December
1994
Letter
from the Editor
By Martin Rowe
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Among the more obvious excesses of the animal testing
industry in recent years have been those of Dr. Ron Wood of New York
University. Dr. Wood, who hasn’t published a paper on primate
experiments in more than five years, has had his license to experiment
on animals temporarily suspended pending investigation of activities
which include substandard laboratory conditions, and the negligent transportation
of monkeys from NYU in the City to NYU’s Department of Environmental
Studies satellite facility in Sterling Forest — something which
resulted in the death of one monkey and the near death of another.
Dr. Wood has, to the tune of $500,000 each year, been strapping monkeys
into restraining devices and sealing them in old refrigerators and forcing
them to inhale toxic fumes from solvents or the fumes from a $250,000
crack pipe — gracefully renamed a “cocaine aerosol generator.”
The result is the unsurprising fact that monkeys suffer from liver damage
among other illnesses and sometimes die prematurely. It should be added
that Dr. Wood’s experiments have led to the resignation of former
NYU head veterinarian Wendell Niemann, two federal investigations into
animal care at NYU, and international opposition.
This is not the place to go into detail about Dr. Wood’s actions.
Anybody who wants further details of Dr. Wood’s experiments should
contact In Defense of Animals at 816 W. Francisco Boulevard, San Rafael,
CA 94901, 415-453-9984. The facts make sorry reading, indeed, but unfortunately
they are only extraordinary in that even those with a vested interest
in keeping this whole thing quiet have come out and condemned Dr. Wood’s
extravagance.
Whatever the vehemence of the response from those outside the animal
advocacy movement, Dr. Wood’s experiment is no different from
thousands of others that take place throughout the universities and
research establishments in the Industrialized World. To you and me —
who are cursed with that deeply unscientific quality called common sense
— you don’t need to be a (rocket) scientist to know that
the effects on human beings of crack cocaine can be seen at considerably
less expense. Anybody walking through Washington Square Park could probably
see it; any emergency room in any city would give you the terrible physiological
results of it; any parent in any neighborhood would probably list its
devastating effects on their son or daughter and their family. Now,
I can’t claim to have seen any crack addicts sitting in refrigerators,
so I may be misunderstanding Dr. Wood’s experiment; but I’ll
bet you $250,000 that the addicts I have seen would love a quarter of
a million bucks to clean up their lives.
But let’s put aside the enormous waste of money, resources, time,
and labor. After all, that’s what so much vivisection does in
the cause of “pure” science. Whatever might be learnt from
the physiological study of a monkey’s anatomy when addicted to
any form of drug, no monkey, primate, or any other than human animal
is going to be able to replicate the socio-cultural, economic, familial,
or individual human reasons why someone gets addicted to crack. Drug
addiction, I suggest in my unscientific way, is a particularly human
problem, and — one would think — requires particularly human
solutions. It would surely have been wiser to have spent the $2.5 million
given to Dr. Wood on education, hospices, epidemiological and sociological
studies, as well as rehabilitation centers rather than on Dr. Wood’s
elaborate chambers, which (I humbly suggest) prove only that when you
give monkeys crack you get addicted monkeys.
If, by some chance, vivisectors like Dr. Wood claim that in fact they
are able to extrapolate those socio-cultural etc. factors from watching
the monkeys wriggle, crave, die from thirst, and generally behave “abnormally,”
then the restraints which stop us from pinning human beings in
harnesses, shoving them in fridges, or stuffing electrodes in their
brain (whatever it may be) become applicable to the animals we use.
Once you admit that human and non-human animals alike experience suffering,
misery, and all the stuff that scientism — the fake science exhibited
by Dr. Wood and others — believes animals don’t experience,
then animal experimentation becomes immoral. It’s as simple as
that: what goes one way, has to go the other; what’s a given in
one, must become a given in the other.
Scientism is very different from real science, which has always triumphed
when it has understood the big picture. Real science considers human
beings and animals — indeed the complete ecosystem — not
as various isolated modules of self-contained behavior, the totality
of whose experience can be measured for instance by the pulses of electric
shocks through a monkey’s brain, but as complete functioning members
of the world society. If Dr. Wood and his kind realized this, then the
terrible events for which he received a suspension would not have happened.
Since Dr. Wood’s license is only suspended and not revoked, it
becomes incumbent upon us to make sure that the authorities at NYU and
elsewhere also want to be spared this excess.
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