Tag: Americans for Medical Progress

Primate Freedom Tour

The Primate Freedom Tour is
rolling through the United States, spreading misinformation about medical
research involving primates and generating a fair amount of controversy
even within the animal rights movement.

The tour travels across the
United States stopping at primate research facilities long enough to protest
and grab a bit of media attention. In large measure, however, the tour
has backfired on its sponsors due to the tactics they have adopted.

Along with the typical animal
rights tactics — one protester locked himself in a cage for three days
outside of a Coulston facility — members of the Primate Freedom Tour
have protested outside the homes of researchers working at primate facilities
and released the home addresses of their targets in press releases. In
several cases police have come close to arresting primate tour members
and a University of California of Davis researcher was arrested recently
for allegedly assaulting protesters outside his home.

Such tactics have garnered
the tour a wave of negative publicity, helped out by press releases form
the tour itself that emphasize the group’s militant stand and tactics.
By July 1, Suzanne Roy and Eric Kleiman, program director and research
director respectively at In Defense of Animals, had enough and issued
a “Personal statement against certain tactics of Primate Freedom Tour”
attacking the militant tactics which, Roy and Kleiman correctly perceive,
only work against the animal rights movement.

As Roy and Kleiman write,

A number of years ago, the A[merican] M[edical] A[ssociation]
developed an action plan for neutralizing the animal rights movement.
Its strategy was to portray animal rights advocates as extremists and
terrorists … We believe the Tour is certainly making the jobs of A[mericans
for] M[edical] P[rogress] and other similar groups easier. Their attempts
to portray all animal advocates as extremist fanatics, engaged in a terroristic
‘jihad’ that must be constrained by the police … are certainly being facilitated
by the Tour’s organizers.

Roy and Kleiman are certainly
right about the ethics and media effect of home protests, but their own
statement itself belies the claim that animal rights activists are being
falsely painted as extremists and terrorists by the AMP and AMA. The fact
is that most animal rights activists and organizations are extremists
as evidenced by the fact that Roy and Kleiman had to release their comments
as a “personal statement” and make very explicit that their views don’t
reflect that of In Defense of Animals, which is one of the sponsors of
the Primate Freedom Tour. Since the Tour began, Roy and Kleiman are the
only two individuals to my knowledge to issue such a statement and no
animal rights organization has come out with any statement containing
anything but praise for the Primate Freedom Tour.

This silence is deafening
and yet Roy and Kleiman would have us believe that the extremists who
would protest at a researchers home represent a small minority of animal
rights activists and the rest of the movement is unfairly associated with
this tiny fringe of the movement. Please, give it a rest already. This
is as believable as the constant refrain that the Animal Liberation Front‘s
acts of destruction don’t represent the animal rights movement, even though
all but a handful of animal rights groups refuse to condemn such actions
and most express their sympathy with the terrorists.

Juvenile Justice Bill Targets Animal Rights Violence

An amendment to the Juvenile
Justice Act, approved by the U.S. Senate a couple weeks ago, would strengthen
the criminal penalties of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act as well as make it
a federal felony to distribute bomb making information over the Internet.

The language to strengthen the
AEA penalties was introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) as part of an
amendment co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and approved
by an 85 to 13 margin. The amendment would increase the penalty for raids
against animal enterprises to up to 5 years in prison and fines up to
double the actual damages done. In addition, the FBI would maintain a
database of information about attacks on animal enterprises, greatly increasing
the coordination of investigations of such crimes at the local, state
and federal level.

In a press release Jacquie Calnan,
president of Americans for Medical Progress, said, “We are grateful to
Senator Hatch for taking a leadership role in protecting biomedical research.
When research laboratories are attacked, the ones who lose most are those
of us who are living with a disease or who are watching a loved one cope
with a devastating illness.”

In a related development, a
bill passed the Minnesota legislature which allows victims of animal rights
activists to recover damages up to triple the actual damages done.

Both bills represent an opportunity
that opponents of animal rights need to seize. Although the increase in
prison terms and fines included in the Hatch/Feinstein amendment would
certainly be welcome, it appears unlikely the Juvenile Justice bill will
survive in a form that President Bill Clinton will sign. In the House
of Representatives, a similar bill is being bogged down with dozens of
proposed amendments as well as a storm of controversy over proposed gun
control measures. It is still possible the amendment might become law,
but it is a long shot.

On the other hand, the 85 to
13 vote demonstrates the support is there in Congress for taking more
serious action against the growing incidence of animal rights violence.
Opponents of animal rights should use the visibility created by the recent
attack at the University of Minnesota to push Congress to pass Hatch’s
amendment in its own right or attached to some other less controversial
piece of legislation.

Preferably such legislation
would not be burdened with Feinstein’s ban on distribution of bomb making
material over the Internet, which is clearly unconstitutional. Some of
the animal rights bomb making material found on places such as the Animal Liberation Front Information Site may itself be actionable in a civil
lawsuit, but Feinstein’s blanket ban is just the latest manifestation
of her anti-Internet hysteria and would never pass muster with the Supreme
Court.

Sources:

US Senate Acts on Animal Rights Terrorism” Americans for Medical Progress press release, May 18, 1999.

Defend Frontline, the ALF and Free Speech! Frontline Information Service press release, May 20, 1999.

Juvenile Justice Bill Used to Target Activists. No Compromise, press release, May 25, 1999.

Anti-ALF Bill Passes Minnesota Legislature. Frontline Information Service press release, May 21, 1999.

Senate blasts bomb-making info on Net. Courtney Macavinta, News.Com, May 19, 1999.

More Xenotransplantation Advances

Even if they don’t lead
immediately to treatments in human beings, the announcement of two recent
advances in genetic engineering of organs provides more evidence of the
sort of technologies likely to hit the mainstream of medical technology
before the end of the next decade.

In mid-February researchers
announced in Science News that they had successfully transplanted
bladders grown in the lab into six beagles. The scientists grew the bladder
cells around a plastic form to make it take the shape of the bladder and
then implanted the artificial bladders in the dogs. Within three months
the artificial bladders were completely active and some of the dogs have
had the bladders for almost a year with no problems.

Obviously getting the technology
to work in human beings is a whole other problem, but these experiments
are doing for this technology what the early animal experiments on organ
transplantations did – they suggest solutions and help scientists better
understand the problems they will encounter when seeking to grow human
organs in the lab.

In a related story, Canadian
researchers are hoping to take that step of translating animal experiments
into a treatment for human beings sometime this year. Researchers there
expect for the first time to use a genetically engineered pig liver to
keep a human being alive while waiting for a liver transplant from a human
being.

Pharmaceutical company Novartis,
which has been harshly criticized by animal rights activists for its efforts
in genetic engineering, is reportedly ready to spend up to $1 billion
to develop a viable pig liver. To avoid the risk of spreading disease
from pigs to human beings, the pigs will be raised under special conditions
to assure they are disease free. The pigs are isolated from other animals
and housed in a sterile environment. The pigs are fed by hand to avoid
microbes that might pass from pig to pig while suckling.

The impetus to move forward
with this technology is especially strong in Canada which has a rather
low rate of human organ donation – only 12.1 donors per million people
compared to the U.S. with 17.7 donors per million people.

As I noted two weeks ago,
the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation attacked Americans for Medical Progress for highlighting former Chicago Bear running back Walter Payton’s
recent announcement that he has a rare fatal liver disease. The CRT attack
on AMP, however, seemed like an act of desperation. They tried to throw
everything but the kitchen sink at AMP – xenotransplantation might not
work, it poses a risk of transmitting disease across species, it could
be avoided by increasing the donor pool, etc.

There are many responses to
these claims (CRT doesn’t seem to keep up with recent scientific advancements
in genetic engineering) but as far as I can tell the bottom line is this:
animal rights activism in the medical experimentation field has been successful
largely to the extent that it has engaged people’s sympathies against
hurting animals, especially unnecessarily. But that play on emotionalism
is a double-edged sword, since most people are openly “speciesist”
who, when it comes down to it, will find the suffering and pain of Walter
Payton far more compelling and worthy of alleviation than that of a pig
whose death could save Payton’s life.

What seems to anger CRT to
no end is that AMP gave them a taste of their own medicine with their
focus on Payton. I say more power to them.

Usual Suspects Attack Americans for Medical Progress over Xenotransplantation

As animal rights activists
and extremist environmental groups gear up to seek an outright ban on
the transplantation of organs from non-human animals to humans, Americans for Medical Progress‘s Jacquie Calnan wrote an excellent, widely published
op-ed on the importance of pursuing research on xenotransplantation and
similar technologies. She and AMP were subsequently attacked in a release
by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and
others.

Calnan’s op-ed, “Payton’s
hope” (available at http://amprogress.org/news/payton.htm) highlighted the problems of former Chicago Bear running back Walter
Payton, who recently announced he has a rare liver disease and may die
within two years if he does not receive a transplant.

As Calnan noted in her op-ed,
although there are 12,000 people on the waiting list for livers, only
about 4,000 such transplants are performed each year. In 1997 more than
1,000 people died while waiting for a matching liver. Calnan’s editorial
did an excellent job of highlighting animal rights hypocrisy, which is
why I suspect it was so quickly attacked. She repeated PETA celebrity
spokesman Bill Maher‘s recent quote to US Magazine that: “To those
people who say, ‘My father is alive because of animal experimentation,’
I say ‘Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live.’
Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of trade off.” Someone
should send Maher a thank you note for so succinctly summing up the animal
rights philosophy.

Calnan mentioned the newly
developed device I mentioned a couple weeks ago that uses pig cells to
help keep some people alive while waiting transplants. The fact is this
technology is here today and it is already saving lives, so the animal
rights and extreme environmental activists have to fall back on two claims
to discredit the technology.

The first is that the risk
of passing diseases from non-humans to humans is too high. Animal rights
activists have released claim after claim trying to make this point, but
most of the more serious ones have later turned out to be baseless. On
the other hand, like any other thing human beings do, there is always
some risk associated with it – the risk of some new deadly disease crossing
from non-humans to humans will never be zero.

But if our society was that
risk-averse no pharmaceutical drugs or medical technology would ever be
approved since the risk of a calamity from any new technology is never
zero. If this sort of principle actually guided medical technology, certainly
technologies that we take for granted, such as vaccination, would never
have been allowed since the potential risks were only poorly known at best.

The second claim is that there
are more than enough organ donors to go around. At the end of her article,
Calnan ask for more people to become organ donors, which is a reasonable
position, but the critics of xenotransplantation seem to assume that those
organ donors are here today. A recent press release from the Boston-based
Campaign for Responsible Transplantation claimed, for example, that Xenotransplantation
advocates “use statistics and emotion to make their case … some 3,000
transplant patients die each year on in the U.S. … [but a ] US General
Accounting Office report … reveals a potential organ donor pool of 150,000
people. This is in stark contrast to previous estimates of 5,000 to 29,000
people annually … if these organs are secured, it would solve the national
organ shortage, and completely eliminate the need for animal organ transplants.”

As is the typical modus operandi with
these groups, however, this last claim is a distortion. The GAO report
was written to explore different methods of evaluating the performance
of Organ Procurement Organizations, who are assigned the task of procuring
organs and getting them into the organ sharing network. In order to do
that sort of evaluation, the GAO wanted a baseline of the upper bound of
eligible organ donors, which it estimated at 147,000 in 1994 using a technique
to estimate actual deaths and then adjust the figures to determine how
many of those deaths would have had harvestable organs.

The interesting thing is that
in the very next paragraph after giving this estimate, the GAO notes the
limits of counting potential organs this way, “we found that both
the death and adjusted-death measures [which are the source of the 147,000
figure] have drawbacks that limit their usefulness, however, including
lack of timely data and inability to identify those deaths suitable for
use in organ donation.”

First, this explicitly concedes
that the 147,000 figure was obtained using a method that the GAO admits
has an “inability to identify those deaths suitable for use in organ
donation,” which is the crux of the problem with human organ donation
itself. If it was too expensive and time consuming for the GAO to go back
four years and decide how many people were eligible organ donors,
imagine the difficulty in trying to harvest those organs on the spot.

It is one thing to look back
several years later and say there were say 40,000 automobile deaths and
of those 6,000 were potential organ donors. It is another thing to be
in place to actually obtain those organs (a severe problem in organ donation
is that even among those who have signed organ donor cards and are good candidates
to donate organs, often the organs are no longer usable by the time doctors
are aware of the potential donor or get permission from family members
to proceed. This is a situation that is unlikely to change significantly
in the near future).

In addition, the CRT release
failed to note that the number organ donors has increased over the last
few years – but the number of people eligible for organ donation has increased
even faster. I suppose if PETA had its way, this wouldn’t be a problem
since there would be no animal research and fewer people would be transplant
candidates since the medical knowledge to save their lives simply wouldn’t
exist, but barring this it seems clear that future advances in medical
science are going to continue to drive the demand for organ donation at
a much faster rate than the increase in donated organs.

If anything the GAO report
on the failures of Organ Procurement Organizations to obtain more organs
is evidence of just how difficult it is going to be to increase the level
of organ donation, and further emphasizes why xenotransplantation and
similar technologies will likely play a key role in the 21st century – provided animal rights activists aren’t given the chance to
halt this important advance.

Successful strategies for dealing with animal rights activists

Meetingsnet.com recently published
an excellent article on the American Association for Animal Laboratory Science‘s (AAALS) strategies for dealing with animal rights activists
who showed up at its national meeting last November.

After being tipped off by
Americans for Medical Progress that the AAALS meeting was being targeted
for protest by animal rights activists, AAALS executive director Michael
Sondag put together a three-prong approach that succeeded in minimizing
confrontation with the activists.

First, he involved local,
state and federal law enforcement agencies in the planning and security
arrangements of the conference. When 140 or so animal rights activists
showed up to protest, AALAS was prepared with over 200 police officers
to keep things under control.

Second, Sondag and the AALAS
gave conference participants a tip sheet with advice to travel in groups
and completely ignore the animal rights activists. Specifically, Sondag
advised participants that this conference wasn’t the time or place
to debate with the animal rights activists.

“The bottom line is,
you’re never going to win that battle,” Sondag said. “All
it’s going to do is turn into a confrontation with pushing and shoving
and someone will get hurt, or sued, or end up in jail.”

Sondag made a couple interesting
observation about the protests at the conference. First, most of those
who showed up to protest the conference weren’t all that interested
in convincing through persuasion. “Ninety percent of what [the protesters
said] had nothing to do with animal rights. They said filthy stuff, made
remarks about people’s anatomy.”

Second, many of the protesters
apparently weren’t animal rights activists but paid protesters. Sondag
said he found classified ads in the local newspaper offering to pay people
$5/day to protest the AALAS.

In a very sad commentary,
however, part of Sondag’s advice included not discussing the science
of animal experiments with the media. “Forget science,” he told
representatives who talked to the media on behalf of the AALAS. “Most
Americans have the equivalent of an eight-grade science education. Speak
plainly.”

This is a strategy destined
to backfire. One of the reasons animal rights activists get some support
from otherwise sensible people is precisely because what goes on in a
scientific laboratory is largely a mystery to most Americans. By refusing
to talk about the science, people will only see labs as even more removed
and remote from their lives and become more likely to take the claims
of animal rights activists at face value.

ALF sets woodchucks free

Animal Liberation Front activists
claimed to have broken in to a Marmotech, Inc. testing laboratory in New
York and released 150 woodchucks. Bud Tennant, who runs the laboratory,
said the number was closer to 30 — most of the animals remained in or
around the facility.

The woodchucks were being used
for research into a possible vaccine for |hepatitis B|. A communiqué from
ALF claimed, “Tennant is merely satisfying his own curiosity about
every minute detail of a specific type of hepatitis found only in woodchucks.”
Tennant told the Ithaca Times that the woodchuck strain of hepatitis
is in the same family as hepatitis B. The experiments on the woodchucks
could lead to “development of improved treatment and prevention [of
hepatitis B] in humans,” Tennant said.

According to |Americans for
Medical Progress| more than 300 million people worldwide
suffer from hepatitis B, with the disease causing one to two million deaths
each year. A drug manufactured by Triangle Pharmaceutical and tested in
Tennant’s lab was able to reduce the level of hepatitis virus in
the woodchuck’s blood by more than 1,000-fold in only seven days.

Sources:

“CU scientist defends use of animals,” Ithaca Journal, July 9, 1998.

“Born Free,” Ithaca Times, July 8, 1998.

“ALF releases woodchucks from Cornell lab,” Americans for Medical
Progress Foundation release, July 6, 1998.