to treating animals with the respect, care and ethical consideration they deserve, and avoiding their use whenever possible." But she has flatly refused to discuss the "ethical consideration they deserve," and that question is at the heart of County Resolution 35.

She says finally: "We have opened our laboratories, publicized our research worldwide and participated in vigorous debates about animal research."

In fact, the university shredded 628 videotapes of experiments on monkeys rather than allow the public to see just one. They have fought vigorously and stonewalled for months on end to block public access to public records. The university has never (as in NEVER) participated in any public debate whatsoever about its use of animals. The two UW-affiliated researchers who have participated have made it very clear that they were not representing the university.

And opened the labs? Maybe on planet Biddy.

UW Ethics: Blowing in the Wind

Section 951.025, Wis. Stats. reads in its entirety:

Decompression prohibited. No person may kill an animal by means of decompression.

I recently wrote about the lock-step positions taken by University of Wisconsin-Madison spokespersons regarding their appeals to the authority of government as a substitute for their personal responsibility or even the university’s responsibility for the decision to hurt monkeys.

Research Animal Resource Center Director Eric Sandgren argued at the January 8, 2010All-Campus Animal Care and Use Committee meeting that animal research ethics is dictated by government regulations. That is, he should have added, until government’s dictates interfere with the university’s desire to engaged in research that is harmful to animals.

This contradictory position is a clear unambiguous illustration of the hidden motivations behind the rhetoric produced by the university and its spokespersons. (The University of Wisconsin-Madison is unlikely to be unique in this regard, and can be considered an exemplar for university-based animal experimentation programs.)

On the one hand, regulations are good and appropriate if they serve the university’s interests. (The opinions of the local citizens should be dismissed.) On the other hand, when regulations threaten the flow of money into the university or the open-ended ability to hurt animals in any way whatsoever, then the regulations should be changed (and local opinion should still be dismissed, of course); apparently, the ethical guidelines in the regulations vary in value and meaning depending on whether or not the university likes them.

It is likely that the university will seek to win an exception to Wisconsin’s state law banning the killing of animals by means of decompression. These two-faced self-serving tax-sucking soft-handed ass-wipes will probably go to the Legislature and demand that they be allowed to simply ignore the state’s Crimes Against Animals statutes altogether. Can you say dick-heads?

The Sheep. Spin, spin, spin.

No fines for sheep deaths at UW-Madison
By DEBORAH ZIFF. Wisconsin State Journal. October 8, 2009.

UW-Madison researchers violated state law when 26 sheep died in experiments on decompression sickness, but Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard won't prosecute the university because the infraction is relatively minor, he wrote in an opinion.

A few excerpts:

"We're trying to decide now that we have this information how to proceed," [Eric] Sandgren said.

I wonder what he means by this? Now that the university and the researchers know they won't be prosecuted or fined? Now that they know this is illegal? Now that they know what? (Previous posts that mention Eric Sandgren.)

If it's the latter, that they didn't know that killing animals by means of decompression was illegal, and that's how I read his comment, it must mean that the animal research oversight committees have never taken the time to learn what the state laws are regarding the treatment of animals. If that's what he meant, that they are just now learning that what they've been doing since 1986 is a violation of Wisconsin's "Crimes Against Animals" statutes (Chapter 951), it speaks poorly for their interest in the public's desires and wishes as spelled out in the state's legal code and paints the UW vivisectors as being just as arrogant and self-important as I have ever imagined them to be.

The studies are funded by the U.S. Navy and other federal and state agencies. UW-Madison is one of three main sites where such research is conducted, Sandgren said.

This claims seems to be rooted in something other than reality. One of three main sites?

Here's another chance to use PubMed to put a vivisector's claims to the test.

The key paper here, the most recently published paper by UW vivisectors on the topic of decompressing sheep is Oxygen pre-breathing decreases dysbaric diseases in UW sheep undergoing hyperbaric exposure. Sobakin AS, Wilson MA, Lehner CE, Dueland RT, Gendron-Fitzpatrick AP. Undersea Hyperb Med. 2008.

There are two easy ways to use PubMed to check out the veacity of this claim. 1. Look at the related articles on the right. 2. Click on each of the authors' names to access their list of indexed articles.

In the first case, and imposing the limits: "Publication Date from 2007 to 2009, Animals" results in a list of 49 items. Ten of these are comments on other papers and one is a conference announcement. The thirty-eight remaining papers are reports of scientific research. Each one includes the name of the lead author’s primary institution. The institutions named, and the number of times each one is named in one of the papers, if more than once, is listed here:

Israel Naval Medical Institute (5)
Dartmouth College
Università di Padova, Italia
University of St Andrews
Virginia Commonwealth University (3)
Naval Medical Research Center, Silver Spring, MD (4)
State University of New York at Stony Brook
University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston
University of Texas Medical School, Houston
University of Virginia
Copenhagen University (3)
Naval Medical Institute, France
Ministry of Defense, Government of India, Delhi (2)
Norwegian Underwater Intervention, Bergen, Norway
George Mason University
New York College of Osteopathic Medicine
University of Wisconsin-Madison (the paper cited above)
Wright State University
Swedish Defence Research Agency, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
[An article in Russian]
North Pacific Universities Marine Mammal Research Consortium
National University of Singapore
NTNU, Trondheim, Norway
University of Dundee
[An article in Slovak]
Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India.

From this list spanning the past three years of publications, it doesn’t appear that UW-Madison is a leader or even very involved in this area of animal experimentation, let alone “one of three main sites where such research is conducted.” Additionally, the animals used in the studies represented in the above list are primarily rats, then pigs. The UW paper is the only one using sheep.

The second way to test Sandgren’s claims with PubMed is to look at the publishing history of each of the authors in the paper cited above. You can do this by clicking on each of their names.

The authors are: Sobakin AS, Wilson MA, Lehner CE, Dueland RT, and Gendron-Fitzpatrick AP.

AS Sobakin seems to have authored only this paper.

Not surprisingly, there are many MA Wilsons. PubMed lists 492 papers authored or co-authored by an MA Wilson. Searching for papers on decompression authored by MA Wilsons again returns only this original paper.

CE Lehner has coauthored eight papers related to decompression:

Oxygen pre-breathing decreases dysbaric diseases in UW sheep undergoing hyperbaric exposure.
Sobakin AS, Wilson MA, Lehner CE, Dueland RT, Gendron-Fitzpatrick AP.
Undersea Hyperb Med. 2008

Estimation and confidence regions for multi-dimensional effective dose.
Li J, Nordheim EV, Zhang C, Lehner CE.
Biom J. 2008

Predicting risk of decompression sickness in humans from outcomes in sheep.
Ball R, Lehner CE, Parker EC.
J Appl Physiol. 1999

Dysbaric osteonecrosis in divers and caisson workers. An animal model.
Lehner CE, Adams WM, Dubielzig RR, Palta M, Lanphier EH.
Clin Orthop Relat Res. 1997

Experimental respiratory decompression sickness in sheep.
Atkins CE, Lehner CE, Beck KA, Dubielzig RR, Nordheim EV, Lanphier EH.
J Appl Physiol. 1988

An in vivo technique for the measurement of bone blood flow in animals.
Rosenthal MS, DeLuca PM Jr, Pearson DW, Nickles RJ, Lehner CE, Lanphier EH.
Phys Med Biol. 1987

Hydrogen washout in bone cortex and periosteum.
Lightfoot EN, Rudolph RF, Lenhoff AM, Lanphier EH, Lehner CE, Whiteside LA.
Undersea Biomed Res. 1986

Lack of harmful effects from simulated dives in pregnant sheep.
Bolton-Klug ME, Lehner CE, Lanphier EH, Rankin JH.
Am J Obstet Gynecol. 1983

By the way, this last paper, from 1983, wasn't illegal because the statute barring killing animals by means of decompression took effect, apparently, in 1985.

This amounts to two papers in the 2000s, two papers in the 1990s, and four papers in the 1980s, or, approximately, 2.7 papers per decade.

RT Dueland has authored only one paper associated with decompression, the paper cited above.

AP Gendron-Fitzpatrick has also authored only one paper associated with decompression, the paper cited above.

Looking at the list of eight papers authored by Lehner, the names Dubielzig and Lanphier appear more than once.

Lanphier has an extensive list of diving-related publications, the majority of which are human-based studies. All but one of his animal-related experiments are those listed above coauthored with CE Lehner.

The single paper using animals, not coauthored with Lehner is:

Responses of fetal sheep to simulated no-decompression dives.
Stock MK, Lanphier EH, Anderson DF, Anderson LC, Phernetton TM, Rankin JH.
J Appl Physiol. 1980.

Lanphier’s last paper was published in 1997 and is listed above.

RR Dubielzig has an even more extensive publication list, but has authored only two papers associated with decompression, both listed above.

So far, there does not appear to be much evidence supporting Eric Sandgren’s claim that the UW is “one of three main sites where such research is conducted.”

Another way to test his claim is to search the UW-Madison website looking for references to diving physiology. There is one tantalizing bit of evidence in support of Sandgren's claim. There is an obsure reference to Marlowe Eldridge, M.D. being the Director of the Diving Physiology Laboratory. But this is the only reference to such a facility. Marlow Eldridge's lab's webpage makes no mention of such a lab but does mention two funded studies on diving. His publication list mentions nothing about decompression in sheep. One of his grants is

Improving Risk Estimation, Safety and Cost-effectiveness in Scuba Diving.
Principal Investigator: Marlowe Eldridge M.D.
Agency: COMM NOAA # A06OAR417001 (144PD98)
Status: Funded 03/01/2006 – 01/31/2008 ($268,177)

The major goal of this project is to improve risk estimation and improve strategies to minimize decompression illness in recreational and occupational scuba drivers.,

The other, and the likely source for Sandgren's claim, is

Neurological Decompression Injury: Is Deep Stop Decompression Protective?
Principal Investigator: Marlowe Eldridge M.D.

Agency: DOD Navy

Status: Pending 10/01/2008-09/31/2011 (~$1,300,000)

This major goal ofthese studies is to improve our understanding of neurological decompression sickness and help evaluate deep stop use as a protective decompression strategy. We will use our established sheep model of the diver to determine the effects of various decompression scenarios with and without a deep stop on neurological decompression sickness. A variety of MR imaging techniques, will be used evaluate for subtle neurological injury and more importantly to gain insight into the mechanisms that may contribute to decompression neuronal injury.

But $1.3 million over four years is hardly enough to make Eldridge's lab “one of three main sites where such research is conducted.”

Another piece of evidence that might be said to support Sandgren’s claim is an old UW webpage named "Milestone Accomplishments, 1972-1997."

Under the section: Milestones in UW Sea Grant Diving Physiology and Safety Research, 1972-97, there are three bulleted claims:

Prototype development of wristwatch "dive computers" that calculate and alert a diver to remaining air supplies and the proper length of ascent decompression stops — now a standard part of scuba diving equipment.

Leading research on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of decompression sickness — including the risks diving poses to the fetuses of pregnant women, and the discovery of "limb bends," bone death, "the chokes" and paralyzing spinal cord hits among commercial and recreational divers who repeatedly make short, deep "bounce" dives.

Investigation of the under-estimated risks of panic among divers, especially in cold waters like the Great Lakes, and the development of a test that predicts with 88 percent accuracy which novice divers are prone to panic.

The only part of the above claims that is related to the decompression of the sheep is the part about potential risks diving poses to the fetuses of pregnant women, but even this is suspect. In Scuba Diving Explained: Questions and Answers on Physiology and Medical Aspects of Scuba Diving (1997), author Lawrence Martin, M.D. writes:

WHAT ABOUT DIVING DURING PREGNANCY?

A short exposure to increased ambient pressure, per se, appears of no consequence to the fetus. However some studies on pregnant animals have shown an increased rate of fetal abnormality from decompression sickness, particularly among sheep; different studies in other animals have not shown an ill effect on the fetus. Like many other medical conditions, the available studies on this issue are inconclusive.

Based on what is known about pregnancy, and about diving, my recommendation (and that of most physicians) is that pregnant women should not dive.

And even the claim about wristwatch "dive computers" seems sketchy. See Scuba Diving History and something about the real inventors of the “dive computer,” Craig Barshinger, and Karl Huggins.

Sandgren claims that UW Madison is one of three main sites where such research is conducted. As I showed above by listing the locations of the institutions where decompression experiments on animals are being conducted, UW Madison isn’t one of the three main sites. But maybe Sandgren was being circumspect and was claiming that UW was one of only three Sea Grant Schools. But even on this point, if that is what he was claiming, he’d also be wrong.

If you visit the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant site, and click on Research, nothing is mentioned about diving physiology or decompression. On the page called "Water Safety & Recreation," under the section titled "Related Research," we finally come to something that might be germane titled, “Improving Safety and Efficiency in Scuba Diving.” But, alas, the link from there is broken; this, apparently is a gateway to research that might lend credence to Sandgren’s claim that UW-Madison is "one of three main sites where such research is conducted."

And finally, Sandgren claims that: “They've made important discoveries that are used now, that are applied, in the case of individual diving sicknesses.”

Like what?

According to the BBC, decompression experiments on goats were suspended in the United Kingdom in March 2007. A UK Ministry of Defense review committee examined non-animal methods for studying decompression sickness. Defense Secretary Des Browne stated that: “The review has concluded that the remaining associated areas of uncertainty in submarine escape and rescue relate to events that are considered highly unlikely and do not therefore need to be addressed by means of animal testing.”

Just what is it, does Sandgren feel, that came out of those eight papers published by vivisectors at UW-Madison that constitute the important discoveries that are being used now to treat diving sickness? None that I can see. And if the university is "one of three main sites where such research is conducted," they are doing a damn fine job of keeping it hidden.

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 to protect it from what he deems the ignorant sentimentality of the laity. George Bernard Shaw. The Doctor's Dilemma. 1909.