Animal Writings

One ongoing travesty that exemplifies the absurdity and indefensible cruelty rampant in vivisection is an experiment at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and Oregon State University (OSU) in which researchers are purportedly trying to find out why some sheep are gay, and are attempting to control whether or not a sheep is gay—or at least willing to initiate sex with a constrained ram (male sheep) after being kept in isolation for several days. "Male-oriented," they call this.

I'll let that sink in. Your tax dollars are paying for this. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding this. The sheep are destroyed when no longer needed by the universities.

You can read about this tragic misuse of funds and waste of life here, here, and here. PETA has done an excellent job of reporting on this disgrace.

Why is this being done? According to the experimenters, Charles Roselli and Frederick Stormshak, and the universities that employ them and get a share of the several million dollars of funding:

"this research also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans.”

"to know whether sexual preferences can be altered by manipulating the prenatal hormone environment, for instance by using drugs to prevent the actions of androgen in the fetal sheep brain.”

"to formulate and test novel hypotheses about the biological basis of sexual orientation in higher mammals including humans.”

This is deeply troubling on many levels.

PETA points out that "Charles Roselli and Frederick Stormshak's hormone-altering experiments on gay sheep are strikingly similar to German experimenter Günter Dörner’s tests on rodents in the mid-20th century" and that "Dörner postulated that homosexuality could be prevented in rodents by 'optimizing' natural conditions or by 'correcting abnormal hormonal concentrations prenatally.'" Roselli and Stormshak cite Dörner's work in their research. The German Society for Sex Research rightly condemned Dörner's experiments in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Its criticisms are relevant to Roselli and Stormshak's manipulation of sheep:


Dr. Udo Schuklenk, Professor and Chair in Ethics in Public Policy and Corporate Governance at Glasgow Caledonian University, sums up the offensiveness and scientific uselessness of the Roselli and Stormshak experiments:


Here are two great excerpts from PETA's open letter to OSU President Ed Ray. The first one shows the profound scientific inadequacy of the "gay sheep" experiments and how any conclusions about human sexuality drawn from the experiments could be way off-base. The second excerpt reveals yet another of the university's flimsy "justifications" of the experiments.


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As Dr. Bank's testimony points out, there have already been studies using actual human patients to study the relationship (apparently weak, at best) between prenatal shifts in hormones and human sexual orientation—which makes the contrived sheep experiments worse than redundant, and reveals once again the potentially costly errors that arise when extrapolating data from animals to humans.

Elizabeth McClung, who writes the excellent Screw Bronze blog, and who identifies herself as "a lesbian in a happy relationship" on the blog's home page, has a superb post on the whole sordid episode. She describes Roselli and Stormshak as "excruciatingly bad scientists doing bad science with bad premises filled with cultural assumptions." [side note: I browsed the blog and found the writing captivating and exquisite.]

She goes on to pointedly criticize the team's justification for using sheep:


More and more, the experiment, beyond being just plain cruel and wasteful, starts to look positvely clueless—one dubious assumption piled onto another. NIH's response is a taxpayer-funded check for several million dollars. So I suppose in one respect the research is a "success." It's no wonder the universities taking their cut would defend it.

Roselli, in yet another faux-justification of the costly experiment, states that:


McClung impressively critiques this attempt to justify manipulating and killing sheep. She first provides an informative and articulate explanation of the biological, psychological, and sociological complexities of AIS and intersex conditions in general, addressing some common misperceptions along the way. She points out that "the number one problem for intersex people is the misconceptions and stigmatization placed upon them by society and doctors. And CAIS is THE intersex condition which most clearly demonstrates this."

McClung concludes:


PETA notes that "In addition, not only has the utility of animal testing regarding the intersex condition been rejected by scientific groups like the British Society for Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes, but there are already five U.S. government-funded clinical (non-animal) trials currently underway. Clearly animal experiments are not needed to study this issue."

Furthermore, in their letter to OSU, PETA points out that:


Activist Alyssa Collins, who is queer, said this about OHSU's experiments:


Consider the the blatantly cruel and contrived nature of the copulation part of experiment. According to PETA's open letter to OSU,


Are they kidding? This doesn't even model normal sheep interactions, much less human sexual activity. Sheep are deeply social animals whose behavior is highly dependent on the dynamics of the herd to which they belong. In real life, a sheep's sexual partners are not mechanically restrained—not to mention possibly frightened out of their wits. Under such forced circumstances, anything could happen. In jail, sometimes a dominant man will coerce another man to perform fellatio on him. Which man is gay in this scenario? I pose this question not only to show that circumstances may affect sexual behavior, and that it is difficult even to extrapolate these human intra-jail sexual dynamics to a more normalized human environment (e.g., both of the men prior to and after jail may have little or no interest in gay sex), but because, to my mind, there is no precisely right answer. Human sexual activity is quite complicated, influenced by a multitude of factors. We may never know everything about it. (And quite frankly, there's nothing inherently wrong with a little mystery.)

Furthermore, this method of trying to induce copulation is cruel. Can't these two brilliant scientists figure out a less cruel way to observe sheeps' sexual preferences? Maybe we should study their aggression. What if the target sheep were allowed to wander freely and the sheep under observation decided simply on that basis that he wasn't interested in any of the other sheep? What if the sheep's performance is affected by his being confined and devoid of all social contact for over a week—which would be highly unlikely for a sheep in any kind of natural setting and very upsetting for an individual whose identity is so dependent on being with his herd?

The vivisectors say "we take good care of our animals, we abide by the Animal Welfare Act, a vet looks after them, blah, blah, blah." This may as well be a recorded message from a robot. Every institution that kills animals says this. It's meaningless. It shows contempt for thinking, feeling people as well as the animals who suffer because of humans' lack of caring and concern.

Puppy mill operators say their animals are treated well.

Owners of battery cage facilities—one of the most heinous confinement systems ever devised—say the birds are treated well. They even will trot their pimp veterinarian who walks past the birds unable to lift their wings, the birds dying from dehydration because they're stuck between the cage bars, the birds resorting to violence because they're denied all natural pecking opportunities, and the dead birds rotting on the cage floor, and says, "Yep, everything's fine." Contrast the ridiculous sunny pronouncements with the hideous deadly reality at Wegman's Egg Farm.

Circuses say they treat their animals well despite video evidence and sworn testimony that "trainers" visciously and repeatedly hit elephants in their most sensitive areas with sharp bullhooks. That's why during performances, trainers merely need to brandish their weapons: the elephants fear them. Here's an example of how Ringling, which claims to "love" their animals, uses violence to terrify, subdue, and enslave elephants and horses.

Zoos say their elephants thrive, even though they develop crippling arthritis from standing around on hard surfaces in small spaces while the zoo masks their pain with drugs until they die.

Universities in which baby monkeys are torn from their mothers and stuck in tiny steel cages—and who sometimes go crazy from the isolation and deprivation—say the animals are treated well. After PETA investigators caught a University of North Carolina (UNC) researcher cutting into the heads of rats without anesthetizing them first, UNC said they treated their animals well. The next year, PETA investigators caught the same researcher doing the same thing. UNC issued a similar canned response.

Why should we trust anything coming from these places? It's tragic that the perpetrators of institutionalized violence think so low of both animals and humans that they make such ludicrious claims. Of course, they do everything they can to prevent the public from seeing what actually goes on behind closed doors. Instead they rely on slick PR to get the public to buy into the system. (And when I say "buy in" I don't just mean mentally; most animal-killing operations are subsidized one way or another with tax dollars. So even if you deeply object to killing for profit and psuedo-science, you're forced to support it.)

PETA reports that "undercover investigations at OHSU have revealed filthy housing, poor veterinary care and a lack of enrichment for the animals, resulting in neurotic behaviors." Big surprise. In a post in the near future, I'll show how simply being part of an experiment produces both acute and chronic stress in animals—and that's before we even consider the harm incurred by the experiment itself! In addition to causing pain and suffering, such prolonged and severe stress in all the subjects also throws into question the accuracy of any of these tests. The animals are in such unnatural, deprived, agonizing conditions that their bodies' defenses, their natural behaviors—really, everything—is affected.

And remember that 90 percent of animals used in vivisection labs aren't even covered by the pathetically weak and under-enforced Animal Welfare Act.

(Please read the next post, which presents a very small sample of the huge number of abuses going on in vivisection labs across the country.)

Amazingly, Roselli told The New York Times that he only mentioned the human implications for his sheep experiments because that is "in the nature of the way we write our grants" and talk to reporters. He adds that animal experimenters "have been forced to draw connections [to humans] in a way that we can justify our research."

Stormshak reiterates: "[i]f people want to extrapolate [to humans the conclusions that he reaches with regard to altering sheep’s sexual orientations], that’s up to them."

So let me get this straight. After all their dubious psuedo-defenses that the sheep experiments might have this or that benefit for humans—depending on which day they were asked, it seems—now they're telling us that the whole "extrapolate to humans" thing is just a ruse; a way to get funding; a false pretext by which to gain public approval. That is about the most honest—albeit self-incriminating— utterance I've ever heard from a vivisector. I love Stormshak's follow-on; in essence: "Sure, if you want to extrapolate, be my guest." He's giving us the choice of whether to extrapolate the findings to humans. That's some great science.

This experiment, like so many vivisection experiments, is at best a "solution" (to put it charitably) looking for a problem. We have no right to treat animals as play things in hope of maybe finding out a fact that one day may or may not be useful. If "but we might find out something" is the only reason one needs to kill animals, then any act, no matter how brutal, no matter how violent, no matter how horrid, may be rationalized on the grounds that it may yield some information. That's sick and wrong. It's essentially a universal excuse for virtually any act of cruelty to animals.

Still looking for those elusive beneficiaries of the experiments...According to PETA:


Not that I think sheep should be exploited for their wool or flesh. But in this instance I have to agree with the sheep farmers.

So neither gays nor AIS persons nor sheep farmers are looking for NIH to investigate the so-called problem of gay sheep. Who is this experiment for? Not the sheep themselves, I wouldn't think. I presume that gay (or bi-curious) sheep are content with their sexual identity and I am nearly positive that they are better accepted by their society than human gays are by theirs. Which leads me to my...

Gayness is not a disease—in sheep or in humans. We don't need to "cure" it. We don't need to intervene to prevent it. There is no ethical rationalization for killing and harming animals in an effort to make them un-gay. What we need to do is learn how to accept people better, and to treat all living beings with respect and compassion.

And even if none of the above arguments swayed you: We do not have unlimited resources for medical research. Do we really want to squander any of it on a crude scheme to figure out why some sheep are homosexual, or "male-oriented" under certain contrived conditions?

To complain:

Ed Ray, President
Oregon State University
634 Kerr Administration Bldg.
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128

Labels: Animal Welfare Act violations, In Defense of Animals, Oregon Health Sciences University, Oregon State University, SAEN, Stop Animal Experimentation Now, vivisection