Quit Monkeying Around

Given that I work on the UCLA campus, I've been loosely following the recent string of news stories regarding the battle between animal rights activists and researchers on campus who use animals to research conditions such as schizophrenia and methamphetamine addiction. Fire bombing researchers' cars and sending personal threats of bodily harm are among some of the actions that have been taken by a group known as the North American Animal Liberation, and that have resulted in a two-sided mass demonstration scheduled for this Wednesday between those for and against the research.

I am not a fan of extremist tactics (for the most part), nor do I think destroying personal property or threatening personal violence ever really sinks into the thick head of your average neuroscientist who views all things (human or otherwise) sans PhD or M.D. as simple tools to further their own lives and careers . . ahem, pardon the bias. I tend to prefer the Morgan Spurlock approach to that of Michael Moore, and the philosophy of Best Friends Animal Society to that of PETA.

HOWEVER . . . extreme measures do play their part, and an important one at that. If it wasn't for the inroads made by the extreme ends of the spectrum, the middle ground on either side of whatever moral line is being drawn would seem far less palatable, and ultimately less attainable. I also respect the fact that, regardless of how much I may disagree with certain aspects of PETA's work, at the end of the day they are still the ones responsible for swaying multimillion dollar designers like Calvin Klein and Donna Karen to stop using fur in their fashion lines and they're the reason that a high school kid such as myself was able to connect the dots with the way my dissection rabbit looked in 11th grade anatomy class and the evidence of the torture inflicted on said rabbit in order to get him or her to look that way. It's full disclosure and it left an impression.

But aside from the differing perspectives and tactics and who's right or wrong, I gotta say that I was sort of dumbfounded by the arrogance and unsupported logic displayed in the following argument offered by one of the neuroscientists at the center of this work. Larry Gordon of the LA Times writes of Dr. David Jentsch:

"At a North Carolina facility shared with Wake Forest University, Jentsch works
with a colony of more than 450 vervet monkeys in what he described as
noncoercive and painless memory tests, DNA samples and scans. He said 10 or
fewer of the animals are put to death by injection each year, so that
researchers can conduct postmortem exams. At a UCLA lab, he administers
methamphetamine to about two dozen monkeys and then withdraws them from it;
about half a dozen are killed each year for postmortems. He contended that the
animals suffer no pain from the work."The pain in addiction is when you lose
your relationships, lose your children, lose your job, when your health goes
down. Animals don't suffer those things," he said. "They suffer none of the
psychosocial pain that is what addiction is all about."

Is it me or did he actually just ground his entire argument in the context of the human experience rather than that of the monkey experience? Animals don't suffer those things, sir, because they're not human and don't define their lives via their job with a large pharmaceutical company or the number of privileged kids they have in private school. But to say that they don't suffer simply because those very human, superficial elements are absent strikes me as bordering on the absurd. It's also kind of important to remember that your lab rat's experience is not defined by or limited to the specific focus of your study.

The fact that, as an educational researcher, I'm sitting in the back of the classroom only concerned with how little Jimmy & Co. are solving an algebra problem, doesn't negate the fact that they may have been sent to school hungry and without breakfast that morning or the kid sitting behind them may be assaulting them in the hallway after class. Just because I ain't studying it, doesn't mean it ain't there.

And by the way, I'm thinking that the whole "lose your relationships, lose your children" aspect was a very large part of being torn from their natural environment and put in a cage in a lab. I'm also pretty sure that losing their lives (i.e. "about a half dozen are killed each year for postmortems") still registers on that whole "suffering" scale thing. Ya think?