Everyone's favourite animal terrorist nutters,
PETA, continue to astound with how twofaced they can be. For example - using
any animal tested medicine is wrong and unethical...
unless it's a member of one of these animal right terrorist groups who needs that medicine.
The problem is, she's an animal rights activist, and she's trying to justify her hypocrisy of having taken treatments for her cancer that had been tested by spreading the same misinformation about animal research that animal rights are known for spreading far and wide. Dying or not, she needs to be called out for spreading falsehoods. Her name is Simon Chaitowitz, and she is the former Communications director for the animal rights group masquerading as a legitimate physicians' group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a crank organization dedicated to eliminating animal research that has had as one of its luminaries the apologist for animal rights terrorism, Jerry Vlasak.
We've had examples before, where one of PETA's board of directors members uses animal products
to sustain her own life:
Like more than ten million Americans, [PETA Senior Vice President Mary Beth Sweetland]’s diabetic. Sweetland injects herself daily with insulin that was tested on animals; she has conceded that her medicine “still contains some animal products -- and I have no qualms about it…. I don’t see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals.”
It's nice to see them branch out into new and exciting doublestandards. All of us are horrible people for using animal derrived medicine. For them, it's a required step for keeping up the good fight.
3 comments:
My oh My,
And this is a scientist writing this???? Well I guess scientists are after all like the average joe and don't need to be informed to have opinions... If you study the matter you will probably be amazed to discover that alternative testing models that do not involve torturing living beings work better in many cases, that most drugs that are being tested on animals are not really useful (or maybe mankind nees the a 3000th pill for a sore throat)and believe it or not rabbits are still bein immobilized and forced to chain smoke because, well oh well we are still not quite sure that smoking is really harmful. And the same experiments are being redone again and again because if the russians make a finding, the Swedes are not going to believe it without reding it. So to make it short here is my informed opinion is : 90% of the experiments on animals are useless and therefore unacceptable. I can accept the 10% that is useful and thank PETA to remind us of the truth behind the propaganda!
Cheers Alaskaman!
Buddy, you're pissing up the wrong tree on this one.
I won't seek to engage you. You might reply to my reply - good on you, but I won't continue dialogue. Thing is, nothing I write will matter. No evidence I can muster will sway your view. That's the way it goes with ideologues - they've the answer before the question's even been stated. However, for people who might be curious, I'll spare them some ink before moving on to more interesting or productive things.
Animal testing is a necessary evil. As a wildlife scientist, and someone who did a stint as a pharma-analytical chemist, I can tell you Captain Anonymous there couldn't be further off base with their 90/10 number.
First thing's first, you can never predict a way a drug will go. Some of the biggest blockbuster drugs, ones that have improved life the most dramatically, started out something else. As way of an anti-example, Viagra started out a heart medication. Asprin, useful for merely annoying headaches, protects during dangerous heart-attacks.
Second, we rarely duplicate work. There's no money in it. People want new research, in new areas, and unless there's been serious methodological problems in old research, people are loath to rehash the past. Occasionally the Swedes replicate the Jamacians' work, but it's due less to not trusting other research, and more to language barriers. Language barriers are rapidly becoming less of an issue, and this is rapidly becoming less common as the internet helps us share results better. So an uncommon thing is becoming even more uncommon.
Third, we're going to develop those sore throat pills. Period. Along with the heart drugs, we're going to do things that are less live saving, but still life-improving. It's what humans do. Given that, I'd rather find out a drug is dangerous in an animal model before we dump it on people. If it kills rats, that's the end of it - we should be very happy we never tried it on humans without putting it to animals first. "But animal models don't predict human responses!", I hear the ideologue cry in response. You think we're blind to that? We pick animals that have congruence in metabolic pathways with the effect we're interested in. It's not like we throw a dart at a board and say `Ah, guinea pigs it is!`
Finally, the nebulous `alternative methods,` like computer models. If these things worked, we would toss animal testing faster than me tossing my lunch after eating Taco Bell. Animal Testing is expensive, slow, and fraught with methodological difficulty. It's annoyingly difficult. If there were any ways that were good enough to make the grade, we'd use them, plain and simple. But they either don't exist, or where they do, we've already moved to using them. Cell cultures, ex vivo blood work, computer simulations and all those other things just aren't nearly good enough 99% of the time. They're too simplistic. They're not realistic. And they're nothing we should currently trust as a complete replacement to animal testing before we treat animals.
PETA, it should be noted, doesn't even support the "10%" of testing you claim is useful. PETA is for total animal liberation - damn the consequences. They send comic books to kids telling them they should hide their puppies from their meat-eating parents in case their parents want to kill their pet. They decry animal euthanization, while lying about their `no-kill` shelter where they euthanize animals themselves. They don't help people see past any propaganda - they're one of the biggest authors of it.
I hope my normal readers can see why the contrary is a load of bull.
AMA prez hosts anti-animal testing group med forum: leading indicator or April Fool's joke? - The Cincinnati Beacon, 2/21/09
Post a Comment