Renewed fight between Chinese merchants and animal rights activists

Just when it looked like animal
rights activists and merchants in San Francisco’s Chinatown had reached
an uneasy truce, once again the two groups are squaring off over the sale
of live animals in Chinatown’s markets.

For a brief recap, the animal
activists charged live animals being offered for sale in the markets were
being treated cruelly. The merchants argued the activists were interfering
with their traditional cultural practices. The activists sued, but the
whole issue appeared to be resolved when the merchants agreed to abide
by a voluntary code of conduct and the activists agreed, in return, not
to appeal a judge’s ruling against the activists.

The whole agreement broke
down, however, over hard-shell turtles. The merchants currently remove
the turtle’s shell and then cut off the animal’s head, which the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals considers cruel. Instead,
it wants the merchants to cut off the turtle’s head first and then remove
the shell. The merchants argue that because turtles instinctively withdraw
their heads into their shells, trying to cut the head off before removing
the shell is too dangerous.

The markets are very crowded,
and “when you try to chop off (the head)while your finger is right
next to the butcher knife, you have to beware of the workers walking back
and forth behind you,” said Michael Lau who works in the market.
“Sooner or later you’ll chop off something besides the head.”

The ASPCA accuses the merchants
of failing to meet an October deadline for adopting humane practices on
the storage and slaughter of frogs and soft-shell turtles. The merchants,
in response, say the ASPCA never really gave them a fair shot at resolving
the implementation problems.

The ASPCA is now apparently
going to join animal rights groups appealing to the California Fish and
Game Commission seeking legislation to regulate the markets’ treatment
of live animals.

Could animal rights activist be wrong about gene therapy?

For the past few months animal
rights groups and activists have been repeating the same old line about
new advances in Genetic Engineering — it’ll never work, it’s cruel because
some of it uses animals, and it is being pushed just so greedy companies
can bilk people out of their money.

So imagine my surprise when
it was announced this week that the first genetic therapy to correct a
human health problem has been tested and appears to work rather well.
The experiment involved injecting a gene for a protein that helps the
heart build new blood vessels to relieve chest pains from angina. The
16 patients who received the injections of vascular endothelia growth
factor suffer from clogged arteries but were considered to week to undergo
bypass surgery or angioplasty.

Sixteen patients of Dr. Jeffrey
Isner of St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston who suffered from extreme
chest pains with even minor exertions all saw substantial improvements
in their angina. Of 11 patients who were followed up after three months,
six were entirely free of pain.

One of the patients, farmer
Floyd Stokes from DeLeon Texas, described his experience on the new treatment,
“One Sunday morning I woke up and told my wife I hadn’t felt so good
in 15 years. I felt fantastic.”

More studies are required to measure
the long term improvement to decide whether this treatment is more efficacious
than currently available treatments, but so far the results are promising.
Thank goodness these researchers weren’t listening when animal rights
activists said genetic engineering would never work.

Wall Street Journal keeps pressure on Peter Singer and Princeton

A few weeks ago I mentioned
that the Wall Street Journal published two scathing attacks on
Princeton for naming animal rights advocate Peter Singer to the prestigious
position of De Camp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton’s Center for Human
Values. Aside from his position on animal liberation, Singer has argued
for infanticide and involuntary euthanasia for people he claims
aren’t leading lives that have value, such as the severely retarded.

Singer and Princeton recently
launched a counterattack, writing letters to the Journal arguing
that the articles distorted Singer’s views on euthanasia and infanticide,
and claiming academic freedom should allow Singer to make his arguments
and let others decide their validity. Journal columnist William
McGurn effectively debunked both these arguments in the Nov. 13 edition
of the paper.

Has the Journal distorted
Singer’s record? Singer claims he qualifies his support of murder, but
as the Journal points out, those qualifications are rarely very
edifying. For example Singer has written, “We should certainly put
very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions
might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic
wrongness of killing an infant.”

In other words, there’s nothing
wrong per se with killing a severely retarded infant, but certain
restrictions might be necessary to make it appear less horrific to those
of us still squeamish and irrational enough to believe in the sanctity
of human life. As McGurn points out, this only highlights the fundamental
problem with Singer’s utilitarian philosophy — Singer sees human beings
as merely means and never ends in themselves.

Singer also tries to sidestep
the problems with his views by pointing out that technology creates many
of these dilemmas — some severely retarded infants, who in earlier periods
would have died, can now be made to live — and at least he is willing
to debate the issues that technology brings up. McGurn demolishes this
sophistry, writing:

… normally when changing circumstances challenge our principles we
look to adapt them. The Internet, for example, has made things easier
for pedophiles. But we do not conclude that our view of pedophilia is
old-fashioned. It is similarly difficult to believe that the path to
a healthy debate begins with a man whose own starting point is the jettisoning
of the understanding of man’s dignity that has defined Western civilization
for two millennia, and who apparently can’t conceive of someone who
could both understand him and disagree.

Finally, does academic freedom
require universities to hire people who believe infanticide is morally
permissible? McGurn writes that a Princeton spokesperson told him that
Singer’s views fall “this side of the moral divide between moral
debate and Nazism.” This is the standard applied at our elite universities
— as long as someone isn’t an out and out Nazi, he or she is more than
welcome. One wonders what keeps Princeton from being selective enough
to exclude Nazis. Would David Duke be acceptable to Princeton, McGurn
asks, if he had a Ph.D.?

As McGurn sums up his article,
Singer’s appointment “leaves us with one of our most elite universities
anointing an ethicist who can at once argue for the killing of infants
while teaching that drawing a moral distinction between child and chimp
is mere prejudice. And then we wonder why so many of our best and brightest
have such a hard time telling right from wrong.”

Vegetarian Times hack piece against animal testing

The October 1998 issue of Vegetarian Times contained a mostly hack piece against animal testing by freelance
writer Kelly James-Enger. James-Enger’s article does quote Adrian Morrison
as saying, “a careful reading of the historical record [of animal
research] reveals that it’s been absolutely indispensable for discovering
and understanding basic biological processes.”

Unfortunately, James-Enger
never bothers to even try to reconcile or explain this in the context
of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine activist Steven Ragland
who in the very next sentence is quoted as saying, “Humans and animals
differ too much to make animal research useful.”

Using insulin derived from
Pigs to treat Diabetes must then qualify as yet another ineffective and
useless innovation foisted upon the world by the evil drug companies.
But if Ragland and the PCRM say humans and non-humans are too different
to make animal research useful, God forbid if anyone at Vegetarian
Times
should critically examine the claim.

Human testing to begin within a year on monkey AIDS vaccine

An area of testing animal
rights activists claimed would never produce results was AIDS research
with monkeys. Unfortunately for the activists, Australian scientists announced
a breakthrough vaccine that fights off HIV infection in monkeys.

Given to monkeys already
infected with the HIV virus, the vaccine caused their immune systems to
produce large numbers of T cells that rid their systems of the virus.
The vaccine works by exposing the monkeys to a modified form of the HIV
virus which stimulated their immune systems.

Of course monkeys are not
human beings and there is no guarantee the method used here will work
in human beings. The Australian scientists hope to begin human trials
on HIV carriers next year and possibly in non-infected human beings soon
after if those trials prove successful. Even if this vaccine should ultimately
prove itself ineffective in human beings, however, this represents an
important advance in human understanding of HIV and points to ways that
the disease can be attacked and hopefully one day cured.

The big news on the genetic revolution front

It seems like every week brings
new developments and breakthroughs in Genetic Engineering, and few announcements
have been bigger than the report that a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison
scientists were able to cultivate human stem cells. The possibilities
for future medical advances from this discovery are amazing.

The most immediate likely
use of the technology will be new diagnostic tests to screen hundreds
of thousands of compounds for possible medicinal properties. Ironic, isn’t
it — yet another technology that animal rights activists abhor might
ultimately lead to a further reduction in the number of animals used in
the drug development process (makes you kind of wonder where animal
rights activists think alternatives to animal testing come from. Do they
think they just drop from the sky?)

In the long run, the work
with stem cells could lead to all sorts of breathtaking developments from
growing heart muscle and brain tissue for transplantation to enhancing
understanding of the development of human embryos.

“Our hope is that these
cells could be grown in the laboratory and then used to regenerate failing
tissue,” said Thomas Okarma, vice president for research and development
at Geron Corporation, which paid for some of the stem cell research. “Because
these cells do not age, they could be used to generate virtually a limitless
supply of cells and tissues for transplantation.”