cc >> Eric Sandreng: The purpose
is to increase public discussion and understanding of issues
surrounding animal research and to provide an opportunity for
interested parties, and there are a lot of interested parties
in this city, to discuss the complex issues that are
associated with use of animals in research.
Now animals in research is a very emotional issue.
It's a very complicated issue. Passions run high and I think
it's remarkable that we find ourselves in a state right now
where this is probably the least contentious issue that's being
discussed. But maybe that's a good start.
That's really where we want to take this anyway.
So there is a long list of people that I would like thank,
and I'll do by saying thank you, people.
But I do want to point out a few people.
There was a forum planning group that was helping to put this
together, and although the people on the group have quite
different perspectives regarding the use of animals in research,
we share tremendous passion about that issue.
And actually we also share a very strong desire to bring this
issue out into the public to have discussions like that.
And I would like those of you who are here from that forum to
stand up for a minute, please. [APPLAUSE]
Thank you all very much. Tonight, we're going to hear
from Dr. Larry Hansen, a neuroscientist at the University
of California San Diego. I will let him do most of the
introducing. And after he is finished
speaking, we will have a chance to ask and have Larry answer or
try to answer questions. The purpose, as I said, one of
the purposes of this forum is to really try to reach an
understanding, so we are inviting speakers that come at
the issues of animals and research from multiple
perspectives. So I would encourage you all to
clap for the speaker and those you who agree with him can cheer
and then the others, try to ask some probing questions.
Let's really try to have an outstanding discussion about
this. Again, that's really part of
what this is all for. With that, I will mention at the
end that I will be kind of running the questions at the
end, and I've seen in the past there are times where people get
up and give mini lecture, either as a preface to a question and
maybe that's all they're doing, and I'll try to discourage that
tonight. Try to keep your questions to
under about 30 seconds. And if it's getting a bit long,
I may stand up. Otherwise I'm ready now to turn
it over to our speaker, and I'm very honored to have you as the
kick-off speaker to this forum. Thank you, Larry.
[APPLAUSE] >> Lawrence Hansen: Thank you
very much. I feel very honored to be the
initial speaker for this, I think very important, forum.
And I appreciate the privilege of getting a chance to talk to
you people about something that matters a lot to me.
And it's funny, I find myself kind of nervous and anxious
about this. I am a blatherer by trade.
I talk all the time. And yet when I find myself
talking about animal welfare issues and animal research, it
just sort of goes up a notch, and I find myself much more
emotional about it than when I'm teaching generic neuropathology
or neuroanatomy. So you have to forgive me if I
sound more anxious than usual. Trust me, I could bore the pants
off of you if we were talking about anything over than animals
and research. I want to start by tooting my
own horn. There are few more obnoxious
sounds than someone tooting their own horn.
And so I blame this on my wife because she was helping me
prepare this, and she said, first of all, you have to show
them your credentials. And I said, but that's very
self-aggrandizing and it's kind of embarrassing.
And she goes, trust me, no one will pay any attention to you
unless you establish your credentials; I'm married to you
and I don't pay any attention to you.
[LAUGHTER] So you have to tell them why you
have an opinion about this as a result of your life experience
and research and medicine. And I was having a discussion
with some members of the panel earlier about words and how
important words are, and I'm kind of a word nut, as a matter
of fact, and probably because I was a literature major.
And so words are a big deal to me.
And I always teach by going back to the etymology of words, and I
always say if you have to have a conflict about what a word
means, we'll go to the dictionary.
And Noah Webster is trump in what a word actually means.
The interesting thing about words, of course, is that words
don't just describe reality, words create reality.
And people know that and they try to frame arguments and they
try to influence conclusions by the way words are used.
So we have to be very careful about words.
But I'm going to be using some words today that will be, some
people would say, are inflammatory or emotional, and
so every time that happens we're going to go back and touch base
with what the dictionary definition is and see if that
isn't a valid application of word.
Speaking of words, credentials comes from the same root as
credibility and credence and Latin for trustworthiness.
So this is supposed to make you trust me because I've been
looking at medical practice and I've been looking at teaching
and research for a long time. The medical, oops, I didn't mean
to do that. The thing about credentials, I
like credentials, they get you a job and then they get you
promotions and all, but every once and a while they take you
to strange places like Madison, Wisconsin, in the dead of
winter. And the reason I've gotten
involved in animal issues is some medical students initially
came up to me when I was teaching medical students, and I
also practice medicine, and these students at UCSD, and all
of the stuff that I'm talking about that I can vouch for is
from UCSD. I have reason to believe that
much of it is similar to what goes on at the University of
Wisconsin, but I want to stipulate that I can be an
expert on the University of California use of animals and a
couple other contexts. And I will defer to local
authorities as to whether that applies to what's going on at
the University of Wisconsin. Anyhow, at UCSD some medical
students came up to me and said you make no secret for your love
of dogs, do you know they're still killing dogs in freshman
physiology and pharmacology. And I said, no, I didn't know
that. And then they asked me, well you
practice medicine, they tell us that you need to kill these dogs
in order to be a doctor, and we want to know if that's true.
And I said, no, it's clearly not true.
And one of my guilty secrets in the past is when I was a medical
student I killed dogs. I killed a dog in physiology and
I killed another dog in surgery because they told me to do it,
and I was just too gutless to stand up to authority figures at
the time. And now that I've been
practicing medicine for a long time, I realize how unnecessary
that was. I often get stumped by a
diagnosis. I do clinical pathology.
I look at brain tumors from all over the community and even all
over the world actually. So I'm something of an expert in
brain tumors, and sometimes I get a brain tumor and I don't
know what it is. And I have to show it to
colleagues and do special stains and I have to weasel and
equivocate, and I've never been in a clinical situation where
I've thought if I only killed more dogs I'd be able to help
this patient. So I told the students, no, you
don't need to kill dogs to be a doctor but don't take my word
for it. So we organized a Doctors
Against Dogs Lab, and we got 300 San Diego physicians to sign a
petition urging the physiology and pharmacology faculty not to
kill dogs. We said, we're it doctors, we
know you don't need to do this, don't kill the dogs.
But they were PhDs and they thought they knew what it took
to be an MD. And we said, you're not even
doctors, not real doctors, no offense, but you don't practice
medicine. And it got to be a big brouhaha.
So that's how I got started in animals.
And then some notoriety came from that, and I was contacted
by an animal welfare group that asked me to look at a grant that
contended it was going to help find the cause and cure of
Alzheimer's disease. And it was a primate vivisection
grant, and it had to do with looking at the visual pursuit,
smooth visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
And I'm going to talk about that at some length because I got a
copy of the grant and I read it and I realized they had to work
hard to find a system less related to Alzheimer's disease
than the vestibulo-ocular reflex and smooth visual pursuit.
It has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease.
So I went up to San Francisco and tried to persuade their
board of supervisors to prohibit this particular experiment that
was going on at UCSF. It's a funny paradox.
The two places that I always think of as the most liberal,
the most knee-jerk liberal places are the People's Republic
of Berkeley around San Francisco and the People's Republic of
Madison. And those are the two places
where they do the most primate vivisection.
It seems very odd to me. Anyhow, so that's how I got
involved in all this stuff. The tenure is kind of nice.
It allows me to come here and make these kinds of
presentations and they can't fire me.
So that's how I got started with this.
And so today I want to talk about the ethics and efficacy of
experimentation on animals, common ground or no man's land.
Three things. Ethics, is it right or wrong?
It is a good thing to do or is it a bad thing to do?
And efficacy is, does it work? Does it produce the result that
it promises to produce? If a primate vivisection
experiment is sold as this is going to help find the cause and
cure of Alzheimer's disease, is there any evidence that that's
true? And wouldn't that change our
final conclusion? Do the ends justify the means?
Basically the ethics of doing research on animals, as far as I
can tell, always come down to do the ends justify the means.
So we have so know what are the ends.
Are the ends to learn more about visual tracking?
Are the ends to learn more about the vestibulo-ocular reflex?
Are the ends to increase our basic neuroscience knowledge of
neurophysiology? And if those are the ends, then
the question is, is it worth making the monkeys go through
some pretty horrible experiences to do that?
Or do you want to raise the ante and say, well, no, the ends are
to cure human diseases, and if this will cure human disease
maybe we would be willing to do something to monkey that we
wouldn't be willing to do if it was just to find out more about
the neurophysiology of the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
So that's efficacy. Does it work or not?
And experimentation on animals, again I wanted define terms very
carefully, we're only concerned with experiments that hurt
animals. Nobody cares, and in fact we
kind of like if Jane Goodall wants to crouch behind a bush
and take notes on what the chimps in Gambi are doing.
And I know a guy who does experiments on dog intelligence
and people bring their dogs. And they love it.
It's like when you do infant development experiments and
people bring their babies and they find out how smart their
babies are. So nobody cares.
That's great. Love those experiments.
We're only concerned with experiments that harm animals,
physically, which is vivisection, and I'll define
that in a minute, or psychologically.
Harry Harlow is a big hero around here I notice.
But he really did pretty horrible things.
He did what I think of as psychological vivisection.
He managed to prove that you can make a monkey fearful, neurotic,
miserable, almost suicidal, and he proved that that happens when
babies don't have their mothers. And in California the kids would
kind of go, well duh. But anyhow, I think some
psychological treatment of animals amounts to psychological
vivisection, but that's kind of a stretch for the definition.
So let's define our terms. Ethics of experimentation on
animals. We're first going to look at the
ethics, is it right to do this or is it wrong to do this?
And then we're going to look at the efficacy.
Do the experiments produce the promised results?
So first of all, history gives us no reason, no reason to think
that the ethics of scientists are any better than the ethics
of nonscientists. Quite the opposite, in fact.
You can do some very efficacious science that's totally
unethical. And you probably are all
familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the
Guatemalan syphilis experiments and the Willowbrook hepatitis
experiments. And in my field there's a
disease called Hallervorden-Spatz disease which
was named after Dr. Hallervorden, who was a
Nazis, no hyperbole, no exaggeration, really a Nazi
doctor. And he was interested in some
mentally impaired children. And as long as they were
exterminating them anyway he said, listen, boys, bring me
those kids' brains. And he published 12 papers after
the war and it was good science. There's no doubt about it;
it was good science. It was valid science.
We still know that the disease that he described causes certain
signs and symptoms. The confusion comes when we
start talking about good science but science isn't good or bad.
Science is an amoral enterprise. Science, when we talk about good
science what we really mean is valid science, reproducible
science, science that teaches us something about the way the
world or the way animals or the way humans work.
That's valid science. But it gets confusing when we
start to say that's good science.
It's not good in the moral or ethical sense, it's simply valid
science. And efficacy and ethics are
uncorrelated domains. There's no reason to think as
efficacy goes up, ethics goes up or that it goes down.
There's no relationship at all. It might be very efficacious if
somebody really annoys you to shoot them in the head.
That's very efficacious but it's not very ethical.
So there's no relation. No inherent relationship between
ethics and efficacy. And it's confusing to talk about
good science versus bad science when people think good and bad
means right or wrong. And then if I was making these
slides again, I think I would have made a separate slide with
just this sentence on it and I would highlight and underline it
and put an asterisk by it. That like-minded people in
groups gravitate to the more extreme positions held in
common. And I think that's the
foundation of all of this conflict.
And that was discovered by psychologists, group
psychologists, and they didn't bolt anybody into a chair or
drill any holes in their skulls or anything.
They did very ethical experiments, and they found it's
a little bit counterintuitive but you get like-minded people
and they don't gravitate towards a bell curve in the middle of
their commonalities. They skew to the far left or to
the far right. It's a little funny.
So liberals who only hang out with liberals don't end up being
sort of moderately left of center, they become very
liberal. And the same thing with
conservatives. And if you don't believe that,
all you have to do is channel surf over to Keith Olbermann for
a while. And he's funny.
I enjoy Keith Olbermann. And he's ranting and raving and
he's frothing at the mouth about liberal causes.
And then, for a change of pace, you can go listen to Glenn Beck.
And you realize oh, my God, like-minded people in groups
gravitate to extreme positions. And they've lost their reality
testing. And I think that explains a lot
of what goes on in what I call vivisection, and I'll define
that term in a bit, is that people who do it and the people
who approve it have already concluded that it's okay and
then they become increasingly extreme.
I'm going to show some pictures of primate vivisections, and
when I was getting this talk ready some of my best friends
are vivisectors in one sense. I work in a neuroscience
laboratory. I work with guys who do rat and
mouse work. They don't really vivisect.
They create transgenic mouse models.
And then after a while they test the mice to see how smart or
stupid they are and then they kill them.
That's not quite the same thing as vivisection.
They don't actually operate on them while they're alive.
Anyhow, they walked in while I was getting some of these
pictures ready of some of the primate research and they
recoiled in horror. They go, oh, come on, nobody
does that. And I said, yeah, people do
this. I mean, they said things like
those pictures must be fake. And I said, no, they're not
fake. And this is from people who
actually experiment on animals for a living but they're just
rat and mice men. And when I was protesting
outside the neuroscience convention, there was a big
neuroscience convention in San Diego, and I'm like a dork.
I'm holding up a sign with a vivisected primate on it.
It was surprising how many of the neuroscientists who would
come by and they'd say, geez, that's terrible, I only use rats
and mice, I'd never do such a thing.
And the problem is, again, this like-minded people in groups
gravitating to the extreme position held in common.
And that's actually, I'm going to come up with a solution to
all of this. And I'm sure everyone will agree
at the end and will fall into each other's arms and sing
Kumbaya, I think ethical determinations about doing
science should not be left to the scientists because the
scientists are the least qualified people to make ethical
determinations. Their ethics are no better than
ours. Well, I'm a scientist so I kind
of want to play both sides of the street.
But the ethics of a scientist is in no way better than the ethics
of a nonscientist. And history actually indicates
they might be worse. They have all the expertise in
the world to talk about efficacy, about how to do
something, but they're not the ones to say whether or not we
should do it. Just like the war is too
important to be left to generals, I think ethical
decisions about whether or not to do vivisections should not be
left to vivisectors. In law, there's the term a
recusal. They're the first people who
should be recusing themselves. The people who tend to profit,
literally profit in that they make money and profit in their
careers and their publications and their research agendas,
they'd have to be saints not to be influenced by that.
But the way the system is set up now they're the ones who make
the decision as to whether or not we should proceed with
primate vivisection. They're the ones who populate
the IACUCs. I apologize for dropping
acronyms, but everybody knows what an IACUC is, right?
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, IACUCs.
Okay. So back to words again.
And I've already gotten into, I wouldn't call it a disagreement
or an argument, but I've already gotten into a semi-spirited
discussion as to whether it's fair to talk about vivisection.
And people sure do like to spin. You might not like Bill O'Reilly
but I like his concept of a no spin zone.
And I think we should use words the way the dictionary defines
them. And everybody is guilty of
trying to spin or slant or euphemize or frame an issue to
lead to a forgone conclusion, and it drives me mad.
And so here I'll be an equal opportunity offender.
I can piss off the pro-abortion people and the antiabortion
people and the conservatives and the liberals because everybody
does it. Everybody thinks their cause is
so just that it's fair to spin or slant or distort.
And here's one more unnecessary offense to the audience, I'm an
animal rights guy, I love dogs and all that kind of stuff, but
here's an offensive metaphor to use.
I don't have a dog in this fight about abortion, I don't feel
strongly about it. So I can see both sides trying
to manipulate people in the middle.
For example, antiabortion tells you exactly what these people
believe. They think we shouldn't do
abortions. But instead they want to be
called pro-life. Well, who's not pro-life?
A lot of people are pro-life. But the antiabortion people
aren't necessarily pro-life not otherwise specified.
They might agree in capital punishment or they might be
carnivores and like to eat steaks and they want the cows to
get killed. It's a world of difference
between pro-life and being antiabortion.
And the pro-abortion people are just as bad.
They think abortion sounds kind of nasty.
Who wants to be pro-abortion? So they're pro-choice.
Well, who doesn't like choice? Everybody likes choice.
But the pro-abortion people don't really mean choice not
otherwise specified. They might not want you to have
a choice to go to a gun show and buy an assault rifle.
They just want the people to be able to have abortions.
So call it pro-abortion, call it antiabortion.
And this kind of stuff goes on and on.
Government revenue enhancement instead of taxes.
Government investment instead of spending.
Affirmative action instead of quotas.
And this was big in Vietnam when I was dodging the draft, the
preemptive reactive strike. So, well, this is really an
attack. A preemptive reactive strike.
They used that term, the military guys.
And then I always kind of liked, this came out in the Gulf War,
servicing a target with ordinance as opposed to bombing.
Maybe it would be better to say bombing.
And one of my personal favorites is a long time ago they changed
the name of the War Department to the Defense Department, and
then more recently, of course, in the Iran-Iraq war we have
enhanced interrogation techniques instead of torture.
So let's all lay down our arms for spinning and let's go to the
dictionary. And I brought this definition
from a book called Medical Meanings because I always teach
with etymology and it gives you the etymology of words.
And so I got this from Medical Meanings, 2nd edition.
I didn't make it up. This is how vivisection is
defined. Let's call a thing by its right
name. Vivisection is the performance
of experimental surgical procedures on living animals,
especially in the pursuit of biomedical research.
From the Latin viverae, to be alive, and secare, to cut.
So we're talking about primate vivisection.
And animal researchers, like all the rest of us, kind of like to
make themselves sound as inoffensive as possible.
So a lot of my vivisection colleagues will say we're
biomedical researchers. There's a lot of biomedical
research that doesn't involve vivisection.
So they're spinning. Or they'll say, we're research
neuroscientists. There's a lot of research
neuroscientists like myself that don't vivisect.
So let's just call it vivisection.
And then, is vivisection cruelty?
Well, I'll run the risk of being offensive but we'll go back to
Noah Webster's dictionary. It seems like a fair, unbiased
source. Noah Webster didn't have a dog
in this fight either when he wrote the dictionary.
So is vivisection cruelty? Well, the definition of cruelty
is disposed to inflict pain or suffering.
So it could even be psychological but certainly it's
physical. Causing or conductive to injury,
grief. So that could be psychological
or pain. So are vivisectors engaged in
cruelty to animals? Are vivisectors engaged in
torturing animals? And, again, some people will say
you're using emotional language. You're being emotional and not
rational. I don't know how to be more
rational than to go to the dictionary and check it out.
Look at the definition of torture.
Torture is anguish, that's basically really bad cruelty, of
mind or body, agony. And I came across this while I
was preparing these slides. United Nations' definition of
torture which I'm not saying applies to vivisectors.
It comes close but it drops off by one word.
United Nations talked about torture is and act by which pain
or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining
information. So if you take out the person
part, that's a pretty good definition of animal research.
I mean, the animal researchers, I do not believe, the
vivisectors, I do not believe, are sadists.
I believe they are doing this to get information.
And they are willing to do it to get information.
And it's kind of like that same question about do the ends
justify the means? And when they were using
enhanced interrogation techniques in Iran and Iraq, or
waterboarding, they would say, well, we need to get this
information to save American lives.
And if you had a guy and you were sure he knew that a plane
was going to hit the World Trade Center and you could get that
information from him, you might say go ahead and torture him.
Because you'd save 3,000 lives. Do the ends justify the means?
On the other hand, these were just Joe Shmoe Iranians or
Iraqis or whatever they were that were in prison and they
were kind of torturing them to keep them in line, maybe the
ends don't justify the means. But I think that you can
certainly say vivisection meets this definition except that it's
applied to an animal instead of to a person.
So by definition, Noah Webster's definition, all vivisection is
at least cruelty to animals and some rises to the level of
torturing animals. And if you want to contend that
cruelty and torture are too strong to be accurate, ask
yourself this question: if they were doing it to me, would I
consider that I was being treated with cruelty?
If they were doing it to me, would I consider I was being
treated or tortured? And if the answer is yes, it
would be cruelty to me or torture to me, then it's cruelty
or torture to the other primates.
Or so I believe. We should not shy away from
brutal words if we are unwilling to shy away from brutal deeds,
so I believe. I know that some of the
vivisectors, some of the animal researchers, biomedical
researchers, are thinking that these are pretty strong words,
pretty tough talk. How many people have seen the
movie True Grit? In the classic John Wayne
version there's this scene where the duke is at one end of a
valley and he tells Ned Pepper, he says, I mean to kill you,
Ned, or take you to Fort Smith where you'll hang at Judge
Parker's convenience. And Ned pepper, who is played by
Robert Duvall, goes, I call that pretty bold talk from a one-eyed
fat man. So he might say, hey, cruelty,
torture, I call that pretty bold talk from a skinny-ass
Californian. So let me see if I can prove to
you that this is cruelty or torture if you ask yourself the
question, would it be cruelty or torture if it was done to me?
So, again, I want to not wander off and make overarching
statements. I want to talk about my
experience. Stuff I can back up, I have
documentation, I have copies of the grants where these things
are described. And this is the one I got
involved in at the University of California San Francisco when
initially some animal welfare people said this grant in its
introduction says that these experiments will help find a
cure or a cause for Alzheimer's disease and we wonder, you being
an Alzheimer's expert, is that true?
And so this is what they do to the macaques, the monkeys in
this grant. And I'm told that similar stuff
goes on at University of Wisconsin, but I know this goes
on at University of California San Francisco.
So this is a grant looking at the smooth visual pursuit.
So it's studying how we track moving objects which is actually
pretty cool. I'm a neuroscientists, I'm a
neuroanatomist, I think that's cool.
How do we track an object across our visual field.
We can do it smoothly if we're following an object, but if we
try to just move our eyes in that same arch we do it
herky-jerky. So that's interesting.
How do you manage to smoothly pursue a moving object.
And it also studies the vestibulo-ocular reflex, and
that's the hook up between your inner ear and your eye muscles.
And in clinical practice sometimes people get nystagmus
so their eyes beat in different directions.
And sometimes, not that it's ever happened to me, but if a
cop pulls you over for a drunk test, he'll have you follow his
finger and he's looking for nystagmus because that's a
manifestation of impaired vestibulo-ocular reflex.
So it's all very interesting neurophysiology, no question
about it. And it's actually valid science.
But in order to study those things this is what they do to
these macaques. They put titanium plates and
bone screws into their skulls so that they can put the monkey
into a frame and he can't move his head because if you're going
to measure his eye movement you can't have the head moving
around. And they put eye coils into the
sclera of the monkey's eyes. And they put a cylindrical
recording chamber into the monkey's skull so that they can
put an electrode through the recording chamber and insert it
into the monkey's brain so that they can measure the activity of
individual neurons. And they implant similar chronic
electrodes into the monkey's cerebellum so they measure the
activity of the follicular nodular lobe.
And they put vision distorting spectacles on the monkey, and
they have to wear them for 12 weeks.
And they put these cylinders actually in the monkey's skull
bone. The mastoid process of the
temporal bone is where your inner ear is, and that's where
the vestibular apparatus is, and to study the vestibulo-ocular
reflex you have to know what the vestibular apparatus is doing so
you have to put a cylinder in there inside the bone.
So that's a lot of manipulations.
That's a lot of surgeries. If they did it to me, I'd say I
was being treated with cruelty. In fact, I would say I was being
tortured. And you can ask yourselves
whether this would amount to cruelty or torture or not.
And then, and this is kind of the over the top frosting on the
cake, is after all that's done to the monkey, the monkey, in
order to get the data that the researchers need, has to
voluntarily track a moving object so they can record what's
going on with the eyes and what's going on in the
cerebellum and what's going on in the cerebrum and what's going
on in the vestibular apparatus and that doesn't work unless the
monkey has his head immobilized and you can see what his eyes
are doing. But the monkeys don't want to do
that. The monkeys, to be fair, are
pretty pissed off. And I can understand them.
So to get the monkeys to do it, they fluid deprive them so that
they are dehydrated. And then they put a little hose
in their mouth so if the monkey tracks, does his trick so that
they can get their readings, he gets a sip of water.
And I've read this grant and I was just amazed and I recoiled
in horror from it and I found out that the monkeys can't even
drink their fill on the weekend because they have to be thirsty
to get to work on Monday. And they describe this as fluid
deprivation to provide a work ethic.
A work ethic. Now that's spinning for you.
Nobody objects to a work ethic but you might object to fluid
deprivation. And then, and this is the point
where they kind of lose me, I'm actually being very serious
about this, but in general I get in trouble for being very
politically incorrect and I make jokes all the time and I get
called to the Dean's office for too much horsing around.
I agree with Oscar Wilde that life is far too important to
take seriously. Except I get serious about this
primate vivisection stuff and dog vivisection and cat
vivisection. But I wonder, are these guys
trying to be funny. This is from the grant and this
is a quote from the grant is "that collars can be hooked with
a pole to allow us to escort the monkeys to a specially designed
primate chair." I'm thinking, are these guys
like Snidely Whiplash or Simon Legree?
Are they twirling their mustache and they're saying we can escort
them to a specially designed primate chair?
I mean, that's not the image that comes to mind with escort
services. That's not what an escort
service does. You'd have to pay plenty to get
an escort service. They hook them up with collars
and they drag them by poles. They're not escorting them to a
specially designed primate chair.
It's an especially designed chair in the same sense that the
electric chair is specially designed.
So when I read this, I wonder are they kidding around or do
they just want to use words in a very special way.
It sounds much better to say we're escorting them to a
specially designed chair than we're dragging them to be
trussed up and have their heads bolted into a frame.
And these are some pictures of these guys.
So this is a picture a friend of mine took of Frick.
And Frick is a macaque and he's from the University of Utah and
he's in one of these experiments.
And here's his collar that you can hook up with a pole and
here's his head with the bolts and the plates in it and here's
Frick in his cage. And it's my impression, it's my
contention actually, that first impressions about cruelty to
animals are very reliable. They're almost never wrong.
When you see an animal and you think it is being treated with
cruelty, there's almost never an explanation, oh, I was wrong
about that. I think first impressions are
very valid. So here's the first impression.
This is what they are doing to Frick to learn about smooth
visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
And these are some pictures that friends of mine took from
Covance, and this is Covance in Vienna, Virginia.
And Covance I guess is a major player in the primate
vivisection world out here too. So these are other experiments
that are going on at Covance. And it's kind of hard to see
what's going on here. You say, what is this?
This guy has got his gloves on and he's on top of this
cylinder, this tube, what's going on in that tube?
You can't really see it too well, I'm sorry, there's a
monkey in there. There's a primate in there and
he's in this clear plastic cylinder with his arms pinned
down like that to immobilize him so that they can do more
research on him. And so ask yourself if they slid
you into a clear plastic tube and immobilized you, would you
conclude you were being treated with cruelty or would you
conclude that you were being tortured?
And here's a monkey at Covance again.
He's stretched out on a rack. And here's something to age me.
Look away from the gruesome picture and I noticed that there
are some gray hairs in the audience along with my own gray
beard. By the way, short term, this is
a tangent, but I noticed you have a lot of Lincoln stuff.
Lincoln is a big hero of mine. And Lincoln supposedly was
sitting with his attorney general and the attorney general
had a white beard like I did and he had completely black hair.
And so somebody said, how come your hair is black and your
beard is white? And Lincoln said, it's obvious,
he talks more than he thinks. So I see some gray hair here.
Obviously I talk more than I think.
But is there enough gray hair that anybody besides me
remembers the Art Linkletter House Party show?
Art Linkletter was great, and he had a segment called "Kids Say
the Darndest Things." And so it's been my experience,
because I work at an animal research intensive university,
that vivisectors say the darndest things.
When I discussed these kinds of issues that I think this is
wrong, an ethical judgment, one of my, and he's a friend, as
close as I can be to a friend with a vivisector, he said, no,
the animals don't suffer that much.
And I'm going, wow, what would it take before you say that
much? I mean, why isn't this that
much? And he dismisses it.
And then I was watching a taped presentation from one of these
sessions where one of the faculty members said one of the
darndest things. He said that this is a sacrifice
that we are willing to make to advance the health of our own
species. And that reminded me, speaking
of old fuddy-duddy stuff, about the old joke from Tonto and the
Lone Ranger where they're surrounded by Indians and the
Lone Ranger says, we are in a lot of trouble, Tonto.
And Tonto goes, what do you mean we, white man.
So we are willing to make this sacrifice to improve the health
of our own species. The guy on the table is not the
vivisector. The guy standing up is the
vivisector. The guy on the table is the one
that's being sacrificed. And it's not even a sacrifice in
the old testament sense of the word.
In the old testament you would burn the fatted calf.
You had an animal that mattered to you.
An animal that you were going to eat or you were going to sheer
and you gave it up to please God.
You give up something that you value.
Obviously they don't value these monkeys, and they're not even
their monkeys, they are our monkeys.
We buy these monkeys. These are taxpayers' dollars for
these monkeys. [APPLAUSE]
So they're not even sacrificing their own animals.
So that was a weird thing. To is a sacrifice we are willing
to make to advance the health of our own species.
And another one of the darndest things they said was when I was
trying to end the dog labs, one of the physiology professors
came to my office, and he said, Hanson, I don't see what your
problem is. He goes, to me there's just a
thick black line between humans and animals.
And I thought, what kind of physiologist are you?
That's the strangest thing in the world for a physiologist to
say. I mean, if evolution teaches us
anything, if science teaches us anything, if biology teaches us
anything it's that there's no thick black line between humans
and other animals. But the vivisectors, they really
want to have it both ways. They want to say that there's
this thick black line so we don't need to treat animals the
way we would want to be treated and we don't need to worry about
their pain and their suffering and their fear and their terror
because there's this thick black line.
And then the anti-vivisectors will say well then there's no
justification for doing this because you can't get valuable
data to improve the health of your own species because the
animals are so different from us.
And they go oh, no, they're close enough for that.
They're similar enough to us that we get valuable data but
they're not similar enough that we have to treat them the way we
would want to be treated. So it seems to me they kind of
want to have it both ways. Vivisectors say the darndest
things. And here's that poor monkey
stretched out, not suffering that much, according to some of
my friends. And that sacrifice thing is
interesting too because, like I said, the people on my floor,
and some of these guys are my friends, I'm not happy with what
they're doing but they don't vivisect, they just make
transgenic mouse models and then they kill them.
But when they get ready to kill them, I hear them talking in the
halls, they never say kill. They never say kill these mice,
we got to go down and kill these mice.
It's always sack. We got to sack, sack, sack.
And so I asked them, why do you say sack?
And they say, it's short for sacrifice.
And I say, why do you say sacrifice?
And they say, because we're sacrificing them.
And I say, you're sacrificing them for your interest and
that's not the way a sacrifice was supposed to go in the old
testament. You're supposed to sacrifice
something, anyway they want to use sacrifice.
It's back to words again. They don't want to walk around
saying kill, kill, kill even though that's what they're
doing. So we use words to disguise the
truth from ourselves, or so it seems to me.
So, okay, the last picture before we go on to the next
topic is this is a guy in one of those specially designed primate
chairs. Sorry it doesn't project very
well. But here his feet are tied and
his tail is tied and his chest is squashed in there and I'm not
sure which experiment they're doing on them because his head
isn't bolted so he might not be in one of these vestibulo-ocular
reflex visual tracking, but if they were doing this to me, I'd
think I was being treated with cruelty.
Okay, so let's switch to efficacy.
I think, the vivisectors can correct me on this, but my
understanding is that their argument is that the ends
justify the means. That's pretty much it,
ethically. That we are doing this in order
to do improve the health of our own species and, therefore, the
monkeys are just kind of screwed.
Or we're doing this just to advance our knowledge base.
Knowledge is good; science is good.
I'm a scientist myself. I've got lots of publications.
I do science. I'm a huge fan of science.
And so some of the vivisectors would say, well we're doing this
to increase our knowledge about the neuro control of eye
movement during smooth visual pursuit and the vestibulo-ocular
reflex. Is that fair?
Yes. Is that true?
Yes. They are doing that.
They are accomplishing that. It is good science.
And then the question is, but look at the cost to that monkey.
And they would say things like well it's a sacrifice we're
willing to make, but that's because they're like-minded
people in groups. I think if you were to get a
sample of Wisconsin citizens and ask them is it worth it to learn
yet more. These experiments have been
going on for 30 years about visual pursuit and
vestibulo-ocular reflex, maybe the people of Madison would
disagree with that. But the like-minded people in
groups are influenced by that phenomenon that a skew to the
extreme position where pretty much anything goes.
But okay, be fair. It does increase our scientific
knowledge. And then does doing this to
Frick advance the health of our own species?
Well, that's interesting. Another one of the strangest
things vivisectors say, I published on this at the
Chronicle of Higher Education, and one of the kind irate
letters I got back from a vivisector because I was saying
how this has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease, he said,
Dr. Hansen cannot possibly know that it is beyond the realm of
possibility that someday, somehow this will affect human
health. Well, you got me.
I mean, it's pretty damn hard to prove anything is beyond the
realm of possibility that someday, somehow.
And what that means is for them anything goes.
Because nothing is beyond the realm of possibility that
someday, somehow. But I would suggest that if
you're not in that like-minded group of people skewed over to
the left before you would allow this much pain and suffer, you'd
want a more direct connection to how it is going to help people.
And even then some people would say it's not worth it.
Opinions would vary as to whether the ends justify the
means. And what I have found, at least
in this study, and I don't know if people in Wisconsin do this
or not, this is from the grant, this is from the grant when I
first got involved, they said this may allow us to find the
cause and ultimately the cure for many diseases of learning
and memory such as Alzheimer's disease.
Nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease.
Monkeys don't get Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer's disease does not affect the visual tracking
system. Alzheimer's disease does not
affect the vestibular nuclei. It doesn't affect the cerebellar
flocculus nodular lobe. It doesn't affect the ocular
motor nuclei. Nothing to do with Alzheimer's
disease. And I've been following them
around for years now making this point.
And when the grant came up for renewal, perhaps I flatter
myself, but I notice now because it's been going on for 20 years
they took out the Alzheimer's. And the newest incarnation of
the grant says it's going to shed light on the normal
functions and pathways that are compromised in many strokes and
motor disorders and potentially lead to new therapies for
assisting recovery from strokes. Strokes?
It's got less to do with strokes than it does with Alzheimer's
disease. Strokes are all about blood
flow. They're all about
atherosclerosis, stenosis, thrombosis, ischemia,
withholding blood, tissue death, infarction.
I'm a stroke guy. I know at least as much about
strokes as I do Alzheimer's disease.
It has nothing to do with strokes or recovery from
strokes. So why do they do this?
I think that they do this in an attempt to deceive.
Although, like-minded people in groups, if you hooked them up to
a lie detector they would say well it's not beyond the realm
of possibility that someday, somehow this will have something
to do with strokes so I'm not telling a lie.
One of the more honest responses I got after I published that
article was from somebody who does this kind of primate
research, and he said that's just grantsmanship.
He goes, those of us who approve or disprove primate research, we
never pay any attention to whether it has any application
to human disease. All we care about is it good
science. So I got to respect the guy to
his honesty. And I think that's usually the
case is all they care about is good science.
But they want to make you care about it because I think that
most of you, or at least a lot of people I know, would say this
is too high a price to make Frick pay to learn yet more
about visual tracking and the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
But I don't know, grandma is getting kind of foggy and if
this will cure Alzheimer's disease okay Frick, time to bolt
your head in there. They're appealing to our fear
and our selfishness. They're appealing to the worst
aspect of us. They want us to throw all the
other animals under the bus. And then this is another point I
want to make. This drives me nuts, is it's
dangerous to interrupt people when they're congratulating
themselves. Because when you pat yourself on
the back and you're startled you could dislocate a shoulder or an
elbow, but they will say things like it's a sacrifice we're
willing to make to improve the health of our own species.
Which is a noble motive, everybody wants to improve human
health. If that's really their motive,
if their motive isn't just basic neuroscience, which I suspect it
is, if their motive isn't advancing their research addenda
or getting tenure or writing more papers or learning more
about basic neuroscience, if their goal is to really improve
the health of our human species, there are better ways to do it.
In 2010 there were 10 million preventable deaths, people that
dies of diarrhea, which we can prevent, people that died of
pneumonia, which we can prevent, we can treat and prevent.
It turns out if you really want to improve the health of your
species, putting the monkeys in chair and bolting their heads in
there is not a very cost effective way to do it.
If you really want to save millions of lives, and that's
what they say is their motivation, I'll take them at
their word to improve the health of the human species, let the
monkeys go and instead send soap to Pakistan.
This was a study where they looked at what's the effect of
hand washing and the prevalence of pneumonia and diarrhea in
Pakistan. People didn't know to use soap.
It turns out that if you teach them how to use soap, you cut
the rates of diarrhea in half. So instead of two million kids,
one million kids die. You cut the rates of pneumonia
in half. So instead of four million kids,
two million kids die. You save three million kids with
soap. So if they're going to justify
what they do based on improving the health of our own species, I
think they are, to use another dog metaphor, barking up the
wrong tree. Okay, thus, primates.
But it's interesting, I got into primates secondarily.
I really got involved in this animal stuff because of dogs.
Boy, do I love dogs. And I got into this because the
medical students asked me could I help them protest the dog
vivisection labs at UCSD. So this is a dog and I don't
know if it projects very well but this is a therapy dog.
And this is dog who is visiting somebody in the hospital who is
obviously pretty sick because she's got an IV in there.
And one of the advantages to being a doctor is that I do go
to the hospital three times a week and I run into therapy
dogs. I love those guys.
Therapy dogs got the little green jackets, and I always just
drop down to my knees and I get some therapy.
Because dogs are just, they love us.
And dogs are to love the way salt shaker is to salt.
They just sprinkle love on you. And if you look up to be, let's
go back to definitions and stuff, look up the scientific
name for dog. It's canis lupus familiaris, and
it doesn't mean familiaris like familiar or commonplace or every
day, it means of the family. Member of the household or an
intimate. And dogs are the way they are
because of us. We have been selectively
breeding them for 10,000 years. That's a lot of generations of
dogs, and every time we've been selecting for dogs to love us.
That's the behavior we select for.
And now they have no choice. We've created these animals that
are hard wired to love us. Here's somebody loving a patient
who he has never met, but the love is sincere because he can't
help it. The salt comes out of the salt
shaker. So you take this dog to the
hospital and he loves the patient and the patient
recognizes that. The patient responds to the
love. And I guess you could say oh,
I'm being emotional again. I'm using words like cruelty and
torture and love but those are all animals' behaviors too.
Dogs really love us, and they can't help it.
We've done that to them. And so to do anything to a dog,
other than treat it like a family member, is a betrayal.
It's a betrayal of a bond between the species that goes
back 10,000 years. Everybody likes to talk about
human animals, nonhuman animals. Yes, there are differences
between one kind of animal and another.
Humans are animals but we're different from the other
animals. And maybe that gives us the
right to do what we want or maybe it doesn't.
Dogs are different from other animals too, and we've made them
that way. We have made them addicted to
humans and to human love. And to treat them badly is worse
than treating other animals badly.
I'm not big, I'm a vegetarian and all that stuff and I'm not
big on factory farms or steaks, but if you're a pig or a cow,
you're just kind of screwed. You have no reason to expect
anything better than that because humans have always been
eating pigs and cows. And if you're a primate, no
wonder you have to have the collar and get dragged because
you know that somebody is trying to do really bad stuff to you.
But a dog and a cat, also 10,000 years of selective breeding,
they love us. They love us.
So the dog therapy is nice. I was at dog beach with my
bulldog, and I met a guy with his dog.
And dogs are talking and we're talking and his dog was a rescue
dog. And they'd been down to Haiti
after the earthquake, and his dog had saved 15 people from the
rubble after the earthquake. And now his dog was too old to
do that and so now he's retired and he goes to the children's
hospital and visits kids with cancer.
That's what you can do with dogs.
Or the vivisectors can do this with dogs.
So this is from Huntingdon Life Sciences, and I don't know what
it would take for them to switch the name to Huntingdon Death
Sciences. But here they are giving toxic
fumes to Beagles in toxicology studies.
I have two Beagles. I have two Beagles.
Naughty dogs. Sweet, naughty dogs.
And if you look at the lab animal magazine, they have these
painful ads of a beautiful Beagle there and they say our
Beagles are so friendly they will never bite.
You can do anything to them. Yeah, so Beagles are cute.
They're so cute. They're even cute when they're
killing them. The only time a Beagle isn't
cute is after you've killed it and you've autopsied it.
So at UCSD, where they were killing 50 dogs a year to teach
physiology and pharmacology, they ended up with a pile of
carcasses like this. Big bags of dead dogs.
And we protested that a lot, and because we're academics and you
want to do it the academic way, first we have the 300 doctors
sign a petition saying please don't kill dogs, you don't need
to do that to be a doctor. They ignored us.
And then I did a peer review paper.
I did a survey of all US medical schools, and I found out that
95% of US medical schools killed no animals to teach
pharmacology, let alone dogs, and 82% killed no animals to
teach physiology. So I thought, well, okay, I got
it published. It's on my CV.
And so I said, okay, I will send this publication to the IACUC,
and the IACUC was mandated by an amendment of the Animal Welfare
Act. And the IACUC's mandate includes
the three Rs. You are supposed to replace the
use of animals when alternatives are available.
That's one of the three Rs. So I sent to the UCSD IACUC
my article. Peer review article with the
statistics, and I said it is incontrovertible that there are
alternatives. If 95% of schools don't do this,
there must be alternatives. You're not pursuing the
alternative, you're ignoring one of the R, you are in violation
of the animal welfare act. That was a very formal thing.
And the response I got back from the IACUC was they had reviewed
the dog lab issue and they found, and this is quotes, that
it raised no animal welfare issues.
And I'm thinking if life-long caging followed by vivisection
followed by killing is not an animal welfare issue, what is an
animal welfare issue? And that's the problem with
IACUCs is they just don't say no.
Yeah, so that's dogs. And then because I also have
cats, it's funny, some people say there are dog people and cat
people, that must be only people that haven't had dogs and cats
because cats love you just as much as dogs do.
They're just a little less overt about it.
They're a little more subtle. They'll wait until you're asleep
and then they'll jump up on the bed.
But they love you because of 10,000 years of selective
breeding and they can't help it. So I think there is an ethical
difference between doing bad things to dogs versus doing bad
things to rats or mice. It may, indeed, be a horrible
bad thing to vivisect rats and mice but it's not a betrayal of
a bargain, it's not a betrayal of a species that we've
genetically engineered to love us.
And the same thing with cats. And of course people do the same
things to cats. I got involved in this.
This is a study that's being done, of all places, at the
Weizmann Institute in Israel. And this is a study that they
want to look at Purkinje cells. I'm a big fan of Purkinje cells.
They're big in neuropath. We look at Purkinje cells all
the time. Selectively vulnerable, Purkinje
cell atrophy, ataxia, I love Purkinje cells.
So this study was, it provided proof for the existence of long
pauses in the Purkinje cell simple spikes activity probably
reflecting underlying bi-stability of membrane
potential in the awake and behaving animal.
And I will give them credit for this.
They didn't contend that it had anything whatsoever to do with
human health. They just wanted to know that
the Purkinje cells had a bi-stable membrane potential.
And the IACUCs said sure, go ahead.
So, obviously I'm a dog man and a cat man and I'm a monkey man.
And so I try to get UCSD, and again I refer to the experts on
site about what goes on at the University of Wisconsin.
I said, look, leave the dogs alone because they love us so
much. Leave the cats alone because
they love us. And leave the primates alone
because they are so much like us.
And in terms of literary construction, the sentence
should be we should avoid vivisection of primates because
they are so much like us and we should avoid vivisection of dogs
and cats because they like us so much.
But it isn't like us so much so I'm willing to sacrifice the
literary quality and say because they love us so much.
So just leave them alone. And in the defense of their
animal use, they say, well, you know, 97% are mice and rats.
Nobody cares about them. And less than one-tenth of one
percent are the monkeys, dogs, and cats.
So that's like, you can forget one-tenth of one percent.
It's trivial. Unless you're one of the dogs or
cats or monkeys. And so I said, okay, great.
I said, I'm not nearly as radical as some of my friends,
and I am willing to throw the rats and mice under the bus if I
can do something for the monkeys and the dogs and the cats.
Meet me one-tenth of one percent of the way.
Is that so much? Just leave the dogs and the cats
alone because they love us and the monkeys because they're like
us. And they said, no, we're not
going to do that. And it's interesting, they like
to use terms, vivisectors do, they like to talk about animals
rights extremists. We're always extremists.
And they like to sort of hint that we're a little bit
dangerous. That we're prone to violence.
We're extremists. We're radicals.
We're dangerous. We're prone to violence.
Well, let me put it to you. If there's a dispute and one
party wants the other party to meet them one-tenth of one
percent of the way and the other party says no, who's being the
extremist? And where does the violence come
in? I'm just a dork holding a sign
in front of the convention center.
I'm not the one who's killing those dogs and vivisecting those
cats and drilling and impaling those monkeys.
So my contention was when you find yourself on an ethical
slippery slope, build a terrace. We're not going to get them to
leave the rats and the mice alone.
I'm sorry about that. I feel bad about that.
But I'm close enough to 60 now, I can see 60 very bright and
clear from where I am, I'd like to accomplish something in my
life before I check out. And I think I can get the public
to support me in banning vivisection of monkeys, dogs,
and cats. They're not going to help me
with rats and mice. So build a terrace.
Leave the monkeys, dogs, and cats alone.
And if they would do that, it's interesting, if they would do
that, the animals researchers would leave alone those animals,
most of us would stop protesting.
I grant you that might be bad, and Gandhi and St. Francis
of Assisi would kind of feel bad about that, but they're
much better men than I am. So I just kind of want to try to
go after the low hanging fruit and get them to leave the
monkeys and the dogs and the cats alone.
Is there any hope? Is there any hope for the
animals? Well actually there is.
I'm a pathologist so I'm by nature kind of a cynical guy
because I see an awful lot of dead people and I see an awful
lot of people's brain tumors that they're on their way to
death and I see Alzheimer's that we, in fact, can't cure or do
anything about. So I'm kind of cynical and
pessimistic but there is reason for hope.
If you look at the historical record, there are animal abuses
that are no longer legal. Again, back to Lincoln, because
Lincoln is a local hero around here, Lincoln said about slavery
he said, we believe that slavery is wrong and like any wrong that
some men will commit if left alone it ought to be prohibited
by law. Well we believe that cruelty to
animals is wrong. And like any wrong that some men
will commit if left alone it ought to be prohibited by law.
So no, we're not going to persuade the life-long
vivisectors to give up their drills and their hammers.
You have to understand for vivisectors, doing this to
animals is not a last resort. It's not like oh, gosh we have
this one question, if we could just do this one experiment we'd
get the question. We really hate to do this.
It's a last resort to cause pain and suffering.
For the professional vivisector, vivisection is a first choice.
That's how they pursue their careers.
That's what they do. And they don't think there's
anything wrong with that because they are like-minded people in
groups and they are slammed over against the one extreme
position. So we're not going to persuade
them. Although, in fairness, there was
the Apostle Paul and the Damascus Road, so there is a
historical precedent for dramatic conversion.
And the guy who wrote "Amazing Grace" and worked for
the abolition of the slave trade was a former slave ship captain.
So twice in the last thousand years people have changed their
minds. So there's hope, but I wouldn't
count on it. So instead we're going to have
to pass laws and protect these animals from the vivisectors.
So bear baiting, bull baiting, dog fighting, dog fighting
that's interesting too. If you read what happened to
Michael Vick, he was surprised as hell that he was doing
anything wrong. He was in a group of like-minded
people. He was raised with dog fighters,
and he hung around with dog fighters.
It was kind of a clue when he named his kennels the Bad News
Kennels what he was up to, and it kind of caught him by
surprise that, gee, a lot of people think this is wrong.
Because he was in a group of like-minded people.
And a lot of the primate vivisectors are kind of
surprised. Well maybe the primate
vivisectors aren't surprised that people think what they're
doing is wrong. But the encouraging thing is the
closer we get to the people rather than the experts, the
more you leave the fate of animals to people with a vested
interest in using them, the worse off the animals are.
Once upon a time no doubt the guy who was running the bear
baiting ring said what are you interfering, it's my bear.
You can't pass a law that says I can't bear bait; it's my bear.
And Michael Vick would say they're my dogs, I can do
whatever I want. But it brings to mind this
politically incorrect joke that I think covers the hope for the
animals. So the joke is this, and this is
more typical of me because I am politically incorrect and I get
in trouble for this. So this is really rich guy is at
a party and he sees this gorgeous woman over there and he
goes up to her and he goes I'm really rich.
I am like Bill Gates rich and you are hot, would you have sex
with me for a million dollars? And she thinks, a million
dollars? I mean, how long could it take
and I'd be set for life and I could go to school.
Half an hour? Okay, I'll do it for a million
dollars. And then he says great.
Now, will you have sex with me for $10?
And she goes, $10? What do you think I am?
And he said we've established what you are, now we're just
haggling about price. [LAUGHTER]
So that's what we've done with animals, we've established,
we're going to interfere with people.
We're going to stop people from doing things to animals, even if
they are their animals that we disapprove of.
Now we're just haggling about where we draw the line.
We're going to stop bear baiters.
We're going to stop bull baiting.
We're going to stop dog fighting and cock fighting, crush videos.
There are animal cruelty felonies in 46 states, and
animal law is a huge burgeoning field in law schools.
California Prop 2, you probably heard about that, that's a
proposition that we passed in California that tells you if
you're a chicken rancher that the chickens can't be in cages
so small that they are unable to spread their wings or stand up
and turn around. They used to have them so
crammed in they couldn't stand up or move their wings.
And every time this happens, every time there's a movement to
improve the quality of animal life, the people that are most
involved with the animals will say well we're the experts,
we're the chicken farmers. We know what chickens need.
The factory farmers, we know what pigs need.
Well this Prop 2 banned gestation crates for sows and it
banned veal crates for little calves and it banned battery
cages for chickens, despite what the factory farmers said.
The encouraging thing is the closer you get to people, the
better the animals do. If you make a statewide
proposition like California did, Prop 2, the agriculture industry
is against it, the chicken farmers are again it, the veal,
they're all against it, but if you get enough people, the
people will actually give the animals a break.
They get closer to the people. Just recently in Missouri there
was an amendment to the Constitution to improve the
supervision of puppy mills. Missouri is the biggest puppy
mill state in the country. There are more puppy mills and
dogs in cages, miserable, horrible lives.
They go to pet stores. And they had a huge lobby
fighting against this Missouri puppy mill amendment.
And it passed in Missouri where there are more puppy mills
because there were enough people.
You get a big enough end and you'll get a pretty good idea as
to what's ethical. You just need a bigger end.
And the problem with IACUCs is they don't have anybody on there
that represents regular people, or if they do, they're routinely
outvoted and they're just a token.
But the IACUC is interesting. Animal Welfare Act was actually
passed in 1965 in response to a just horrific photo expose in
life magazine about concentration camps for lost and
stolen dogs. Class B animal dealers were
stealing dogs out of people's yards or taking puppies from a
free to good home ad and sending them off to animal research
facilities. And somebody took these
pictures, and as a result of that they passed the Animal
Welfare Act. And the Animal Welfare Act was
later amended to mandate these IACUCs.
And the animal welfare people thought this is great, there's
going to be somebody with a voice on the Institutional
Animal Care and Use Committee. It turns out anybody who uses
any animals in a university setting has to get approval from
an IACUC. And so the animal advocates were
thinking this is great, there's somebody looking out for the
animals. Turns out it didn't work out
that way. But there's another phrase that
at least the IACUCs exist, and if we could amend the law so
that there could be a broader representation of citizens on
the IACUCs rather than just the vested interest of the
vivisectors, it could actually work.
There may well be a case where they have a hot new treatment
for spinal cord paralysis. And maybe somebody could
persuade the general citizens that if we paralyze this monkey
and then try to cure him, it will directly lead to treatment
of paralyzed veterans. And maybe the citizens will say,
okay, then the ends do justify the means.
Maybe so. I don't know.
But they have a right to weigh in on it, and they certainly
have a right to weigh in on whether vestibulo-ocular reflex
is going to cure Alzheimer's disease.
I think they'd call that one in a second.
So IACUCs are interesting because I think they are, to use
a phrase I once came across, hypocrisy is the complement that
vice pays to virtue. So the existence of IACUCs, it's
kind of a rubber stamp and it's a fig leaf and it doesn't really
protect the animals but the fact that it exists is the
hypocritical complement of the virtue of looking out for
animals' interests. And here is some more.
This is kind of interesting. European Union banned
vivisection of great apes. Do you think the vivisectors
wanted them to do that? No.
Swiss Supreme Court refused permission to do these kind of
visual tracking experiments because they said there isn't
enough direct relevance to human health.
So this is too intense cruelty and insufficient justification.
Same thing happened in Munich. Same thing happened in Berlin.
They banned those exact same experiments that I'm trying to
get them to stop at UCSF and that are going on in Wisconsin.
Oklahoma, for God's sakes, Oklahoma, a red state, the
Oklahoma State University administration was confronted
with an issue that somebody had gotten a grant to do anthrax
vaccine testing on macaques, and they said, no, you're just not
going to euthanize primates on this campus.
Oklahoma. Take that Madison, Wisconsin.
But, Dane County, the Dane County noble attempt, when I
gave this talk before that initiative failed I always
thought Dane County was showing the way.
This is the idea is you have to have citizens who are not
prejudice in favor of animal research on a panel to balance
the people that are in favor, you could say, okay, all the
animal researchers have to recuse themselves because they
are hopelessly biased by their research agendas and nobody is
allowed on here who is a PETA member.
Let's just take guys from the sandwich shop.
And then the PETA guys can make their case, like jury duty.
They send out a summons and you have to decide what's going on.
[APPLAUSE] That's what I think.
Okay, so I've kind of blathered and blundered my way through
this, and it's because it means so much to me that I'm less
articulate and less funny than usual.
So I will end with a guy who's much more articulate than I am
and much wiser than I am. And this is Mark Twain, and he
said this when he was inducted into the London Anti-Vivisection
Society. He said, "I believe I am not
interested to know whether vivisection produces results
that are profitable to the human race or doesn't.
To know that the results are profitable to the race would not
remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon
unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity for it and is
to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking
further. It is so distinctly a matter of
feeling with me and is so strong and so deeply rooted in my make
and constitution that I am sure I could not even see a
vivisector vivisected with anything more than a sort of
qualified satisfaction. I do not say that I should not
go and look on, I only mean that I should almost surely fail to
get out of it the degree of contentment which, of course,
it ought to be expected to furnish."
So I'll leave him with the last word.
Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]