Following on the heels of the departure of Michael Podell from Ohio State University, the New York Times featured a long article on the debate within animal research circles on how vigorously to defend animal research against animal rights protests.
This is a debate that I’ve never quite understood. It seems obvious that universities should vigorously and publicly defend animal research being conducted at their universities, especially in the case of something like Ohio State University where Podell was the researcher but the grant was actually to the university.
On the contrary, as several people cited in The Times article said, the general consensus is to say as little as possible and hope the animal rights protesters will go away. Dr. Richard Bianco, who is in charge of laboratory animal care at the University of Minnesota (which has actively defended its animal research), told The Times,
We should be proud of what we do and talk about it. We’re scared to death. That’s our problem.
In the Ohio State University case, the officials at OSU were so afraid of inciting yet more protests, that they even refused to write an opinion column for local newspapers defending their research. That’s just pathetic.
What is genuinely shocking is this view that seems to prevail both in business and academia that if you ignore them long enough or cancel one program here or divest your stock there that the animal rights movement will be appeased and just go away. That is never going to happen.
First, in case these folks haven’t noticed we are now living in an age where instant communication over the Internet is all-but ubiquitous. Fringe and special interest groups are able to quickly communicate, share information, and get their version of the story out to reporters. If an institution just responds with silence, both the activists and the general public are going to assume that it’s because the activist claims are correct. Left unchallenged, activist claims about medical research will become the dominant narrative.
Second, even minor victories energize these sorts of movements. After all, the animal rights movement isn’t exactly used to winning very often, so little victories mean a lot. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty has really shown how to run an animal rights campaign, focusing on an already vulnerable target, then attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of its employees and associates. In the real world, convincing some small, marginal market maker to abandon an HLS stock listing is not a major victory, but SHAC does a good job of spinning these sort of events as major victories in the battle for the animals (although SHAC also risks a backlash with its hype that HLS is on the edge of collapse).
What after all were the lesson that activists learned from the OSU debacle? That some academic institutions will not bother to defend their own research grants, and that a professor working at such an institution can be isolated and harassed until he decides that fighting on is no longer worth it. If I were the leader of an animal rights group, I’d be scanning animal research grants at universities looking for a researcher with a family at a university that has historically not stepped up to defend its researchers. That’s always going to be a winning strategy.
Institutions doing animal research need to be proactively reaching out to their community to explain what they do and why they do it. They also need to at least discuss contingency plans on how to deal with animal rights activists. There are groups such as Americans for Medical Progress and The Foundation for Biomedical Research that are uniquely suited to help out and advise institutions under attack from animal rights activists, and such institutions should at the very least consult with them to better understand exactly what they are facing.
Universities and businesses do not have the luxury of pretending that the animal rights movement is some loose, disjointed collection of a bunch of fringe idealists. Today the animal rights movement is relatively sophisticated with the capacity to use modern technologies to leverage the actions of disparate activists across the country into a coordinated attack on a given institution. Trying to ignore the activists is easily the single worst thing any institution could do.
Source:
Debate over whether to defend animal tests. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, July 23, 2002.
