It is about terror

Animal rights terrorists and their defenders
usually try to argue they’re only concerned with damaging property
to stop experiments or registering their moral outrage, but a recent release
from |Stop Quintiles’ Animal Tests| (SQAT), reveals the true motives
behind the activists ‘direction action.’

The release described a recent protest at |Quintiles|,
a laboratory that conducts experiments on animals. Fourteen activists
showed up to harass Quintiles employees as they were leaving work. According
to SQAT’s press release, employees “were forced to run a gauntlet
of shouting protesters … and several cars belonging to Quintiles
staff were chase up the road by irate demonstrators.”

And the goal of this protest – to instill
a sense of terror and fear into the researchers.

Fear was evident
on the faces of many of the workers, both inside the lab and as they were
leaving, and several cowered in their cars in response to the verbal onslaught.
Those who cause fear and terror to innocent creatures had been forced,
in some small degree, to experience those feelings themselves.”

Rhetoric almost identical to the pro-life movement’s
strategy of intimidating abortion providers and their clients.

Tumor-destroying virus tested in mice

A reovirus that normally causes mild respiratory
infections in human beings has been found to be an effective killer of
cancerous tumors in mice.

According to a report in Science,
the reovirus uses the Ras pathway in the cells of mice, which normally
regulates cell growth. It is the Ras pathway that is activated in about
75 percent of human cancers.

Other viruses have been found to destroy tumors,
but this is the first virus that uses the Ras pathway. “This is the
pathway everyone wants to target,” said Peter Forsyth, an oncologist
at the University of Calgary. “The treatment is very effective.”

The main advantage of the reovirus is that
it doesn’t seem to affect noncancerous cells. Clinical trials in human
beings are years away, however.

Damned if you do . . .

One of vice-president Al Gore’s big environmental
projects has been to force chemical companies to test thousands of chemicals
already on the market for toxicity – most of these chemicals were
in widespread use before modern safety regulations and thus never went
through the testing regimen that new compounds go through. The Environmental
Protection Agency pressured the Chemical Manufacturers Association into
running a battery of five animal toxicity tests on 3,000 or so chemicals.

The use of animal toxicity tests brought an
objection from the Humane Society of the United States, which wants the
EPA to use this initiative to develop and implement alternatives to animal
testing, saying among other things that “the relevance of all this
animal testing to human safety is questionable, according to several toxicologists
with whom we have conferred.”

According to HSUS, the LD50 test (which establishes
the dose level that kills 50 percent of the experimental animals) is “widely
criticized on humane and scientific grounds.”

In fact, if interpreted properly, the LD50
tests still give important information about toxicity that can’t be gleaned
solely from the tissue and cell culture alternatives that HSUS and other
animal rights organizations push.

Those tests certainly have their place,
especially for establishing potential toxicity before conducting animal
tests, but there is still an enormous gap between testing on isolated
tissues and cells and testing on a whole organism.

Do other primates deserve the same rights as human beings?

A group of New Zealand activists calling itself
the Great Ape Project of New Zealand recently asked that nation to amend
its constitution to grant great apes the same rights as human beings.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos would be given the same
legal right to life and freedom from torture and invasive surgery that
humans have.

According to David Penny of the Great Ape Project,
“There is now a mountain of evidence that the great apes are as intelligent
as young human children and very similar in their emotional and cognitive
development.”

PETA demands withdrawal Nike commercial

Coming on the heels of its complaints
about commercials featuring National Football League defenseman John Randle
chasing a chicken dressed as Brett Favre, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is demanding Nike withdraw a commercial featuring the NFL’s
Denver Broncos.

The commercial parodies the running
of the bulls in Spain. The viewer sees the bulls stampeding down a street
and a matador waiting for them in a large stadium. Before the bulls can
get to the stadium, though, the Denver Broncos defense lines up in formation
on the street. The commercial cuts back to the stadium where the matador
is perplexed by a loud crash and then wailing of bulls in the distance.

According to a PETA press release,
the commercial “promotes animal torment and cruelty.” Personally,
I thought the commercial was hilarious.

Source:

PETA sees red over Broncos Nike Ad. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Press Release, October 12, 1998.

Will transplant recipients be less than human?

Animal rights activists seem to
be increasingly desperate in their fight against Xenotransplantation
the transplanting of organs and tissues from animals into human beings.
First, they argued such transplantation simply wouldn’t work. After
that argument failed, they argued there were enormous dangers of passing
diseases between animals and humans. Now that the evidence indicates this
risk is minimal, the activists are pulling out the big guns in their rhetorical
grab bag – people who receive animal organs aren’t really human.

According to Gill Langley, who
co-wrote a recent report on xenotransplantation for the
British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and Compassion in World Farming, “The
human xenotransplantation patient will become a literal chimera. It sounds
like scare-mongering, but let me assure you that the word chimera is being
used by xenotransplant scientists.”

Scare-mongering? From an animal rights
activist?

If the thought of being less than
human isn’t enough, Langley’s report warns that patients whose
lives are saved by these new technologies (which he still claims won’t
work) could face unknown psychological consequences.

So this is the justification
that animal rights activists are going to present to the 50,000 people
in Europe alone who are waiting to receive organs? Xenotransplantation
must be stopped to prevent those dying individuals from becoming less
than human and suffering the attendant psychological side effects. Better
dead than depressed?

Source:

Activists say animal transplants make us less human. Reuters, October 13, 1998.