A Deafening Silence

Peta recently released videos taken by an undercover investigator working as an animal care technician at the Wisconsin National Primate Resarch Center, a part of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The university was outraged.

But why should they have been angry if, as they are wont to say, the animals they use are all well treated? Informed observers will recognize that their outrage is really nothing more than embarrassment. The people who work in the labs don't want outsiders seeing what they do, seeing the animals' bleak cages, seeing the suffering our tax dollars pay for. They don't want their neighbor knitting their brow when they seem them.

The university has a long history of doing everything in its power to keep us from learning what is going on in its labs. In this regard, they are just like every other animal lab in the world. They all operate in the same way.

A Deafening Silence

[originally published in Primate Freedom Project’s Fall, 2006 issue of The Congressional Educator]

Scientific advancement often arrives as a stunning discovery. But stunning discoveries are the result of years of accumulated data. Any loss of this accumulated knowledge could be irreplaceable. The willful destruction of years of accumulated data is a crime against science and humanity itself.

Yet, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison destroyed sixty boxes of videotapes of its experiments on monkeys, the absence of outrage from the academic community was deafening.

Worse, the tapes were destroyed to stop people from learning what was occurring in the university’s labs. So, not only were years of accumulated observation and records lost forever, but also, the destruction was motivated by the university’s fear of an educated citizenry.

How did this happen?

Scientific American published a special edition titled “The Hidden Mind” on August 31, 2002. On page 72, there was a revised version of a 1993 Scientific American article titled “The Neurobiology of Fear” written by Dr. Ned Kalin, a primate vivisector and chairman of the university’s Department of Psychiatry. [Kalin is still the Chair]

In the article, Kalin explained that monkeys from a few days old up to twelve weeks old were separated from the mothers and subjected to three fear-inducing conditions and that the events were videotaped.

We wrote to the university requesting copies of these videotapes under authority of Wisconsin’s open records statute. Our requests were ignored. Under a different name, we again requested copies of the videos a few months later and finally received a denial of our request.

In 2005, we read a paper written in 2000, by Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at UW-Madison [now at UC Irvine], Ned Kalin, and others in the journal Brain Research, titled “Effects of amygdala lesions on sleep in rhesus monkeys.” Benca et. al. explained that monkeys who had been used in Kalin’s experimental brain mutilations were strapped into restraint chairs overnight. Some of these monkeys were videotaped throughout the night.

Through a local attorney, we wrote to the university requesting copies of these videotapes. Shortly thereafter, in a letter dated December 13, 2005, senior UW legal counsel John Dowling formally denied our request.

We were able to interest a local weekly newspaper in this problem. The news editor, Bill Lueders, is also president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. When Mr. Lueders requested the tapes he was told: “They may have been damaged in a plumbing accident.”

In a letter to the newspaper dated July 6, 2006, Downing stated: “The videotapes and photographs in question were damaged, along with other data, when a steam valve broke on 1/18/05 releasing water and steam into the storage area. After the required time to keep these data had elapsed, they were destroyed.”

The newspaper reported: “But the UW provided no information as to what was damaged, or how badly. ‘I don’t know,’ says Dowling, when asked if the damage made it impossible to view the tapes. He also doesn’t know what his own letter means in saying that the tapes were destroyed ‘after the required time.’ He assumes this language, provided by others, refers to some records retention schedule.”

In our April request, we noted that the Wisconsin open records law prohibits the destruction of a requested record at least 60 days after access is denied. The tapes were destoyed 62 days after Dowling’s denial of the newspaper’s request. A record provided by the UW to the paper stated that 60 boxes of videotapes had been shredded on February 13, 2006.

A system completely out of balance

If activists had gained entry to the facility and had destroyed the tapes, it is likely that the university would have loudly claimed that the cure for childhood cancer had been lost and that the people responsible were terrorists.

On May 23, 2006, another UW primate vivisector, Michelle Basso, another monkey brain mutilator [now at UCLA], testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security in support of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act:

“I received a magazine to which I did not subscribe. Then I received a couple more magazines. I started to receive statements from magazine companies and other mail-order paraphernalia. I have a right o live free of fear.”

So, vivisectors want people who send them unwanted magazine subscriptions to go to jail, but at the same time, don’t want the public to know what is going on in the labs and feel perfectly justified in shredding boxes of primary data in order to keep the public in the dark.

The simple fact that the vivisection community has remained quiet about the loss of the primary data in the videotapes, and simultaneously lobbied for stiffer penalties for those who call attention to their activities should be sufficient reason to question any claims they might make.

If they are willing to shred data to keep it hidden from the public, why should anyone believe them when they claim that they are humane or that their research matters one whit? Their shrill complaints about being criticized and targeted by animal rights activists must be considered in the context of their refusal to open their labs to public inspection and the millions of taxpayer dollars they receive.

So it comes as little surprise that people concerned with how the animals are being treated will have to sneak in one way or another to see for themselves. And it comes as no surprise that when they do they will record what they see and and tell others about what they have seen. And it also comes as no surprise that the labs and their host institutons will make the absurd claim that it is in some way wrong for them to do so.