Statement by P. Michael Conn
26 SEPT, 2001
Before the City Council, Portland, Oregon
Your Honor and Members of the Council:
My name is Dr. Michael Conn. I work as Special Assistant to the President of Oregon Health and Sciences University and as Associate Director of one of its Institutes, the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. I also have a research program that has contributed to the development of treatments for breast and prostate cancer, endometriosis and problems of infertility.
Because of what I have to tell you today, it is important that you understand that my own
research program does not currently use animals, although we have in the past. Like most
Americans, I understand the value of animal research in basic science — so important for
development of treatments for both human and animal disease. Therapies for diabetes, AIDS,
Alzheimer’s, cancer, along with antibiotics, vaccines and surgical techniques — to name just a few things — all had origins in animal research. I have spoken and written about the importance of humane animal research and how it benefits humans and animals.
Recently, I was invited to visit the University of South Florida, located in Tampa, Florida. Shortly before this trip, I was alerted that a mid-west activist had announced my visit to Florida on an e-mail listserve. This person, who, I later learned and I am quoting here–, “believes we must be willing to do whatever it takes to gain animals freedom,” even if that means the killing of a so-called “animal abuser,” solicited letters to the university administration and to my academic colleagues. I also received an email from the educational coordinator of Florida Voices for Animals detailing my “ignominy,” and telling me that I was unwelcome in Tampa. I responded, explaining that although I support the humane use of animals in medical research, I do not, myself, use animals in my research projects.
Let me step out of the sequence of events just for a moment. One of the largest animal extremist organizations in the world, “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,”– PeTA– subsequently picked up on the midwest and Florida postings and created a page for me on their website, also soliciting e-mails and letters. I learned that PeTA, which has helped fund one of the mid-west activist’s advertising campaigns, is focusing not on my own work but, on the fact that I work for an institution that conducts animal research. PeTA never mentions, however, that my institution is fully accredited and compliant with all federal and state laws.
Back to the sequence of events: My plane was met at the Tampa airport by animal extremists who tried to engage and film me. Exercising their rights, under a Florida open meetings law, they were present at virtually all of my scheduled meetings with USF committees. Some stood outside meeting room doors, distributing fliers that made outlandish claims and lobbying attendees.
Others, wearing t-shirts that said, “keep primate tester Dr. P. M. Conn out of USF,” made
derogatory comments. Still others asked me why I was lying about using primates in my program — a question that a sympathetic faculty member turned into an accusation, insisting in obscene language that I was lying about not using animals in my current research program.
In one meeting, news media with video cameras burst into the room. They never interviewed me, choosing to accept unchallenged the claims made by the extremists and identifying me simply as a “vivisector,” a term of opprobrium used by extremists.
The campus was plastered with handbills, full of absurdly incorrect information. There was no way for me to reach out and dialogue with those who were responsible for this campaign of mis-information. Naively, I did try on one occasion to talk with one of the extremists, but he showed no interest in meaningful discussion.
I received threatening calls at the hotel and knocks on the door in the middle of the night. I never knew who was going to be coming through the door of a meeting room. This put me in a constant state of fear to the degree that, at one point, when a casually dressed faculty member, whom I did not know, entered from the door behind me, I jumped out of the way in fright, later, apologizing to her.
It got so bad that an armed state police officer was assigned to look after me.
The constant presence of an armed guard made me recognize that I was a “sitting duck” to
anyone with a weapon. At one point, after being accused of telling lies, cursed at, and in constant fear for my well being all the while trying to meaningfully address the academic concerns and questions of my USF colleagues I considered returning home to Portland for reasons of personal safety. Though my nerves were shot, I decided to remain in this incredibly stressful situation for the planned two days.
At a little after 4 a.m. on the day of my departure, the police officer met me in the lobby of the hotel, escorted me to a taxi and followed me for a few miles before waving goodbye and turning off to another road. I thought it was over, and with a tremendous sense of relief I checked in and passed through security. Suddenly, as I was about to step onto an escalator, I became aware that some of the extremists — muttering “we came to say goodbye,” and “we were afraid we missed you” — had physically surrounded me. I managed to step aside so that I could descend the escalator several steps behind them. An alert gate agent, noting the message on their t-shirts, phoned airport police, and I was quickly boarded onto an empty plane.
I was to learn, however, that it still wasn’t over. Now, back in Portland, animal extremists have shouted at me from the road above at my home, and I have found that someone has been ransacking my garbage.
All this terrorism is new to me. Remember, I do not work with animals. I work at a university that does, a university, I remind you, that is fully compliant with all laws and measures up to the highest standards of animal care.
I believe that the events I have recounted were meant “to terrorize,” a verb that Webster defines as “to coerce by filling with terror as by the use or threat of violence.” But some animal extremists say, “We do not use violence. We demonstrate and destroy property, but we never injure or kill persons.” What are we to think of that?
Maybe we should ask the four scientists at my institution who received letters armed with razor blades set to cut the hand of the opener — I think that they would call that the use of violence.
Maybe we should ask the center administrators who have received anonymous telephone calls and unsigned mail, and e-mails, which all but threatened them with death — the callers or writers expressing such wishes as that the scientists soon suffer in hell. Even if these communications carefully stopped short of illegal death threats, the administrators felt the force of their violence.
Or maybe we should ask the scientist at another University who has been warned that his
children’s pictures would be put up on the internet — hostages, in other words — until he stops research on animals. Surely he feels this as both a threat and an experience of violence.
The leaders of the animal extremist movement say that they are non-violent in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They point out that unlike some of their
colleagues in England, who recently took a baseball bat to the head of a researcher, they haven’t physically assaulted or killed anyone — at least, not yet.
But that fact doesn’t qualify them as non-violent, or put them in league with Gandhi and King and Rosa Parks. Gandhi and King and Rosa Parks appealed to the consciences of their adversaries; animal extremists, on the other hand, bully and intimidate. Gandhi and King and Rosa Parks chose to suffer themselves; animal extremists, on the other hand, set out to inflict suffering on us. Gandhi and King allowed themselves to be arrested for their cause, while animal terrorists set fires in the night, phone anonymously, send unsigned e-mails and post outright lies and half-truths on their web sites.
A little over one year ago, the FBI found my name and home address written on a file card in the home of the former national spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front. Mr. Rosebraugh has been arrested for trespassing at the primate center, publishes a web site on how to make firebombs and distributes a video called “Igniting the Revolution,” which urges people to burn homes and businesses.
You can be assured that when I learned of the FBI discovery, I felt not just the threat of violence, but something more, something that violated my person, something that felt very much like violence. Most certainly I was then, as I was in Florida last month, a target of terrorists.
Painful as it is to be in the cross hairs of terrorists, neither my colleagues nor I will bow to their force or be deflected from our course of discovery that leads to cures of human and animal disease. I challenged those who taunted me in Florida to tell the parents of a critically-ill child that research is not important. The only time these terrorists did not follow me was when I passed through the Cancer ward at Florida’s Moffitt hospital. Go figure.
I am pleased to answer any questions.
