Letters to the Editor
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Should I believe these people are just crazy? Or is there more going on?
Wow, from the descriptions in the story, these SHAC people certainly seem menacing and scary. I bet not a single industry-supplied description of SHAC violence was omitted from the story.
However, we didn't hear a lot from SHAC on what motivates this fervor. One link to a video of punched beagles and a reference to another video of physically abused monkeys.
We did get a long exposition from the leader of SHAC about how her voice-overs in cartoons informed her activism. I wonder if she is typical of the alleged thousands of SHAC activists? Seems unlikely. Is the cartoon work all she talked about in her interview? Or was there more substantive stuff we didn't hear about in the article?
At the end of this article, I either believe that a bunch of Luddites can't accept the need for animal research, or that there is an animal testing company tha is performing such outrageous "research" that thousands of people are committing themselves to perform criminal acts against them on the worldwide basis.
Hmmm, about those videos again. If I was a legitimate company, engaged in vital, lifesaving research to test drugs--who was at the same time the target of an extremist grass-roots movement--wouldn't I be damn careful that there was no question of excessive cruelty in how my experimental animals were treated?
In other words, if this testing outfit is being harrassed so unfairly, and to such an extent that it is having trouble finding business partners, why the hell are they punching Beagles and vivisecting conscious monkeys? Forgive me if I assume that for every filmed incident, 100 offenses were committed without being recorded. What's going on there?
To paraphrase noted radio curmugeon Paul Harvey;"Where's the rest of this story?"
I confess I don't worry myself overmuch about the issues of animal treatment worldwide, and I find myself mystified about why so many people seem so strongly motivated by it. But aside from the obvious cachet of B-list celebrity that hangs around it, there may be more going on under the journalistic radar that I don't know about. I don't feel like this story helped me understand the motivations of animal-rights activists at all.
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don't they teach this stuff in 4th grade government anymore?
>>The Americans with Disabilities Act granted rights to people with disabilities. That Act is not in the Constitution.>>
The 1990 ADA does not grant inaliable rights to disabled people; the US constitution did that over 200 years ago. The Act essentially creates standards for accessible building construction.
A congressional act is not the same as an amendment to the US Constitution. A congressional act makes certain polities US law (like every building built or substantially renovated since passage must be handicapped accessible).
Regardless.
It still doesn't give animals any rights.
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Uh...the Constitution
Does NOT give rights to people. People inherently have rights and the Constitution is intended to LIMIT GOVERNMENT INCURSION AGAINST THOSE INHERENT INALIENABLE RIGHTS. The Constitution is a document laying out the duties and responsibilities of government so that it does NOT violate rights. The Bill of Rights is not an exhaustive list of rights either. They are a listing of the most often abused rights (at the time of their writing) by illegitimate government and is intended to specifically prevent a continuation of such abuse. The 9th Amendment goes on to expressly state that the enumeration of certain rights in no way disparages or disavows other rights inherently held by the people. Thus, if is isn't listed in the Bill of Rights that does NOT mean that you do not enjoy some right.
The Bill of Rights was resisted by Jefferson and many other Founders because they feared, rightly it seems, that governments and people in the future would incorrectly view such a list as a limiting list of rights when that is NOT the case. We have innumerable rights, too many to list. Madison offered up the 9th Amendment as a direct attempt to quell the fears of Jefferson and his like-minded fellows.
As to animal rights, we can offer them as much as we wish - and the more we learn about their sentience, consciousness, and emotions, the more expansive those rights should be. Brutalization of ANY living thing for any reason is not acceptable. Period. I am with the Activists on this one. There are many fields of research that pointlessly brutalize sentient animals without the NEED to do so because there are alternatives or the answers obtained are simply not worth the harm done.
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re: Should I believe these people are crazy?
I don't know, depends on what you think of fanatics. Doesn't matter the stripe, they're all the same in the end. Whomever doesn't agree with them must be shown the error of their ways, if that takes violence, so be it.
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With the activists
tempus,
Which activists? The ones beating people with axe handles? The ones making threatening calls to and about relatives? The ones stalking people peripherally connected to the company? Or the ones peacefully protesting and exercising their rights of free speech? You really ought to specify when commenting about an article like this one or people might get the idea you condone beating animals (humans) to prevent the beating of other animals.
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John Cook - member of SHAC?
This was the biased piece I've seen written about animal research - it wouldn't be out of place on the PETA website. Cook has succeeded in glorifying this group of terrorists who are ruining people's lives. "Claritin to Viagra" indeed - his only mention of drugs that needed animal testing to get to market demonstrates his attitude. What about the immunizations that your kids get? The cancer medicine that your grandmother is given? Do you really want your baby shot full of something that has never been tested before?
If so, the answer is sipmle - don't have your kids immunized. Refuse to take tylenol the next time you have a headache. Terrorize your grandmother and write hateful epithets on her car when she takes a drug for her anemia. YOU create the market for animal research.
Cook needs an editor. This piece was ridiculously biased.
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Hamburgers were animals too
Two points:
1) The number of animal souls lost to drug testing is far fewer to those lost to hamburgers (if you include cheeseburgers and bacon deluxe cheesburgers). Why aren't these people attacking people in burger establishments with axe handles? Probably because they would be set upon by crazed burger eaters, flushed with hormone packed meat. In the great Karmic scale, killing an animal to save a human life surely beats killing an animal because you are peckish. Their cause therefore strikes me as semi-retarded.
2) To the person who keeps saying that you have to have human testing to get a drug approved, yes, that is true. But it is impossible to get FDA approval to do the initial toxicity testing on humans before you have extensive proof of lack of toxicity in animals (so called "pre-clinical studies").