Animal Writings

Here are some recent and ongoing examples of severe and—from all appearances—unlawful cruelty in vivisection labs, as reported by Stop Animal Exploitation NOW (SAEN), founded by Michael Budkie, a former USDA inspector. For over a decade, SAEN staff and volunteers have used a variety of means (all legal and peaceful)—including poring through research protocols and inspection reports, with their chillingly clinical descriptions of horrors and animals wasting away because of callous human indifference—to expose thousands of abusive practices and Animal Welfare Act (AWA) violations in animal labs. SAEN personnel subject themselves to the possibility of lifelong nightmares and depression to help the helpless, and to fight horrid, pointless cruelty. They are heroes to me and angels to the animals.


In an article appropriately entitled "Addiction to Torture", SAEN reports that in drug addiction experiments at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV), the rhesus monkey subjects not only have to repeatedly endure the agony of drug withdrawal, but also "experience such severe stress that they often become self-abusive." One monkey, according to a USDA inspection report "would show improvement for a period but would return to bouts of stereotypic behavior including aggression and self injurious behavior." This went on for several years. His condition eventually got so bad that the experimenter removed him from the experiement and requested that he be euthanized.

SAEN points out more suffering resulting simply from the deplorable lab conditions:


The article also reports on this callous negligence last year:



SAEN notes these pathological behaviors in rhesus monkeys at the University of Michigan (UM) who are forced into drug addiction studies (quoted portions of the text refer to internal UM documents):


The chronically neurotic and self-mutilating behavior may in part be a result of the primates' severe housing conditions. They live in steel cages that are 33 inches wide by 30 inches long by 36 inches high. In other words, they live their lives in 3-foot square boxes! This is impossible to do without going crazy! As SAEN—and any primatologist—explains:



Let's talk a little about drug addiction. Humans are the only species with a drug addiction problem. Some kids turn to drugs because of peer pressure, perhaps combined with low self-esteem and a desire to fit in. Sometimes people turn to drugs because they don't want to deal with disturbing or self-incriminating issues, which can range from bad grades to marital infidelities to fear of dying to worrying about losing loved ones. In some cases artists initially use drugs as a way to spur creativity. Often people who experiment with drugs when younger, perhaps as a means of showing rebellious independence, grow out of it as they mature. Many parents blame themselves when a child develops a drug addiction. A person's choice of drugs may depend quite a bit on his/her demographics. Education is often a key element of preventing drug addiction. So is an open relationship with parents and/or partners. Any attempt to model these complexities in nonhumans is going to fall woefully short of accurate.

In treating drug addicts, counselors may listen to patients' problems and feelings, and ask them about their past and present relationships, and many other aspects of their lives. One of their first goals may be to get patients to admit that they have a problem; often individuals with a drug addiction will deny that they have a problem. Frequently, when a patient understands why he or she turns to drugs, that helps in the recovery. To keep patients off drugs may involve ensuring that they discover new fulfillments in their lives, which can range from religion to sports to meditation. Drug rehab counselors realize that while there are generalities in drug addiction patients, each case is unique.

Drug rehab treatment may cost $20,000 or more, and insurance—if the patient has it—may not cover all the costs.

Meanwhile, in drug addiction studies in vivisection labs, we stick nonhumans, with no rights, into torture chambers that bear absolutely no resemblance to any human situation, and furthermore the unwitting subjects go berzerk from the prolonged violence and environmental emptiness. Concurrently, successful drug rehab facilities may close their doors due to lack of funding.

SAEN sums up how the horrid conditions that primates must endure in drug adddiction vivisection labs are not only torturous but invalidate the already scientifically dubious experiments in which the primates are used:


In other words these animals may have been messed up from the very start of the experiments in which they are forced to participate.

And note how we use these primates—our very close cousins—over and over, in the most horrid ways, sometimes for decades. We make their lives an endless living hell.


Primates imprisoned in small barren cages resort to desperate coping and—eventually—madness-induced behaviors, such as ripping out their fur, tearing at their flesh, and banging on their cages. These intelligent, complex, and social individuals are in extreme need of stimulation and their only recourse is self-injury or monotonous flailing. Some just lie on the floor clutching at their tails, indicating that they have simply given up trying to escape or to find any meaning in their lives. These self-mutilations and "learned helplessness" surrenders are reported at primate labs across the country.

At the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana, one chimpanzee has spent the last 47 years (as of 2005) of her life in impoverished vivisection labs. Several other chimps have been locked in the system since the early 1960s. Many of the chimps at NIRC were caught from the wild. Perhaps they have distant memories of freedom.


Here's what they're doing to macaque monkeys at the University of Minnesota (and many other publicly-funded vivisection labs throughout the country): depriving them of water for up to 22 hours at a time, bolting restraining bars into the bones of their skulls, and confining them to restraint chairs which deny them all means of mobility, including walking, crawling, and climbing.

Primatologist Ardith A. Eudey, who has been studying and teaching about primates since 1973, and has extensive field knowledge of macaque monkeys, describes the effect of these extreme punishments on the individuals who are forced to live through them (emphasis mine):


In a letter to University of Minnesota (UM) president Robert H. Bruininks, SAEN points out this outrage: Despite all the tortures inflicted on the monkeys, the vivisectors at UM officially reported that the monkeys experienced no unrelieved pain or distress. This is a hideous cover-up.


SAEN goes into more detail, enumerating the unreported pain forced upon the laboratory monkeys:


The UM animal care committee requested to one of the vivisectors that the primates be reported as experiencing significant pain and distress:


(Higher letters indicate more severe, prolonged, or unrelieved pain and distress.)

Here we see some examples—out of probably thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands—where vivisectors and the universities that take a cut of their money deny their victims' pain and suffering. We also see the impotence of animal care committees and the inexcusable lack of enforcement of minimal animal welfare regulations by the USDA. Then again, the USDA is one of the biggest vivisectors on the planet. (I'll talk about that in a future post.)

If these "researchers" cannot recognize the extreme physical and psychological pain they force on their subjects, how are we supposed to believe any of their scientific observations? If they're lying about the pain experienced by their victims, we also cannot put any faith in their reported findings. And shame on them.

Failure to report the pain endured by the monkeys held captive in vivisection labs also impedes efforts to replace torturous animal experiments with ethical, human-focused research. The vivisectors and their labs may be denying the severe pain of their victims as a job preservation strategy, and as a means to keep grabbing more taxpayer money—money that could be used on far more relevant, accurate, scientifically rigorous, and ethical medical research.


At the University of Connecticut (UCONN), one of the worst violators of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), $1.6 million of tax money has gone to fund the extremely abusive experiments of Dr. David Waitzman. According to SAEN:


The UCONN Animal Rights Collective examined internal university logs and found some horrible information about the fate of Cornelius, a 7-year old rhesus monkey who died at the hands of Dr Waitzman only eight months after arriving from Covance Labs:


"Complication during recording." How intentionally vague and benign-sounding. The vivisector didn't have the integrity to admit that he inflicted ultimately fatal torture on this poor animal, and he didn't extend the tiny dignity of acknowledging Cornelius' prolonged suffering. Don't expect honesty or empathy when captors note the fate of their victims. Call it a "complication during recording."

Covance Labs, from which Cornelius was obtained, has its own record of horrific cruelty and out-of-control meanness toward primates. Like the rest of the vivisection industry, their reaction when getting caught is to deny and lie about the cruelty. We'll take a look at Covance's grotesque methods in a subsequent post.


Similar tax-funded tortuous primate experiments are going on at the University of California. Here's what Dr. Bruce Max Feldman, a veterinarian with 46 years experience, including 10 years with laboratory animals and 10 years with primates, had to say about them:


Physician Stephen R. Kaufman succinctly lays out why the prolonged and severe pain and distress inflicted on primates by vivisection labs the degrades if not nullifies the vivisectors' already-dubious science:


Although this sidebar focuses on cruelty and cover-ups in vivisection labs, it's worthwhile to keep in mind that to add insult to profound injury, primate experimentation results in failure after failure, and is doomed to keep doing so, due to significant differences between the two species (and note that primates are the animals most like humans). This article, Beyond Animal Research, points out some of the many costly debacles from primate experiments, and reminds us of this basic fact: primates aren't differently-shaped humans. They do not get the same diseases or have the same lifestyles as humans. We use them because they can't fight back and they have no rights.

There are endless more ethical, more scientific, more relevant, more predictive, more useful, more reliable, more proven ways to understand causes and progressions of human diseases, and to discover, test, affirm, and improve treatments as well as preventive measures for those diseases. The aforementioned article lists some of them. But it's handy and lucrative to torture primates, and when you wear a white coat and have good connections with the press, and assuringly promise people that these experiments will lead to a cure for cancer and AIDS and Alzheimer's and heart disease and every other disease and condition that anyone might have, and you have lots of poster children available so you can tug at the public's heartstrings (and wallets), and you hide from the public the terrified screams of animals on whom you've inflicted unrelieved intense pain, and hide the desperate coping behaviors of animals going insane from unending confinement and boredom, the multi-billion dollar vivisection perpetuates.


Let's look at the deplorable combination of cruelty, lying, moral laziness, and bad science at the University of Wisconsin Primate Center. First, SAEN explains a little about the reporting requirements of the Animal Welfare Act (remember, most animals used in vivisection, including birds, rodents, and amphibians, are excluded from the AWA, so they have essentially NO legal protections from cruelty or negligence in animal laboratories—or anywhere else):


Now, here's what the UW does to primates in its lab:


What else? Here's an excerpt from the UW lab itself:


And not just temporary pain, but chronic, extended pain as per the nature of a long-term disease. These experiments also confine primates in those hideous and highly restrictive restraint chairs.

What else?

[Now a human adult is not going to get third-degree burns from 131-degree water, but nearly all experts recommend setting the water heater to no higher than 120 degrees F. The recommendations are much stricter for human children. So already we have an extrapolation problem. How sensitive is a monkey's tail to hot water? Is it like an adult human placing his/her hand in hot water? Or face in hot water? Maybe monkeys are less sensitive to hot water than human adults. Then again, humans don't all have the same level of pain resistance. Or maybe monkeys' tails are more sensitive to heat than human children are. Maybe the pain is worse when you don't know what's being done to you, or for how long, and you're afraid, and your system is completely messed up from having to live in a tiny prison with absolutely no stimulation your whole life.

What if the drug tests safe in monkeys—even at high doses—but is toxic to humans, as was the case with the asthma medication Isuprel? Or will it be like Amrinone, a medication for heart failure that caused no problems in laboratory monkeys but produced a serious—in some cases, fatal—blood condition called thrombocytopenia in twenty percent of human patients?

Spare the monkeys. I'll volunteer. I'm willing to undergo some pain within reasonable limits, and I'll let you know if the pain reliever works. At least I'm the same species as the victims it's supposed to help. In addition to taking measurements I can tell you in my own words how well it's working. I can report nuances and side effects. Get a bunch of us and you can get an idea of diversity of responses.

It is a well-established fact that each species reacts uniquely to a given substance, and that it is impossible to reliably extrapolate the response of species Y from species X. Even mice and rats often have divergent responses. To those who say we have to test on animals because we can't test on people, you're wrong. We do test on people. The first volunteers to take a new drug are the so-called guinea pigs. But at least they're doing it with informed consent, and there are no inter-species extrapolation errors.]

According to SAEN, which pored through USDA documents:


Being denied water for 16 hours almost every day, having devices bolted in your skulls, being infected with disease—that's not painful? Bastards.

SAEN goes on to deliver stinging criticism—and rightly so:



From SAEN (emphasis mine):


That is horrid. Inexcusable.

Rabbits in this lab also suffer from reckless lack of diligence:


The next month, an apparently untrained technician botched a procedure and killed another rabbit.

Gross negligence appears to have killed dogs in the Loyola lab, also. After a major surgery that required anesthesia, the dogs "were not monitored for anywhere between 10.5 and 15 hours," according to SAEN. Five of the seven dogs who who underwent the procedure died. Two were found dead, and three had to be euthanized.

SAEN made sure the dogs were not forgotten victims:


Want to increase the chances that that Loyola is punished, and hopefully with more than a handslap? Email Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyer, Director of the Eastern Regional Office of USDA/APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service). As SAEN urges, "[D]emand that Loyola receive the largest penalty allowed by law."


Your tax dollars are being used for animal welfare regulators to let cruelty fluorish. SAEN reports:


The number of animals affected increased over 300 percent from three years prior. But...


As you've seen, vivisection labs routinely lie (or are stunningly clueless) about pain and distress in laboratory animals. Either way the misinformation grossly underestimates animal suffering. In addition, the vivisection lobby is notorious for promulgating flagrantly dishonest statistics about how many animals experience pain in laboratories. For starters, they typically ignore the 90 percent or more of animals who are not covered by the AWA. The USDA plays the deception game, too: Animals used in federally-owned laboratories used to be included in official totals of animals in laboratories but now are excluded, producing, as SAEN says, "an artifical appearance of a reduction in overall animal use."

Here's one reason the regulatory system that is supposed to provide minimal protections to animals is broken: The USDA engages in vivisection themselves. In fact, they are one of the largest users of animals in labs.

But that's not all. The USDA is exempt from the AWA—the law they're supposed to enforce!

Although I am opposed to animal experiments, I agree with this recommendation by SAEN:


Two related facts:

• Matt Rossell of In Defense of Animals, while doing an undercover investigation of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, reported that one USDA inspector quit in frustration after she was told to cut her list of violations in half, then in half again.


• According to SAEN, "The Department of Interior experiments on over 8,500 animals per year, mostly wildlife."

The Texas Heart Institute has been cited for multiple AWA violations, including inadequate veterinary care. Here's a sample of one citation:


The calf was obviously suffering while personnel at the "heart" institute did nothing.

North Dakota State University (NDSU) has also had many AWA violations, including 20 in a six month period. Michael Budkie, Executive Director of SAEN, points out that "recent sheep deaths at NDSU have been caused by septicemia [systemic bacterial infection], toxemia [blood poisoning], and even gangrene." Other sheep who died at NDSU had apparently untreated abcesses (which can be very painful), and a range of other infectious diseases.

Mr. Budkie adds:


Another instance—like so many of them in labs across the country—where sick animals are just left to suffer and die.

This concludes our sample of a tiny percentage of ongoing abuses at vivisection labs.

Here's just a brief reminder of abuses that are occurring elsewhere:

• Horrific cruelty at a pig farm that's a supplier to Hormel
  
  Here's some of the brutality inflicted on the pigs:
  
  
  • A supervisor shoved a cane into a sow's vagina, struck her on the back about 17 times, and then struck another sow.
  
  
  • Multiple pigs were beaten with metal gate rods, and lacerations were found on more than 30 sows, which is probably evidence of more abuse.
  
  
  • A worker hit a young pig in the face four times with the edge of a herding board, and investigators witnessed dozens of similar incidents involving this worker and 11 other workers.
  
  
  • Two men, including a supervisor, were witnessed jabbing clothespins into pigs' eyes and faces. A supervisor also poked two animals in the eyes with his fingers.


• Everyday severe abuse at one of California's largest egg operations
  
  Investigators found the following, and more:
  
  
  • Sick birds neglected to die on top of dead piles—denied veterinary care or proper attention
  
  
  • Workers killing birds by grabbing their necks and swinging them around in circles—an attempt to break their necks which often resulted in prolonged deaths for the animals
  
  
  • Hens suffering from bloody open wounds and untreated infections
  
  
  • Dead hens left to decompose in cages with birds still laying eggs for human consumption

The list could go on and on. It's endless. Whenever we treat living beings—of any species—as mere units, there will be abuse. When we severely exploit entire classes of beings, we implement many psychological and behavioral responses to block or mask the horror of the mass-killers that we have become. We are not born wanting to inflict massive suffering on innocent beings and ruining their lives. But for reasons that go beyond the scope of this sidebar and this post, we have created a world in which one of our main industries is confining, controlling, dominating, hurting, inflicting suffering upon, and killing animals. We have done the same thing with people many times. It makes us coarse and conflicted inside. We take out our frustrations on the helpless victims. We invent self-serving interpretations of religion and philosophy to make the daily cruelty seem justified. We invent reasons why we're superior to our oppressed victims, although we have seen over and over that we're not as different from them as we thought we were. (And a superior species would be the kindest, not most brutal.) The more we engage in institutionalized cruelty, the more we harden our hearts. As long as there is institutionalized exploitation and enslavement of animals or humans, there will be unending cases of violence and cruelty directed at the victims.

There are many ways to turn this around. Your individual purchasing habits are the most powerful, immediate step you can take. Veganism has never been easier. Please—don't reflexively balk at the word. Don't instantly dismiss it. Sincerely think it over. Visit ChooseVeg.com, TryVeg.com, and GoVeg.com for starters. Google "vegan " followed by whatever dish or type of food you're insterested in. Check out VeganHealth.org for a no-nonsense at all the health aspects of veganism. Ending vivisection is a little tougher, since so much of it is funded by our taxes. But there are simple things you can do to reduce it— and actually improve our physical / mental / emotional health in the process. We'll look into that in a future post.

Labels: Animal Welfare Act violations, pain, primates, SAEN, vivisection