Month: January 2004

Tufts Kills Five Dogs in Bone Research Experiment Despite Animal Rights Objections

The New England Anti-Vivisection Society and other animal rights groups failed to stop Tufts University’s School of Veterinary Medicine from killing five dogs involved in research. Tufts also temporarily suspended an Adopt-A-Dog program which had been the source of information about the dog research and which Tufts apparently believed might pose a security risk by bringing opponents of its bone research into its facilities.

Tufts is currently doing research on different methods of fixing broken bones in dogs. One experiment involved breaking the bones of the back two legs of five dogs using a surgical procedure. One leg on each dog was set using a conventional fixator attached with external screws, while the other leg was set using a more flexible fixator. The animals were anesthetized during the surgical procedures, and given drugs for pain as their bone healed.

The final step in the procedure, however, required the dogs to be killed so the leg bones of the dogs could be removed and evaluated.

The New England Anti-Vivisection Society and about 30 Tufts students had been protesting the planned killing of the dogs for months. In a December 29 press release NEAVS president Theo Capaldo said,

In response to the students’ concerns, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) asked them to find alternatives to the study when actually the IACUC should have demanded that the researchers do a better job of finding alternatives to this egregious study in the first place. The IACUC should never have approved a study that involved: such severe injury to healthy dogs; the need for days of heavy pain killers; and the killing of the dogs in the end. The research should never have met the approval of this committee. The students are absolutely right to call into question this unjustifiable research and its egregious end point.

. . .

If Tufts is unwilling to allow its own students to insist on the ethical imperative to find alternatives to such awful research, then they need to be challenged. After all, the students involved represent those interested in helping and healing animals and those interested in changing public policy about how animals are treated in our society. In prohibiting these students from doing this work at their own University, Tufts is not only being inhumane to the dogs but to the students as well. How can the University not allow them to do what they are there to learn to do: make the world a better place for animals? It’s a very disheartening contradiction.

In a prepared statement, Tufts spokeswoman Barbara Donato said,

Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine recognizes that the responsible conduct of biomedical research using animals is a highly complex public policy issue over which people of diverse backgrounds will disagree. We respect diversity of opinions on this matter and encourage our students, faculty and staff to develop and express informed views while also respecting the viewpoints of others.

Tufts also decided to temporarily suspended an Adopt-A-Teaching Dog program. Students apparently learned of the bone study through their involvement in that program. That program involves using students walking and playing with dogs used to teach non-invasive veterinary techniques.

Tufts apparently feared that giving students opposed to the bone research access to their research facilities was a potential security threat. According to Donato,

To the extent that we can permit students to access the facility without jeopardizing security, we hope to do so. . . . Any research institution, including Tufts, has an obligation to provide a secure facility for the housing of research animals and will do whatever is necessary to protect the security and welfare of the animals, as well as the integrity of the research.

Sources:

Tufts kills five dogs in bone research project despite protests. Donna Boynton; Telegram & Gazette (Massachusetts), January 3, 2004.

New England Anti-Vivisection Society and Tufts Students Ask Tufts to Save Dogs’ Lives: ‘Turn over a New Leaf’ for the New Year. Press Release, New England Anti-Vivisection Society, December 29, 2003.

Mad Cow Disease in America

The biggest animal-related story of the New Year is the discovery of a single Mad Cow-infected calf in late December and steps the U.S. government is taking to reduce both the public health and economic threat that this poses.

Although Mad Cow Disease doesn’t appear to be the sort of plague that animal rights activists once claimed it would be (I once attended a talk by Howard Lyman where he claimed the disease would rival AIDS) it is a serious public health threat and the precautions taken so far are more than warranted.

Of course some folks both inside and outside of the animal rights movement do not appear to have any problem substituting their ignorance where the facts do not quite fit the case.

Time Magazine writer Margaret Carlson decided to exaggerate to the number of cases of vCJD (the human form of Mad Cow Disease) in Great Britain. During an appearance on CNN ‘s Capitol Gang, Carlson said (emphasis added),

But the United States has a lot of information that Britain didn’t have when they had their outbreak of mad cow disease and the government kept saying, Don’t worry about it, and thousands of people contracted the disease. And while the system of branding and numbers and all that isn’t what it should be, it’s a lot better than it used to be, better than it is in Britain. And the testing is so much better. So it might be contained, and then there’ll be very little political fallout.

In fact, from 1996 through 2001, there were only 111 “probable cases” of vCJD. The total number of cases is likely to be less than 500 — and this in the country where people probably consumed more Mad Cow-tainted beef than any other.

The reality is that although fears of a widespread human outbreak might have been warranted in the mid-1990s, by the end of the decade it was clear that transmission of the disease between cows and human beings through the consumption of tainted meat was actually quite difficult.

But don’t tell that to former USDA veterinarian Lester Friedlander who had one of the more idiotic statements about Mad Cow Disease. Friedlander has rightly campaigned for years for a ban on downer animals — a ban which the Bush administration put in place after the announcement of the discovery of the Mad Cow-infected calf. Friedlander was widely quoted in news stories about the Mad Cow calf, but showed his ignorance in responding to USDA Secretary Ann Veneman’s statement that, “I plan to serve beef for my Christmas dinner and we remain confident in the
safety of our food supply.” According to a Go Vegan Texas!, Freidlander’s response was,

She might as well kiss her ass goodbye, then.

What an ignorant statement. That would be like claiming that people should stop eating vegetables due to Hepatitis A outbreaks (which are a much bigger threat to human health than Mad Cow disease).

Animal rights groups are already trying to parlay the discovery of the Mad Cow-infected calf to push their campaigns for Americans to go vegetarian. Those are about as likely to succeed as past such campaigns have. In Great Britain there was an initial upsurge in vegetarianism which was later reversed when it became clear that the risk to human health was relatively small, especially after government-mandated changes in animal agriculture. In the United States, the odds of anyone actually contracting vCJD are so low that it’s doubtful there will even be any temporary upsurge in vegetarianism.

Source:

Special Two-Hour Report on Mad Cow Disease. Press Release, Go Vegan Texas!, December 29, 2003.

Some 2003 Web Site Statistics

Even though my professional duties put a bit of a crimp on my blogging in 2003 (working 70 hour weeks for months at a time will do that to you), it was still a pretty good year:

Total Page Views: 5,831,925

Total New Posts: 23,361

I’ve also been reading quite a bit about people starting to see the value in categorizing their posts. My theory is if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it to excess:

Total New Categories in 2003: 518

Total # of Categories: 1,643

Each of those categories, of course, has an automatically generated RSS feed. Not too shabby.

Margaret Carlson’s Ignorant Statement on Mad Cow Disease

Happened to be flipping through channels this Saturday to see Margaret Carlson display her complete ignorance about Mad Cow disease on CNN’s The Capitol Gang talking about Mad Cow Disease. From the transcript (emphasis added),

But the United States has a lot of information that Britain didn’t have when they had their outbreak of mad cow disease and the government kept saying, Don’t worry about it, and thousands of people contracted the disease. And while the system of branding and numbers and all that isn’t what it should be, it’s a lot better than it used to be, better than it is in Britain. And the testing is so much better. So it might be contained, and then there’ll be very little political fallout.

In fact, from 1996 through 2001, there were only 111 “probable cases” of vCJD — the human form of Mad Cow disease — in Great Britain. The total number of people who will eventually die from vCJD in the United Kingdom is likely to be somewhere between 200-400.

The “thousands of people contracted the disease” claim is sheer nonsense — i.e. vintage Margaret Carlson.

Update: One minor thing I want to point out — it is conceivable that thousands of people were exposed to Mad Cow diesase but will never contract a life-threatening case of the disease. Why? Because a leading hypothesis is that in most people the incubation period for the disease is several times longer than human life span. So there are people alive today who might die from vCJD if they live to be 250 but otherwise will never even know they have been exposed to the disease. But that is quite a bit different from Carlson’s claim that thousands of Britons “contracted” the disease.

Source:

CJD deaths ‘may have peaked’. The BBC, November 23, 2001.

MoveOn.Org’s Bush=Hitler Ad

There’s been a lot of hype lately about the role of the Internet in this and future elections. MoveOn.Org shows the major downside of the Internet — namely that independent political sites gain audience by being on the extremes which is going to be embarassing to candidates who associate with them.

The Republican National Committee, for example, is smartly doing all it can to make a big deal out of the Bush=Hitler ad that was posted to the MoveOn.Org web site and then later pulled. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a case of just some random idiot posting the ad, but rather an editorial decision by someone with MoveOn.Org to post the ad and then later remove it. This is part of MoveOn.Org’s ad contest which is backed up by serious money (including matching funds from George Soros).

The RNC wants all of Democratic candidates for president to renounce the ad. Certainly some Democratic presidential candidates have been more closely associated with MoveOn.Org than others. For example, Howard Dean’s organization actively campaigned to win MoveOn.Org’s endorsement, and called the publicity stunt an example of the best sort of participatory democracy,

We want to thank everyone who helped make this victory possible. To the volunteers and Dean supporters across the country, thanks for all of your work. To the 139,360 who supported me, thanks for casting the first votes to take our country back. You have demonstrated that you really do have the power.

This primary was participatory democracy at its finest. This week’s vote was not about money-other campaigns devoted far more resources to this primary than ours did-and it was not about special interest groups buying access to government. This primary, the first online primary of the modern age, was about individual Americans influencing the process directly. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans researched this race, voted, and told their friends to vote.

You have to wonder if Dean’s going to appreciate being asked about every inane thing that MoveOn.Org comes up with. But his endorsement of MoveOn.Org makes that all-but-inevitable.

Ultimately, Democrats and their supporters seem to have learned nothing at all from the Republican mistakes of the Clinton years. Republicans then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by turning legitimate criticism of the Clinton administration into an irrational, all-consuming hatred of the President which made them look like extremists. The best commentary I’ve heard about Dean yet is that he is not a repeat of McGovern, but rather the second coming of Newt Gingrich.