Carnival Against Vivisection

Even before I saw Pattrice's post calling on us to write about vivisection, the topic was in my mind. Lately I've been having terrible nightmares about vivisection. In these vivid dreams I’d find animals I know and love strapped into horrible machines or shut sick in tiny cages in labs, and always for some reason I couldn’t free them, I couldn’t get them out. I’d wake up in a sweat and check on everyone to make sure they were all ok.

Vivisection as a topic wasn’t one I really understood or even thought about when I first became vegetarian, but five years later I found myself working as a researcher at an animal group, in their anti-vivisection department. It was a crash course in the truly unimaginable. The sickest, weirdest, most heinous, most painful things you could never dream up, someone out there is doing them to animals and being paid by the government to do so.

I quickly learned that all the regulations out there which we believe protect animals, like the animal welfare act, or internal review committees at universities, these things protect the researchers but not the animals. I read report after report where the reviewers expressed concern about excessive pain in the animals, but rubber stamped it anyway.

Another thing I learned, which was quite shocking to me, was that drug companies would conduct experiments on many different types of animals but bury any results negative to the drug. Since species differ, many species could take a certain drug with no ill effect, and we know that animal experiments don’t reliably predict side effects in humans. However, if you are using animal experiments to try to prove your products safe, it’s amazing to me that they would know some animals had birth defects, some animals had convulsions, some died, and they just didn’t publish those results and only used the experiments where the animals were fine.

At this very same time one of my closest friends since childhood earned her PhD in biochemistry. She does not experiment on animals incidentally. Her line of work began with an interest in protecting plant crops from fungal disease. But she, as a capital-S Scientist, always defended “basic research” to me. She thought that people should be able to cut open the brains of cats while they were still alive for no other reason than seeing what would happen. She felt research got corrupted when it had a pre-determined goal.

This same friend also told me how she would pursue grants from the government emphasizing how her own basic research might one day cure disease, though in actuality she told me there was really no connection. It was a game they had to play to get funding for their work.

I’m going to drift away from that story line to go back to something Pattrice said, she connected vivisection to child abuse. To many this might be a shocking comparison, but there are so many ways in which it rings true. It is the complete destructive domination of the smaller, weaker being by the bigger stronger one. It is a complete betrayal of trust in the animal who is tame, trusting of people, forced to cooperate in their own use and disposal. And on another level, as someone who has survived abuse, I get a flash of that cold eye, that someone even in doing terrible things, is somehow observing, measuring pain, fascinated with watching and studying their damage on another being.

And there you are, helpless, and all your existence is pain, and you don’t even comprehend why or how, or that there is anything else in the entire world. Amazingly, somewhere in the world, someone is experimenting on animals to try to develop a drug that will make children forget incidents of sexual abuse, or at least make those memories less vivid. Because it’s not about owning your own body, owning your own life, owning your own memories, and finding your own peace, it’s about developing, marketing and selling for profit a pill that someone can swallow to presumably avoid the hard work of living and healing. A pill so you don’t have to go to the therapist. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want any child to hurt or suffer, I just don’t believe a pill fixes that.

My friend, the bio-chemist, is experiencing some chinks in her scientific armor. She said she thinks it’s wrong to force animals to smoke so the tobacco companies can try to disprove what we all know that smoking is bad for you and everyone should quit right now.

But it’s worse than that. We can and do find life-saving cures and information from studying our own population and our own genes. However, we continue to experiment on animals to seek cures to diseases we already know how to prevent. Most lung cancer is caused by smoking, other cases are caused by other environmental factors/exposures, and the remaining ones have a genetic origin. But people don’t stop smoking so we torture mice, and cats, and dogs, and monkeys and on and on. We know that exercise, low-fat diets, and preferably veganism will prevent the majority of non-congenital heart disease. But we want to eat burgers and fries coated in trans-fats so we torture animals.

I’m going to die some day. It might be a lot sooner than I’d like. I can’t prevent every risk in the world. I can’t know what I can’t know, like what day not to go downtown, or when I should call in sick instead of getting in my car. I don’t know how much time I have, but I want that time to count somehow.

Vivisection is so mixed up in our lives. Because of US law any medications we take were tested on animals at some time. Most were developed from human-based leads, looking at populations, isolating and concentrating substances from herbal remedies, etc. Many “new” drugs are found when someone is taking something for another reason but finds it also relieves another condition, and then the scientists scramble to find out why and exactly what ingredient does what. But it’s almost impossible to actually see all the vivisection around us and also nearly impossible to get away from it.

Edit: Sorry, I meant to add that conclusion that we can choose to buy products that were not tested on animals obviously. Even when we avoid prescription medications, buy the bunny-hugger toothpaste and cleanser, our tax dollars still fund vivisection. I'm not usually one to suggest legislative solutions to animal issues, but in the case of vivisection working to reform laws that require animal testing (but weirdly enough no human cell culture testing) would be a good start.