Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  So in our country’s finest universities (as well as in some of our just so-so ones) researchers, not to be stymied, are still making test animals “hot” with deadly diseases and screwing bolts in their heads. They’re still performing cataract surgery on healthy ones, then giving them different rehabilitation treatments, then killing them and dissecting their brains to see which treatment produced the best result within the visual cortex. (Monkeys can’t be trained to read eye charts.) But perhaps most dramatically of all, researchers throughout the ’80s and ’90s tried to give chimps AIDS. Anyone opposed to animal research was damned as being against finding a cure (only a matter of time) for one of the most dreadful scourges of modern times. Chimps became the Poster Primates in the fight against AIDS, employed as a symbol against the animal rights movement.

  But after infecting more than one hundred chimps with HIV, scientists became increasingly frustrated with their lack of success. They could kill a monkey by destroying his own simian immune system, but they simply could not give him AIDS. Vaccines, created by injecting weakened simian viruses into chimps, also proved to be disappointing, merely creating the fatal animal disease they were intended to prevent. Now, after twenty years, scientists no longer consider our fellow primates to be “good” models for AIDS research. The intensive breeding of chimps for research, blessed by the National Institutes of Health, has resulted in eighteen hundred “excess” chimps. There were always researchers eager to infect them, but few—actually none—are interested in caring for the animals for their natural life span, about forty-five years.

  Artificially induced diseases in animals practically never result in a cure for those diseases that can be applicable to humans, although the risk of strange new species-jumping sicknesses grows stronger every day. Misleading monkey experiments delayed an effective polio vaccine for decades. Successes in human kidney transplants, blood transfusions, and heart bypass surgery all resulted when doctors ignored the baleful results of experiments on dogs and used human material. Guinea pigs die when injected with penicillin. Thalidomide was found to be safe, safe, safe for rodents; so was Opren, an arthritis drug that caused fatal liver toxicity in a number of human patients before it was taken off the market. Animal tests for new drugs do not predict side effects in humans up to 52 percent of the time. The National Cancer Institute stopped testing anticancer drugs on animals in the mid-1980s, finding toxicity results useless and misleading. (For instance, 46 percent of substances deemed carcinogenic in mice are noncarcinogenic in rats.) It is common now upon the announcement of any implication wrung from animal research for the researchers to publicly caution against using the findings to make conclusions about human disease or behavior.

  And then there is the smoking debacle. The tobacco industry was able to deny a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer for decades because many thousands of dogs, monkeys, rabbits, and rats, fitted with masks and placed in “smoking chambers” or immobilized in stereotaxic chairs with tubes blowing smoke down their windpipes could not be encouraged to develop carcinomas. In a more perfect world these animals all would have gotten lung cancer, thereby savings millions of human lives. They would have given a future with hope to an entire generation . . . (but those stubborn creatures didn’t do it).

  Such a dismal record of nonachievement explains why enthusiasts of animal experimentation have to devote a portion of their energies and profits to public relations (Vivisectors Do It For You!). One of their most effective strategies is to enlist people in the war not against disease but against animal rights supporters. . . . I just want to thank the National Institutes of Health because I wouldn’t be in remission today had it not been for all those dead dogs, some tearful housewife says to a congressional committee; or . . . I guess those animal people would like to make me feel ashamed to say this, but I think the life of my baby is more important than that of a research kitten. . . . Parents’ terror of the mysterious Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was manipulated shamelessly with the cure-is-dependent-upon-animal-research mantra until the precipitous recent drop in infant deaths was attributed to the simple act of putting babies to bed on their backs instead of on their stomachs, a change in custom that has been described as “one of the simplest and most effective public health interventions ever.” (An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but it’s certainly not something drug companies are interested in.)

  Yet when caught in the manipulation or misrepresentation of data or the exploitation of fears and hopes, science and medicine, hand in hand, retreat to the high ground, professing to be saddened by a public that so “fears expertise,” that is so unobjective and so ignorant, that is so shockingly unaware of the nature of science (being wrong is a constant feature of scientific method), of what it can do successfully (potentially everything) and what it cannot do (resolve society’s ethical qualms, or make value judgments).

  Between competing notions a nonrational incommensurability lies, thus a switch from one belief or manner of action to another can never be achieved by logic alone. Major changes in thinking are frequently not incremental but occur all at once. In the book Scientific Revolutions, author Thomas Kuhn likens such change to the gestalt shift: “These flashes of intuition resemble instantaneous electron orbital changes. They are never in transition. They are here. Then they are . . . there.”

  Animal experimentation seems to be bloodily quaint baggage to carry into the twenty-first century and vivisection a most primitive method of discovery. Still, it does seem that something like instantaneous electron orbital exchange in the mass mind is required to make the vivisector’s work totally unacceptable to society. The Animal Liberation Front breaks into labs, damages equipment, and frees animals, all to great notoriety and accusations of terrorism, but its raids often provide irrefutable proof of researchers’ barbarism. The ALF stole films from the University of Pennsylvania’s head injury lab that showed baboons in vises getting their heads smashed while researchers chortled. The National Institutes of Health had called the Pennsylvania lab “one of the best in the world,” but the federal government cut off funding after the improperly acquired film was made public. And if the young, rosy-cheeked commandos from the ALF with their bolt cutters and black ski masks broke into all the labs, emptied all the cages, and carried the deliberately diseased and wounded and moribund animals in litters down Constitution Avenue next New Year’s Day, and if the event was featured on all the television networks in vivid and unrelenting repellent close-up, horrifying a majority of the viewing public, who would find the sight virtually pornographic, what would happen in this world of laws?

  Well, all the rosy-cheeked, idealistic, No Compromise! ALF members would be jailed without bond pending trial on criminal trespass and theft charges, and the animals, the stolen property, would be returned to the labs for disposal. Prior to the return, the labs would have to rely even more than usual upon B dealers who are licensed by the Department of Agriculture to provide pound and other “random source” animals for them, “random source” frequently being lost or stolen pets. (Medical researchers prefer former pets over other animal sources since they are easier to control, more trusting and obedient. . . .) Congress, urged on by a distraught citizenry, would debate what, or whether, changes would be necessary in the wording of the Animal Welfare Act (which surely must have the welfare of animals as its intent—otherwise, why is it called that . . .) because, as it is, the wording does not prohibit any type of experiment or procedure that can be performed on animals in laboratories and makes clear that the government cannot interfere with the conduct or design of those procedures. There would be much talk about wording, and strengthening the existing intent of the wording. The language of rights—practically the only ethical language we speak in this country—would not be spoken. Instead, humane treatment would be interpreted and described, as would suffering, and pain. Researchers and other interested parties would argue that animal suffering is an emotionally charged term that can’t be defined as a
reality, and that any attempt to define it would be biased on the side of sentimentality or sympathy and would be intellectually unverifiable. The “animal people” would speak about intentional cruelty inflicted upon sentient beings, and the researchers would say: It’s not cruelty, it’s science. I suppose you’d prefer us to experiment on severely retarded people instead—well, we’re not going to do that, that would be morally reprehensible and, of course, against the law. We have laws in this country, you know. . . .

  And so it would go. Maybe bigger cages for the beasts would be required. Maybe daily water would be legislated (except in those cases where the denial of water was the point of the experiment). But the wrong would not be addressed because no right would have been established.

  There are thousands of animal-advocacy organizations in the United States, with millions of members. Feral cats, wild horses, greyhounds, fowl, bats, as well as the more dramatic gorillas, pandas, and dolphins, all have their devoted protectors, and various methods are used to win public sympathy for them. But many advocates are working for more humane treatment of animals and would prefer not to argue the rights issue at all. To argue that a monkey has the right not to have his arms cut off in an experiment is far different than arguing that a thirsty horse should be given water before his journey to becoming dog food. It is one thing to show up as a carrot at the county fair toting a placard that reads, “Eat Your Veggies, Not Your Friends,” and quite another to find a convincing language with a commanding legal basis that liberates animals from “thinghood.” It’s one thing to rescue individual animals from the slaughterhouse by buying them, as the group Farm Sanctuary does (you can sponsor a sheep for $20 a month, a duck for $8), and quite another to argue that raising animals for slaughter is morally unacceptable.

  It’s easier to have a little brown rat as a pet (very affectionate) or even to make cruelty-free stock investments than it is to wade into real rights talk and tempt flake status. Rights is radical and abolitionist, welfare is conservative (the word to some extent has already been co-opted and absorbed by the status quo) and reformist.

  The Humane Farming Association may be radical in its methods—in one case, members of the group slipped into a slaughterhouse and stole calves’ eyeballs to test for the toxic drug clenbuterol—but its purpose is to make farming more environmentally responsible and to protect and enlighten the consumer. The Humane Society of the United States has become politically sophisticated at lobbying and promoting ballot initiatives (patiently, patiently, which causes more obstreperous groups like the Animal Liberation Front to behave impolitely—like driving up to a McDonald’s with a dead cow in the back of a pickup truck and a sign saying “Here’s Your Lunch”). Even so, HSUS, traditionally considered kitty and doggy moderate, has, since 1980, claimed that there is no basis for maintaining a moral distinction between the treatment of humans and other animals, a view quite extremist in its implications.

  Welfare groups have been laboring on behalf of the animals for some time—the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the American Anti-Vivisection Society are both over a hundred years old—but the rights movement took off only in 1973, when the New York Review of Books published an unsolicited review of the book Animals, Men, and Morals by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris. The writer was the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who expanded his article into the ideological classic Animal Liberation. PETA, founded by Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco in 1980, is the group that perhaps best personifies the rights movement, for it broke tactical ground in 1981 with a daring legal action that attempted to prosecute a researcher for animal cruelty. Pacheco volunteered as an assistant to a Dr. Edward Taub at the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, with the intention of secretly documenting conditions in an “ordinary” lab. Taub had been surgically crippling primates to monitor the rehabilitation of impaired limbs for many years, apparently suspending his efforts only long enough to write proposals for federal grants that would, and did, allow him to continue his labors. Pacheco and PETA got a precedent-setting search warrant from a circuit judge, and police raided the filthy lab and confiscated seventeen monkeys, as well as Taub’s files and a monkey’s severed hand that the less-than-charismatic researcher kept on his desk as a paperweight. Although the rights of the mutilated primates could not be argued, as those rights had never been established, Taub was found guilty of cruelty to animals by a jury. The conviction was overturned on appeal when the court ruled that state statutes did not apply to research conducted under a federal program. Since then, additional daring cases have been won, only to be lost on appeal, and the cases that are won involve animal cruelty or welfare, never the rights of an animal, for of course an animal has no rights; an animal has no standing in a court of law. The injuries to a person’s “aesthetic interests” can be judicially recognized (I am offended by seeing spotted owls mounted on the hoods of logging trucks . . .), but an animal’s interest in continuing to exist cannot.

  The animal people need their day in court on the rights issue, and groups such as the Animal Legal Defense Fund are seeking to find, try, and win the perfect case—the case that will take animals out of the realm of property and grant them legal status of their own. The plaintiff will undoubtedly be a chimp. The chimpanzees’ ability to be trained in sign language, and their further ability to use that language to express their fears and needs, could provide the scientific basis for the argument that they deserve the same freedom from enslavement that most humans now enjoy. Peter Singer’s latest philosophical effort is the Great Ape Project, a rhetorical demand for the extension of the “community of equals” to include all the great apes: human beings and “our disquieting doubles”—chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The rights of life and freedom from torture and imprisonment would be granted to these animals, and then, possibly, would trickle down to those our less disquieting doubles.

  Sometimes a number of animal people gather together as they did recently for a “World Congress” at the cavernous USAir Arena in Landover, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. The arena can hold eighteen thousand people, and it was not full. The dilemma of the animals still lacks the drawing power of a mediocre rock band. Of course, animals can never be called upon to do a star turn on the movement’s behalf—that would be anathematic to the whole precept. So only people were there, about three thousand of them. There were three days of speeches. The crowd was attentive. The speakers were calmly impassioned, well spoken, nicely dressed, well prepared; they politely restricted themselves to the time allotted. Nobody screamed, We’ve got to stop dressing up as carrots! or Whose idea was it to petition the town of Fishkill to change its name? It made us look like morons! The importance of unity was stressed. But there are so many methods, so many concerns, so many didactics . . . so many mundane and divine and extravagant ways to work for the animals. Managing “colonies” of feral cats by setting up feeding stations (Alley Cat Allies) seems less noble than trying to save a silverback gorilla (The Biosynergy Institute) from the stewpot, but it would be impolite to say so at the big meeting of the year. The group the Nature of Wellness—with its witty baby-in-a-bonnet newspaper ads (“Most People See A Beautiful Healthy Child. We See A Cure For Feline Leukemia”), which ridicule the premises and promises of animal testing—probably runs a more intellectually engaging campaign than the person who decides to show up outside Macy’s some summer afternoon pretending to be a fur-bearing animal with its leg in a trap, but no one’s going to question the latter’s devotion. A fifth-grade teacher from Charleston who has her class read Black Beauty and then write an essay “If I Were an Abused Carriage Horse, What Would My Three Wishes Be?” leads a different, and probably less accident-prone life than the individual from Colorado who goes out to harangue the hunters on opening day. The feminists with their earnest semantic quibblings and Internet horror stories (alt.sex. bestiality . . . One person described having sex with stray dogs and then dropping them off at ani
mal shelters . . .), equating everything with the subjugation of women, may not be quite as helpful in the long run as the lawyers strategizing in the Animal Legal Defense Fund, but no one’s going to tell them to lighten up. The members of the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida who brought about the cancellation of a liposuction surgery workshop using live pigs can be just as proud of their work on behalf of the animals as the animal law lawyers, theorists, and essayists Steven Wise and Gary Francione, who teach at Harvard and Rutgers, respectively. Everyone here is working, working, working for the animals in the hope that everything, somehow, is going to add up and that the animals will be . . . saved.

  There is no limit to the things an animal rights activist can worry about in this world. And it became clear as the groups were heard and topics covered and enemies identified that whenever a battle is won, a victory claimed for the animals, it doesn’t stay a victory for long. It’s either nondefinitive, or it’s superceded by something worse.

  Two great successes for the movement involved the fur and the cosmetic industries. The wearing of fur was discredited through the tactics of howling insult. Corpse Coat!! activists would scream at the slightest opportunity, or they would solicitously ask of some fur wearer, How did you get the blood off that? Then they’d go out and paint “SHAME” and “DEATH” all over furriers’ windows. Education followed by organized consumer boycotts encouraged cosmetic companies to pretty much eliminate animal testing. (Mommy, is it true that they blinded hundreds of white bunnies to make this pretty soap?)

  But the fur industry is still around, hoping for government subsidies to boost export sales and counting on a new wave of designers—there’s always a new wave—who believe the trend gurus’ predictions of a “fur renaissance fueled by a growing interest in luxury investments” and are churning out the beaver capes, the burgundy ponyskin jackets, and the acid green sable barn jackets. And some of the big names in the beauty industry—Helene Curtis, Chesebrough Pond’s—continue to test on animals. Overall, the use of animals in research could very well be increasing—who knows? Corporate monoliths such as Procter & Gamble and Bausch & Lomb never stopped animal testing; the Department of Defense could still be cutting the vocal cords of beagles and testing nerve gas on them. The DOD doesn’t have to release any figures at all, and research facilities in general enjoy institutionalized secrecy and seldom have to provide real numbers to the public. The Silver Spring monkeys that PETA pried from researcher Taub almost two decades ago became wards of the National Institutes of Health and were only recently put to death (humanely, of course) after a final set of experiments in which the tops of their skulls were removed and their brains repeatedly pierced with electrodes. Augustus, Big Boy, and Dominion had already lost the use of their limbs in previous experiments when government-financed scientists at Tulane had severed the nerves to their arms and shoulders.