World Week for Animals in Laboratories Highlights Ridiculous Research
- Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 8:49
- Animal Testing, Breaking News
- 635 views
Experiments at prestigious universities criticized for wasting taxpayer dollars
Washington, DC (April 20, 2010) – World Week for Animals in Laboratories (WWAIL) is underway, with demonstrations across the globe highlighting the waste of taxpayer dollars on cruel and ridiculous animal research. Only days after taxpayers in the United States filed their annual tax returns, and as tax protests reach new heights, In Defense of Animals (IDA) released a “Top 10 Reasons Why Animal Research is a Cruel Joke” list to spotlight experiments that almost seem designed to waste precious taxpayer money.
Across the United States and in Canada, England, France, Ireland and New Zealand, demonstrators will target waste of public funds. Several demos will be at universities that conducted experiments on IDA’s “Top 10” list.
“With unemployment sky-high and the U.S. economy still suffering from the Great Recession, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) still spends billions of tax dollars every year to fund animal experiments,” said IDA Research Director Eric Kleiman. “This is little more than white-coated welfare for experimenters living on a grant gravy train funded by hard-hit taxpayers.”
IDA’s “Top 10” list features NIH-funded experiments selected from scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals over the past three years, approved by federally-mandated oversight committees. Below are some experiments that made IDA’s “Top 10” list. (Warning: list contains graphic content.)
* Female rats might enjoy vaginal stimulation (Dartmouth);
* Monkeys lose more weight exercising than eating less (Oregon Health & Science Univ.);
* Castrated hamsters can still ejaculate (UC-Berkeley, Univ. of Virginia, Columbia Univ.);
* Baby chimpanzees need nurturing (Emory University / Yerkes Primate Center);
* Lizards forced to fight get stressed and then decapitated (Harvard and Univ. of South Dakota).
“These experiments demonstrate why World Week for Animals in Laboratories is so necessary,” said Kleiman. Protests at UC-Berkeley (April 20), Dartmouth (April 24) and Oregon Health & Science University – OHSU (April 25) will expose the waste and the need for systemic reform.
Numerous NIH-funded researchers have admitted that the entire funding system is an “old boys’ network” in need of fundamental reform. The NIH funds significantly more researchers over the age of 70 than under 30, and 22 researchers received 222 grants worth $170 million. The former head of the National Cancer Institute stated this system is a “terrible wasted opportunity,” and a past NIH Director said the system provides “disincentives” to “truly transformative” research.
An NIH “breakthrough” grant was awarded to an experimenter at Dartmouth, where what NIH terms “novel,” “high-risk, high-reward” research on sexual dysfunction in women resulted in multiple sex experiments on rats. At OHSU, an experimenter found that adopted monkey children fare better than orphans and adolescents are more sensitive to social stress. This experimenter has been funded with 137 grants over the past 23 years. The UC-Berkeley ejaculating hamster experimenter has been funded by the NIH for decades, with publications dating back to the early 1960s.
“This is a wake-up call about where our tax dollars go,” concluded Kleiman. “These experiments are the tip of the iceberg of waste in biomedical animal research. This fundamentally broken, taxpayer-supported NIH system continues to fund white-coated welfare.”
IDA’s complete Top 10 list is available at http://idausa.org/ridiculousresearch. A list of international events marking WWAIL is available at http://wwail.org .
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Eric Kleiman, 717-939-3231, ericsk@idausa.org
IN DEFENSE OF ANIMALS • 3010 KERNER BLVD. • SAN RAFAEL, CA 94901 • 415-448-0048
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A Supreme Court who se justices cannot use categories, who cannot define science and who cannot comprehend the difference between regulations by which individuals claim rights and laws that punish criminal totalitarianizers of others and their rights is no sort of court. It is I claim an intellectual sick joke. Murdering animals for any reason ought to be a crime; in any society of the sane And graphic depiction of material supplied to anyone without the volitional instigation of the buyer, without an agreed-upon sum of money changing hands and without definitions under law being demanded and set in place and satisfied as to what the subject matter being sold is must be illegal and not allowed to be offered. One cannot in any society of reasonable men expect such material to be offered as anything but graphically-depicted “horror”. It could not be allowed in artistic fiction; as nonfiction, it can be protected only by its non-broadcast, non-news status since as news, it violates the rights of those who have no wish to be brutalized by graphic depictions. A society’s government and citizenry can survive bad taste, individuals’ bad judgment, etc. What it cannot survive I claim is the discontexting of non-fictional actions from their meaning in regulated categories. Information offered as fiction must be required in any realistic social order to be about a moral-ethical self-responsibe normative in pursuit of a categorically-sane, reasonable and personally-vital value goal. Non-fiction is judged against a different standard–that of volitionally chosen relevance to the obtainer, buyer, seeker; but the principle remains the same. The buyer has the right to get what he/she pays for; the seller has limited rights to purvey certain sorts of material. But the subject being a crime as depicted lays the perpetrator open to unavoidable prosecution; to to permite the dissemination of pictures of crime means that a crime has to have been committed to obatin the pictures. And by definition, they must be a salable item only under the very limited conditions I described–an item offered with generic headlines, full disclosure and volitional instigation of the search by the buyer, with some clause for non-performance or malperformance by the seller being applied to the rights of the marketplace’s participants. Liberty of choice, pursuit of happiness, means not that people or animals can be murdered by someone who then sells the videos or audios to buyers; it means the crimes are illegal but that if there are such depictions available made by non professionals, they can sell it only under individual choice and regulated conditions. The Court’s Justices were absolutely wrong here.
It is time to stop these antiqated and barbaric methods of “scientific’ research and emerge into a new era of discovery that does no harm. The old methods benifit neither human or animal and ,I believe. prevent us from finding answers that more civilized and humain research would.
Sincerely
Angel Trust
Canada
IT IS 2010, WE KNOW WE SHOULDN’T BE DOING THIS LET ALONE THE TAXES ON PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN. TRICIA HAMILTON