Last week's post on animal rights activism set off a debate about the proper use of both animals in biomedical research and of law enforcement in targeting activists. As promised, here's a Q-and-A with Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research:
What's the animal rights extremist situation like in the UK and western Europe?
The UK has typically always had more activity, and I think part of that is the British take great pride in being an animal-loving society. When the activists went beyond activism to extremism, the public in the UK was quite tolerant. I honestly think those days are over.
Why?
They pushed the envelope too far -- pulled some unbelievable stunts, like robbing a grave. When they dug up the mother of some people who had a guinea pig farm and the guinea pigs were bred for research, that’s when the public said, 'Enough is enough. This has gone too far.'
Also, the aggressive attacks against Oxford and Cambridge have not set well with the public. Oxford is building a new biomedical research facility, and activists tried to get it stopped by threatening and harassing and intimidating those involved in the building of it. They harassed and intimidated students, and finally the UK public pushed back. I think the luster is off.
Also, the UK government got involved. They were concerned with the effects this was having with biomedical research and development in the country. Every great nation is based on the strength of its R&D, and if that’s challenged it affects everybody.
The police and other law enforcement got involved, and now a number of [extremists] have been arrested, convicted, sentenced.
What does all that mean for the United States?*
We in the US watch what happens in the UK for a variety of reasons. We have our own extremists in the US -- and I make a very significant distinction between animal welfare activists and those who seek to end all animal research for all reasons by essentially any means necessary.
What about the numbers? Are we talking about a couple dozen people?
Probably. There are aboveground and underground; the underground, the
Animal Liberation Front, operates like any terrorist organization. They are anonymous, work in individual cells. Theoretically one cell doesn’t know what another is sound. Then there are these campaigns to target research facilities in the US through a tactic called secondary and tertiary targeting.
It’s quite creative, been successful: not only do they target research facilities and people who work in them, but companies that do business with research facilities in an effort to break down the support network. Every company requires insurance; every company requires banks; every company requires contractors to do plumbing, electrical work, whatever. If a group identifies who the service companies are, they went after them. They say, 'If you continue to do business, a bomb will go off in your building, we know where you children live' -- that sort of thing.
As a result, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which specifically goes to animal rights terrorists who intend to intimidate and harass, where someone fears for the safety of themselves or families, who intentionally do economic damage.
I've read that the A.E.T.A. poses a threat to civil liberties. One one website I read that "Anyone engaging in non-violent civil disobedience causing at least $10,000 profit loss, will be considered a terrorist."
They refuse to actually read the law. All First Amendment activities are specifically excluded from the law.
The beauty of the law, from legal standpoint, is that it was drafted and redrafted to take into consideration the sort of broad landscape of political concern about this. It was supported by major champions of
First Amendment protected activities, like the chairman of Subcommittee on Crime in the House, Bobby Scott, and a number of more conservative members on the other side of the aisle. It was signed off by the ACLU.
Only those who didn’t want to see the bill passed said it would infringe on First Amendment freedoms.
The bill was enacted in November, and the activity has really not slowed down; there hasn't been a single arrest under this law; law enforcement is being very careful.
A lot of people are worried that the War on Terrorism has reduced civil liberties, putting innocent people under surveillance. Couldn't this do the same thing?*
This law was passed after the Patriot Act when members of Congress were sensitive to the issues you raised. For those who didn’t want the law at all, they were going to continue to complain. It was carefully crafted; it says these kinds of constant intimidation and harassment, going after families, driving researchers out of business, isn’t going to be tolerated in the US. We got ahead of the UK legislatively, because we watched them carefully.
Lawmakers said, 'We don’t want that here.' Research is going to go on because people are going to pursue cures and treatments. There are still many, many diseases that we don’t know how to treat, that we don’t do a good job of curing, like spinal cord injury. If you’re in an environment hostile to that, the research doesn’t stop, it just moves.
The US is concerned, the UK is concerned, and legitimately so, because the laundry list of activities that have been going on have been amazing and quite repugnant. An example of how malicious these people are: there was a guy in Oklahoma who traded shares in a company -- he was a market maker -- in a company that was a target of the activists.
His mother, in her early 90’s, was in a nursing home. They tracked her down, sent her messages that her son was an accused pedophile, they sent her in the nursing home -- mislabeled so you didn’t know what it was -- sex paraphernalia ... they were just vicious to this elderly woman in an attempt to get this guy to stop doing business. He testified to this in congress.
My point is -- this is what Congress is going after. Animal rights extremists may sound innocent, but they’re not. All this legislation is not to quell cherished First Amendment activities; people can write, demo, picket, boycott all they want.
What's going to happen in the next five years in the U.S.?*
From our vantage point, we have a number of regulatory and policy rules that govern research. We feel strongly that animal research needs to be very carefully and forcefully regulated, because a strong regulatory framework provides public confidence in the enterprise. As we go forward, want to make sure we’re constantly balancing best interest of the animals with research that needs to be conducted. What animal rights groups have in mind, it’s hard to know; I think they’re sort of regrouping after the passage of the AETA, and some of the organizers of these actions are now behind bars. So they’re figuring out the next steps, and there’ll be more steps.
The public, in this country, is definitely not tolerant of illegal behavior for the greater whatever the animal rights people say. There’s a quote that one activist gave that he repeated -- when challenged, he stood by it: “If you kill one vivisector, you could save 5 million animals. If you kill two vivisectors, you could save 10 million."
(Note: I Googled the quote, but couldn't find it.)
That kind of rhetoric is very distasteful to the public. It doesn’t get them anything. And as a result the pendulum has swung towards good, humane animal research.
(Here there followed a digression that I didn't transcribe, after which Trull made the following point:)*
By law in the US, under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, a company can’t submit an application for a drug or device without animal testing. The reason for that was Hitler. Hitler was a big animal rights guy; Goebbels bragged in a 1933 speech about what an animal-lving society Germany was, and that’s why they do research on humans rather than animals. At the end of World War II, the Geneva Convention and
Helsinki Accords said that all civilized nations will do testing on animals before introducing into humans.
There’s a reason why animal research, even though sometimes it’s very very hard to take -- but it ‘s also hard to see human suffering. It’s heart-wrenching. Humans are the ultimate animal model, but we go last.
We all have to come to grips with that and weigh the benefits against the harm; and I maintain that the vast majority of public, if animal research could lead to a cure for something someone they love is suffering from, they’d think that way.
The other important thing: nobody wants to use animals in research, but until we have better understanding of complex living systems, we can’t do it all in computers.
Animal research is expensive, labor-intensive; if there was a chepaer, faster way, you don’t think we'd do it? Instead of just complaining, the extremists should come up with some solutions. Go invent the computer model. We’d applaud.
