PETA AU Global 2020 Issue 2

THEWALL: Vivisection Unveiled A t this moment, more than 100 million living, feeling beings just like you are being imprisoned in bleak,

• In a psychology study at the University of Chicago, a rat was stuffed into a tube and placed in a cage with another rat. The unrestrained one worked frantically to free the trapped one, ignoring chocolate that was offered as a distraction – a clear display of the empathy that their human tormentors lacked. Even in this technological age, with human DNA sequenced on the internet, organs on a chip, and high-speed computers programmed with human data, massive numbers of animals are still being used as laboratory tools.

cigarettes had been placed. And electrodes were inserted into dogs’ penises to measure the effect of smoking on sexual performance. • At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, rabbits’ necks were cut open and blood clots were injected into their carotid arteries in order to induce strokes while they were fully conscious. They lost their balance, became paralyzed, and died. • In head-injury experiments at the University of Pennsylvania, experimenters cemented helmets onto the heads of sedated baboons and then used a hydraulic device to thrust them forward with an acceleration of up to 1,000 units of g-force in order to inflict severe head injuries. They were given no painkillers. Workers

From 2017 to 2018, US laboratories increased the number of animals used by 4%, including a 12.2% increase in the number of primates. In the UK, 3.52 million procedures were conducted on animals in 2018 alone. PETA will never forget these victims and will keep striving to reach a day when all experiments on animals are just shameful memories.

desolate, cramped cages in laboratories across the United States. Each is an individual with emotions like fear, loneliness, love, and pain, yet they’re deprived of everything that might make their miserable lives worth living. They’re constantly poked, prodded, biopsied, infected, injected, and robbed of their babies. They’re tormented in painful psychological experiments for maternal deprivation, sexual deviancy, and addiction studies. They’re shocked, hung by their tails, and denied food and water just to make them compliant. Yet all this “basic research” fails to lead to human treatments a staggering 90% of the time. Nearly all of these animals will be killed and thrown out with the biomedical waste. Since its founding in 1980, PETA has repeatedly exposed unethical, grotesquely cruel, misleading, pointless, and downright bizarre experiments and has stopped many of them. Now, PETA’s vivisection wall is traveling across North America to wake people up to the need for modern, non-animal methods. Following are true descriptions of the torture that animals have endured: • As part of the maternal-deprivation experiments at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility, experimenters terrorized newborn rhesus macaques, who innately fear snakes, with realistic electronic versions. Following an intensive year-long PETA campaign, NIH ended these experiments and shut down the laboratory. • At Boys Town National Research Hospital, experimenters starved cats, implanted tubes and wires in their throats, and screwed metal devices into their skulls. They also severed the nerves in kittens’ brains. Some kittens were subjected to experiments on the very day they were born. PETA stopped these experiments, too. • In tobacco experiments, dogs were forced to inhale cigarette smoke via mechanical ventilators or tracheotomies in which lit

Take Action Now US readers: Text WRONG to 73822 to urge NIH to stop squandering your taxes on

cruel, crude animal experiments and instead invest in far more effective, 100% humane, state-of-the-art, non-animal research methods.

then pried the helmets off with a hammer and a screwdriver – tearing off part of one monkey’s ear in the process – and made fun of the brain-damaged animals. After PETA released footage of this cruelty, the laboratory lost its funding. • To study ringing in the ears, experimenters at the University of Maryland–Baltimore drilled holes into ferrets’ and rats’ heads, inserted electrodes into their brains, and drove screws into their skulls to hold in place a metal post and a recording device that measured brain responses to sounds. The rats were locked in chambers and blasted with loud noise. Some were accidentally deafened, which made them useless for the experiment, so they were killed. • Amonkey known as #V357 was used in nerve-agent attack training in the laboratory at the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground inMaryland. Every eight weeks, experimenters injected himwith a massive drug overdose to mimic a chemical attack. He sweated profusely, violently convulsed, and struggled to breathe. Several of his fingers were bitten or torn off in fights with other monkeys. He died, alone in his cage, after experimenters injected himwith a chemical that severely restricted blood flow to his brain. The Army stopped these experiments following pressure from PETA.

WITHOUT CONSENT Imagine having your body left to science while you’re still in it. Since medieval times, people with power have experimented on vulnerable individuals. The victims have included immigrant women used in gynecological surgeries, orphans in tuberculosis and psychological experiments, GIs in LSD and poison gas experiments, and impoverished black men in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Today, it’s clear why such abuse was wrong, but our knowledge of the past must guide our present-day conduct. We are just one animal species among many, and having the power to exploit others does not give us the right. “Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are like us.’ Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like us.’” – Charles R. Magel (1920–2014), American philosopher, writer, and professor

“The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don’t have any love for them.

I never have. I don’t really like animals.” – Harry Harlow (1905–1981), experimenter who created the monkey “pit of despair”

Global 11

10 THE WRITING ON THE WALL