A Moderate Proposal

To the dismay of many of my friends, I’m not unalterably opposed to vivisection. In fact, I’d wholeheartedly support it, were vivisectors to make one minor administrative change. It would be that scientists perform the experiments not on nonhumans but on themselves and their colleagues. Scientists keep telling us how beneficial the experiments are for Science with a capital S, Progress with a capital P, and of course Man with a capital M. If the experiments really are Necessary with a capital N, the scientists should be willing to make this sacrifice (with a small s) for the greater good. In any case, because of strict regulations, according to no less an authority than Lord Sainsbury, British Science Minister, advocate of genetic engineering and owner of a very large supermarket chain, experiments generally cause no more than “moderate” suffering. If this is actually true, scientists shouldn’t too much mind throwing their hats into this ring.

Here is the thing. Scientists experiment on each other all the time. In fact many scientists have WILLINGLY infected themselves with diseases and tried to cure themselves, but are also tempered with the understanding that human life is more valuable than animal life. No one thinks otherwise apart from the animal liberation movement and even then they follow their own apartheid of animal segregation segregation and actively distinguish between the different levels of animal (I am sure they would have no qualms about poisoning or indeed starving rats and the various other rodents that would otherwise eat us out of our farmed food.).

The corollary of this premise is to suggest that the Animal Liberation movement merely refused to use any technology developed through the usage of an animal experiment. (I will point out that this includes seatbelts which were tested on pigs). Because Progress, Science and Man obviously aren’t as important as the animals that died for it and so you shouldn’t use them.

Oh and Lord Sainsbury is a life peer and is a NAMESAKE of the Sainsbury Supermarket group. He isn’t a “British Science Minister” since he is an unelected peer of the House of LORDS (not Commons who are the ministers). And there are currently two of them.

Now, I’m sure you can spot the problem: too many important experiments for the number of vivisectors. Just in Europe an animal is killed every three seconds in a laboratory. In Britain it’s one every twelve seconds, in Japan one every other second, and in the United States one per second. I’m not sure even full-ride scholarships and high salaries will suffice to bring in enough scientists to fill this bill. But that’s okay, because every problem carries within it the seed of its own solution.

The majority of animals used in research that die are things like Caenorhabditis Elegans and Drosophila Melanogaster. Most lab animals are actually way too expensive to be killed in such quantities. C. Elegans is a nematode and Drosophila is a fruit fly. Other creatures used include invertebrates, frogs and fish which are cheap, simple and easily replaced. And most scientists earn pretty small salaries. What this fine gentleman is trying to do is to make you assume that scientists cannot achieve orgasm without the death of a giant panda rather than the reality of biological research where most of the animals used are ones you would probably kill off hand and are probably butchered in greater quantities in order to maintain our food supply.

I probably kill more nematodes and encourage more invertebrate death than any scientist. And my tools are the ever so lethal metronidazole. Well lethal to intestinal parasites in humans. Now if we are to accept that there is no apartheid of animals and that the life of all animals are the same then why should I doom hundreds of roundworms, thousands of hook worms and millions of malarial parasites to death for the life of just one human being? Why should you kill mosquitoes to stop the spread of Malaria, Dengue, Chikunguny and Filariasis? Why should you control Leishmaniasis and Yellow Fever by killing the vector? Surely they have as much rights as you to survive right? If a mouse is the same as a human then why isn’t a mosquito? If you prick it does it not bleed? If it pricks me, I certainly do!

The solution comes through the words of Sainsbury, or rather his existence: add another category of those eligible to be vivisected. This would, of course, be those politicians who speak or vote in favor of experimenting on live animals. Given the importance of these experiments to everything from the economy to national security to shiny-clean hair to new cosmetics, I think the politicians will be glad to serve the public in this manner.

We don’t experiment on people unless they willingly chose to be experimented on because we have gone down that route in the past and don’t wish to do so again. The fact animal liberation activists routinely bring this up as a solution either speaks of people who ONLY speak in Rhetoric meaning that they have absolutely no fucking answers to the problem of animal experimentation (AKA even we don’t like experimenting on animals and would be THRILLED if we didn’t have to in order to progress biology and medicine. However by nature, biology REQUIRES animal experimentation otherwise we would have no progress in biology as a science. It’s like suggesting that you learn electronics without touching electricity.)

The counter argument of rhetoric would be to suggest that “If Animal Lib love animals so much, why don’t they volunteer for experimentation?”.

At fi
rst I toyed with the notion of putting vivisectors’ families on the short list, but decided to keep them in reserve in case they’re needed to provide “spare parts,” as the xenotransplantation literature so elegantly puts it, for those humans rich enough to afford their own personal organ donors. The use of vivisectors’ families should eradicate the technical and moral problems caused by the current planned use of pigs, and should also bring in some extra cash for the corporations that hire the vivisectors (and that’s always been the real point, hasn’t it?): some estimates put the market for pig organs to transplant into humans at $6 billion per year, just in the United States.

Either this is rhetoric which just proves that the NIO and indeed the original poster are paint eatingly stupid, or this is someone who thinks that xenotransplantation is widespread and indeed done for frivolous reasons.

The primary reason for research into xeno-transplantation is for hearts. A pig heart is the same size as a human one. If you can make pigs have the same tissue type as a human you can GROW a human heart in a matter of months. The other use is the usage of their heart valves as a superior replacement to those who have lost theirs. This can range from individuals who have congenital anomalies to those who fell ill. I personally know of a young girl with a heart valve replacement who has a new lease on life (she couldn’t even sit up without fainting and now she is running around and playing) due to mismanagement of her condition by a series of quacks and anti-medical luddites. The biological heart valve means that you don’t have to take blood thinners for the rest of your life unlike the mechanical valve.

Only an arsehole would think that there is no moral and technical problem with using organs taken from a human being against their will causing the death of an individual human being is appropriate in ANY situation. For those rich enough does no justice to the nature of disease and to those who need organs.

The donation of an organ is one of the purest expressions of human kindness. It is the voluntary cessation of the life of a loved one who is dying or whose brain has died so that a complete stranger can live longer by using their organs. At it’s simplest form it is a blood transfusion. At it’s greatest it is life itself. In India due to the shortage of blood donations due to the massive demand I have seen parents fall at the feet of those who gave blood to save their children or loved ones. And only an arsehole would turn such a powerful act of humanity into one of absolute fuckwittery.

Humans Donate Organs Because of Love. Because someone feels empathy for another. And despite that, 60% of people on organ transplant lists die waiting for a match. Xenotransplantation will save a lot of people’s lives. Oh and I want to be an organ donor. I have explicitly stated that. I donate blood, but when I die I hope that my organs will help someone one of the 40% who do get to live.

But we still have the problem of numbers, don’t we? Not enough vivisectionists, not enough politicians. Naturally, CEOs of companies that profit from vivisection need to go on the list, and in these desperate straits—how could we possibly live without draize eye tests?—I think we’ll just need to add everyone who works for those companies, too. Certainly the stockholders. Especially the stockholders.

I suspect, however, that we still won’t have enough: our culture’s appetite for subjects on which to inflict “moderate suffering” seems insatiable. We need to forcefeed agrochemicals and drano to dogs through tubes directly into their stomachs, and we need to transplant the hearts and kidneys of pigs into the necks of baboons. We immobilize monkeys, lizards, cats, dogs, take off the tops of their heads. We break the necks of baboons. We addict macaques to cocaine, electroshock them if they will not use. We create superviruses that kill everyone they contact. We cut out portions of the brains of marmosets, and leave them as stupid as the experimenters themselves. We cut off the heads of live animals using scissors, then study their brains. We put live animals in freezers and let them try to claw their way out. We teach chimps American Sign Language, then put them in cages the size of cupboards: when they sign they want out, we ignore them, inject them with pesticides. We separate monkeys from their mothers, give them HIV, then put painful coils in their eyes to track where they look.

Ah yes! Medical Ludditery at it’s finest! The OP thinks we only do those things to Dogs and Pigs!

We don’t feed “Agrochemicals” and “Drano” to animals. I believe the research done is mainly to find out how to deal with poisons. These are two of the most common household suicidal poisons and knowing how to treat them is vital. And such testing does not take place anymore because we know how to treat it. This is meant to create the image that we are pouring chemicals down dogs throats while they gag for fun.

These are things we do to humans too to help them. I can think of a reason to paralyse a human for the rest of their forseeable life. It’s often used as a form of palliative care f
or those in terminal pain. Most medical research that succeeds is applied to human beings.

And this is a fantastic strawman. There is a tonne of amazing research done into animals and the problem is that this absolutely stunning example of a complete wanker has no idea about the value of that because he personally is a lucky fucker who doesn’t need that research.

Can you think of one fucking reason we should experiment with HIV and AIDS in animals? Oh right! To find a cure so we can treat HIV and AIDS and not be wankers!

But I’ve got a plan. Make vivisection duty mandatory for every human who supports animal testing. We are, after all, animals. It will be just like jury duty. You get a note from the county advising you your turn has come, and you are to report next Tuesday. You call the evening before to see if the experiment has been cancelled. It hasn’t, but you learn they only want males. You are, so you show up the next day. You learn you’ll be testing Viagra. Good, you say. I don’t need it (you hasten to add) but what can it hurt? You soon find out. You take the drug. Instead of cutting off your penis, as happened in experiments on beagles, rabbits, rats, mice, and monkeys, the vivisectors (who at the very least have no testicles, else they would surely refuse each time they were told to torture another) cut open your penis and insert an electrode into a branch of the pelvic nerve. They pass a charge through for a minute at a time, causing erections. They then measure the blood pressure of the erection. Their hope is that viagra will help maintain the erection. It seems to do that, but you and everyone else concerned already knew that from many previous tests. Can I go home now? you ask, your opened-penis smarting. Oh, sorry, they say. We forgot to tell you: afterwards all subjects are sacrificed.

Viagra was tested as a blood pressure medication. Medication that lets you live well past your sixties and into your 70s and 80s to the point where we are beginning to consider the 70s as a period of active life. Medication that lets those who cannot maintain an erection to have one. It sounds like something to laugh about but you know what? It’s laughing at someone who cannot partake of one of the actual pleasures of life. Not all of us can get an erection by imagining the torture of human beings. Some of us need Viagra.

And majority of the animals used in medical tests are not sacrificed. Good grief! They are expensive. Those that are “killed” are done so because there is no alternative. But our research animals give us something that we could never as a species have achieved otherwise. We might be at the top of the food chain but we’ve only come as far as we have because of them. They gave their lives, a good portion in some degree of pain or discomfort or sad so that we could improve ours. A lot of what we have is due to them and for the most part they are treated extremely well. Often recieving care that is unavailable to them as pets. It sounds arrogant to say humans are more valuable than animals but it is the truth and we know that. It’s just that animal liberation mean that cute animals are as valuable as humans.

This isn’t the first or the last time that Camille and the NIO have posted such graphic ideas with little grasp of the reality of animal research. It’s the actual problem with animal liberation is that this sort of research only exists in the minds of the animal liberation fanatic.

But as I said. I kill more animals than many so called vivisectionists do in an entire country. Roundworm, Hookworm, Malarial Parasites, Trypanosomes, Tapeworms, Filarials… The list is endless. What makes their lives less valuable than that of the humans they feast upon?