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http://www.labdepotinc.com/c-480-homogenizer.php
I remember seeing an advertisement for a similar piece of equipment--a blender-like device that could essentially puree a whole mouse in thirty seconds. (The mouse, I assume and fervently hope, had been quickly and humanely dispatched.) This is used to pulverize once-living, animate, complex small mammals for research and training purposes.
I'm not an anti-vivisectionist, exactly, although I suspect that a lot of animal experimentation probably isn't necessary. I do, however, appreciate that a lot of important treatments for life-threatening diseases and other research that contributes significantly to human welfare involves animal suffering, to a certain extent.
These small animals are living and breathing. They have eyes and paws and prehensile tails. Their brains aren't as complex as those of humans, of course, but they do have intelligence which other creatures in the animal kingdom do not have. They can learn. They are capable of affection of a sort. They even seem to have a bit of personality.
What makes it all right to pith a mouse (impale its head on a sharp spike) and then stick it in a blender and grind it into tissue indistinguishable from that of the rest of its litter but not to destroy an embryonic human long before it's capable of pain or fear?
For that matter, why is it all right to cheer on the destruction of living children in faraway countries but to wax melodramatic, hysterical, and stalkerlike over the termination of offspring who are still largely theoretical?
I suspect that it does, indeed, have less to do with respect for all life as sacred and more to do with the expectation that the chief responsibility and purpose of women should be to reproduce. If men could get pregnant, the right to a prompt, safe, and private abortion would have been the second amendment, with the right to own guns a distant priority.
I expect all anti-abortionists forthwith to join PETA, become vegetarians, and refuse to pay their taxes until we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, dismantle our Department of Defense, and ban the federal death penalty.
