Month: April 2003

Cat Torturer Pleads Guilty

Matthew Kaczorowski, 21, plead guilty earlier this month for his role in the making of a videotape showing the torture and killing of a cat.

Kaczorowski made the tape along with Jesse Power, 22, and Anthony Wennekers, 25. Power and Wennekers were arrested back in 2001 and eventually plead guilty to charges stemming from the videotape, but Kaczorowski remained a fugitive for 18 months until his arrest earlier this year.

Kaczorowski was allowed to plea to a charge of mischief. His sentencing will not take place until the appeal over Power’s sentence is resolved. Power was sentenced to just 90 days in jail and 18 months house arrest. The prosecutor is appealing that light sentence to a higher court.

Wennekers was sentenced to time served and released after 11 months in custody.

Source:

Man pleads guilty in cat torture case. Nick Pron, Toronto Star, April 10, 2003.

Use of Live Animals In Medical Schools Continues to Decline

A study recently published in Academic Medicine found that the number of medical schools using dogs in classroom training continues to decline as does the number of schools using any live animals in laboratory training.

The survey of medical schools found that just 32 percent still used live animals in laboratory training of 2001. That’s down from 73 percent in 1985.

There are several reasons for the decline including pressure from animal rights activists, the fact that live animals are expensive to use, and alternatives to live animals have made significant progress over the last 20 years.

But can a medical student receive all the training he needs from non-animal alternatives? Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center physiology professor says no,

The experience [of training with a live animal] cannot be substituted by any computer simulation. Can a computer simulate how much pressure to put on a bleeding artery? Can it help you understand pain and evaluate the level of anesthesia needed?

Dr. Lawrence Hansen, co-author of the study, argues that the value of the live animal has to be weighed against the costs, including the welfare of the animal,

Does the dog have any value at all? If the dog was a block of wood, I’d say go ahead and do this. But we have to do a cost-benefit analysis. It’s a lifetime of caging, followed by vivisection, and then euthanasia. And that’s a high ethical cost for the dog to pay

Hansen is the spokesman for Doctors Against Dog Labs, a group that wants an end to the use of dogs in medical training. In essay at that group’s web site, Hansen writes,

When I compare dog and human brains the similarities far outnumber the differences. It’s true dogs have smaller frontal lobes, which explains their lack of inhibition (e.g., butt sniffing) and unfortunately also accounts for their poor judgment in relying on the kindness of humans. But the very similarities that make dogs “good models” for human physiology and pharmacology labs are good reasons why we shouldn’t be killing creatures so like ourselves.

Because dogs and humans are more alike than different we should treat dogs more like we would want to be treated ourselves. During a particularly awful moment in his tragedy, King Lear despairs, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods! They kill us for their sport!” Well, that may or may not be true of the gods or of God, but to dogs we humans are gods. We made them what they are through millennia of selective breeding until they became the perfect companion animal — loyal, loving, devoted. They only want to please us. It is a betrayal of trust and of the bond between men and dogs to so casually kill them for minuscule educational benefit. We can and should choose to be merciful gods, unlike those tormenting Lear for sport, or boys pulling the wings off flies.

Well if the trend Hansen reports on continues, it looks like he’ll get his wish.

Source:

Med Schools Are Phasing Out Use of Dogs in Training Doctors. Bruce Taylor Seeman, Newhouse News Service, April 3, 2003.

Why Not Kill Dogs? Lawrence Hansen.

UCSD’s use of live dogs in lab decried. Cheryl Clark, San Diego Union-Tribune, February 12, 2003.

South Salt Lake, Utah Settles with Animal Rights Activists

South Salt Lake, Utah, reached a settlement agreement with the Utah Animal Rights Coalition over protests earlier this year at South Salt Lake KFC restaurants.

UARC attorney Brian Barnard filed the complaint which arose over South Salt Lake’s regulation of protests. The city requires five days notification to obtain a permit to protest — the law doesn’t include any provision at all for spontaneous protests. The city did waive the five day requirement for UARC but the permit it was finally issued said the protester could not “approach any customers who wish to enter the business premises.”

When UARC applied for a permit for a March 10 protest, the permit was denied because the group had not filed for the permit at least 5 days in advance.

The settlement between the animal rights group and the city required South Salt Lake to pay $101 in damages and agree to revise its ordinances relating to protests. The city is currently conceding changes that allow protestors to get within 5 feet of people who are not part of the protest, and would change the 5 day notification period to 3 days.

Source:

South Salt Lake Settles Suit Over Protests at KFC.

SARS, Influenza and Meat?

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has been a major topic in the news recently, which means it was also an opportunity for animal rights groups and individuals to spread the usual nonsense and lies about zoonosis (diseases that humans may acquire from animals).

One of the major errors concerns the 1918 influenza pandemic. For such a major event with plenty of books, articles and web pages available, you’d think they could at least get this right, but alas, no.

Michael Greger, MD, weighed in with this bit of outdated information,

Animal agriculture is not just a public health hazard for those that consume meat. In fact, the single worst epidemic in recorded history, the 1918 influenza pandemic, has been blamed on the livestock industry. In that case, the unnatural density and proximity of ducks and pigs raised for slaughter probably led to the deaths of 20 to 40 million people. . . . All of these influenza strains seem to have arisen in the same region of southern China where intensive systems of animal agriculture have become a breeding ground for new killer viruses.

PETA chimes in claiming that,

The influenza epidemic of 1918 originated in pigs.

But these claims are completely dishonest distortions of what is known about the 1918 epidemic.

The 1918 influenza pandemic did not originate in Asia. The first known cases of the disease, in fact, occurred Kansas in May 1918. Five hundred soldiers became infected with a mysterious new disease, and 48 of them died. It is most likely the disease originated either in Europe or the United States — soldiers traveling both ways across the Atlantic would have quickly spread the virus.

Did the disease arise from animal agriculture? To answer that question, first consider one of the more astounding aspects of the 1918 influenza pandemic — we actually have samples of the disease that were preserved (in some cases because the bodies of victims were buried in places like Alaska, where the ground remained frozen) and have been partially sequenced.

As far as ducks are concerned, a study of waterfowl from the Smithsonian Institution’s collection found that this was unlikely. The Smithsonian has a huge collection of liquid-preserved waterfowl from which it extracted genetic material. The genetic material was tested for a specific gene that made the 1918 influenza strain so deadly. Researchers who studied the genetic material concluded that (emphasis added), “Comparisons of this sequence with that of the 1918 pandemic virus suggest that the pandemic viral HA gene was not derived directly from an avian source.”

But did the disease spread from pigs to humans? The short answer is that nobody knows, and that it is just as likely that the disease spread from human beings to pigs.

The 1918 strain could definitely infect both humans and pigs, but the 1918 pandemic was the first time that swine influenza was recognized as a disease — this was something entirely new for both pigs and human beings. The swine influenza was isolated in 1930 and human form of the disease in 1933, and they were similar enough for researchers to conclude that they were essentially the same virus.

Dr. Richard D. Slemons, DVM at Ohio State University, writes of the question of how the pandemic started,

Since swine flu was reported as a new disease entity in pigs in 1918, it was further believed that the agent was originally transmitted from humans to pigs and subsequently became established in pigs. Retrospective serologic investigations provided further data supporting the belief that the same agent was responsible for the 1918 influenza outbreaks in humans and pigs. However, these data did not provide insight into whether the virus went from humans to pigs or vice versa. The question as to whether the virus originated in humans or pigs, or even another species and then jumped to both pigs and humans, remains unanswered.

Why can’t groups like PETA ever get even basic facts right?

Sources:

SARS: Another deadly virus from the meat industry. Michael Greger, April 13, 2003.

SARS Epidemic Caused by Meat?. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, April 2003.

Influenza: Past Clues Guide Future Defense. PulmonaryReviews.Com, January 2002.

History, Structure, and Function of Swine Influenza Virus. Richard D. Slemons.

Seeking the 1918 Spanish Influenza Virus. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, American Society for Microbiology, July 1999.

Origin and evolution of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza virus hemagglutinin gene. Reid AH, Fanning TG, Hultin JV, Taubenberger JK, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1999 Feb 16;96(4):1164-6.

1918 Human Influenza Epidemic No Longer Linked to Birds. Smithsonian Institution, Press Release, August 2, 2002.

If It Squeaks Like a Duck . . .

An animal rights extremist in Santa Cruz, California wanted to make his point about animal cruelty and defaced signs put up by a sorority advertising an upcoming duck event. The vandal scrawled “animal cruelty” across the signs and crossed out a word and wrote “tortures” over it. So what sort of vile event did the fraternity have planned? A rubber duck race.

Janice Allegrie of Omega Nu told the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “They are cute, but they’re rubber.”

Omega Nu has run its Duck Derby over the last 13 year sand raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that largely benefit local public and private agencies.

(Then again, if a rubber duck can squeak, isn’t that proof enough that it feels pain just like you and I?)

Source:

Zealot acts to halt abuse . . . of rubber ducks. Donna Jones, Santa Cruz Sentinel, April 12, 2003.

Glenn Sacks on the “Women Work Harder” Claims

For years I’ve been hearing these claims that a United Nations study found that when you include housework and other non-compensated labor women actually work more hours per week on average than men. In fact, sometimes this claim is taken further and cited for various other purposes — for example, with claims that the additional work that women preform should be added to the GDP or that various programs that cover workers should be amended to take into account women’s undocumented work.

But Glenn Sacks did a nice job of puncturing this myth in a March 18 column, Men, Women and Work. Now certainly the work that women do is to be praised and duly compensated. Laws and traditions that kept women from working or excluded them from certain professions was not only morally wrong, but was also completely wrongheaded economically. Anyone whose ever worked with or for a talented woman must marvel at the idea that in an earlier time those talents would have been allowed to go to waste (and it is mindboggling that some nations still hamper there economies with such dubious restrictions).

But the question at hand is whether or not women work significant numbers of hours more than men, and the answer there is no. Well, at least that the studies that claim to show this are bogus.

The major source of such claims is the United Nations’ 1995 Human Development Report. This claimed that by the time you add in housework and other uncompensated work that women do, they end up working significantly more hours than men. But Sacks notes there are a number of problems with the report,

As men’s issues author Warren Farrell explained in his 1999 book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, the UN report upon which most claims of “women work more” are based was deeply flawed. In fact, UN official Terry McKinley admitted in February, 1996 that the UN misrepresented the study in several important ways. For one, the information provided by the UN to the press only applied to countries where women were found to work more hours than men; the countries where men were found to work more hours than women were deliberately excluded.

Now there is a neat trick that more researchers would love to be able to pull out of their hats. Releasing only the data that supports a hypothesis while not including the data that contradicts a hypothesis is pretty much a ticket to ride. Sacks continues,

Moreoer, when the data provided by researchers in some countries (including the US) did not fit the UN’s intention to show that women “do more,” researchers were asked in a private communication to amend their studies. Researchers were asked to include women’s voluntary community work as well as hobbies in order to increase women’s perceived workload. Researchers were not asked to include those items or new ones in men’s labor. As a study of men and women’s labor, the UN findings are worthless.

And it’s not just the UN using such patently unsound methods. He also takes to task UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift which claimed that “women work an extra month of 24 hour days each year.” Holy cow — is there even enough time available for such an enormous disparity? Well there is if you compare two very different groups of men and women. Sacks writes,

For one, she compared the housework burdens of full-time employed males with those of part-time employed females, portraying men working 50 hour weeks as lazy and selfish for not doing as much housework as their wives who were working a 20 hour week. Also, she claimed that men did no more housework in the late 1980s than in the prefeminist era, but, with one minor exception, she used data on male housework from studies done in the pre-feminist era, rendering it worthless [as a source for late 1980s male housework trends].

In the United States, Sacks reports, men in act work 3-5 hours per week more than women on average. That’s actually a pretty amazing figure, especially if it includes women who have temporarily altered their workload after having children. Lets have three cheers for America — where everyone is entitled to work 50 hours a week regardless of their sex!

Source:

Men, Women and Work. Glenn Sacks, Mens News Daily, March 18, 2003.